Aaron Riccio's Reviews
It aims to tell a story of the brotherhood of soldiers, but it's ill-served by undeveloped characterizations.
It fares best when it escapes the environs of your oasis and delves into its all-too-rare puzzled-filled dungeons.
Exist Archive is bound to end up as a footnote, perpetually overshadowed by the titles that it so earnestly emulates.
The overwhelming size of Wildlands‘s open world is often used to disguise the game’s lack of real freedom within it.
The game gets lost in metonymy, the act of substituting a label for something of a real substance or meaning.
It shouldn't be cutting corners, and it's silly that the four major zones are all still so faded, dull, and repetitious.
As with Dear Esther before it, it offers up an admirable and atmospheric experience that simply isn't all that much fun to play.
Instead of improving upon the original game's basic mechanics, this remaster instead indulges in fan service.
Instead of boldly striking out into the unknown, Mass Effect: Andromeda merely imposes its most predictable habits onto it.
The game treats its themes with such absurdity and reductive PSA qualities that there might as well be a planet named Glee.
There are too many dings on the chassis, from the constant inability to activate promised features and occasionally glitchy effects of current and standard modes.
Lords of the Fallen is trying to Goldilocks it, neither being too hard nor too soft, and that lands it in the rather generic and unadmirable position that last year's Bound by Flame found itself.
The consequences of brash actions are glossed over, and the last three sequences of the game feel redundant, with back-to-back assassinations occurring first at public guillotines and then private dinner parties.
Nobody Wants to Die struggles to reach a satisfying conclusion, which is, perhaps fittingly, indicated by its very title. There’s a serial killer, conspiracy theory, James’s traumatic past, his current partner’s illicit body-rental surrogacy, and a class riot. The game’s body-swapping shenanigans mashes several of those plots into a confusing showdown that may leave you unsure as to who you’re even confronting. The ending that my choices led to—the point at which you’d most want to do a reconstruction—was abrupt and disappointing, leaving the fate of many characters in question. How unfortunate, then, that out of all the places in which the game allows you to rewind time and relive past events, your save file isn’t one of them.
As a whole, BIOMORPH doesn’t live up to the unique promise of its killer creature designs.
All that said, Showtime! is relentlessly charming, and its short, relatively uncomplicated plays will probably kill with a younger demographic. In fact, the setting also plays to the game’s favor whenever secret areas are too obviously telegraphed: Being able to see the strings, like the ones holding up Kung Fu Peach’s martial-arts marionette rival, is a part of the overall aesthetic and performance, not a mark against it. In the end, and perhaps above all, it’s just peachy to see such love given to the arts, with Darkle foes dispatched as much by dazzlingly synchronous ice skating and “the power of song” as by lassos, katanas, and a properly parrying kick.
Though the length of Ghosts of New Eden’s campaign is useful in establishing the intimate relationship between Red and Antea, it makes the rest of the game feel padded, especially if you’re doing the enjoyable, story-rich sidequests. There just aren’t enough enemy types or Manifestation skills to keep combat feeling fresh, and what you learn within the game’s first 10 hours is more or less what you’ll be doing for the subsequent 20 to 30.
It doesn’t help just how stubbornly Illusion Island’s gameplay traffics in the familiar. It’s not until the last level that it takes off the training wheels and offers much of a challenge for older audiences, but it’s disappointing that it’s game over just as the campaign is getting a head of steam up. Illusion Island, then, has enough magic to make you wish there was more of it.
Have a Nice Death has been steadily cranking out content for just over a year in Early Access, and there are some nice combat-related surprises in store for players, like the rare alternative bosses that sometimes pop up in departments you’d long since thought you had mastered. But there still seems to be barely enough variety here to compel players to find the secret ending, let alone to keep replaying on increasingly harder “breakdowns” (the game’s version of difficulties). Turns out, the game’s comic perversion of R.I.P. is truer than it knows. There’s no peace to be found in this endless depiction of Death’s toil, only (paper)work.
SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls too much attention to its intentions, especially with fussy dialogue like “I feel a dulcet tension in the air.” Then again, it does capture the soothing sensation that comes from immersing oneself in another world and learning about it, and with the exception of the game’s final encounter, it’s nothing if not consistent. In the end, SEASON isn’t about answers so much as it is about coping with loss. As one character puts it, repeating one word like a mantra, time always moves on: flow, flow, flow.