I’m utterly torn with Bloody Ties (no pun intended). On the one hand, I genuinely found myself enjoying my departure from Villedor in favor of a brutal, balls-to-the-walls tournament. On the other hand, no game I’ve played in the last decade has been as unstable as Dying Light 2. I’ve been forced to curse the sky and proclaim Techland’s latest DLC nigh-unplayable. When it works, it’s great. But these developers have some serious fixin’ to do.
Sniper Elite 5 let me down. I expected the next generation of this franchise. Instead, we got Sniper Elite 4.5. If Rebellion Developments hopes to continue this series down the line, they’ll need to return to the drawing board and bring something fresh next time.
Pecaminosa is a perfect little game to spend a weekend with. It won’t challenge you, it doesn’t last long, and the atmosphere is enough to warrant a look from any noir fan. I can’t help but feel like you might be better off playing it on steam, but you’d still have pages of exhausting dialogue to sit through. I suppose that’s all really subjective, but Pecaminosa misses the mark more than it hits for my money.
Without any concrete information as to when we can expect the next season of Peaky Blinders, Peaky Blinders: Mastermind might end up being a nice distraction from the limbo we’ve all been left in.
What sort of horror game puts you to sleep? One that doesn’t try anything new. And that’s what Infliction is.
If you like this sort of game, there’s a lot of fun to be had here. It can be rough getting through those first three or four hours, but if you do you’ll be rewarded with a story that completely delivers on the lesson it’s trying to teach.
It’s tough to recommend a ‘remaster’ of a game that’s only half remastered.
Will there ever be another Choo-Choo Charles? I sort of hope so. Sure, this first stab at it has issues, but there’s no reason Two Star Games can’t continue to mold this into a dark horse juggernaut. It may take years, but I hope it happens. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the future of this franchise.
I can live with many of Need For Speed Unbound’s faults. Admittedly, there were fleeting moments when I enjoyed the routine of earning cash, upgrading, outrunning police, and climbing Lakeshore’s underground racing ranks. But, when a Need For Speed game spits in the face of people that use wheel and pedal setups, it’s tough to feel a need for anything other than a need to play a better game. There’s a foundation here to build upon, but EA and Criterion have their work cut out for them if they ever hope to compete with the giants of the racing game scene.
I can’t see the NHL franchise reaching the heights of its mid-2000s glory years anytime soon, but at least we have the Frostbite engine in there to start building upon. It took far too long to arrive, though; it’s here now. And while I can see the potential for it to one day have this series feeling exciting again, I don’t see that happening for a long time. But, hey, it’s the only hockey game in town, so I guess I’ll see you on the ice.
I stand by that it plays as well as it ever has. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a proper representation of the sport. If EA Vancouver ever hopes to stand alongside the giants of the genre – NBA 2K and MLB The Show – they’ll need to rethink what simulation hockey really means.
You know, it’s bizarre to think, but this is sort of like Crysis’ mid-life crisis.
South Park: Snow Day by no means lives up to its predecessors. Still, it manages to be worthwhile for those invested in the franchise.
Bus Simulator 21 turned out to be a lot better than I was anticipating. It has a ton of the typical shortcomings you see in simulator-type games, but it also gets a lot right. The maps are large, pretty, and varied. Busses handle well and feel weighty when making corners. And the multiplayer is genuinely fantastic. If other sims take note of what Bus Simulator 21 is doing in regards to cooperative modes, this might be a genre I start to pay much more mind to.
I was pleasantly surprised by Drug Dealer Simulator. What I thought was going to be a joke of a game turned out to be something I had a lot of fun with.
Should you play The Witcher 3? Absolutely. It’s one of a handful of games from the past decade that you simply can’t miss. Should you play The Witcher 3 on the Switch? Honestly, probably not.
Skull and Bones does what it set out to do quite well. Combat is fun, the upgrade system is rewarding, the environment is engaging, and the sound design is phenomenal. But everything that it doesn’t do sticks out like a sore thumb. A next-to-non-existent narrative, repetitive one-trick missions, and a lack of anything pirate-related other than sailing a ship hurts. To its credit, I enjoyed my first twenty or so hours more than I thought I would. But it’ll take a significant, focused effort from Ubisoft to maintain interest over the years to come.
Regardless of the mediocre upgrades to NHL 24’s game modes, I must admit, the on-ice action is a big step forward for the franchise. The new hitting and passing systems need work, but the changes in how momentum affects the moment-to-moment gameplay have injected new life into the series. At the end of the day, I find myself wanting to step back out onto the ice. And that’s more than I can say for how I’ve felt over the last several years.
Anyone hip to the source material is sure to find a lot to love about Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions.
It’s perfectly edible. Delicious, even. But it could be so much better.