Ian Boudreau
- Red Dead Redemption
- StarCraft
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Ian Boudreau's Reviews
An ambitious, beautiful, and obsessively detailed society simulation that still needs to iron out a few rough edges.
Old issues return and some of its new ideas are less effective than others, but Total War: Pharaoh remains a strong and exciting addition to the series' historical catalog.
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.
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.
While missions can be frustrating and the new diplomacy system is nothing to write home about, Stronghold: Warlords should satisfy devoted fans with its new, gorgeously realised setting.
Some creaky design concepts that don't hold up well and a slipshod PC port hold Nier Replicant back from greatness on PC.
The classic RTS battles carry the third entry in this once-essential series, returning more or less untouched, but alongside a bloated and unfinished campaign mode that feels at odds with the core ideas of Company of Heroes.
Simple and beautiful to look at, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is a pleasant distraction but lacks the depth in its combat and economy to stay interesting for very long.
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.
A new and complete version of Dragon's Dogma adds some modern polish to a diamond in the rough.
[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.
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.
Grim-faced dedication to history has produced a rules-heavy RTS that's rarely fun or strategically rewarding – a highly accurate depiction of the First World War, in other words, and a success in that respect at least.
An earnest but empty love letter to Quake and Duke Nukem 3D that never gets around to doing anything to call its own.
A cheeky take on Dungeons & Dragons lore isn't enough to carry the lacklustre combat, sluggish controls, and dodgy enemy hitboxes.
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.
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.
A Civ-like with neat ideas, but half-formed fundamentals and messy execution make your decisions feel less than impactful.