The World to the West was a real surprise for me after Teslagrad. The dark, oppressive fairy-tale world gives way to a more light-hearted adventure story that focuses on the joy of exploration and puzzling, rather than tough platforming and unforgiving boss encounters.
If you’re desperate to complete your remastered Resident Evil collection, and have never played Resident Evil: Revelations before, the low price point is appealing. The game is certainly worth experiencing for Resident Evil fans, if only for the ridiculous and entertaining plot.
For all my complaints about the mission structure and repetitive semi-randomised maps, I never once stopped playing thanks to excellent gunplay, and fun upgrade system, and just enough narrative to keep me interested. It is always difficult for developers to create decent narrative in these games and the story in Shadow Warrior 2 seems more ambitious than the game can effectively convey.
I kept going back to it this time and found myself getting swept up in cathartic violence and juvenile insults for hours at a time.
Fast-paced combat, limb-specific attacks, easy to understand crafting, and flexible levelling is what sets The Surge apart from its peers and, at times, puts it ahead of the Souls series. The bulk of the gameplay, and indeed much of the narrative pacing, is lifted straight from Lords of the Fallen and should be familiar to fans of the genre.
Played back-to-back, the Outlast Trinity collection begins to feel a little stale as the basic gameplay loop barely changes. That said, each title features its own slowly unravelling narrative, intimidating foes, terrifying locations and slowly builds up in intensity towards the conclusion.
Mr. Shifty often feels like a low-violence, puzzle-oriented, super-powered version of Hotline Miami. At its very best, it captures the stop-start flow of the original Hotline Miami — observe, plan, and then engage in a glorious display of speed, skill, and violence.
Average execution across the board makes for an experience that, while not terrible in moment-to-moment gameplay, leaves no lasting impression.
Gameplay is certainly more of the same, wrapped in a new narrative, but it matches the same high standard set by the original.