Cian Maher


24 games reviewed
77.5 average score
80 median score
70.0% of games recommended
Are you Cian Maher? If so, email [email protected] to claim this critic page.
Jan 16, 2019

Despite stunning art direction, a kicking soundtrack, and some interesting story points, it's not an enjoyable game for the most part, thanks to its clunky combat, tedious grinding, and poor puzzle design.

Read full review

Mar 29, 2019

Operencia transports you somewhere far, far away, and once you get there, you'll probably want to stay a while.

Read full review

5 / 10 - Weedcraft Inc
Apr 11, 2019

Weedcraft is a well-designed management sim with stylish art and catchy music. Generally, it does its job well. Managing things is hectic and engaging, and you can't afford to take your eye off the ball for too long, lest someone take advantage of your ignorance and kick you out of the market and into prison. However, its characters are stale, its dialogue is boring, and its depiction of ill people is really disgusting. These aren't minor flaws by any means and they drastically affect play.

Read full review

9 / 10 - Darkwood
May 14, 2019

Darkwood's forests are atmospherically horrifying in a novel and affecting way.

Read full review

Nov 25, 2019

Shenmue 3 suffers from hamfisted exposition, tedious repetition, monotonous grinding, and a heap of other fundamental flaws that are inexcusable in 2019. However, its environments are so confident in their sense of place that exploration is a capable redeemer, and the game is at times, on that ground alone, worth playing.

Read full review

Dec 11, 2019

Darksiders: Genesis suffers from a poorly-suited camera but has great combat and intriguing writing.

Read full review

Snack World starts off as a charming RPG, but tedium quickly sets in.

Read full review

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX recreates the strange pair of Pokemon spin-offs from over a decade ago with style.

Read full review

Mar 10, 2020

Presuming these techy mishaps are rectified, Ori And The Will Of The Wisps is one of the most charming, engaging, visually striking and emotionally touching games I’ve played in a long time. It’s difficult but fair, complex but intuitive, and gruelling but conquerable.

Read full review

Unscored - Horizon's Gate
May 13, 2020

Overall, Horizon’s Gate is a joy to play.

Read full review

Sep 17, 2020

Hades is, to put it plainly, a masterpiece. It has a refreshingly unique trajectory, tells a compelling story with an alluring cast, and has such a good handle on moment-to-moment play that it is never anything less than genuinely excellent. It’s a game that grows the more you play it, as opposed to being something that suffers from a slow descent into tedium. And for that reason, it is a genuine forever game.

Read full review

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was a risk. Not really because it took Vikings as its subject matter — people love Vikings, to the extent that loads of folks are a bit sick of Norse stuff at this point. It was a risk because it compounded the ideals of Assassin’s Creed’s origins and Assassin’s Creed Origins. Fortunately, it turns out that the best game in this series is the one that’s drawn from pretty much everything that came before it, in order to carve out its own unique identity based on the absolute best bits of its many, many predecessors.

Read full review

Nov 30, 2020

From stoner oracles to gods who have been turned into trees, to the sheer batshittiness of its entire cast of gods and monsters, Immortals Fenyx Rising is a genuine joy to play, and a real treat for Greek mythology lovers.

Read full review

Feb 9, 2021

If Persona 5 was about forming bonds with new people and recruiting them for a common cause, Persona 5 Strikers is about taking the Phantom Thieves and proving that the friendship they share is lasting, that it can and will endure any hardship. I think, right now, that message is immeasurably important, and hits harder than a bullet formed from the Seven Deadly Sins.

Read full review

Apr 28, 2021

New Pokemon Snap has issues when it comes to tedium between courses, arbitrary solutions, and boring, barely functional extra mechanics, but the courses and Pokemon are legitimately incredible. The Photodex is a marvel, multiplayer creates healthy competition for replayability , and just being able to inhabit Lental is a spectacle in and of itself. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to someone who can’t tell Bagon from Beldum, but if you’re a born and bred Pokemon fan, New Pokemon Snap could be your sleeper hit of the year.

Read full review

Jul 22, 2021

Pokemon Unite is weird. It both feels everything and nothing like Pokemon and nothing and everything like a MOBA. It’s not necessarily a balanced meeting point between these two ostensibly incomparable concepts - instead, it’s its own thing entirely. And, for the most part, this new, strange, messy hybrid works. Its misunderstanding of what makes it special in the first place is an unignorable aspect of an otherwise remarkable effort, and there will be people out there who are turned off by the overbearing presence of microtransactions, even if they don’t technically make the game pay-to-win.

Read full review

Jul 27, 2021

Ultimately, though, The Forgotten City is one of those games that will inspire other games for years to come. It’s absurd to think it was mostly developed by a three-person team, and yet the clear, unanimous focus a team this small permits is evident throughout the entire game. It is clever not just in terms of its story or themes, but in how it packages and delivers those themes through one of the most inspired and tight gameplay loops I’ve seen in a long time.

Read full review

- Omno
Jul 29, 2021

It would be easy for someone to say that Omno does nothing new, but the reason it’s easy to say that is because it’s completely incorrect. Omno has plenty of imaginative and ingenious ideas - they’re just unfortunately hampered by more established ones that didn’t need to be there.

Read full review

Aug 18, 2021

As I sit here now, wrapping up this review in an attempt to shut myself up before I accidentally spoil something I would rather people experience for themselves, I am wearing a stupid smile. I am, at this moment, thinking about how great it would be for Recompile to garner the attention, respect, and acclaim it deserves. This is no ordinary game - it is brilliant and ambitious and frustrating in the one and only way that frustration can be a positive term. Recompile is a rare gem in a cave of unremarkable cobblestone, a pearl among cracked shells and coarse sand. If you do one thing after reading this review, do both yourself and I a favour: download Recompile, and once you're done with it, tell your friends to download it, too.

Read full review

Sep 14, 2021

All of that said, denouncing Eastward’s strengths and successes for any of the above would be disingenuous. It is a remarkable game that, while retro in ambition, will paradoxically go on to inspire the drive and uniqueness of future projects. It is clever, vibrant, and unapologetically original, and unless some magnificent twist of fate occurs over the next three months, it will undoubtedly go down as one of the best games of the year.

Read full review