David Lovato's Reviews
Beautiful music and cute, unique visuals aren't enough to save Mushroom Wars 2 from its flaws.
Final Fantasy XII is a good game that broke a lot of ground upon release, as an RPG, as a work of fantasy, and as a Final Fantasy entry. With that said, The Zodiac Age feels like a bare-minimum up-port, with little besides the textures being improved.
In the end, Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII is a rock-solid title, but it could have been so much more. Forcing it to fit under the Black Ops moniker was a mistake, and comes across as forced, given its very light relation to the previous three titles. The whole thing smacks of Treyarch wanting to take risks and go in new directions, but stopping just shy and instead tacking older characters or ideas. Longtime fans of the franchise won't want to miss out on this - especially those who love the Zombies experience - but those who checked out of Call of Duty before likely won't find enough here to bring them back.
There are myriad good reasons why Marvel's Spider-Man is the best-selling and highest-rated Spider-Man title in years. While it has a few glaring flaws, they pale in comparison to all of the things the team at Insomniac got right. A well-acted, strong story serves as the backbone for an experience that just plain feels right for Spider-Man, and fans and newcomers alike won't be disappointed by this trip to the Spider-verse.
Little Big Workshop's biggest flaws are its generic character designs and a few control issues, but these are greatly overshadowed by how fun this is.
Röki is a lovely game with strong characters and a fun, whimsical story. It shakes up its genres enough to be unique, but doesn't try to fix what isn't broken, and doesn't push itself past what it sets out to accomplish. Environment and creature designs are superb, while their human counterparts (of which there are very few anyway) leave a little more to be desired. It's a game just about anybody can pick up, play, and be immersed in a world they're likely not too familiar with, unless they grew up with the folklore this draws inspiration from. A few graphical glitches crop up here and there, but otherwise this is a solid and a fun adventure filled with puzzles, action, and intrigue.
Eternal Hope is reasonably well designed in terms of gameplay, even if the controls feel sloppy and some puzzles do not always make much sense. It is difficult to make puzzle games last very long, but this one definitely has enough length for its low price point. A stronger story or tighter gameplay would have made this game into a great one, and the team behind this adventure certainly has the potential to do it, but as it is, Eternal Hope just lacks focus.
Curious Expedition 2 offers a customizable gaming experience that can be as casual or as hardcore as players like, with tons of content and options, many of which can be changed on the fly. The game is smooth and solid, and having so much randomly generated content (and so much content to pull from) ensures a different experience on every run-through, even if the gameplay loop gets a little stale sometimes. For a certainly fair price point, players are getting a game they can play a hundred times a hundred different ways. Some of the best games are the ones where developers simply create a space and let players play; Curious Expedition 2 does so wonderfully.
Girl of Glass: A Summer Bird's Tale draws elements from point-and-click adventures, visual novels, and turn-based RPGS, blending them with a whimsical world and sympathetic characters to make a wonderful story. The battle system, while at times too difficult, adds flavour and action to the point-and-click formula that some might otherwise find slow, and the characters and their stories pique the player's interest and keep them wanting to dig in more and keep the story going. Where a lot of point-and-clicks feel slapped together to make a quick experience, this is a rare gem that feels like it was designed from the ground up to be exactly what it is. It doesn't try too hard, it doesn't cram in aspects from other genres in ways that don't fit. Girl of Glass: A Summer Bird's Tale is a wonderful story, built into a game that tells it wonderfully.
HyperBrawl Tournament plays like a big-studio freemium title, but without any of the big studio polish… and it isn't free. It might work well enough within its own context, but the player base is non-existent, plus the AI is too frustrating to make bot matches fun. There seems to be plenty of content to unlock through ranking up, but frustrating matches offer little incentive to do it. If the developer can build up a player base, this might offer a bit of fun, but as-is there's just not much to keep people coming back to this Switch version.
Men of War II is a solid RTS marred by clunky controls and complicated gameplay, but its worst offense is requiring an internet connection, even for single-player modes. Without that requirement (which, again, is currently meant to change sometime post-launch) and with just a little polish to the controls, UI, or both, this could be a must-have for RTS/WW2 buffs. Fans of the series will probably have an easier time diving in, while new players are likely to find themselves completely lost without going through the tutorials. On the whole, the game feels solid, looks good, sounds good, and has a lot of potential, and its flaws aren't so bad they can't be polished out.
Good graphics and solid mechanics are held back by the way the player is never given much of a reason to do anything but the current main objective, and the laid-back nature of the game conflicts with the main-character-is-dying dilemma presented as the driving force of the story. The developers at Vile Monarch have put together some great systems and laid the groundwork for a fun simulation game, but fall short of giving players much of a reason or opportunity to actually play in it. There are a lot of good things here, and with more direction and purpose, the team is clearly capable of making something great. Despite the flaws, The Last Alchemist is still a fun casual game that'll feel right at home for those who love a nice stroll through a whimsical landscape or laid-back puzzle solving.
Resident Evil Village tends to slip into a sort of “what if” zone where it could have been a lot of things, but what Capcom ended up making is a great game. The scares are present but often take a backseat to the action, and the plot is dark but campy in the way Resident Evil has set itself up to pull off time and again. More care could have been given to this story and its characters instead of trying to force it into the overall Resident Evil narrative, but what is here in RE7 and Village is still a touching story about family wrapped in a dual horror-action package. Capcom has shown it can take Resident Evil to a lot of different horizons, and time will tell where the franchise goes from here.
Not as robust as RPG Maker with unfinished translations to boot, Pixel Game Maker MV has a journey ahead of it to reach the capability of its sister series, but already accomplishes the bare bones of what it set out to do: provide a simple GUI-based tool for making video games. In a world where cheap or free game engines are on the rise, it’s unclear how the more restrictive licensing of Kadokawa’s engines will affect the number of games and users that stick around, but like RPG Maker before it, Pixel Game Maker MV is poised to be one of the better tools for learning basic game development concepts without taking classes on coding.
7 Days to Die previously needed a lot of work. It is now in a playable and downright fun state, with a strong crafting and scavenging element that often makes sense and keeps immersion in the survival setting. Zombies become more dangerous as time goes on, but so does the player, as long as they balance their survival with scavenging for better equipment and learning new skills, and 7 Days to Die does a better job staving off the difficulty plateau many survival games eventually succumb to. Following updates, the gameplay is sturdy and solid, built off of an already fun foundation.