Dan Murphy's Reviews
Stikbold finally gives the sport of dodgeball a credible representation in a video game. It nails the simplicity and mastery of the sport while remaining fun and humorous, but it lacks online capabilities and is just a bit too short.
The best way to enjoy the classic space shooter today, and it's just as compellingly addictive as ever, but a lack of online functionality holds it back.
The most realistic Football Manager game, is also the best release so far
The beautiful game just got a whole lot better
88 Heroes is a fun, chaotic platformer where 88 is king. You have 88 minutes to complete 88 rooms, you have 88 seconds to complete each room and have an army of 88 characters to play with. With a lot of unique and funny heroes on offer, 88 Heroes is a nice bit of platforming goodness.
A great slice of frantic cooking fun with a simple premise that is built upon with several layers of depth. While it can be played in single player, the real fun comes from playing with others due to the screams that occur when everything inevitably sets on fire.
Severed takes a gimmick in touch-based combat and actually manages to successfully wrap an entertaining game around it. The eerie, ambiguous, yet beautiful, world helps but I found that enough new aspects were added to the combat to keep it interesting until the very end. If this is the Vita’s swansong then it’s going out on a wonderful note.
There’s one aim in Action Henk: run fast. Run faster than the ghosts, faster than your friends, and faster than strangers on the internet. Beating records is what drives you on through sweaty palms and uncountable attempts, because the feeling as you finally break one is thrilling. It’s an addictive ride that will have you pressing the restart button over and over again.
The Flame in the Flood is a quiet apocalypse in which it's Mother Nature you have to fight, not aliens or zombies. The goal is to drift down a river in a flooded world to reach salvation at the end. Surviving is no walk in the park, but with Chuck Ragan's brilliant soundtrack to soothe you, it's sure worth a try.
Rubble Without a Cause takes King's Quest down a much darker path and is very enjoyable for it. With having to solve puzzles against the clock it really feels as if your decisions matter, due to gut punching consequences.
Enter the Gungeon is slick, smooth and bombastic to play with a deluge of weapons and randomly generated weapons to keep things interesting. While it doesn't bring anything brand new to the genre, it's still a nail-biting thrill ride of a game worthy of high praise.
In a genre which is suffocating, The Long Dark stands out among the crowd as perhaps the best. Brutal, unforgiving survival wrapped up in a very plausible scenario where beauty kills.
The Sexy Brutale is a lavishly stylish, unique and engrossing murder mystery game in which, on a day that always restarts, you must prevent the staff of a grand mansion from murdering the several guests and solve the intriguing mystery.
Jackbox is back once again and it’s better than ever with a sequel to a fan favourite, a Family Fortunes-style quiz and perhaps the best game Jackbox have ever created. Only a couple of duds, which still do have their moments, let it down.
New Machina is shoot-em-up kings Housemarque's latest game, and it might just be their best. A top-down Resogun that takes all that was good from that, improves on it and then adds so much more. Tight and responsive controls and great visuals make up for some exhilarating action.
A beautiful and thought provoking exploration into so many different ideas on life, which can be completed in one joyous, yet bewildering, sitting.
Blood and Wine, The Witcher 3’s final piece of DLC, could not have given such a remarkable game a more fitting send off. With a beautiful new world to explore, Toussaint is brimming with hours of content, stories, monsters to slay, great characters and a whole new bloody Gwent faction. The best of all is how the writers have been allowed to write some genuinely hilarious little stories -- you can tell that their having a ball and it had me in hysterics on several occasions.
Hearts of Stone is the perfect example of DLC done right. There's not a better reason to get back into The Witcher 3 again.
An incredible game and should be enjoyed by everyone, and the most fun I've had with a shooter in years. Brimming with personality, the only concerns are longevity, and how dependent it is on other players to make the game fun.
PES has refined year on year in this generation, continuing to improve, but PES 2017 is the crowning moment. With different tactics and styles that are effective, and unique players, great goal feel and lovely control, PES 2017 just feels so good to play. It may well be the greatest football game ever made.