Joseph Pugh's Reviews
I personally wish the game was a little longer, or a couple of bucks cheaper. But it’s a well-designed, focused, and most importantly fun couch co-op experience.
Fall Guys is silly and stupid fun, and that is perfectly okay. It just needs a bit more variety and the RNG feeling of the team based mini-games are a real downer. The game is a nearly perfect platform to be expanded upon and I hope that’s the case going forward.
Drake Hollow puts a lovely spin on the survival genre. Building a camp to care for Drakes instead of yourself is a nice twist, and defending that camp from raids is a lot of fun. But fighting the same four enemy types with a simple combat system can’t carry the fun for the entire adventure.
It can be frustrating at times, the game isn't always fair and a lot of its mechanics are downright frustrating. Yet after all the time I've put in, the bugs, and the horse crap. I still want to play it, because it is so much fun. I under no circumstances recommend you so just blindly buy the game, but I think you should try it. Catch it on sale or play the base game through Xbox game pass, if you like it, the rabbit hole is a deep one. I have over a thousand hours in and I'm still going strong.
The story is simplistic but the lore is interesting. The combat is fun at times but hampered by the games linear nature and finite resources. Exploring and finding new loot is fun but I do not think stealth killing enemies combined with RNG works well at all.
The missions are ho-hum, but the combat more than makes up for it and the fact that all four Javelins play so differently is fantastic. Yet the games loading screen and bugs can put a serious damper on the enjoyment. It’s a decent foundation that will likely improve over time. But the latest patch that removed the respawn restrictions is a serious low blow for the hardcore crowd, and it has dampened my enthusiasm a great deal for it.
Fade To Silence isn't a bad game really, it has some neat ideas. The winter landscape feels brutal, it drips with Lovecraft flair and I enjoy the base building and sieges. The cleansing and freeze mechanic work well and assuming you don't get tangled up on the terrain, the sled dog transport is neat. Some of its mechanics just work against itself. It would have been better as a sandbox, tossing away its linear nature. The time gating, lack of randomness and permadeath just don't work well in those circumstances. It is still worth experiencing though, especially if you like Lovecraft stuff, pick it up on sale.
It is a much bigger game than FTL and because of that, its flaws are much more pronounced. Yet it remains fun and I can’t see any reason why you wouldn’t enjoy it if you liked FTL. It has a ton of variation to play with and a lot to manage. Just keep in mind that the randomness is all part of the fun and sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.
The retro graphics look great and the animations are superb. But I don’t feel like there is enough “game” there for the price of admission. If you really enjoy timing or pattern memorization, the 2D action game coating could be a nice change of pace. Otherwise, try out the demo on Steam if you can or pick it up on sale.
Some of the varied objectives and boss fights did a good job of breaking up the repetition but fighting the repeated bosses was a drag. Sky Cannoneer isn’t an expensive game, but it is a short one. At the same time if it lasted any longer it would have overstayed its welcome as mindless action is only entertaining for so long.
The Outer Worlds has a load of mechanics put into place, and while they are functional, they aren’t cohesive. They were implemented with little regard for how they would interact with each other and the game is a mess because of it. They had to make it so a player could complete the game no matter how they built their character. Obsidian succeeded, but only by making those choices matter very little in the first place.
The game is at its best in levels that add something interesting, such as the dog or streams of lava. But those moments are far and few in between, despite the games short length. Most levels my partner and I didn’t speak a word to each other after we decided what rooms each of us would tackle. A dark contrast to other party games that have players constantly yelling at each other and laughing.
Stranded Deep is a pretty chill survival game. I enjoyed the setting and my early hours with the game. It had a few high points such as building my raft and my first boss encounter. My enthusiasm didn’t last long, however, as the lack of variety and surprise combined with the game’s problems and inconsistencies wore me down.
I think if you had actually played the original, you may appreciate this upgrade on your walk down nostalgia lane. As a newcomer, it just has no proper place to sit beside the games that exist today and there is no room for it on the shelf. It can be an amusing romp, but you kick up the dust of this Dinosaur at every turn, and the new can of paint just can’t hide that fact.
You could get some casual fun out Uagi-Saba. I didn’t dislike my time in it, I just wasn’t particularly engaged. If the idea of perfecting the genetic line of a creature sounds intriguing, you could put some hours into obtaining it. But the lack of interactivity of the creature raising and shallow depth of the colony building, combined with the frame rate drops makes it hard to recommend
You die, you respawn within feet of your death. You pick up the bag of junk you dropped. The enemies you killed have not respawned, the enemies you wounded have not healed. But you have full health. Death in Fallout 76 is a health refill, a free stim-pack. If Bethesda were to grant you God Mode, where you literally cannot lose health. It would functionally be the same as it is right now.
The lack of meaningful gameplay, try-hard humor, and day one DLC make it hard to recommend. You could get some laughs by getting some friends together and goofing off in the open world, but there are much better alternatives out there you could spend your money on.
I can’t find the entertainment in Stranded Sails. The quests aren’t fun, what little progression that exists is there to help ease the tedium of completing the repetitive fetch quests in the first place. I can’t even say it is a relaxing game because the energy bar is frustrating and the sole means of combating it lacks any kind of interesting engagement. Yet if it was removed the game’s existence would be that much more mindless bordering on an idle game.
This is painful. Waking was made by one person and is a game of true passion. It contains a concept I would like to recommend to anyone who is comfortable enough to delve within themselves for the sake of an intimate video game experience. What Jason Oda set out to do is truly touching. Yet the vessel in which the experience is presented is badly blemished.
It is deep, fun and has extremely high replay value. It's disappointing that the multiplayer has a couple of hiccups but the AI is solid and provides a good challenge with plenty of entertainment. Whether you're playing a custom scenario or the campaign, you are in for a good time. Planetfall may end up being my personal game of the year and I can't recommend it enough. Especially for console players who rarely get these type of games. If you like strategy or grid-based tactics, buy it immediately, you won't regret it.