Aegis is genuine fun, and a genuine twist on a very staid genre.
Super Strike isn’t exactly Beach Spikers 2, but for fans of the sport, it’s something of a consolation prize.
[T]here’s not a single picture in the dozens and dozens of puzzles the game boasts that you’ll actually want to put together.
I think it’s an absolute tragedy that Koi is all-but guaranteed to be lost among everything else that’s available on the PlayStation 4. It’s a smart, genuine little game, with soul and a story to tell, and wraps it within one of the best examples we’ve seen to date of serenity as a play concept.
Explicit narrative aside, I found Stranger of Sword City to be a real winner of a dungeon crawler.
Of course Republique serves to act as an Orwellian-style warning against totalitarian and far-right regimes. The overwhelming bulk of the game is geared towards developing that theme, and its narrow focus does come at the expense of characters that I would have liked to see developed to far greater depth. But it's also a superb pure stealth game, and it's always nice to see these kinds of games done without a reliance on violence.
The problem McDroid has is that it really doesn’t offer anything that we haven’t actually experienced in a game before, and for a while now the consensus seems to be that people are bored with the tower defence genre. McDroid’s inability to do anything genuinely new is a real problem. People already have their favourite tower defence games.
Hyrule Warriors Legends isn’t as technically impressive as the original release on the Wii U, but it stands out as a true highlight among portable Warriors games. Content rich, rich with Zelda lore, and a mechanically-tight brawler, it’s a love letter to the fans, and it’s good to see that Koei Tecmo is still working on this property… it bodes well for what we might see on the NX down the track.
Though the game is a pure play brawler (albeit with really stylish violence and a stunning aesthetic and music score), the theme adds genuine flavour to the proceedings. People tend to forget, but Shakespeare himself was a populist playwright, and his work was filled with the old hyperviolence, sex and a bit more hyperviolence on top of that to get audiences roudy and cheering the actors on.
My only recommendation is that if you're coming to this looking for multiplayer fun, consider buying copies for friends too, because from day one the community for the game has been fairly limited. But it's a cheap game, so even if you decide to stick purely with the pre-built levels the developers threw in with the base package, you're still going to have a good time with this.
Modern board game design greatly de-emphasises the importance of dice rolls in favour of systems that are more predictable and strategic, and I've got to say that I much prefer this brave new world of strategy over luck that we have in our board games now.
My overwhelming experience over the entire course of Grumpy Reaper is that it's pleasant as a casual puzzle game.
This game simply drips with atmosphere in a world that manages to transition from one darkly beautiful sight to the next.
There are those that enjoy it for its quirkiness and originality, and then there are those that simply find it too different to really resonate. For my part I really appreciate what Idea Factory has achieved with this game, and, while the theme is quite dark, it’s presented in that same bright and cheerful, satirical space that we’re so used to with this developer/ publisher that it’s charming and irreverent. It’s always nice to play games like that.
This game has been more meaningful to me and had a greater emotional impact on me than any game I've played since Nier itself, and as far as I'm concerned that means it's as close to perfection as games can get.
The solution is always obvious, and never elaborate enough to be truly entertaining. In other words it’s pointless busywork.
What’s left is a competent, but wholly remarkable and uninteresting hack-and-slask JRPG. There’s plenty of loot to reward the grind if you can handle how overwhelmingly generic the experience is, but, I wasn’t really going in for loot. I wanted a game that was like Muramasa: The Demon Blade; a game that would take the aesthetics of classical Japan and really do something with it. Instead, Sadame proves itself to be vapid and uninspired in the extreme, and so very disappointing as a result.
It’s irredeemable.
Senran Kagura: Estival Versus is great fun, combining the rawest of Japanese-style raunch humour with a tight and mechanically sound combat system. Frankly, I don't think there's much else the developer could have done to nail the brief on what this game set out to achieve, and the PlayStation 4 has a new king of exploitation entertainment on it.
Lacrosse 16 captures the soul of the sport. In the moment-to-moment play this is a fast, energetic, entertaining sport and that is exactly what Big Ant have offered in its take on it.