Chris Brown's Reviews
A lazy, broken, and boring slog through the most ineptly realised post-apocalypse I have ever encountered. This is not Fallout. Every defining feature of the Fallout experience has been excised or compromised to accommodate a poorly designed and executed multiplayer experience.
Syberia 3 is just flat-out bad – an ugly, buggy, irritating, insulting title that should never have seen the light of day.
Daylight incompetently piles on the clichés and delivers an experience that is far more likely to induce boredom than anything resembling fear.
By taking elements of iconic 90's horror staples, Invader Studios have resurrected a Frankensteined horror experience that is far less than it's borrowed parts. From the glacial pacing to the ponderous in-game action Daymare 1998 rather than invoking terror instead delivers tedium.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is a wonderful idea that fails to deliver on almost every level. While it can be breath-taking to look at, it is a tedious chore and needlessly unforgiving. I applaud Patrice Désilets and his team for attempting something new and fresh, but great ideas alone do not make for great games.
There are hints of a great game buried under the decaying leviathan that is Call of Cthulhu, but they are interspersed with the detritus of too many disparate or poorly executed ideas that those hints feel more like broken promises than unrealized ones.
I honestly believe that the team at Spiders wanted to deliver the very best game that they are capable of producing and sadly I think that is exactly what they have done. The Technomancer is not a bad game, but it is devastatingly mediocre.
Armikrog is a game that has had obvious care and exacting attention given to its visual design and animation… at the expense of almost everything else. A bland and woefully short game with asinine puzzles and an unresponsive interface, it's beautiful but that's about it.
Bland visuals, rehashed game play, and constant bugs and minor irritations completely overshadow the core Heroes experience. These criticisms, along with the game's complete lack of new ideas, makes it the weakest entry in the long running series. Might & Magic: Heroes VII is best avoided and forgotten.
1954 Alcatraz fails to deliver. There is a lot to like, the narrative and setting are exceptional, but the constant shortcomings of almost every other aspect of the game quickly saps enjoyment and replaces it with frustration and disappointment.
Admire Spiders for their ambition, but as with its prior efforts this is again a case of reaching too far and spreading too thin. The result is a game that feels incomplete despite its comparatively short length for the genre.
Observation is undeniably beautiful, but it is also vapid and shallow. An interesting premise is let down by simple puzzles and awkward controls. While the game does have some interesting ideas, the execution fails to stick the landing.
Daedalic Entertainment's State of Mind wants players to explore the idea of what is it that makes us us, but never provides the player any real opportunity to do so. You simply follow the path and mark off another check mark. In the end all you're really doing is little more than counting electric sheep.
The Fractured But Whole is more of the same. It's occasionally hilarious, but often misses. Not even an updated combat system and interesting new skills can disguise that fact that it is just The Stick of Truth in a different and less-interesting costume.
Space Hulk: Deathwing is a below par title with some excellent art design and satisfying enough combat. Enemy variety is higher than expected, and the unlockable weapons all feel appropriate, but overall it can only really be recommended to 40K diehards.
Despite some interesting puzzles, Keepers of the Void is a repetitive, shallow, and excruciatingly dull. The issues I was able to look past in the core game smacked me much harder this time around, and unlike the attacks in-game, I could see every one of these hits coming.
Warhammer Chaosbane is a rather pretty, but ultimately shallow Diablo wannabe. By adhering too closely to its inspiration is fails to bring anything new to the table, and end up looking like a poor imitation in somewhat shinier armour and fails to deliver anything with any impact. More whiffle bat than Warhammer.
Far Cry Primal is more and yet less of the same Far Cry we've been playing for the past few years, minus a few fun systems. It's not worth the asking price, and demands more of your time than it deserves.
Might and Magic X is an unabashedly old school RPG experience that, despite one or two high notes, often only serves to remind us why so many of these mechanics were relegated to history.
Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption nails its combat but loses ground almost everywhere else. This Souls-like boss battler leans too heavily on its inspiration and has no sense of itself as a result.