Alex Santa Maria's Reviews
No aspect of Generation Zero is remarkable. It feels like a hollow husk of an experience waiting to be filled in by players who will never come.
For Honor: Marching Fire is in a weird spot. These are good updates, but I’m not sure it makes sense to shell out for the full package. While the new characters are fun, none of them change the game in such a way as to make them vital. Unless you’ve absolutely mastered the entire rest of the roster, you’ll find plenty to do outside of the premium options.
Tower 57 is a gorgeous game with an old-school heart and absurd sensibilities, but it fails to put its best foot forward when you go in blind and alone.
In the end, I found Battle Chasers: Nightwar to be a great game for a very specific group of people that I happen to be outside of.
This is another roguelike that pushes the genre forward, bringing pinpoint accurate jumping and shooting to the endless arcade randomization that players of these games love.
A campaign cannot survive on dialogue alone.
Rogue Company proves its worth on current-gen.
Ubisoft's hacker title shines on Xbox Series X.
More Tetris Effect is never a bad thing.
CrossfireX is hard to recommend to just about anyone thanks to a painfully generic single player component and a baffling multiplayer offering.
Past Cure is a hodgepodge of stealth, action, and drama that reaches for the stars and falls somewhere far below.
The few times that the RNG in BPM: Bullets Per Minute actually managed to put together a set of weapons and abilities that allowed for significant progress, the game shined, but it's just not worth the hours of suffering failed runs and mistimed shots. To borrow the game's own 90s shooter comparisons, playing BPM is like diving into Doom on Ultra Nightmare before learning how to play an FPS. The fun is still there, but it's buried under so many roadblocks and complications. The frustrating end result is a game with a great idea that bungles just about every part of the execution.
Beyond Mankind: The Awakening has few redeeming qualities. The story is nothing new, the gameplay has pacing issues, and the presentation is generations out of date. There are plenty of indie games out there that showcase innovative gameplay and moving storytelling for a relatively small fee, and with the bar that high, Beyond Mankind: The Awakening fails to even make the jump to try to meet it.
Instead of an illuminating revelation of emergent gameplay, all Headspun managed to give me was a headache.
Time Loader is a brief, puzzling journey that never even gets close to 88 miles per hour.
Spartan Fist is all sizzle and no steak. It looks the part, and your initial fisticuffs are invigorating. However, that fun is fleeting thanks to the gameplay's repetitive nature and sloppy execution.
Need for Speed Payback is a grind to play both figuratively and literally. Even if you like the arcade racing on offer, it's not worth slogging through the amateur presentation, repetitive missions and microtransaction hooks.
I See Red starts off strong and then immediately falters with shoddy controls, repetitive missions, and lackluster graphics. But at least it's got style.
Atari Mania is a mess that fails to recall the tight gameplay or pixilated wonder of Atari's past despite its inspired premise.