You could argue that Squadrons breaks no fresh ground, that it is merely the latest in a prized patch of genre; but the ground, fresh or otherwise, was left behind long ago, and being the latest is no bad thing.
If you're hoping for a sombre tale of lives brought low by the touch of darkness, my advice would be to go for a ride and take in the sights instead.
The new studios pay both respect and homage to the original releases by valuing their clarity above all else.
There may well be the feeling of a missed opportunity here, but no matter. Almost worthy is still pretty good.
The more I played the less the goings-on of the narrative bothered me, and the more I relished the wavelike rhythm of the action: the roll and crash of sailing and breaking to alight for supplies.
What's on offer here is a version of what would only have been available, back then, from a top-flight studio; a haven for those who crave a hit of Tartakovsky; and a hack-and-slash hardly ahead of the curve but happy to polish the past.
I would recommend the remake to anyone with a nostalgic thirst for the original, but so, too, to those that like their laughs with a dark bite.
The game may never have been as sweet as it was in the first of the three main areas, but, to its credit, that’s because I was swept along by the story.
Where it succeeds isn't in how close it scrapes to the level of prestige TV, or to films. Its coup is not, "Look how closely we can make games resemble highbrow art." It's more, "Look what previously fenced-off realms we can get interactivity into."
As with the rest of the game, outside of the more focussed platform sequences, I was boosted through by the breezy mood more than anything else. Skelattack is a masterpiece in the art of the pleasant.
The chief pleasures on offer are those of the power fantasy and of the newly burgeoning subgenre that we might call the zoological misadventure.
John Wick Hex could have been a number of different games, none of them as strange and satisfying as this.
Does it succeed? Well, I don't know—I'm not an astronaut—but I can report that it has a pleasing gravity.
In the beauty stakes and beyond, there are very few, in the rarefied realms of indie or AAA, who can challenge it.
Those intoxicated by the game's dreamy brew may argue that there are no detours—that, like the Zero, you're either on it or you're not. If you're anything like me and Conway, however, you'll be somewhere in-between.
The mood wafts above it all, overpowering any laughable suggestions of plot or character—neither of which fuels Zombie Army 4.
It's a game of MacGuffins, so to speak—what you're doing and why you're doing it is inessential to the joys and the juice on offer.
Wattam should be played, if for no other reason than to see a designer expressing ambivalence about his own ideas.
It isn't that we miss the mists of Arcadia Bay specifically, or that we long to retread old ground; it's the slow etching of stories, scattered with care.
With Shenmue III, we are offered a glimpse into a gifted mind, constantly turning the everyday into play.