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Ryan Aston


Favorite Games:
  • BioShock Infinite
  • Silent Hill 2
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

30 games reviewed
61.7 average score
60 median score
44.8% of games recommended
Unscored - The Room
Aug 18, 2014

While it's to The Room's credit that the graphics and sound design remain impressive with the transition to PC, and able to compete against other PC titles, the gameplay does not, and without a compelling story the experience ends up being sadly forgettable.

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It doesn’t help that House of Ashes tends toward monotony. Much of the game is spent slowly exploring dark caves, sometimes the exact same ones, except with different characters. Too often you may find yourself trying to shake off tedium by trying to interact with something only to inadvertently activate a protagonist’s death. Or a jump scare might shake you out of it, but given how telegraphed they are, the game’s horror ends up being as ineffective as the story, which is given over to Aqua Teen Hunger Force-like levels of deranged non-sequitur plotting. While the prior games in this series never reached the heights of Until Dawn, they didn’t lack for disturbing and memorable imagery. By contrast, this game’s non-human baddies are so over-designed and uninspired that they never jangle the player’s nerves.

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Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.

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This series reboot fails to replicate the cleanness of the original games’ racing mechanics.

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Jun 3, 2021

Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players. Worse, Hired Gun turns its back to all that’s promising about Games Workshop’s fiction, such as the various spinoff novels that offer insights into a demented upper-class nobility as well as life in the Underhive, choosing instead to tell a meaningless, mostly incoherent story about archetypal characters who are unmemorable at best. Late in the game, a momentary detour featuring an iconic Warhammer 40,000 monster, one that’s wildly out of place and acting against its bestial nature, serves as a baffling example of how unmoored this game is to its own property.

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Jun 21, 2017

Driven to Win's Takedown mode feels like exploitation, the video-game equivalent of tying fireworks to G.I. Joes.

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Aug 17, 2017

The game's propensity for indulging counterintuitive elements feels like a willful act of self-sabotage.

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May 18, 2023

Conversely, Lego 2K Drive has multiple currencies, and playing through the campaign unlocks frustratingly little. As such, players are artificially restrained while frequently being prodding toward spending real money. And the unfortunate result of that is that Lego 2K Drive is, at best, a competent arcade racing game let down by its difficulty and microtransactions.

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Aug 27, 2021

Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve—Travis drives a facsimile of Kaneda’s bike from Akira and can transform into a Gundam rip-off—No More Heroes III shows no respect for the artistry or cultural context of the pop culture that it pilfers from. In fact, Given its alternately snarky, nihilistic, and condescending opinions of just about everything, you would be justified in feeling that the game doesn’t just dislike the things that it references but even itself.

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In the end, Melody of Memory is very much a fans-only affair.

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Feb 4, 2019

The little that's good here isn't enough for one to shake off the faulty nature of the game's narrative and thematic machinery.

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This game never makes the leap from smaller-scale locales to more epic-sized ones, meaning that the notion of laying waste to a city block as Mr. Stay-Puft or some similarly silly, over-the-top paranormal leviathan against the Ghostbusters remains only a fantasy. Like the film that preceded it, Spirits Unleashed is stuck sending us down memory lane at the expense of stepping forward into new terrain. For many, this nostalgia will be enough, but even with updates it seems unlikely that Spirits Unleashed’s core gameplay will sustain it for long.

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If one is really so inclined to play the game, this Ultimate Evil Edition isn’t even the best version to take on. Despite the smart design decisions made porting the typically PC-based game to consoles, the interface makes it more complicated than necessary to find numbers and statistics, digging through menus that lack the finesse of the original PC version, and Adventure mode remains locked until the campaign is complete, a frustrating decision considering how many may have already completed the now two-year-old game on original release.

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It's unfortunate that A Plague Tale's story falls short of its technical accomplishments.

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Oct 13, 2017

There's no mystery to Union, which is grounded in exactly the way that the Beacon Mental Hospital was not.

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Dec 9, 2016

Dead Rising 4 is a defanged sequel unlikely to satisfy fans of the series or appeal to new ones.

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The game, at present, isn’t without its issues, such as framerate stuttering and network dropouts, all of which will hopefully be addressed in future updates. Something, though, that isn’t likely to be addressed is the lack of variety, as there are only three maps—the Sawyer residence, the slaughterhouse, and the derelict gas station—each with a day/night variant. But don’t expect locations from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, like the abandoned carnival ground and radio station, to be added, as the makers of the game only have interactive rights to the original film. At least in terms of content, this Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that, even as it pays rock-solid tribute to a film classic, fidelity has its limitations.

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Feb 11, 2021

At its best, the game sustains an effectively ominous atmosphere as it channels recognizable childhood fears.

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Some of the best features are frustratingly kept out of the player's hands for hours, by which time many will have lost interest.

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Oct 27, 2023

The score, composed by Chris Detyna, Jakub Gawlina and Leszek Górniak, impresses with fresh instrumentation and variations on Brad Fiedel’s powerful theme. Of particular note is a gorgeous acoustic rendition scoring the credits and one of multiple sex scenes, calling back to the original film. But Resistance is more than just hollow fan service or wish-fulfilment for a worn-down fanbase, as it stands out as an engaging first-person action-adventure. And, with this remaster, it gets a second wind as a truly “complete” experience.

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