'Thought provoking' may be the best way to describe my overall experience with SOMA. With the story being expertly delivered through eloquent voice acting and dialogue, environmental design, and questionable moral choices. SOMA stands out as a deft lesson in storytelling, which many developers should learn from. I'd highly recommend trying SOMA for anyone and everyone.
Let Them Come offered a surprising amount of variety for what essentially is a glorified shooting range. Weapons and upgrades feel unimpactful at first but quickly build momentum into some more fierce and powerful. Monsters are offered up on a platter for the player to blissfully murder then contorts the players elated murder spree into one of strategy and wit, continually mixing things up. But all this weighs heavy on how much players enjoy tower defence style games.
Outcast: Second Contact looks like a completely new game. And that’s its problem. Outcast: Second Contact only has re-texturing to its advantage, with mechanics and audio left untouched. Its glossy coat promising more than it had. A few tweaks to the audio presentation and how Slade handles could’ve gone a long way to bettering the experience. Those who have dabbled with Outcast in the past may find naught but nostalgic memories to power them through, other than that, there's nothing to be had here. This is re-texturing at its finest, but it’s not a remaster.
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus is a mixed bag of ideas that could work well but somehow don’t. I felt forced to sit behind cover for large sections of the game instead indulging in gun toting, dual-wielding promises. And even when I successfully managed to reach cover, the slightest movement would alert those around me and compromise any semblance of a stealthy approach. I was stuck in a parasitic loop that left me pining for the days of Wolfenstein 3D or even Wolfenstein: The New Order.
The Stick of Truth managed to salvage my love of the series. Now, 3 years later, I feel that South Park: The Fractured but Whole has sought to destroy the bridges its predecessor rebuilt. The funny moments are sporadic, lost amongst a series of tired gags and namechecks, but the gameplay goes someway to saving the overall experience.
The Evil Within 2 plays out more like an action game than a survival horror. All the elements that it has in place take away from the restrictive close confines of traditional horror games and broadens the spectrum but lessens the atmosphere and impact a survival horror game should have.
At the end of it all, Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a novel triumph within the RPG genre with a few glaring faults. Battles are exciting and easy to get a grasp of, I’d even say it's very welcoming of beginners to the genre due to the lack of need of party diversity and strategy.
All in all, its N++ it's not bad. I’d recommend it to anyone but had high hopes it would have developed a bit more over time.
DreamBreak had the potential to be a lot more than it currently is. However, Aist design choices for mixing in rather quirky mini games that feel oddly out of place with the main game and with DreamBreak’s main portion of gameplay feeling heavily underwhelming, puzzles too obvious and the story feeling kind of shoehorned, it's hard to give it a thumbs up.
Time Recoil is short and precise. It’s an action packed romp utilising a much loved bullet time mechanic that creates a stylish persona for a rather bland looking game. Although stages don’t differ much from one another you won’t be sticking around in them long enough to care all that much. In essence, Time Recoil is a “burner game” as I like to put it. You can pick it up easily and have fun, it does the job it says it does. But once you’ve finished it -- which won't take long-- you’ll be discarding it as fast you got it.