Stefan L's Reviews
Despite being a standalone game, Trials of the Blood Dragon is at best a quirky aside to Trials Fusion. With so many truly ridiculous ideas in the story, they’ve given themselves free license to experiment and try new things, but so many of them simply don’t come off and aren’t that much fun. Let’s cross our fingers that RedLynx get back to what the series is so good at with their next game.
At its best, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a joyous flight across the rooftops of a gorgeous city, with a grace that belies the weight to Faith's movement, but DICE seem to forget this on a few occasions, dragging it down with combat that brings the free running to a halt. It's a fantastic game at times, but just as with the utopian setting, there are problems that lie breath the surface.
The controls for your ship feel just a little bit awkward, and it can be tiring to hold your arm up to move around – I took to lazily resting it on my leg and using this as the new centre point. More jarring is the way that every time you load to a new location, you’re booted out to the SteamVR void for a few moments, which led me to believe the game had crashed the first couple of times.
Quar’s a game that could very easily live outside of VR, and this is a game that can easily be played sat down, but it’s also a good example of how VR can give you a fresh perspective on a genre.
Translating the physical contact between putter and golf ball to the player needs a little work and, as with SelfieTennis, the physics can sometimes feel a bit simplistic at times.
The actual puzzles are very well thought out, but the graphics are simplistic and, to be honest, the reason why there’s lasers being bounced around doesn’t make much sense.
The world tends towards the dull and brown, shrouded in fog to help keep the frame rate high, and the floating barges don’t result in the kinds of running battles that you might expect, but rather see people crash into each other and then take pot shots. It’s an interesting attempt, but not the multiplayer shooter I was hoping for.
In retrospect, adapting Flight Control to VR is a no brainer, but Phaser Lock Interactive have endeavoured to build on that games core idea, and pretty much pulled it off.
Falls into the same traps of “simulator” games on any platform, with not quite enough variety and substance to get by.
It’s fantastically silly, but as with many of these “simulator” games, it’s a concept that can wear thin after a while. It’s a well rounded game that’s definitely worth playing, and perfect for showing VR to people, but that’ll be the main reason why you load it up after having played it for an hour or two.
Valve have absolutely perfected a number of the necessary ideas for room scale VR, it’s just a shame that they’re not tackling a more fully fledged experience.
I find that simple back and forth oddly compelling in its own right.
As with many early VR games, it’s bright and colourful, with simplistic graphics, but that does nothing to explain the green cat with building items sticking out of its back or the magical hat that you pop onto your head to reach the game’s menus. Those just help to add a touch of whimsical charm to a very well done puzzle game.
With four strikingly different races, Creative Assembly have done a fantastic job in bringing the Warhammer tabletop game's fantasy setting, variety and tactical trade-offs to life. Those thematic differences have also been infused into the campaign in several ways, but there's perhaps a little too much common ground, and you can see the same fundamental framework beneath the surface. With plenty more races still to explore and stories to tell from this world, Total War: Warhammer does little to disappoint as this fantasy project is made reality.
Marrying Paradox's particular brand of real time grand strategy to the familiarity of space and 4X empire building has worked wonders, making this the most welcoming and accessible of their games that I've played. There's a few minor niggles, but it's compelling and it's easy to lose yourself in Stellaris for hours at a time, as you build your empire and explore both the galaxy and the stories that it can contain.
It’s great to explore the background of one of the comic’s more popular characters, but doesn’t significantly push Telltale’s games on from their previous highs.
All together, they make for a map pack that’s really quite strong and distinctive visually, but also has some good variety in what they offer. Certainly, it feels more interesting and varied than Awakening did a few months ago.
Alienation is a slick and polished twin stick shooter, filled with huge explosions and seemingly endless enemies to kill, but it's let down in a lot of little ways. It's still a great game, but I didn't fall as madly in love with it as I did with its predecessor.
Enter the Gungeon naturally won't be for everyone, especially with its high difficulty and the pixel art graphics, regardless of how well crafted they are. It is, however, an excellent blend of roguelike and satisfying bullet hell gunplay that's easy to dip into time and again.
Though Minecraft: Story Mode really hasn’t pushed the graphic adventure genre to new heights, it’s another example of just how adaptable Telltale are when it comes to creating stories for other properties. Though Minecraft really doesn’t have a story, that fact simply gave them free reign to create a world and characters of their own, and the fifth episode’s standalone adventure is just another example of that, with more adventures yet to come.