It's not a bad game, and is fun for a weekend, but it doesn't offer enough to justify it's price tag.
I really appreciate what Beautiful Desolation is trying to do with creative storytelling; well-developed characters; and a mind-bending and beautiful, albeit desolate, sci-fi world. I just ended up too frustrated by the limitations of the console medium and a lack of direction in many of the quests to ultimately recommend this game on this platform. It's a point-and-click adventure presented without a pointer or a clicker, better played on PC.
For every good bit there is something bad, and the end result left me feeling like the package was less than the sum of its parts.
The Long Gate took the fun parts of my Computer Science degree and mashed it back in with the tedious stuff. The puzzles are good, the world built around them is fantastic, but the marriage of the two is one destined for divorce. This type of first-person puzzler just doesn't work for me. Keep the First Person to the Shooters, and keep the puzzlers top down. I commend the attempt and vision of the game, but for me it was a combination doomed to fail.
The Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is not what I expected and ultimately not what I wanted. I was hoping for a card game but a card game it is not. It's a classic RPG, simply presented solely in the medium of cards. But even taken for what it is, it falls too short of the running time of a good RPG, fails to deliver the challenge or strategy to make itself stand out in that genre, and tarnishes and excellent story with characters that struggle to redeem their faults.
It follows the formula of a Call of Duty game, but delivers each element just a bit worse than it's predecessors. Call of Duty: Vanguard is a game that will surely grow and improve over time, but what we have at launch is something that at least fails to cater to what I was hoping for in any aspect of the game. The single player campaign is ridiculous even if it does deliver some moments of high action; the multiplayer is a mess, at least for someone with my skillset; and zombies is simply unfinished. It'll get better, but what we've got right now just isn't all that good.
Gloomhaven as a video game is a faithful recreation of the board game into the digital world. This is both commendable and detrimental. It is a good game, but there is also a reason no one sits around a table and plays by themselves and this is pretty much it.
Terminator: Resistance Enhanced is a game that doesn't really understand its source material. The evidence for that can't be made more plain than the way it can't even maintain consistency of vision from one mission to the very next one. The NPC models, audio, bugs and glitches, and repetitive nature of much of the play speaks to an implementation that falls short of any vision, whether the one presented or the one I believe should have been the goal. It does get better with the DLC, and the Infiltrator Mode is an excellent experience in it's own right, although one short lived - clocking in at less than three quarters of an hour with little replayabilty. But factoring in that minor triumph and better subplot of DLC into the mess of the main campaign still falls short of something I can really recommend.
Terminator: Resistance Enhanced is a game that doesn't really understand its source material. The evidence for that can't be made more plain than the way it can't even maintain consistency of vision from one mission to the very next one. The NPC models, audio, bugs and glitches, and repetitive nature of much of the play speaks to an implementation that falls short of any vision, whether the one presented or the one I believe should have been the goal. It does get better with the DLC, and the Infiltrator Mode is an excellent experience in it's own right, although one short lived - clocking in at less than three quarters of an hour with little replayabilty. But factoring in that minor triumph and better subplot of DLC into the mess of the main campaign still falls short of something I can really recommend.
Gunslingers & Zombies gameplay and visuals are better than this score would suggest. It's just let down by awkward controls, worse camera angles, and other evidence of a generally uninterested PC port. There's a better game out there on PC that might be more fun than paying more for a Switch version that really didn't care enough to take advantage of anything that makes the Switch good.
This is the Destiny we have for now. And things will change over the next year, a lot of tweaks are incoming. Difficulty will probably be scaled back as the current state scares away new and casual players. The consumables economy is likely going to need to be tweaked as well, the game will evolve with the seasons, but Lightfall itself is an overall disappointing chapter in a game that remains excellent. Bungie appears to be buying time until the Final Shape next year, and we're being asked to pay for it.
Unless you've already bought this as part of a season pass, don't waste your money on Curse of Osiris until Bungie actually changes direction, and I'm not talking about executing their proposed changes which painfully miss the mark yet again. The base game of Destiny 2 is a great shooter for 50-60 hours of solid content on your first play through of a redemptive story. But there is no endgame to keep going beyond that and there isn't anything packaged into this DLC than enhances that initial experience. At this point, if you're desperate for a looter/shooter then either fire up Destiny 1 again, watch Anthem videos on YouTube and hope for a brighter Q4 2018, or else maybe go give the Division a chance. It had a dumpster fire launch but can be had on the cheap now and I hear it's become a very good game in its current state.
I almost feel amiss even giving this game a score. But then again I feel the same about even calling it a game. It's an $11 demo. You'll be hard pressed to stretch your total playtime past half an hour. The worst part of it is that it's actually pretty good, but as soon as the story feels like the prologue is over and it's time to take off, you get kicked right to the title screen and it's all over.
The Bookwalker: Thief of Tales simply fails to deliver. It's probably a better experience on PC, but should be generally avoided on console without some updates to the controls and stability of the game. It doesn't take long to finish, at least I don't think so - a handful of hours to the final level. So at least it has that going for it.