Ian Boudreau's Reviews
I’m still working my way through my first season at the helm of the semi-pro Bath City FC (a team I’ve chosen as a way to connect with my coworkers in PCGamesN’s hometown), and so there’s still more I’d like to see before assigning a score – particularly, the initial patch that updates the beta build I’ve been playing. But my impressions of Football Manager 2021 so far are largely positive. This is a clear step forward over last year’s edition, even if some of its new ideas don’t completely work.
An utterly charming yarn about friendship and kindness that breathes gritty modern life into the quaint JRPG format of classic Dragon Quest.
After such a long wait for a successor to X-Wing and TIE Fighter, Star Wars: Squadrons feels like a lucky shot with a proton torpedo.
Delightfully chaotic and ruggedly lovable, this is a decidedly old-fashioned shooter that succeeds on the principle of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
A creative expansion that adds enjoyable new mechanics and units, plus a unique two-stage campaign, without feeling disjointed from the core game.
Successfully modernises the medieval strategy series, preserving much of what's good and adding some interesting new ideas. While it still needs to iron out a few details, it's a worthy successor to the series' august crown.
An earnest but empty love letter to Quake and Duke Nukem 3D that never gets around to doing anything to call its own.
An accessible, lightweight competitive shooter. Though it's a little thin in its current state, this is a solid start for what will hopefully become a lively and dynamic game as its season pass gets underway.
Age of Wonders: Planetfall, while a bit opaque in some areas, is the most entertaining 4X I've played in years.
I’ve missed out on Roller Coaster Tycoon and its descendants, so I can’t compare Parkitect to those games. What I can say is that it is delightful and non-threatening, and playing it has typically left me feeling pleasantly drowsy and contented, the way I might after wandering around a brightly-lit midway, munching a corn dog covered in mustard in a gauzy childhood memory of the carnival.
It’s by no means a terrible game, but it whiffs on too many elements for the admittedly cool aesthetics to carry the day.
Frozen Synapse 2 is a welcome return to the intensely micromanaged turn-based tactical battles that made the original so compelling. The asynchronous multiplayer is unquestionably the star of the show, and queuing up multiple online games at once means you're never stuck waiting for an opponent, and that you can play at your own pace. But while the new City Game story mode is conceptually interesting, in practice the largely scripted sequence of story missions doesn't allow for much in the way of meaningful gameplay depth.
What's struck me most about my time with Vampyr is that it manages to turn you into a predator through its mechanics as much as it does with its storytelling. It does collapse under its own weight by the end, but the fact that it so effectively seduces you, almost trance-like, into roleplaying a villain makes it worth biting into.
Overwatch is a carefully curated ship in a bottle made from some of gaming's best new ideas.
I still feel as though I've only scratched the surface of this game, and when I've finished writing this, I'm going to go play more of it. Truly, Nurgle loves his children.
Shadwen has a lot of dings and dents – a superfluous crafting and loot system, unreliable physics, poor AI, and a fairly one-note aesthetic, and a brief campaign – but it manages to entertain nonetheless with its devil-may-care approach to puzzle solving and a heroine who’s actually a rather horrible, stabby bastard.
Add in a terrific soundtrack by Command & Conquer composer Frank Klepacki, and that’s 8-Bit Armies – it’s a small, tightly-designed RTS geared toward genre newcomers that doesn’t offer much in the way of gimmicky flash or weird new asymmetric factions, but counters with an easy-to-use design with just enough moving pieces to make it a great first step for players who are RTS-curious but intimidated by the likes of StarCraft 2 or Total War.
[W]hile I loved the atmosphere, the setting, and the aesthetic of The Flame in the Flood, I never got that "one more run" feeling I've gotten from other roguelites like Isaac or Spelunky. It's possible that the game's pace is a bit off, or that I haven't quite figured out the "correct" way to play it.
Cobalt could definitely use a bit more documentation or a more fleshed-out tutorial to explain the many systems it throws at you from the outset, and the gameplay never feels as tight as, say, Super Meat Boy, but it's full of its own weird, clunky charm and certainly has a high skill ceiling for those interested in mastering it. Imagine R2-D2 in Mark of the Ninja – that's Cobalt.
Playing it was a trial for me every time I fired it up – the firehose of outdated pop culture references and toilet humor made me feel like Alex DeLarge undergoing the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. Should I ever find myself on stage for a robot game show in the 26th century, I'll opt for lethal injection instead.