Stefan L's Reviews
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.
At its heart, Stikbold’s a fairly simple game of hitting people with balls, but it has a bunch of fun and silly ideas alongside that which turn it into a manic little party game to while away a few hours.
Dirt Rally gets Codemasters back to their roots, with a game that focuses on rallying through and through. It's tough and unforgiving of your mistakes, but that's what rallying is about and it makes getting to grips with the car's handling, measuring your approach to a stage and coming out on top all the more satisfying.
Some parts of the TrackMania Turbo's structure feel restrictive or poorly thought out, but there's little to detract from the compulsive time attacks, the outlandish track design and the gorgeously vibrant graphics.
By and large, The Division lives up to the years of hype and high expectations. At its core, it marries solid cover-based shooting with a loot heavy RPG and an enticingly beautiful setting, but it really comes together when you can team up with friends and take on enemies, whether rebellious AI factions or other agents in the fraught and tense Dark Zone.
PopCap have gone out of their way to cater to the solo player, and while the story questing is a disjointed affair, having AI to play with in every part of the game is excellent. However, even with other additions like the Backyard Battleground and new characters, this largely feels like more of the same. It's not as exciting and refreshing as two years ago, but that's not too big a complaint when it's more co-op defence and liberally borrowed and adapted multiplayer, all slathered in the quirky Plants vs. Zombies universe.
Snowfall is another intriguing expansion from Colossal Order, which blends eyecatching new visuals which come alongside some clever new ideas and additions to how the game plays
Awakening as a whole shows how good Black Ops 3 can look, and there's a few gorgeous locations spread across the multiplayer maps as well. Those obviously inject some welcome variety into the competitive playlists – well, once the handful of glitches have been ironed out – but for me and many others, Der Eisendrache is the standout addition.
Completely changing the environment that you play in and the way in which you get around that world was a bold move by Techland, but they've taken the challenge in their stride, and created something which is often just pure fun to play. If you're a fan of Dying Light, then The Following is a near essential expansion.
The 2013 reboot was no slouch in the visuals department, especially when played on PC or current gen consoles, but Rise of the Tomb Raider takes this even further.
Though it's a little awkward at times, it's never truly annoying, and the many virtues of the PlayStation 4 and the DualShock 4 help to make the game feel more natural and fluid in action than on the Vita. The sequel looks like it's really really going to flesh out the ideas at play in the original, when it releases later this year, but until then, Gravity Rush Remastered is the best way to play or revisit one of the Vita's most distinctive games.
Though it lacks some of the nuance and complexity to make the most of some of its ideas, Deserts of Kharak captures the essence of the Homeworld series. Fans of the classic originals will find a familiar form of real time strategy adapted to a new setting, and telling another tale of a lonely carrier fighting through to its destination against the odds.
If anything, what was already a pastiche of a rather traditional fantasy RPG has been taken down an even more classical route. It's a story of kings, princesses, castles and dragons, as the gates to Expandria quickly get forced open, and you head off to investigate reports of a large explosion behind the wall which had kept this area off limits so far.