A people management sim set in yonder Scottish highlands that is, unfortunately, a drier, slower and more bucolic take on its Rimwordly influences.
In Kerbal Space Program, we have a perfect game of experimentation. Checking to see what goes wrong and correcting your next trial accordingly. When struggling with my first launches and landings, and the tricky controls, I was close to believing it was a game of impossible luck. But it is so far from that as to make the initial belief laughable. Instead, it is about accruing and applying small units of knowledge, one on top of the other.
Most of the time, Elite works. The excitement, even the boredom, of the game is still preserved for me as something I am happy to have paid for. But it would be a poor reviewer indeed who did not mention that the sim's rough edges have not been satisfactorily sanded down.
Planetary Annihilation is a slick, modernised RTS, engineered from the ground up to appeal to the fast-paced, competitive, hotkey-loving esports crowd. For people like me, it is a bruising gauntlet of defeat. But even I can see the appeal. Putting aside the fact that to play online you need a quad-core processor instead of a brain, the game itself has a huge amont of character.
[T]he state of your ship is what keeps you going. You fight more to earn more to buy more. In this way it is a very transparent game. But also a repetitive one, and overall, a mixed bag. I know a game is not capturing me when, as a reviewer, I keep checking my "hours played" stat on Steam to see if I can fairly say: "OK, that's enough". Still, I recognise there are always those who want more space sauce, who won't mind fighting on a 2D plane, and who will be much more possessed by upgrading their own "Wobblenaut".
else Heart.Break() helps you to see programming for the magic it is. It may have made me feel I had neglected an entire realm of the world. But it also showed me that it's never too late to learn.
[T]hose who haven't got it by now may be quite happy to continue ignoring it. I think this would be an enormous shame. If this is you, I want to tell you that it is a game worth playing.
At level 26, I'm enjoying The Division. At level 30, I'm worried it'll get repetitive.
A MOBA in a non-cutesy, non-fantasy setting, with just enough respect for the genre's tradition while having the courage to keep things slow, uncomplicated and strategic. Here's that slap on the back, space videogame. You deserve it.
The Surge is shonky, inferior and more than a little derivative. But if you fancy a shortcut-filled robotic challenge, it's not all bad. Just be ready to get deprogrammed.
If you're the kind of person who wishes it still was the eighties and likes the idea of revisiting a button-mashing romp, warts and all, you'll find a lot to like about this one. But even so, you might find it wearing thin after a while. After all, even the Age of Nostalgia must come to an end.
Overall, Ashes isn’t bad, it’s just very plain. Gorgeous, but plain. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before and done better.
This is what you have waiting for you: a ridiculous and pointless horror story, and a slow death. It’s wonderful.
It is safely good. Even with the addition of Operations mode and the behemoths and the return to a more instinctively dramatic setting, it still feels like Battlefield.
Compared to the variety offered by the alternatives this year, I don’t see why either Battlefield 1 or Titanfall 2 won’t scratch the same itch, and then some. This raises a far more worrying question for CoD as an ongoing and risk-averse phenomenon: how long can it afford not to innovate? At some point even the faithful, even those incredible knife-wielding ninjas, will tire of running over the same old ground.
Infinite Warfare’s story mode is an expensive-looking spectacle without a single idea of its own, mechanically or narratively. Even Ethan the robot’s attempts to salvage the Marine vs Navy vs Army banter by playing off some well-worn robot tropes can’t save the story or dialogue from being hogwash. Even the rare glimpse of interesting ‘burning asteroid’ level design can’t redeem the rest of the grey corridors and flaming city streets. As for how good it looks (and it does look very good) that is no saving grace.
Overall, I don't know exactly how I feel about For Honor. It sometimes feels like a Ubisoft hired a bunch of scientists in white coats to observe Dark Souls PvP from behind reinforced perspex and experiment on it with Dota DNA in a mad attempt to recreate a tame monster in a safe environment for their own nefarious ends (profit). What they've made is an interesting chimera, something that is both more accessible but sometimes just as unforgiving.
All this and more reveals Wildlands to be a shooter that has been released messy and unfinished, a practice that Ubi is doing with increased proficiency with each passing game, seemingly using their beta tests as demos and marketing opportunities instead of using them to actually test and repair their game to an acceptable level.
All in all, I found it difficult to get into Crea in the same way I did for its forefathers. It would be easy for me to say that part of that is down to fatigue with the genre – I have been through it all before, after all. But that is not the main problem I have with this latecomer. The fact is, it just does everything less well.
It’s a bit of a mixed bag. If you’re happy to sit idly waiting for balloons of jobs to pop up, and take each day as slowly as it comes, then you’ll probably get a lot more out of this tale of corruption and downfalls than I did. But if you’re interested in deeper systems and micromanaging your officers, forget it, it’s Chinatown.