Alec Meer
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.
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.
There are many good things within Massive Chalice, but they're frustratingly kept at arm's length from me.
I'm frustrated that there's a great game here, laid a little low by grind, by sub-racing game insta-death factors and irritating, quote-drenched dialogue. This is, at heart, a small and simple game which tries to make itself bigger with unnecessary frippery rather than expanding its worthy core. It's perfectly serviceable as a land-based remix of FTL, but your next great, chaotic adventure Convoy is not. Yet.
As much as the awkwardness, the wobbly writing and the ghastly attitudes often pushed me away from Risen, I'd still take its offbeat ambition and clumsy ambition over a slick, impersonal Diablo or a focus grouped Bioware effort. At the same time, sharper, caveman-free writing and a big spend on more accomplished voice-acting would be redempetive – would transform Risen from appealingly odd and into truly impressive. But maybe what's special about this would be lost if it were able to pursue norms. Perhaps it needs to be as weird and awkward and unpleasant as it is. Perhaps that's why I like it so much, even when I hate it.
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 a shame the same anything-goes mindset doesn't apply to the mission structure and the story, because the dryness, repetition and general rudimentary air is what will ultimately keep me from coming back for more, but if you want a few hours of XCOM-lite with cyberpunk trimmings and the option for co-op, you could do a lot worse than Shadowrun Chronicles.
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.
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.
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.
No numbers, no inventory to speak of, but so much to do, so many ways it can play out and plenty of snowballing consequences. Its superficially simple 2D art occasionally flares into high prettiness too. We might not have Red Dead Redemption, but Westerado is an enormously satisfying consolation prize.
Whether This War of Mine truly succeeds in saying anything more than 'war is hell' I don't know. Equally, I'm not at all sure it needs to. We play a lot of wars, and it is surely only fair to sometimes be reminded that war is not really about a muscle-bound American man saving the day. It makes its point very well, in that it is harrowing, it is careful, and its increasingly deadly Groundhog day approach supports rather than disrupts the atmosphere of extreme strife. It's without doubt effective and impressive at what it does.
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.
Sky-high ambition. Incredible visual design and attention to detail. Promise it couldn't possibly live up to. Shortcuts. Pride. A fall.
[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.
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
The Magic Circle has a very clear understanding of how games can be laid low, especially when high-minded ambition rather than practicality is in charge, but whether because of budgetary limitations or because it's too determined to convey its message first and foremost, it seems to then make some of those same mistakes.
So yes, an awful lot of what makes Dungeon Keeper Dungeon Keeper is in here, and I respect the hell out of that, but there's a certain degree of elegance missing due to the micro-intensive method it's chosen to move the dial towards.
It's extremely rare to come across a game in which all of the details of that design intertwine so effectively. And then you realise it lets you redefine a lot of the parameters individually instead of having monolithic difficulty levels and, wow.
Though I dearly wish it would calm down, and it's too messy to be as classic as its forefather, Dungeons 2 is the tinkerer's cave I've been waiting for.