The game is made with competence and is certainly challenging where it needs to be, but is badly let down by its presentation, with one of the most painful soundtracks I've heard in years having me reach for the mute button.
Unfortunately, while the standard platforming action (and associated minigames) are accessible enough for multiplayer fun, the mechanics of the alien-based minigames, and the physics that drive the spaceship, make the other two thirds of the game frustrating beyond measure for anyone who hasn't put a lot of time into learning how to play them.
The level design tends to be quite bland, too – unique mechanic aside you’re played what this kind of game is offering in some way before. But still, it’s good, clean, light-hearted fun.
This is a strong debut by developer Bacon Bandits, and while it looks quite simple, the balancing of a game that relies so heavily on the randomness of letter tiles to form its core mechanics can't have been easy. And yet, with very few exceptions, I never felt hard done by the luck of the draw.
As a missed opportunity, Shadow of the Beast is a sublime one. The powerful juxtaposition between the Beast, his enemies, and the natural world, is a worthy theme to explore, and the bloodletting that the Beast gets up to is both visceral and entirely appropriate to that theme. That the developers really struggled to explore the concept in any meaningful depth is disappointing, but nonetheless, Shadow of the Beast is ultimately worthwhile.
It still lacks atmosphere. It's still remarkably competent without actually pushing the genre forwards. It's still a multiplayer experience that I'm betting will shrink to a tiny community in months.
I enjoyed Star Fox Zero a great deal. I found it challenging, but rewarding, vibrant and dynamic without being beyond my skillset. I don't necessarily understand – nor agree – with people criticising the game for trying to be a streamlined dogfight simulation, but at the same time I don't think this game has nearly done enough to push it forward.
Valkyria Chronicles is, simply, one of the best tactical games you’ll ever play. It’s serious, but doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s emotionally compelling while never losing sight of the fact it’s also a game. It’s a popular and well-regarded game that, for whatever reason, people simply don’t talk about it enough.
It’s heavily exploitative with those school uniforms, and that might put you off it, but for existing fans of the girls and their antics, this is another very worthy and thematically spot-on feather in the cap. It also represents one of the stronger efforts at storytelling in the series, aside from Idea Factory’s own work, and that's a good sign for the future development of the series.
Blues and Bullets is without a doubt the most true, and also most effective, crime noir game we have to date, with a masterful understanding of the themes and visual motifs that comprise a noir tale, and an understanding on how to work within those without being clichéd or trite.
In terms of giving the fans what they want, I'm certain Naughty Dog has nailed every part of the brief that it was given. Uncharted 4 shows a truly masterful eye for detail and is near perfect in mechanical execution.
t’s a good game, with some clever, creative puzzle design that takes the Lemmings-like inspiration for the series about as far as it would be possible to push it, and all those different amiibo special abilities do give a lot of variety to the puzzles, but it’s little nasty for Nintendo to hold back a full experience unless you’ve got over a hundred dollars worth of toys.
Platforming is tight and varied, and the plot matches the lighthearted tone of the rest of the game. Shantae and the Pirate's Curse is a spirited little game, and by far the best 2D platformer on the PlayStation 4 to date.
In other words, it’s a RTS game without any strategy, and a town building simulator with endless timers to deal with. The fact that I needed to use premium-currency gems within the first hour of play or be stuck having to exit the game to wait for the cash to build up to do something else. And a game you need to exit every half hour is not really a game that works on a console.
Alienation is a hugely enjoyable game, but it's one that's playing the ball a little too safely, and resting too heavily on the successes of games that have come before it. Ultimately I don't think this will be remembered as a classic, and it doesn't need to be; what Housemarque has created is a bit of fun with friends around, no more, and no less.
I take all my hats off to Experience Inc. for what it has done with Ray Gigant. This is a breathlessly creative and fundamentally interesting game, and it, along with Stranger of Sword City, cements the developer as one of my favourites out there at the moment.
Kemco produces JRPGs on a budget that are designed to give people a momentary throwback to the 16-bit era of the genre, and while I don't expect anything mind blowing when I do go into these games, I find things this soulless and unimaginative very, very trying indeed.
I found the soul of Langrisser to be well and truly in the right place, and while I don’t believe it is a classic game, I also don’t believe for a moment that it deserves the commentary it has been getting to date. It’s an ugly-as-sin duckling, but we know how that story turns out.
Mario & Sonic at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games is good fun, but ultimately it's too shallow and simple to be anything but a passing diversion. Nintendo and/or Sega could actually build a bunch of the minigames in here into full sports games in their own right… and frankly I wish they would do just that.
Though there's less direct threat when compared to more mainstream horror titles, there's an intensity to that environment that helps to create a wonderfully sinister atmosphere. It's not an essential horror game, but it's a genuinely ripping yarn.