Aaron Riccio's Reviews
Players who manage to get past the technical issues will find themselves saddled with a generic, emotionless game.
GTA may be more graphic, but I'd rather have kids play in that fully realized world, with the wealth of side-missions, beautiful views, and more authentic vehicles, than in this dumbed-down cartoon catastrophe.
Despite being occasionally funny, the game is never fun.
Blanc abounds in beautifully layered textures, with sharp distinctions between foreground and background planes. Which makes it all the more frustrating that such intricacy isn’t present in the text-free story, which at times devolves into bland obstacle courses that seem to exist only to disguise the monotony of the game’s mechanics. Except perhaps for the lack of sustenance in this world that goes undiscussed, there’s no element of surprise here, as the cub and fawn set out to find their families and accomplish just that. The humans are missing, and nobody cares, not even the domesticated sheep left behind in the stables that are somehow still alive.
True Colors already feels closer to an interactive movie than a game, especially in the final chapter. Here, we’re plunged into a series of overly expository flashbacks in which our decisions have already been made for us. There are fewer choices to make and interactions to discover as we’re led toward a narrative twist that’s as convenient as it is messy. You can see the seams in the editing as the game’s engine chooses which of two responses you’re going to get from each member of the town council, depending on how you interacted with them in earlier chapters. Were you ever actually empathetic toward these people, or simply tallying up points to get them on your side? A stronger game might have better concealed this behind-the-scenes scorekeeping, but Alex’s power makes the game’s true colors all too visible.
The game lacks for Samurai Jack's smooth, stylish animation and deceptively deep characterizations.
Even when Fall Guys is working perfectly as intended, its appeal is limited.
It retreads the same ground of the prior games' fetch-quest-driven, backtracking-filled action-adventuring.
Its characters already lacked personality, and the 3D makeover is mostly successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.
Even when the game isn't actively shooting itself in the foot, it never entirely succeeds.
By the time New Dawn reaches its rushed third act, it's broken down entirely.
It doesn’t matter how cool an individual set piece looks if all the smaller scenes leading up to it are marred by unresponsive vehicles, dumb AI, and shoddy physics.
In single-player or multiplayer, Hidden Agenda is a game in which winning almost always feels like losing.
The game sacrifices specificity of environment, story, and characterization so as to ensure that the car is king.
Because creativity comes at the cost of cohesion, the whole adventure turns into one irritating mini-game.
Even at only three-to-four hours in length, Submerged feels padded.
There may be a good game buried under Gearbox Software's first attempt at a MOBA, but too many of its systems are developmentally in their infancy.
These mechanics aren't broken so much as literally insane, in the sense that each chapter requires you to do the exact same things, somehow expecting different results.
It lies somewhere between a fully formed game in which wizards learn to chain elements into powerful spells and a low-rent improv show.
Mirage ought to have been more than the dim illusion of where the series has already traveled.