Andrei Dumitrescu's Reviews
Mordheim: City of the Damned combines a well-developed combat system and a mercenary and management system to create a fantasy driven game with low stakes but plenty of impressive moments.
Hard West is a good but limited game, and at its current price, it offers a solid set of mechanics for those who are twiddling their turn-based tactics thumbs while they wait for the sequel to XCOM to arrive next year.
Game of Thrones - The Ice Dragon is a good closing chapter for the first season of the video game, managing to deliver some satisfying final moments for the main protagonists and to confound the expectations of players to some extent.
The Crew - Wild Run is a sign that the development team at Ivory Tower and publisher Ubisoft have plans to support the racing game in the long-term and will continue to deliver patches, more modes, and extra cards in the coming months.
ROOT is a hard first-person shooter, an experience clearly designed for players who love the classics of the genre and feel that modern releases are too cinematic and too focused on narrative for their good.
Clandestine takes a great idea, the fact that spying is a two man job and delivers carefully balanced gameplay mechanics, both for the field operative and the hacker, that are easy to understand but hard to master.
Football Manager 2016 feels a little thin initially, but as players dig deeper into the experience, they will find that it offers the best expression of the core mechanics that has defined the series for the past few years.
Starcraft 2 - Legacy of the Void is best described using the words that Blizzard makes a character utter relatively early in the campaign: "It's technology is ancient, yet highly advanced." The phrase manages to capture the way the developers at Blizzard have kept the series fresh, by mining the classic ideas of the real-time strategy genre while seeking to mix them with innovative approaches. For Legacy of the Void the words also nicely encapsulate its relationship with the game engine and the structure of the campaign and multiplayer modes, both of which are as old as the franchise itself but still offer gamers plenty of surprises. Starcraft II deserves its place as one of the most influential releases of the past five years, and this Protoss-focused chapter manages to deliver a fitting end to its core narrative while opening up the multiplayer in some interesting ways.
Fallout 4 is a deep and broad video game that can easily occupy more than 100 hours of a gamer's life, as long as they don't become bored of some of the core mechanics of the open-world genre and want to explore the universe past the core narrative.
Anno 2205 is good city builder with an interesting take on the future of humanity and with plenty of humanity, the kind of video game that a player can spend tens of hours with as long as he is interested in making all his cities run at peak efficiency all of the time.
Galak-Z is clearly designed for players who enjoy a challenge, and it offers an impressive mix of frantic combat, long-term planning, tactical planning and anime-inspired looks that will appeal to a lot of fans of the rogue-like genre.
The Park is an interesting attempt to offer a spin-off experience for those who love The Secret World and to deliver some Halloween appropriate content for gamers who are interested in psychological horror.
Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide is a game for those who want to get a Left 4 Dead like experience that has a little more depth and uses a fantasy universe rather than an undead apocalypse to get gamers to cooperate.
Zen Pinball 2 - Balls of Glory is a solid collection of tables for Zen Pinball 2 that can deliver tens of hours of gameplay for a gamer who is a fan of all the featured television animated series included.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate is a game for the fans of the series, a step forward when compared to Unity, but not the great comeback that many loyalists were expecting.
Many gamers will love or hate the game based on how they feel about the two dimensional combat and the unique way it challenges players to be aware of movement, shields, disruptor, boost and weapon fire at the same time.
Transformers: Devastation is an experience for those who already love the franchise and the idea of big robots punching each other, and in many ways it feels like an attempt to show that if one ignores the modern movie series, the Autobots versus Decepticons series can be both fun and well-suited to the video game treatment.
Ancestory has an interesting core idea, but the game in its current state fails to deliver enough variety or keep gamers interested in the long-run.
Animal Gods feels incomplete in many ways, an experience that showcases some intriguing gameplay and a unique world but fails to flesh out either of them.
Rising Tide is a solid package, and in many ways, this is how the game should have been delivered when it first arrived last year.