Stefan L's Reviews
While the car handling and actual driving is excellent, Kunos Simulazioni don't successfully turn this into an enjoyable game, stuffing it with single player events and a career that are both frustrating rather than fun. At its best, Assetto Corsa is quite simply a sublime driving sim. I just wish I could say that without caveats.
No Man’s Sky manages to be a hugely impressive accomplishment for the team at Hello Games, but the hubris and hype meant it could never live up to the expectations heaped upon it. Despite the various caveats and areas that Hello will look to improve upon over the coming months, you can so easily lose hours at a time landing on a new and interesting planet for the first time, giving the local flora and fauna idiotic names, before falling down a hole and getting lost in a sprawling cave system, only to do the exact same thing on the next planet over. There’s nothing quite like it.
If you’re a fan of the kind of ultra-difficult, ultra precise platformers that gained popularity a few years ago, then 10 Second Ninja X is right up your alley. It doesn’t reach the same heights of controller breaking frustration, which is probably a good thing, but with minimalist controls, short and to the point levels, and a whimsically silly story, there’s quite a lot to like here.
This game is as much about the man behind the mask and the problems that Bruce Wayne faces, as it is taking on crime bosses, meeting familiar faces in new and interesting ways, and unravelling mysteries. Telltale’s Batman series is off to a great start, giving us a fresh view into the character that goes well beyond beating up criminals in alleyways.
For a certain nostalgic generation of gamer, it’s hard not to fall in love with Headlander’s retro futuristic stylings and the kind of “what if…” set up that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Terry Nation TV show or a film like Logan’s Run. The combat and and boss fights let it down, but this is an eminently enjoyable twist on the Metroidvania genre.
Human Fall Flat is a game that’s aware of how unusual it is and builds to its own strengths. Bob’s ungainly controls work particularly well in the invitingly designed worlds that let you play around, cheat and conspire with a co-op buddy.
Quadrilateral Cowboy’s a game that gets hacking right – if you permit me calling it that – with the command line interface brilliantly letting you manipulate the world and use the other tools of the cyberpunk heisting trade. It’s effortlessly cool, from a slightly nerdy retro perspective, but hidden beneath that, there’s a simple and very ordinary feeling tale of a trio of kickass women living outside the law and pulling off ever more outlandish heists.
While it’s far removed from Call of Duty of old, it can still be fun. I enjoyed good fortune in my first match back since the last DLC to have a positive K/D ratio, just managed to win an incredibly tight match of Domination on Cryogen, out-scored a ludicrously dominant team in the second half of another Domination match a map later, and so on.
Plotting the downfall of the human race is a rare treat in videogames, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in bringing this to pass in Zombie Night Terror. The zombie apocalypse by way of Lemmings, NoClip have done a great job of mixing their inspirations into something new and imaginative.
I’m certainly eager to see where nDreams take us to next, as they hone their craft in developing for virtual reality, but The Assembly is sadly just a first step on that journey. It does some interesting things, with a nicely constructed story split between two characters and contrasting styles of gameplay, and it gets the controls right for first person exploration in VR, but without that, it would struggle to stand out from the crowd.
I’m certainly eager to see where nDreams take us to next, as they hone their craft in developing for virtual reality, but The Assembly is sadly just a first step on that journey. It does some interesting things, with a nicely constructed story split between two characters and contrasting styles of gameplay, and it gets the controls right for first person exploration in VR, but without that, it would struggle to stand out from the crowd.
The puzzle-like missions of Crush Your Enemies are a lot of fun, as you race against the clock in a frantic rush to defeat the enemies, or simply grind with sheer weight of numbers. Ignoring the crass sense of humour and forgetable story, Crush Your Enemies does an admirable job of distilling the strategy genre down into a bitesized form.
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.