The defining game of the last ten years is also one of the most surprising. Minecraft is unmissable.
This time around, the repeat journey was absolutely worth it, and I'm glad if surprised to end 2013 finding that XCOM was my greatest timesink for a second year running. It won't, naturally, change the minds of anyone who felt XCOM was a betrayal of X-COM, but if like me you're contented by the Gollop and Firaxis efforts co-existing and doing their own thing rather than replacing each other, this really is an excellent add-on despite a few pulled punches.
There's a sadness to that as much as there is to our limited time with a fully-operational Rapture, but at the same time Burial At Sea is extremely effective at posing big, gnawing and dramatic new questions to a riddle we thought answered. I am so very hungry for part two, but I do hope it gives us more Rapture-in-light as well as answers, self-reference and metatextuality. Burial
It's the best Assassin's Creed yet! Which is 90% because Black Flag, a a third-person action adventure about pirates in the Caribbean, isn't really an Assassin's Creed game in the traditional sense, and 10% because the lead character is from Swansea.
I was deeply disappointed to find after all my worrying and all my sacrifice that The Novelist's conclusions are suspiciously neat, too mechanical and too implausible in the family permanently cutting off one option in favour of another rather than pursuing compromise later in their lives – the destination is, sadly, not the measure of the journey. Some familial interactions ring hollow too, sound too scripted, too dramatic, too perfect. Nonetheless, it's a journey I'm glad I made.
Yeah, I love the world and the existential agony of it all, but I just don't think it's a particularly well-realised strategy game too.
It's an uneven experience, populated as much by frustration as it is by triumph, but it feels technically solid and is appropriately enormous and secret-filled.
In terms of making people want to play because it looks beautiful and strange, rather than because it's an adventure game. Unfortunately the latter creates huge expectations, an albatross they hung around their own neck.
Aside from interface complaints, I would not really call Banished a bad game. I would also not call it a pleasant game.
[Luftrausers] is such a little thing. I have to focus hard to remember it when it's not right there in front of me. It probably doesn't have much staying power. But when it's there, when the sound of machine-marking throbs through my speakers, when I drop like a stone into the ocean then rebound heroically skywards, with smoke pouring out my engines, it's everything that matters.
Sky-high ambition. Incredible visual design and attention to detail. Promise it couldn't possibly live up to. Shortcuts. Pride. A fall.
Singular of vision but faltering in execution and in need of some fleshing out – something's missing here, in terms of exploration and progression, but what is there is really quite special.
I'm perhaps not quite as in love with this series as I was after episode 1, but I badly want to find out what happens next, and I badly want to play episode 3 again to see what I might have missed.
Warlock 2 is a smart and appropriately chaotic strategy game which really feels as though it has an identity of its own, rather than being made up of borrowed parts (er, other than its own).
On the first playthrough, it's distracting that Daylight is one-note tonally, unconvincingly written and acted, and unwisely tethers progress to increasingly drearily combing environments for every last scrap of 'oh no something terrible happened here once and everyone's dangerously mental' paperwork. On the second playthrough, it's oppressive. At a guess, self-awareness of this is why the game's so short, but by God another pass on the writing and more care about voice-acting would have made the world of difference.
I think this is the best episode yet, despite being a little on the short side, and despite having repetition at its foundation it does a bloody good job of both concealing it and dragging me deeper into the game's murky world. I know that I'm being sheep-herded to a fairly fixed conclusion, and I'm now enjoying the neon snarl of the ride enough to be entirely comfortable with that.
There are some bum notes both tonally and strategically, Tropico old hands will find the bones of the things over-familiar, and despite having tons of things to fiddle with ultimately it's hard not call it a lightweight game. I really think it has to be, though.
Adam: Wolfenstein – BETTER THAN IT HAD ANY RIGHT TO BE Alec: Quite right too.
I do think it suffers from significant tonal misjudgements, but it does a very good job of keeping me busy, keeping me pushing pennies into the slot, and keeping me fed with micro-anecdotes that, though they might dissipate immediately, are instantly replaced by new ones.
Runers is cute and clever, despite its uninspiring surface, and I can well imagine it occupying the same comfort gaming berth that The Binding of Isaac did for me a couple of years ago, and Realm of the Mad God before it.