Mick Fraser's Reviews
The Last Oricru has some decent ideas and will scratch an itch for fans of Risen, but it's not quite good enough to overshadow its peers.
There are dozens of alternatives out there either for Dark Souls fans or sci-fi nuts, and Dolmen is just too riddled with issues to recommend.
Elex II is another example of Piranha Bytes aiming far too high. It's a plodding, often clunky adventure with few bright spots.
Demon Skin isn't a bad game, but it is ropey and certainly needed more work where the animations and menus are concerned.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood has potential, but is little more than a C-tier experience that's unlikely to stick in anyone's memory for long.
Bright Memory is a short, janky blast of fun that almost makes up for in ambition what it lacks in execution.
Everreach has potential, but it's not there yet. Hopefully, Elder Games will continue to support it post-launch.
Terminator Resistance suffers from a chronic lack of charm that can't even be saved by evoking its hallowed source material.
I won't disparage what GODS is and always was, which is quite simply one of the greatest of its time - but that denomination of era is crucially important here. Because judged up against its contemporaries, the original was a powerhouse - but there's simply no real place for it in 2018.
There was potential here, but Masters of Anima is ultimately a bit of a letdown.
An average adventure that fails to excite or entice.
Rad Rodgers is too self aware, and falls short on many levels.
Metal Gear Survive is alright. It strikes such an almost perfect balance between mind-numbing tedium and rage-tinted fun that if you're willing to let it take you, there's a very compelling experience under all the brown and grey textures - just don't expect it to do justice to the franchise under which it shuffles.
Vesta is best described as okay, and it never really rises above that level despite its prettiness
A brave attempt at creating a more thoughtful shooter hindered by poor execution and messy technique.
A poor first expansion to Ubisoft's floundering shooter. They must do better.
The Technomancer, like Bound by Flame before it, tries to be too much like the genre leaders instead of finding its own way, and ends up falling short of the mark.
A faux-retro shooter with an irreverent sense of humour, Bedlam is hard to recommend as anything other than a curio, despite its popular source material.
Like Of Orcs and Men before it, Bound by Flame is an uneven mishmash of decent new ideas and painfully generic genre tropes that struggle to gel, yet somehow it blunders through to deliver a mostly enjoyable adventure. Bound by Flame had a great deal of potential but it feels half-realised, and this is simply not the epic adventure we were promised.
Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark isn't an awful game, but it's a long way short of the bar set by High Moon.