Blood & Truth is on balance a very enjoyable, highly entertaining game, and this has the best chance that Sony has had yet to sell VR on the “AAA” community.
Observation is truly a thinking person's game... and it's a rare gem for that.
It's almost painfully delightful, warm, colourful, and completely charming in everything that it does, but its reliance on nostalgia and series tradition means that I'm just not sure that this will be one to win the series new fans.
Castlevania Anniversary Collection is an excellent, high quality retro collection. It is of a collection where too many of the games don't hold enough value beyond their nostalgia, and it's lacking titles I would have considered to be key. However, with a great set of features, and plenty of classic dark fantasy platforming, this package is a useful reminder of just how prestigious the entire franchise really is.
While the basic formula to Total War hasn't changed, Creative Assembly is genuinely impressive in the way that it manages to capture the subtleties of warfare in whatever era its depicting.
Time hasn’t been good to Blades of Time, and and other than for the morbidly curious, I can’t see anyone being masochistic enough to derive any value out of it.
A Plague Tale comes so achingly close to the brilliance of a Hellblade, but sadly where Ninja Theory's "blockbuster indie" project is a masterpiece, Armicia's story is "just" a page-turner.
World End Syndrome does more than enough as a visual novel - it's hard to put down, well written, and the art is gorgeous.
Fell Seal came out of nowhere. That's my fault because I don't really follow Kickstarter these days, and that's where this one got its start. But I'm so glad that I had the chance to play it.
Something about the survival genre has taken all those brilliant ingredients and spat out a failure of a meal, however, and that's an depressing reflection on the entire genre.
European Conqueror doesn't really work as a historical wargame. Its predecessor dealt with it loosely enough, but European Conqueror takes the abstraction one step too far for its own good. With that being said, this is still a very fine tactical wargame, with good scope, and certainly so much to do that you won't be putting it down in a hurry.
Shadowgate is still Shadowgate, and there's an inherent classic quality to this adventure that, coupled with the dark fantasy atmosphere and general difficulty, also makes it inherently rewarding.
What really lets Our World Is Ended down is its lack of narrative focus. On the one hand you'd got a compelling discussion about fluid reality - something that, much like AI and robotics, is quickly falling out of the area of "science fiction" and into "we actually need to talk about this, because it's happening" territory. On the other hand, you've got a lot of stories about a bunch of generally unlikable characters and their obsession with breasts.
When I think about the best visual novels out there - the likes of Steins;Gate and Danganronpa, VA-11 HALL-A shares many of the same traits. It's thoughtfully written, to provide some deeper insights and philosophical musics that help to elevate the game above being simple entertainment... but at the same time it does so in a vibrant and deeply entertaining way. And it is impossible to put down.
The result of all of this is a highly limited package that doesn't do Konami any favours. For a company to have such an incredible heritage - including two of the most influential games of all time in Frogger and Track & Field - and then to ignore all of that for a range of early era SHMUPs (and one platformer) that few will remember is bemusing, to say the least. There is some limited appeal in there for people who are fans of the one particular genre, but even then, the package does a very barebones job of celebrating that.
The sheer quality of Rayark's rhythm games override any small issues that I might have with them, and Cytus Alpha is one of the finest playing rhythm games you'll ever come across. It's abstract, minimalist and focused, but it delivers such vibrant rhythm game action that it's impossible not to love.
It's a game (and franchise) that wears its indie credentials on its sleeve, and it's hard to be too disappointed by its flaws for that reason.
The concept of Panty Party is hilarious, though once you move past making jokes about finally getting your hands on Hatsune Miku's underwear, the humour of the game doesn't exactly sustain itself either.
Moero Chronicle is so completely unabashed about its fan service and endless innuendo that it's oddly charming, in its own way. There's absolutely no way that people who don't enjoy fan service for the sake of fan service will get anything out of this game. The dungeon crawling is executed well enough, but it's traditional to a fault. Furthermore, the localisation is so bad that it hurts a lot of the fun nonsense that runs through the script.
This genre is about pretty mundane work, but what makes it so wonderful is it distills that work down to the point that it feels effortless. Sadly, I ended up having to put more effort into My Time At Portia than I do with the actual work I do in real life.