While it’s not as impactful as Rusty Lake Hotel, or my favourite Cube Escape, Seasons, there’s an absolute ton going on here for a crazy tiny [price].
Better responding controls would do a lot of good, but for £6.40 you’ve got a lovely idea, often delivered very well.
Astonishing amounts of work have gone into this, to creating such a vast detailed city, writing an apparently infinite story, building something on such scale. And then this has been dramatically let down by the dreadful AI, a woeful inability to edit, and the mindnumbing monotony of its identical missions. I'm fascinated by it, but I absolutely cannot recommend it.
Get into the flow and there are moments of pleasure to be found. Nipping from shadow to shadow, flinging a shadow blade at a distant foe, evading attention, and reaching a goal, occasionally feels neat. But these moments tend to come as a run of luck, that doesn’t involve bumping into any of the game’s issues.
It’s poop, which is disappointing. And it doesn’t help that you have to switch off one of a whole bunch of hideous German techno/thrash metal music stations every time you start a vehicle. That’s weird. It didn’t entertain me, it didn’t distract my son, and it’s very broken. Maybe it’ll be a cult classic by Giant Machines 2023, but not yet.
I love that they reached so high, but I really wish they'd thought harder about what it was they were trying to balance on as they did. Ambition wasn't thwarted by technology, but just a lack of common sense. I find myself still wanting to recommend you play it, not least because the action is mostly fine, if very repetitive, and therefore there's nothing that's actively unpleasant about playing it – you can experience the wonders it has to offer, just for the price of grinding through the okay-ness of it all.
t’s very funny, very sharp, and most importantly, a lot of frenzied fun.
Oh, this is a bummer. What a lovely setting for a game, and a potentially intriguing society, as AI develops and perhaps the flaws of humanity begin to be revealed in robotic kind. It could have been a fascinating exploration of the human condition, or just a really nice sci-fi tale.
It all neatly works, no fuss, no show. It’s graphically dull as a ditch, there’s no music, scant plinky sound effects – this is an austere production. But it delivers a huge pile of smart puzzles without pretension, which turns out to sometimes be enough.
[The price] is a lot for two hours, and as I think I’ve perhaps covered above, it’s an abysmal game. The Welshest game I’ve ever played, but still abysmal. Great TV show for the most part, but one that keeps annoying your viewing pleasure by asking you to click on a dot. Graphics are amazing, though!
Sorcery! has been spectacular, each episode better than the last, and the fourth a towering triumph. It has been such an intelligent combination of trusting a quality source material, while being bold enough to take enormous steps away to innovate and explore even better ideas and possibilities. Everyone who cares about RPGs needs to take a look to see how much more they should be expecting from their genre, and to have a really bloody good time.
It’s definitely bloated, needing a brutal hand to strip out a few dozen of the weaker puzzles. Because in there are challenges that are not only good, but sometimes great. Really satisfying to solve. It’s that they’re too frequently diluted down by a series of chambers far more entertaining for the brief banter between TOM and Ava at the start than the process of completion. As such, it falls a good distance short of the two mighty games it emulates.
It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.
Metrico+ really needs a lot more focus. It's throwing an awful lot at the wall, and while there's certainly a great deal of smarts at play here, they're not united, not well contained.
It’s a perfect game for playing with kids (although try to keep your sniggering at the cactus willies to a minimum, in order to avoid awkward conversations). What we don’t have is Ubisoft Reflections reaching for something new, something innovative, something surprising.
Kelvin is one of the most competent and solid adventures I’ve seen in forever, without resorting to the intrinsic nastiness that imbues too much of the output from developers like Daedalic. It looks just lovely, a bold and distinct cartoon style that’s something I want to see more of.
Human: Fall Flat is unquestionably charming, and tremendous fun when it’s not annoying me so much I want to find the developers and put staples in their toes.
It’s a clumsy, dull, shallow, lacklustre trudge through cold soup. And fails at the most important aspect of any game in the genre: making me want to have another go.
It’s wildly derivative, which is such a peculiar thing to see from such a developer, but I’m glad it exists. It’s just… well, it’s fine.
It’s clever for all sorts of reasons, but the most smart aspect is its recognition of your passivity in the role of a visual novel player, and making that the most crucial part of the story is telling. It’s a chilling thought, spending less than an hour losing thirty years from the lives of everyone you know, and while I think the game does crucially badly fail to give the feeling that three decades have passed for the people you follow, the ten years or so it far more feels like has just the right effect of alienating distance and discomfort.