Sparklite has several aspects that are quite enjoyable and well made. The soundtrack is delightfully happy and well composed, the world can be a pleasure to explore and the gadget crafting system in the workshop provides you with so many cool things. All of these are held back by an endless grind for money. The 2 hours of content are padded with hours upon hours of painful grinding that will poison the experience resulting in a game you will loathe rather than enjoy.
Death Stranding is a game with a fantastic and uniquely interesting story. Backed with a strong cast of experienced actors, the game manages to tell the story flawlessly. The gameplay doesn’t quite live up to the same level. The delivery aspects are fun and in its own, tells a story. It just gets quite repetitive over time and leaves you wanting a bit more diversity to the delivery missions. Overall, Death Stranding should be seen as a very successful first project for Kojima productions and is hopefully a sign of many more to come.
The Sojourn makes a great first impression. Strong visuals that show great production values. Unfortunately, the game fails to keep things interesting. Repetitive levels and repeating puzzle ideas stop this game from leaving a lasting impression.
Road To Eden is a fantastic addition to the turn-based genre. A unique world with an unusual lineup of characters will capture your interest and keep you enjoying things until the very end. While the combat can get boring and repetitive, the story and other aspects of the game keep you engaged and prevent you getting sick of it too easily. This franchise has a very promising future.
Forager starts out incredibly strong. A huge map that is currently hidden. You get a Zelda like feeling that there is a huge adventure ahead. What initially appears to be an exciting game with lots of mysteries to uncover, actually turns out to be an endless loot grind with very little to stimulate your creative needs and sense of adventure. Forager was 5 hours of fun and 5 hours of a steady decline into “is this what I have been working toward?”. The low price tag makes this game well worth the money. It is just a shame there isn't more meat to sink your teeth into.
The Blackout Club has a lot to offer, but gives you very little. The game feels like an incomplete early access game. The missions are repetitive, the character loadouts and gear are very limited. You need to have a group of friends to play with. You can’t progress with the story by just joining in with random people. With all of the potential of the story and setting, it is a shame to see it all wasted with a poorly executed finish.
Lightbearer brings a lot of new ideas to the table and manages to provide a highly humorous and entertaining experience. It was a risk to deviate so far from the original game but it has been executed so well that your laughter will make you love Nick Lightbearer so much that you won’t want it to end. The groovy style & setting combined with all the drug taking will give you a true rollercoaster experience with lots of weird stuff and lots of laughs. DLC often gives us more of the same. With Lightbearer you will get something completely now and highly entertaining.
We Happy Few is a fantastic game but is not without its flaws. The combat and stealth leave you wanting that little bit more. Stealth, combat and crafting have a lot of potential but are implemented very minimalistically. The game manages to save itself through the delivery of an incredibly unique and almost magical world that will quickly make you forget about the shortcomings. From the spooky Bobbies to the drugged up citizens. We Happy Few paints a colorful picture of a dark world. When things are looking gloomy, you can always pop a Joy!
A very unique twist on a long running genre has brought some life back into the RTS scene. Building a settlement that is capable of holding off a seemingly endless zombie horde is a very exciting prospect and it has been executed incredibly well with this game. The speed at which you can lose the game will have you on edge and constantly in fear of the zombies. If you loved the classic RTS games and want a game you can sink some hours into, They are Billions is for you.
As far as rail shooters go, Dick Wilde doesn’t try to do anything unique or unusual. It has some solid shooting built on a fairly generic theme. The levels are quite repetitive and mundane, but if you shake up your play style with different weapons it will prolong the enjoyment quite a bit. Once you reach the end of the fun in single player, the online multiplayer will help spice things up but it can only do so much to cover up the fact that you are just playing the same 3 or 4 level designs over and over again.
Vacation simulator does a great job as a sandbox that shows all of the cool little things you can do with VR. If you have just bought a VR headset and are looking for games to play, this one is well worth picking up. Much like the narrative, this game feels like more of an experiment than an actual game. You won’t sink a lot of hours into it, but in the 5 or 6 hours you spend playing it, you will encounter a huge amount of the cool gameplay elements that make up VR games.
