For all its wealth of content, Puyo Puyo Tetris does rely on developing and then maintaining a strong online community for truly long-term value. As a local multiplayer game, you'll be glad to have it around for the parties, and it'll help plane trips and other long travels fly by in a snap. Get hooked into the game's steep learning curve online, however, and you'll have a game that you'll be playing for months, if not years, and not once, for even the briefest second, will the game lose its charm.
Dragon Quest Heroes 2 is undeniable proof that the mix between a genuine JRPG and Warriors game works, and now it's time for a Final Fantasy Heroes, methinks.
ArmaGallant is a budget production, and that means that it will likely not sustain the community that a game of its nature needs. I'm already finding myself queuing for ten minutes at time to get a match going, and that's really disappointing, because this is one I could see myself playing for quite a while yet, given half the chance. It also helps that I am, to date, actually undefeated. Bring on a world championships and those eSports sponsorships, please, I want to turn pro at ArmaGallant.
As Nintendo's second big release on the Switch following on from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I have no trouble believing that this will solidify the console's rapidly-growing reputation of offering far more than people thought it would prior to launch. It might be a flawed experience, but that's almost irrelevant when you consider just how much of it there really is on offer. This is how you do a "HD remaster".
There's a lot to like in Vikings, even if the game's never able to effectively articulate how it's different to the genre's greats. It manages - just - to be more than a by-the-numbers Diablo clone thanks to the creative energy that went into its bosses and environment design, but it relies too heavily on that, and the assumption that you'll be playing the game in multiplayer. As a single player experience, the limits on what Vikings can offer become distracting; making it good for a lazy afternoon of grinding fun, but not something that you'll remember over the longer term.
It's a good package of entertaining games, and is presented beautifully, but it's also not essential.
Goichi Suda's love letter to Noir is so striking and vivid that it's a game I'll not soon forget. By turns shocking, darkly humorous, confounding, and always creative, this was Suda-san's first game as an independent game developer, and through it we see so much of what would become Suda's trademarks; that same transgressive attitude, the same love for classical film and literature genres, and that same intensity in his storytelling (that will ultimately get overlooked by most critics).
Mervils: A VR Adventure relies too heavily on a gimmick it doesn't even use properly, and that's the very definition of a limited experience.
If you can get a multiplayer game going there's a bit more strategy involved, I guess, but there isn't much of a community wrapped around this one, leaving Korix feeling like a game that had a good idea buried away in there, but fails to give people the VR strategy experience that they'll be looking for.
What Virry really is is a series of micro-documentaries that show you, close up and in VR, a range of different animals as they live in their natural environment. It's the closest you'll get to a zebra, let alone a lion, and while that's going on, a commentator will share some basic facts about the animal and the threats that it's facing.
There might not be much depth here over the long term, but for some short bursts of frenetic action, it absolutely has the lightgun genre nailed.
It's probably just as well Sony gave this thing away for free with PSPlus memberships. It's the only hope the game has of actually keeping an audience (because it's a multiplayer-only game, it needs a large and sustained community).
A Rose in the Twilight is, in its entirety, a metaphor for the rose itself; it's a truly beautiful masterpiece, but it's also a gothic kind of beauty, in that it's more than happy to stab you sharply, even as you appreciate everything about it. It's a ravishing, masterful work, that will be played by just a handful, but hopefully remembered for a long time to come.
I don't think I've ever played a more pointless game than R.B.I. Baseball 17. Yeah, sure, you can argue that it's cheaper than the MLB The Show games, but surely if you're enough of a fan of baseball to want to buy a video game take on the sport at all, you'd be willing to spend that extra money for a game that you will actually want to play, and a game that will actually do your favourite sport justice. I just don't see how anyone, anywhere, could possibly want what this one is offering.
If you're like me and do take game narratives seriously, then these two are right up there with the best in the industry, and sticking them together into a single package makes them completely essential.
I want to see more Siralim, but if there's to be a Siralim 3, I do want it to be something different this time.
For some reason Nintendo insists that Mario Sports games should be vapid experiences that insult the intelligence of the very young children that they seem to be pitched at.
Talisman is a classic board game, and deserves respect for that. It's also eminently playable to this day, and very easy to pick up and play; it's a genuinely good game for lazy Sundays with friends. But it's also not the perfect game, nor is this port the perfect port. And sadly that means that Talisman on PlayStation 4 won't win over a new generation of fans to the game.
What I got was a game filled with storytelling (I can't emphasise enough just how many cut scenes Toukiden 2 has), and with a huge shift to open world design. In fact, where the first Toukiden was very solidly in the Monster Hunter tradition, this one edges that much closer to a hybrid JRPG/ Monster Hunter experience, and I couldn't be happier about that. This is exactly what I want from a "Monster Hunter clone."
Between missions there's not much to do, other than drive around a spectacularly boring Bolivia looking for more icons to kick missions off. Bolivia's actually a beautiful country, and this game probably set tourism back for the country by a couple of decades.