Ultimately, what makes Earthlock so essential is just how earnest it is in its love for classic JRPGs. It’s worth sitting through its more cumbersome features in order to appreciate the hard work that a team of people who clearly love the genre have sweated over to refine the game to the point where it’s not only a homage to the greats of old, but it adds just a little to what makes the genre so wonderful.
Why a small team thought it could make a grand open-world RPG is beyond me, but Skylight Freerange 2 demonstrates the horrible consequences of vastly overreaching what your resources and skill level allow. Full props to the developers for trying - the game is oddly fascinating in just how badly it has failed -, but make no bones about this, if the screenshots and video haven’t proven it to you: this game is an utter travesty.
This is the most disappointed that I’ve been with Square Enix for quite some time. I appreciate that the publisher wanted to make sure that fans had access to everything they needed ahead of the release of the big game (Kingdom Hearts 3), but the overall package feels like it’s a collection of Z-list content thrown together.
Thanks to brilliant characterisation and the ability to throw some genuine humour and moments of softness into the mix, the team at Bandai Namco has been able to deliver one of the most refreshingly nuanced quests that we’ve seen in this series, and for the first time in a very long time, I haven’t been able to put a Tales game down.
For all its humour, its intelligent noirish thriller narrative, and the sheer amount of stuff to do, Yakuza’s real strength forever remains in the little details that it gets right about its representation of Japanese cities. Kiryu wanders into a convenience store to buy health supplements (restorative potions, in the vernacular of other JRPGs), and I’m homesick for Japan - even the convenience stores are exciting shopping trips in that country, I swear. Goro wanders down a street, and the lighting from the signs on the street makes me wish I was back in Japan right there and then.
It’s made me into a fan of Fate. If that’s not a sign of a quality game, then nothing is.
I love any excuse to step back into an Atelier game, and the Dusk trilogy is an especially heartfelt and wonderful series. I’m glad Koei Tecmo got around to localising the Vita version of this game. It’s more a concession to the fans who bought the first two on the Vita than anything else, I suspect, and I’d be surprised if Koei expected this to make any kind of money, but it is a good gesture by the company to allow us to finish our collection for Atelier games on the go.
If you were to think of Siegecraft Commander as a proof-of-concept, then it’s a mighty fine one. In the tradition of Worms Forts it’s an intriguing base-building strategy game, and the real-time nature of it solves one of the bigger issues of Worms Forts: that it could be bogged down to almost stalemate, making games drag on for ages. That being said, the game does need a lot more than what it’s offering, and as with all indie games, I wonder about the wisdom of making the game so heavily reliant on multiplayer. When players have to wait around for however long just to get a game going, they’re just as likely to go and play something else instead.
Even if you weren’t able to get into the first, give this one a go. The story’s self-contained enough that you’ll still be able to follow along, and in the effort to make the game more accessible to a wider audience, the overall experience is also more refined and there’s clearly a meatier budget backing it.
I appreciate everything that the developers were trying to achieve with Rollercoaster Dreams, but this game should be a real lesson in working within your means. The best, most well-resourced developers in the world would struggle to make a quality simulation game with online sharing, VR support, and the ability to fully explore and interact with your creations. This is the work of a small indie developer that should have focused on getting a few things right, than throwing in everything and failing at it all.
This is well worthwhile picking up if you've got a New Year's party to host, or attend.
Now I genuinely do not feel the need to own a physical pinball table, which was something I had been contemplating before. That’s how good this is.
This game’s obvious new feature is its HD art, and, more than just being beautiful, the ability of this art to enhance the characters and world makes Shantae: Half-Genie Hero the most impressive take on the whole fantasy Middle East setting since the utterly brilliant Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
Crystal Rift possesses all the potential in the world, and I certainly hope the game performs well enough that the development team is able to go back to the drawing board and come up with a more comprehensive and nuanced structure for another crack at the VR dungeon crawler. Because, as I said at the start, for all its many flaws as a game, Crystal Rift has absolutely sold me on the idea of the VR dungeon crawler.
The gameplay itself is vintage Shin Megami Tensei and doesn’t really need to be anything else.
Home consoles aren't great platforms for hidden object games, but as we saw with the Mystery Case Files game on the Wii some years back, it can be done. Clockwork Tales' inconsistent tone, lack of self-awareness, and generally poor presentation let down an otherwise standard example of the genre, which means you'll need to be a really big genre fan to derive much value from this.
Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS is in almost every way a better quality release to the already-superb Wii U game. A better introduction and tutorial, and the superb Super Mario Challenge mode show that there’s been significant work done to this version to improve it over the Wii U title. However, the inability to upload and share levels that you’ve created is unforgivable. It rips the soul of the original Mario Maker right out of the game, leaving a shell of a game that does very little to encourage you to make interesting courses
Each level is significantly more difficult than the last, and you’ll find you need to replay old levels over and over again to earn stars to upgrade towers to give you a fighting chance at the next level. Eventually you unlock the ability to upgrade the towers to offer additional effects; the water tower can freeze enemies, the fire tower can burn them, but it’s too little, too late. All of this would be almost okay if 4 Elements also wasn’t one of the most unrelentingly plain-looking games, with terrible sprites representing enemies, and bland level design to back it up.
There are dozens and dozens of different elemental monsters to discover, and that’s half the joy of the game. The other half is the bright charm and personality of Alchemic Jousts. It’s not the deepest strategy game you’ll ever play, but it’s one of the most charming that you’ll see for some time to come.
This kind of game flies by okay as a little mobile time waster, but a PlayStation 4 experience needs to offer much more than this.