Nicola Ardron's Reviews
Forager is a fiendishly addictive incremental game with crisp, low-fi visuals, compelling game play loop and clever pacing. Just make sure you don't have to be anywhere before you begin playing!
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a fun if slightly buggy shooter, made more interesting with the addition of a friend to help you punch Nazis to the face.
Etherborn is a space and gravity bending puzzle game that challenges your spatial awareness, however despite a very compelling hook and lovely visuals it runs out of ideas very quickly.
Effie is a 3D puzzle platformer with a strong nod to games of yesteryear. Simple combat as well as a lack of any real challenge and samey boss fights make it a title best suited to a younger audience.
Astroneer is a lovely serene survival crafting game that can feel aimless at times, but has masses of potential to be something special.
World War Z is a competent team-based shooter that doesn't really add anything new to the genre. It is, however, great fun to play with friends in short bursts.
12 is better than 6 is a frantic, top-down shooter with a lovely pen and paper visual style
Beat Cop is a relentless time management game where writing tickets and arresting perps is set against a background of sleaze and corruption.
Metro Exodus feels like a game where its ambitions slightly outstrip its abilities. Visually stunning, it suffers a little too much from an obtuse system of storytelling and maps that are slightly too large creating long periods of doing nothing.
Apex Legends is a superb game featuring an excellent array of heroes, tight, responsive gun play, smooth movement, smart communication system and an astonishing level of polish in a free-to-play game.
By trying to be all things to all people Genesis Alpha One loses any sense of identity. There is some really interesting ideas at work, and cool aesthetic in one portion of the game, but other areas feel underdeveloped.
Shadow Heritage is slightly more fun to play than Hunted was, but some weird narrative decisions undo a lot of the character progression from the main campaign and totally expose the illusion of player choice
Subnautica is not without its issues, but it successfully manages to combine a strong sense of exploration and discovery with an interesting story hook and an exceptional soundtrack to make it one of the very best examples of the genre.
Legacy of the First Blade is a mostly underwhelming first DLC that has some interesting story information for long term fans of the Assassin's Creed series.
If you can re-frame Fallout 76 as a survival crafting game in the Fallout universe rather than viewing it as the next instalment in the series then you will have a better time. It is not without its faults, but there is a base there that has the potential to be improved upon as time goes by.
It feels trite to put a score on a game like Memory of Us as it tells an important and poignant story that should be heard, it's just that at times the game parts get in the way of that story.
Boundless is a game heavy on exploration and crafting. The existence of craft able portals to other worlds extends the scope considerably, but obtuse recipes and unintuitive menus dampen the enthusiasm somewhat.
Black Ops 4 is an excellent entry into the series. Some may mourn the loss of the single player campaign, but this is the tightest most balanced multiplayer the franchise has seen in a long while.
A huge, ambitious game building on the solid foundations of Origins to deliver a game that feels like another positive step towards a very interesting future for the franchise.
A minimalist's take on the real time strategy genre, with a strong pick and play quality that doesn't quite do enough to bridge the gap between novices and veterans of the genre.