Chris Davis
Doki Doki Literature Club is free and I feel slightly uncomfortable being so critical of it. However, it also demands over four hours of your time. We all have backlogs of games we’ve already payed for and yet haven’t found the time to play. Go and play one of them instead. Doki Doki Literature Club isn’t worth your time.
And so ends a terrible season pass. As with Lost on Mars, the only redeeming quality with Dead Living Zombies is the silly humor. However, this isn’t enough to get through the low-quality zombie hoards or motivate you to pump bullets into mutation stations. At least it’s all over now. I can delete Far Cry 5 from my hard drive and forget about it just like Ubisoft did judging by the effort put into this DLC.
Lost on Mars‘ only redeeming feature is the humor and even that won’t be to everyone’s taste. There’s no variety to the enemies or indoor environments and the campaign is especially disappointing, being no more than a quest for collectibles. It’s hard to understand how DLC that takes you to Mars with a funny sidekick can end up being so unbelievably boring. Lost on Mars is another piece of skippable content in a season pass that is looking like a waste of time.
House Flipper isn’t ready to be placed on the market. For a game that is all about customizing a property, you have far too few options to chose from and there’s a complete lack of cohesion between furniture and colors. House Flipper is appealing enough to tempt in buyers for an open viewing, but a closer inspection reveals the obvious shortcomings. As a buyer, you should either negotiate hard for a discount on the selling price or wait until the quality of the game meets the buyer’s asking price.
Vietnam could make a great setting for a Far Cry game but it has to be handled with more care than this. I appreciate that at $12 this is not supposed to be a full Far Cry experience, however I still expect more than a glorified two-hour fan-mod. The next two pieces of DLC will have to offer big improvements to make Far Cry 5‘s season pass worth the money.
Detroit’s storytelling is lackluster and formulaic. The script has less emotion in it than androids before they become deviants and, in fact, I have to wonder whether an android wrote it. Perhaps it’s some in-joke on Cage’s part. As consumers and critics, we would never praise this level of storytelling in movies, TV shows, or books, yet for some reason, this nonsense is acclaimed just because there is a basic level of interactivity involved. If we want the quality of storytelling in games to improve, we need to demand more than this soulless and predictable nonsense.
Rogue could have been an essential game in the franchise, if only for the story and the rare chance to see inside the world of the Templars. Instead, we barely get any story development except for cameos and knowing references to other games. The missions are tedious and the lack of interesting locations is a step back from previous entries. Rogue might have scraped a three out of five if I’d reviewed it back in 2014, but in 2018 it doesn’t even deserve that.
Despite how bad it is, you can have some fun with Hidden Agenda. If you play it with friends over a few drinks, you’ll probably have a laugh in the same way you do when watching bad horror films. That’s the best I can say for Hidden Agenda. It’s a narrative game with a dull and poorly written narrative. It’s a choose your own adventure game with boring and uninformed choices. It’s a “play with friends experience” that is likely to leave you with fewer friends at the end of it. Hidden Agenda manages to scrap a two out of five because, despite itself, I did laugh out loud a few times.
Mass Effect: Andromeda offers the dream of exploration in a distant galaxy, but every time the dream looks like it’s within reach, it’s snapped from your grasp by poor quest design, performance problems, or simply mediocre writing.
While True Learn doesn’t quite live up to its fascinating premise and could have done with more time in Early Access. However, developer Luden.io has already proven responsive to customer feedback and, in six months to a year, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see While True Learn living up to its cool concept.
Combat is challenging and enjoyable enough that I briefly started a second playthrough on hard. I wanted to master the combat challenge and solve the puzzles properly instead of brute forcing my way through them. I got through a few encounters and then it hit me just how similar the experience would be the second time around. There weren't any cool new mutations to play with or better weapons to acquire. So I stopped playing. My first playthrough lasted fifteen hours and it was decent. I'll keep an eye out for a sequel or an expansion, but at the moment, Mutant Year Zero doesn't have enough worldbuilding or interesting variety in its upgrades for my tastes. I doubt I'll ever finish that second playthrough.
GRIP has moments of brilliance, but not enough for me to recommend a purchase unless you’re a fan of Rollcage and are interested in what is essentially an incredibly late Rollcage 3. The addition of either some more courses or a level editor would be a huge improvement although I don’t know if that is in the works. GRIP isn’t everything I hoped it would be, however there is a solid base and plenty to suggest that Rollcage‘s formula still has something to offer in 2018.
Timespinner has a great art style and the music is excellent, but a five-hour crawl through relatively bland maps isn't enough in a year with incredible games such as Guacamelee 2, Dead Cells, and Celeste. I spent another hour with Timespinner after finishing the story but didn't quite get 100% and felt no desire to finish it off. Timespinner is decent, but when compared to other titles that came out this year it comes up lacking. It needed more abilities and more interesting ways to use them in puzzles. Doubling the length would have also helped because it felt over way too soon.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey ends up being a textbook example of how you can have too much of a good thing. I enjoyed clearing out forts in Origins, and for about fifteen hours I enjoyed doing it in Odyssey as well. But nothing changes. You keep doing the same thing again and again, and the gameplay, while fun, is nowhere near compelling enough to justify you spending over seventy hours on it. Thank God there’s not going to be an Assassin’s Creed game in 2019. I need a rest.