Gun 'n' Stories delivers a fun wild west experience with a very unusual take on the shooting gallery gameplay style. Being able to hit bullets out of the air seems silly but it's a lot of fun, it is just a shame the game does so little to make this a viable defense. It is far easier to focus on killing than dodging bullets. With that being said, this is still one of the more enjoyable VR shooters. The story is funny, the weapons are cool and the difficulty scales quite well. If you have a few hours to spare and want a fun shooting game to play, this game is worth picking up.
Part of me wonders what this game could have been like if it were a regular first-person shooter and not grid based. The game was good, but it seems like there is a lot more that could have been. I was let down by the lack of steampunk elements and how most of the unique and interesting parts didn't happen until the second half of the game, but It didn't take away from the fun of the puzzle solving. This game has some good puzzles and it is a lot of fun trying to figure them out. The diverse enemy types and combat make the RPG elements of the game more interesting and make you put some thought into the gear you equip. A story with voice acting is a real plus when it comes to indie games and this really helps bring the Vaporum to life and give a good sense of what went on in this place before your arrival. I would like to see another entry to this series in the future. Fumium has the potential for a lot more and It would be great to see another game around this in the future. If you like dungeon crawlers, then this game is definitely worth picking up.
I found The Elder Scrolls: Legends to be an enjoyable game for the most part. I found myself getting frustrated a few times when things just felt unfair with AI opponents. It does hurt the game, but with some persistence, it is always possible to win levels if you shuffle your deck a bit. The story and narrative elements to the game were a nice addition to the story mode. The voice acting was a nice addition that helped give the game a more professional feel compared to what we see with most mobile games. ES Legends is not a perfect game, but it is a good attempt at replicating the success of games like Hearthstone.
Beyond: Two Souls starts off incredibly well. Realistic visuals, great voice acting and a plot that really sinks a hook into you. Unfortunately, the story takes various tangents that constantly distract from the main plot. Even the tangents have tangents. By the end of the game the story has gotten so convoluted that you can barely make sense of what any of this stuff had to do with the supernatural stuff. Even if you enjoy the tangents, the controls are really difficult to work with. For a game that is based on the ability to make decisions, the controls take a lot of this away from you.
The first Lift is Strange game set the bar quite high. Before the Storm just did not have enough to live up to the first. The story was lacking any interesting plot elements to reel you in. The gameplay lacked...pretty much anything. The puzzles were slow and boring. Chloe's behavior was so frustrating at times. For the most part it felt like all of this stuff was there to serve as a distraction from a story that is mediocre at best.
For a game based on a move, Mad Max was a surprising treat. The vehicle combat was a lot of fun and very intense once you have unlocked the upgrades.. The melee combat also works quite well and makes the base attacks really enjoyable. The story is nothing to sing about, but does a good job at filling you in on how the world works now that modern civilization is a thing of the past. The visual quality is ok, but regular and severe frame rate drops impact the game quite hard when the action is heating up. Base and fortress attacks will keep you entertained for a while but the work to build them up to the point where you can make use of them is a waste since you have to leave the area once it is complete.
The wait for Breath of the Wild to release was a long one but turned out to be worth every minute. The transition to an open world experience turned out to be one of the best moves the series could have made. Exploring Hyrule is such an incredibly rewarding experience. The funny little side quests to the loot-filled dungeons. There will always be a secret of some kind to find when you are exploring. The story is the same as always but somehow feels fresh. Building up the strength to face Gannon is one of the best adventures you will ever experience in a video game.
The story from start to finish holds up very well and keeps you interested. The mixture of nature and a darker 60s era industrialism creates a very unusual theme. The level design could have been better, but the time you spend running around in the L.E.A.F suit is so much fun that getting lost is not so bad. The moral aspects of the game stand out very strong and will keep this game in your mind long after you have completed it.
Stories: Path of Destiny has a lot of good ideas and tries to implement them as best it can. Ultimately, most of the best ideas fall a little short of the mark. The combat is ambitious but ends up being sloppy. The story is large but ends up being repetitive. The RPG elements are fun, but most of it is maxed out very early in the game making it sort of pointless. Everything that this game does, starts out well, but always falls short. In most cases, these drawbacks are enough to ruin the experience. The end result is a game that tries to do a lot, but doesn't try hard enough.