Keri Honea's Reviews
The first couple of hours of ReCore were almost downright magical. The story had me on its hook, the gameplay was fun, Mack was adorable and so much fun to use in combat, and I admit that the environment initially took my breath away. A few hours later, everything fell stale. The gameplay gave way to typical dungeon-platforming formulas. Even the beauty of the characters and environment appeared to diminish, as though the game was slowly rolling back to the PlayStation 2 era. At least I had the story to keep me going, and that somewhat made it worth it to push through to the end. If ReCore had simplified a smidge, focused on its core gameplay and core values, it wouldn't be anywhere close to the loose conglomeration of half-executed ideas that it sadly is.
Ryse is an absolutely beautiful game, but all the beauty in the world can't make up for repetitive gameplay that will most likely bore the average gamer, even those who like hack-and-slash.
Once Upon a Climb was short and sweet, with a heavy emphasis upon sweet. Short games aren’t always a bad thing, but Episode 3 leaves you feeling as though something is lacking. Nothing was abrupt or cut off, but it never feels fully fleshed out either. King’s Quest had such a strong start, but the last two episodes have not lived up to the bar set before them, either from Sierra Games or from the first chapter. At least the humor lived up to the King’s Quest seal of quality.
Lara Croft and The Temple of Osiris has a lot of great ideas running behind it, but the execution fell a little short.
My feelings about London Detective Mysteria are as mixed as what the game tries to be. It's not the best or the worst otome I've ever played, and most of the romance routes are rather sweet.
It's really hard to recommend this game to first-timers with all of the problems and the JRPG stereotypes. I can't recommend it to long-time returning fans unless they owned a PS4 Pro. At least with a PS4 Pro you can choose the lipstick color.
The story is so great, it's difficult for me to not recommend it, but I can only, in good conscience, recommend only one playthrough. The magic is a bit lost after that.
It's always a shame when a game has such an incredible foundation and never becomes what it should. Fans of LEGO games and of the movie will have fun regardless, because we're a bit crazy like that. But if you don't fall in the crazy category, best bet is to wait for the next LEGO game that will hopefully feature this same innovation. TT Games has plenty of good ideas here. Please don't let them die before they can be implemented in a truly great LEGO game.
Hopefully a patch will come down that will add at least an instruction on switching skills and fix the sound issues. Ys Origin isn't a great game, even with the various modes, difficulty settings, and characters that unlock for replayability, simply because it's straight dungeon crawl with little variety. However, these issues prevent Ys Origin from being as good as it could be, and they certainly make it difficult to recommend the title to newcomers of Ys.
It’s unfortunately obvious how much Bound wanted to be like Journey, but it’s even more unfortunate that they go so close and yet failed to fully capture everything amazing about Journey. A beautiful environment, unique concept (the dancing), and deep story will get you very far, but the gameplay needs to be just as entertaining. Unless you’re a Trophy Hunter and/or you enjoy speedrunning, there’s not much that will keep you bound to this title.
Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force honestly has a lot going for it, but failed to seal the deal in the end. No matter the ending, I felt more frustrated than anything with all the monotony thrust upon me. Perhaps if the stories weren’t so predictable, or perhaps if the grind wasn’t so prevalent I would have been able to overlook one or the other. Instead, I wrapped up my adventures with Fang with wistful dissatisfaction.
Megadimension Neptunia VII is a mixed bag, with great combat elements and parody sadly shuffled together with overly padded plot, repetitive boss fights, and boring story presentation. All of the bad could be overlooked with how well it analyzes and tears down the low points of gaming culture, but then it sinks itself just as low with copious and pointless bewbage.
Super Dungeon Bros. could be a really fun party game with friends, but starting dungeons over each time will still get old just as fast. At least the recent Gauntlet game saves progress so you can jump in any room you haven't cleared at any time. The rock-n-roll bro concept is very amusing, and the variety of weapons available to craft adds plenty of motivation to replay it. However, until the developer adds in the ability to save your dungeon progress, not many will stick around long enough to craft any of them.
With the vast love of the Mass Effect series, Andromeda was never going to make people 100% happy, the same way the ME3 ending didn't make people happy. The BioWare team put so many great things in place, but the main story, the characters, and most of the writing keep the game from being great. Sadly, technical mess keeps it from being good.
Nevertheless, that recommendation comes with a caveat. As much as I enjoyed Anomaly 2, I have a very hard time recommending the console version to anyone. Even this non-PC gamer thinks I would have had a far better time with a keyboard and mouse.
Blues and Bullets has a very rough start, but it has enough shining moments to keep players intrigued to see where Ness's story will roll. If the developers work more with the gameplay, fine tune the controls and add some difficulty with the sleuthing sequences, and continue to ramp up the story, then they will have an indie sleeper hit, even with the low quality character models. They also need to prove that the choices players make for Ness mean anything, because it's hard to say how any of it at this point matters at all. Even as it is now, however, it's well worth the $5 an episode.
As pretty as the game looks and sounds, it just doesn't make up for shallow gameplay and a story that really fell flat for me in the end. At least I was able to complete it in six hours, so the tedium didn't last for that long.
As such, Gat Out of Hell is strictly for fans of Saints Row IV, those who have been wanting to play more of exactly that.
The absolute beauty of the painting-like art style also helped. There's one thing that India has that was just as amazing as it was in China.
Ys IX had a lot of potential to clean up everything Ys VIII did wrong with the series, but instead, the developers decided to double-down on those previous decisions. At least in Ys VIII, the hideout where Dogi hangs out and the tower defense elements to protect it make some sense. In Ys IX, the hideout feels forced, and the tower defense element for the Grimwald Nox feels incredibly out of place and forced.