Joseph Pugh's Reviews
Death Stranding 2 keeps the spirit of the original by continuing to be a game about deliveries. However, it threw away its soul by removing any and all friction involved in those deliveries. Instead of overcoming obstacles, the most direct path rarely has any, and the entire game is designed to allow you to ignore its core gameplay loop without engaging with what the game actually is. I can’t overstate just how disappointed I am with this sequel.
I’d love to talk about and gush over all of the cool aspects of Wilds, but for a review, there’s largely no point because the overbearing streamlining, hand-holding, and dumbing down of the game completely ruins those cool aspects for me. Anything positive thing I could say would have a hundred caveats waiting in the wings. For the first time, I have a new entry in one of my favorite video game series, and I have absolutely no desire to play it.
Avowed is almost a good game. Its meaningful choices and excellent combat are held back by a trite gameplay loop of open but not-quite-open zones with poor scaling and a bafflingly bad tier system for your gear.
There are so many great tactics games out there, that any new one that enters the fold has to give me a good reason to spend my time with it over the others. While Legends of Kingdom Rush isn’t truly a bad game, it really doesn’t bring anything notable to the table. It simply exists.
Startup Panic is charming and its soul is there, but the body it occupies is just incredibly shallow. I didn’t dislike my time with it, I was always interested in what was to come. At the same time, however, I had to ask myself what I was doing. The reality was, I was just hitting the same few menu buttons over and over again with no real engaging agency. I was reminded of things like Farmville, where you are hardly playing at all.
Trash Sailor’s frantic gameplay and variety of hazards and enemies certainly elevate it above the heap of a dumpster dive. But the frustrating controls and lack of challenge mean it still smells a bit after taking it home.
It’s a faithful remaster that will send old school fans on a serious nostalgia high without tainting your memories of it, and that’s fantastic. Newcomers might not be swept off their feet and its gift of pleasant memories may only work out for fans of the classics. But that’s okay, we’ve been waiting a really long time.
King of Seas has all the ingredients to bake into a fresh riveting pirate game. It just feels like the cook tripped on deck, and seagulls flew off with some of them while leaving the others half-eaten.
Returnal’s shooting mechanics are solid, the game is gorgeous, the enemy variety is nice, and the boss fights are stellar. So, it’s a shame that literally everything else kind of falls apart. The rogue-lite aspects are sub-par at best and outright bad at worst.
The heavy repetition and strange way it gatekeeps critical knowledge brings down an otherwise clever game about creating a successful battle plan by summoning monsters.
Roundguard is a small, lightweight, and simple game about pinball physics in a dungeon-crawling setting. I feel that it’s asking price is a bit much on PC and consoles, but it’s a perfect choice on Apple Arcade.
The Survivalists combines a poor survival experience with a lacking adventure game. The result is a gimped title that struggles to be anything at all. Its novel monkey system isn't enough to salvage this shipwreck.
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.
RoadCraft has updates ahead of it, including some kind of “hard” mode. I look forward to seeing it evolve because there are aspects I enjoy, and heck, if I ever went back to SnowRunner, I’d miss the ability to manipulate the terrain greatly. But as it stands, RoadCraft doesn’t feel right. At best, it feels more like a toy and less like a game. At worst, it just feels like busy work.
It’s frustrating because Starship Troopers: Extermination has a lot of cool ideas and some matches are blood-pumping spectacles that feel fantastic. Yet, the lack of structure dictating the coordination of 16 random strangers and the unfinished feel of the game brings the experience down far too often. These issues can certainly be addressed, but whether or not the game’s player base will sustain it long enough to see any meaningful updates is completely uncertain.
When I first started playing, I thought for sure I had a game-of-the-year candidate in my hands. If Dragons Dogma 2 wasn’t such an unbalanced mess, it would be one of the best games released this year. The good news is, Dragons’s Dogma 2 can be fixed. We shouldn’t have to wait or hope for it to be fixed in the first place, but Capcom could certainly address the issue in an update. I sincerely hope they do, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 is begging to be a great game, the awful lack of scaling is the only thing standing its way.
Granblue Fantasy Relink is the greatest game I don’t want to play. Its stellar combat, great AI, interesting world, and epic quests forge the experience to a sharp point, but the lack of any meaningful challenge severely dulls its edge.
This Means Warp is incredibly fun and shines the brightest with friends. It could do with a bit more variety in some places, but the biggest thing holding it back is the crashing issue, and I sincerely hope it’s resolved soon.
Green Hell is a game that’s going to be great once the developers have maggots eat away all the infected bits and patch the wounds in a lovely update-lined bandage. It just isn’t there yet, and I’m somewhat sad I’ve had my experience soured before it got there.
The phobias themselves have a fantastic aesthetic design and animation too. The rigid and puzzlelike nature gives the game a unique playstyle that’s a lot of fun to solve. The lack of polish is very apparent, however. Between the bugs, strange design choices, and lack of cohesion the game feels like it needed more time in the oven, and maybe some focused direction.