Put simply, NieR: Automata is the greatest game ever made. It's not just that it is the deepest and most narratively potent game ever developed - and it is a truly deep narrative experience - but more than that, Yoko Taro has finally found perhaps the developer on the planet capable of doing his visionary work justice.
This is an exceptional port of a hugely underrated game. The character art is one of the most critical features in the game, and on the much larger PC screen the art is vibrant, detailed, and attractive. This alone really makes Monster Monpiece's PC port the definitive version. Hopefully this is not the last we see of Compile Heart producing CCGs.
Unlike Nintendo's Mini NES retro console that was released last year, this is a more difficult package to recommend to people that didn't grow up playing the games.
Unlike Nintendo's Mini NES retro console that was released last year, this is a more difficult package to recommend to people that didn't grow up playing the games.
This vision of Berserk loses a lot of its narrative potency because it cuts around it and provides only the most basic of skeletons for narrative context.
When I first saw this at TGS last year, I thought it was going to be a grander simulation game than it has turned out to be. In part I'm disappointed, because a hardcore simulation about exploring uncharted oceans in search of new land would be a fascinating game, but at the same time the simple, clean charm of Neo Atlas is really difficult to resist, especially when I'm in the mood to play something low-pressure while catching up on my movie or television backlog.
Horizon is a remarkably refined and technically brilliant game, but Guerrilla has yet to prove that it can take that next step and produce a genuine classic.
Nioh plays well. It eschews the control setup that the Souls games popularised for something a little more like what we’re used to from Koei Tecmo - face buttons to attack and so on. Indeed, in playing it, it almost behaves more like a methodically-paced Ninja Gaiden, and as someone who never quite had the reflexes to really enjoy the Ninja Gaiden series, it really hit that sweet spot.
What makes Dragon Quest so special is that each game manages to straddle a line between nostalgia for simple, elegant combat mechanics, and the modern game design world, where it can poke fun at itself and laugh along with players. Dragon Quest VIII isn’t the perfect port in coming to the 3DS. It is, however, very close to the perfect classical JRPG.
This might mean that VR games never fit in with the current expectations of non-VR games, but when they’re stuff like Dexed, I don’t mind in the slightest. This is a game that focuses on immersion, and immersive it is. Simple gameplay loops give players a reason to keep coming back and playing more, but what will stay with you for far longer is just how beautiful it all is.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is a game that really struggles to find the new voice that Resident Evil so needs as a franchise. It’s incredibly well designed and executed, and you’re not going to find a game that does VR better than this one.
Even as a dedicated single player game, Dynasty Warriors: Godseekers is one of the best games available on the platform. It’s just so perfectly balanced, invigorating, intelligent, and rich.
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.