It’s all ever so tranquil on the surface, and never once made my cortisone levels spike, but there’s a fierce brain throbbing away beneath those sedate low-poly models.
It’s Winter is short and without much to ‘do’, which is clearly a problem for some folks who want to feel they’ve wrung the most value out of their spending money, but I wouldn’t want it more complex and I certainly wouldn’t want it longer: that would break the spell.
There’s plenty of stuff I’d change, especially tonally and in terms of international relationships, but I played it happily until I couldn’t see straight.
Dawn Of Man’s great triumph is that, a dozen hours after I’d picked my first berry, forging my first iron sword felt like an immortal accomplishment.
Its jigsaw pieces, jolly and randomly-scattered as they might be, only assemble in a finite amount of ways.
Gathering Storm is a chunky collection of small remixes that amount to a big difference.
This imaginative and darkly humorous sci-fi survival game has you fearfully chart a vast, hostile universe
A drug I don’t want to quit. A miracle of design? Yeah, go on.
Bury Me, My Love isn’t, first and foremost, a treaty about refugee-ism: it’s a compelling and effective game about deciding what the hell to do next.
Beneath a sumptuous, absurdly beautiful surface, dark beasts haunt a troubled girl's crumbling fantasy world
A game of everything, a game of nothing. Eternal, unknowable, remarkable, infuriating, Kenshi defies easy judgement. Kenshi is. I implore you to play it.
I’m greedy. I want a bigger, beefier, more flexible Mutant Year Zero. But that’s because the small, linear but smart, powerful and atmospheric Mutant Year Zero I got grabbed hold of me so completely.
Flashpoint is fine expansion in terms of re-engineering BattleTech for extended play
Plunge into ingenious shifting labyrinths to battle lethal beasts, in the knowledge that every gory failure makes you stronger
It's neat, and it's much more tense than any of these screenshots make it look. In another world, it would have carried itself less like a tie-in browser game for Cbeebies and attracted a more Spire-like audience. The price of insanity, perhaps.
It's a hot mess.
Look past the dull presentation for a deeply satisfying war game
As much as I enjoyed learning the rules and rhythms of bus driving – thanks in part to the warm words of Mira Tannhauser – once that was done, I just couldn't find waters deep enough to swim in for long. On the other hand, Bus Sim 18 mostly smoothly (there are some bugs and performance issues, with patches planned) simulates what it sets out to simulate, and I don't for one moment regret experiencing that.
I'm left frustrated that Vampyr falls short of truly combining a smart choose-your-own-adventure game with a meaty action one.
It functions both as a broadly traditional but significantly less rigid MMO and as a 'lost' Elder Scrolls. There's much I wish it did better, but I can't fail to be drawn in by the sheer substance of it.