Stefan L's Reviews
Vermintide 2's co-op battling is nice step forward over the original. It's gruelling at times, and that can sap the fun out when you're failing missions and not making progress, with the weighty combat, the additional sub-classes and a long and deep progression of difficulty and loot, there's plenty here for those that want to be in for the long haul.
After Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, I came into A Way Out with expectations of a fraught and trying prison escape drama. That's just the beginning though, and it soon transforms into a fun revenge flick. It doesn't have the emotional impact of Brothers, and there's some rough edges from the breadth of ideas that Hazelight include, but most importantly we just had a lot of fun.
If we ever try to colonise our red neighbour, it's going to be one of the greatest challenges that mankind will ever undertake. Though Surviving Mars makes a game out of it, Haemimont have brilliantly kept that hard edge, as it constantly pushes and tests your ability to plan with survival in mind, especially with the unpredictability of the Mysteries of Mars. There's plenty of ways to improve it and put more colony control in the hands of the player, but the first landing is already off to a great start.
Life Is Strange: Before the Storm isn't a story that needed telling, and it was a risk for Deck 9 to try and add to a beloved series, but they've pulled it off. It answers the question of who Rachel Amber was and what she really meant to Chloe, showing something that feels more grounded like a TV teen dramas and speaks to the struggle to find your place in the world.
Deck Nine have again managed to find a particular point in time that feels natural to explore.
The Bridge Constructor series gets a lot out of being combined with Portal, resulting in a quirky and engaging new twist on this physics-based puzzler. It could have gone further, whether upping the challenge you can aim for or actually giving you the portals to play with, but what's here is pleasingly inventive and has more than few tricky brain teasers.
New arcade racers have been few and far between over the last half decade, and Gravel is just one attempt to reignite the genre. There's some good racing to be found here, with plenty of licensed cars to take through some lovely scenery, but it doesn't get your heart pounding with excitement. Gravel might be a fairly decent racer, but its biggest sin is that, despite the fireworks and exotic locations, it's just a bit boring.
Payday 2 is definitely getting long in the tooth, but the game's appearance on Nintendo Switch is a good, solid port of the game. All of the same quirks and quibbles remain the same, there's the lingering question from how the game has been supported in the past, and there's the simple fact that we've seen all of this in higher fidelity elsewhere, but if you've got a burning desire for some co-op heisting fun on Switch, then this will scratch your itch to live outside the law.
Fe is a thoroughly lovely adventure, full of wonder as you explore and lose yourself in this darkly wonderful forest. Its distinctive art style and the unusual creature designs conjure up something that's both familiar and alien at the same time, which is only enhanced by the etherial lighting and the animals' voices. A few nitpicking design issues and some shaky performance on Switch aside, it's easy to recommend this charming game of discovery and singing.
While these might boil down to being relatively straightforward ports from Wii U to Switch, that doesn't make them any less essential for fans of the action game genre and Platinum Games' work… unless you've already played them both on Wii U. Either way, with Bayonetta 3 in the works, the Switch is now the witch's new home.
Shadow of the Colossus isn't necessarily a game that needed to be remade in such an elaborate fashion, and yet, I'm so glad that it has been. Bluepoint's remake of this sublime and poignant adventure is phenomenal, both managing to stay utterly true to the original and bringing it up to date in glorious fashion.
Rise of the Tomb Kings is a great first expansion for Total War: Warhammer II.
A fantastic genre mash-up between hack and slash, boss rush and twin-stick bullet hell shooters, Furi is as unique a blend now as it was in 2016. It fits effortlessly onto the Nintendo Switch, but it's a game that is waiting to challenge you and worth testing yourself against on other platforms.
Beholder is an intriguing concept and thematically rather strong, as it twists and exaggerates a Cold War totalitarian surveillance state into the form of a video game. However, with a sequel on the way, we hope that Warm Lamp can improve on an idea that's rather rough around the edges but is dying to be fleshed out further.
Having now passed the 1.0 mark and left Steam Early Access, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds remains a diamond in the rough.
Curse of Osiris won't be viewed as the best expansion Destiny has ever seen, but its release will hopefully mark a turning point for the game as a whole. While the added content is nice to help bring people back into the fold, more important are the changes to add more reasons to keep on playing the game beyond this short story. There's still work to be done, but this is a start.
Reigns' devilishly simplistic game of Tinder-like kingdom management feels just as inventive now as it did in 2015, but Reigns: Her Majesty fixes some of its more poorly considered design choices while also putting a refreshing spin on the challenge you face by casting you as a (very powerful) woman in a man's world. The king is dead. Long live the queen!
I'm still very much enjoying Batman: The Enemy Within, and the way Telltale are forcing Bruce Wayne out of his punchy vigilante comfort zone
Knowledge is Power makes good use of PlayLink to open the door to those more familiar with tapping on phones and browsing the internet than knowing where that Square button is meant to be, and that's its real strength. Outside of that, it has a few other ideas, but ends up as a fairly middle of the road quiz game that's easy enough to put on the telly and your phones for a quick test of knowledge.
There's some good ideas in how PlayLink can be used to let a group of players (and non-gamers in particular) join together and shape a filmic story, but the actual interface feels clumsy, and the story and scripting leaves plenty to be desired. It's safe to say that Hidden Agenda is an obvious disappointment.