Jamie Tarren's Reviews
Despite its minor limitations, Aquarium Designer on Xbox is a delightful and immersive experience. It offers a good balance between creative freedom and educational value, making it a great choice for casual players and aspiring aquarists alike. While the limited selection of aquatic life and slightly awkward menu navigation might dampen the experience for the most demanding players, the soothing visuals, calming soundtrack, and diverse design options ensure a relaxing and rewarding journey for most. If you’re looking for a way to unwind after a long day, unleash your inner artist, and learn a little something about the wonders of the underwater world, Aquarium Designer is definitely worth checking out. Just keep in mind that the real challenge might not be designing your dream aquarium, but tearing yourself away from it at the end of the day.
Overall, I found Breakpoint lacked any real innovation and quickly becomes a grind fest for gear to improve your Gear Score. The game’s world is beautifully designed and connected by a transport network, but even the game’s gorgeous visuals struggle to hide the real issues with Breakpoint.
Overall, Streets of Rogue is an enjoyable rogue-lite offering a new experience every time you play. Will you hack the electrics to turn off security cameras or knock on the door and go in guns blazing, there’s a play style suited to everyone. It has lots of nonsense too from taking a pill to make you a giant right through to grabbing a toilet and throwing it all over someone to poison them. The co-op is a great addition too, and definitely worth a try at some point.
We. The Revolution offers a wonderfully unique experience into the French Revolution and more of an insight into the justice system back then in 18th Century.
World War Z is an enjoyable to play zombie story, best served in co-op or against other players in PvP. The mechanics of the zombie hordes creates a frantic escape from danger and makes you play smart in terms of keeping your ammo topped up. I would have no second thought on recommending World War Z to anyone considering a purchase.
Who would have thought being a bird was so dangerous with bugs and frogs about. Bird Game + offers a unique art style with its black and white visuals, but lacks an in-depth story to be told. Just as you feel you’re enjoying the game, suddenly you’re at the end of the 3 levels. Although for the price of £3.99 currently it seems just about right and value for money.
All in all I’m fairly happy with the full release of DayZ. It captures survival well and has the systems in place to succeed. I struggled to emerge my head in base building and generators due to trying to survive and not having a group to team up with. However, having played PC builds I have a full knowledge on these systems and how the game currently feels with the latest build, which is a slow transition still.
At most Donut County will offer a good 3-4 hours of solid gameplay that is light-hearted and enjoyable. The game flags as slightly too easy to breeze through, but in terms of the fun gameplay in creating havoc with holes in the ground, I would definitely recommend picking this up for a session one night.
Fallout 76 combines a large portion of Fallout 4 assets and flaws without making any real much-needed refinements for the online aspect. The world is vast and at times lifeless without NPCs and a sparsely player count to each server. Where Fallout 76 excels is providing hours of online fun when you team up. Players can help build your bases and you can take over areas such as a food factory to produce Preserved InstaMash, which was a real Fallout highlight for me. Hopefully future content and patches will get Fallout 76 to where it needs to be, as the world and mechanics are there, it just lacks any real polish, partly due to its aging, clunky game engine.
Volume 1 was a brief introduction of what’s to come in Thief of Thieves and the narrative storytelling combined with the stealth gameplay was a balanced mix of playing and watching character dialogue. There’s plenty to look forward to in terms of how the story progresses from here in Volume 2, which should be out in December. According to devs Rival Games there will be monthly releases up until February.
Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2 is a fantastically hand drawn side-scroller making small steps of improvement from the original, and with the addition of 4-player multiplayer there’s plenty for this to stand out as a sequel. Now all I want is a roll and slide mechanic to try and do none hit runs on levels.
Fishing Sim World is one for the fishing enthusiasts with the time and patience to invest in learning the game’s core set of controls for catching fish. Play the long learning game and you’ll be pulling fish after fish out the water, but if you struggle to get past this barrier you’ll be throwing your rod into the lake and heading home for the day.
Planet Alpha is a fun to play platforming adventure set at a fast pace and on a fascinating world to explore. Once you’ve learned that you can control time of day, the puzzle mechanics become more unique and interesting. It’s just let down by the lack of unique gameplay compared to previous atmospheric platformers released.
The Mooseman is interesting to play and brings a glimmer of Limbo-esque gameplay to the table. I would however, be more inclined to replay Limbo as I have done before, whereas The Mooseman is just missing that something in its gameplay that makes me want to enjoy the challenges it has to offer.
State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem is a half hearted attempt at a remake. Visually the game sees slight improvements and in terms of enjoyment this will offer between maybe 4-5 hours before it begins to feel too much the same. If you enjoy blasting relentless enemies for fun with different weapons and vehicles then this may be of interest.
Shape of The World offers a good selection of 10 hours or more gameplay and with procedurally generated areas every experience is different. I would definitely recommend a headphone experience to get the best out of its soothing soundtrack and beautiful colour livening areas.
For a side-scrolling beat-em up title, Die For Valhalla! is a fairly enjoyable title with procedurally generated levels no experience will be the same and the extra of local co-op can mean double the fun or quadruple the fun in this case. My only concern is how long will you want to play essentially the same style of play over and over.
Jurassic World Evolution is fantastically linked to Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. It was great to see 3 movie franchise actors lend their voices to their in-game counterparts. In terms of gameplay, it offers a fun to play dinosaur park management experience, although future updates will control it’s success as new dinosaurs are the only fresh element currently from last week’s update so far.
Vampyr is a dark and appealing RPG with a strong storyline full of mystery and exploring London such dark times was a delightful scare visually and through the game’s sound effects. As you learn new abilities you will become the ultimate killer and master the game’s simple combat system in no time.
Yoku’s Island Express is beautifully charming in story, gameplay and visually. The blend of pinball and platformer mechanics are a fantastic mix and leave nothing more to desire from the gameplay experience. Don’t miss out on this!