Where the Heart Leads doesn’t want you to play and after a while, I just stopped fighting it.
Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood comes across like an accidental homage to a time best left to nostalgia. Games back in the PS3 era were excelling despite obvious limitations. This game exists in a time when those limitations are all but removed, yet still feels like it comes up short because while it plays like them, it just wasn’t intentional.
As much as the team at GameMill Entertainment hit, they also missed. Overall, G.I. JOE Operation Blackout feels like a Fortnite game without any of the hook. Even with the love behind the game, there is no mistaking that this is a licensed product and plays like a licensed product. But at $40, it isn’t entirely not worth it. It just isn’t entirely worth it either.
Afterlife VR falls nicely into the B-tier Horror niche and does a decent job for doing only that, but is too afraid of being anything more. Unknown protagonist goes to unknown location with an unknown connection to an uninteresting story with an unsurprising twist ending. In the end, I have seen Afterlife VR 100 times, basically when my 6 year old watches a random spooky game playthrough on YouTube.
It isn’t that SkateBIRD is bad, there is just nothing there to make any part of it more than ok. It feels as if Glass Bottom Games spent all their energy high fiving each other over the idea of putting tiny birds on tiny boards and making real world environments into skate parks. There just wasn’t anything left in their tank to make the rest of the game as interesting.
Quantum Error still has the chance to become something, if the developers can take a step back and learn and grow. There is love and there is passion, you can feel it, it just outweighs the skill. So, I ask, what are you? Are you a generic asset flip or are you one of the better remasters, an homage if you will, of a never released game from the early 2000s I never had a chance to love?
The looks, the sounds, the modern control use, the light touches of humor, Legend Bowl really does deliver on the past. It just doesn’t do enough to make the past match my nostalgia for it.
Mundaun is one last story from Grandpa. You’ve just got to deal with some snoring now and again to get through it.
Star Trek: Resurgence absolutely shines when it shines. In many ways, it is the Star Trek game I always wanted; an outstanding Star Trek story, walking the halls of a starship with its crew, enjoying new races, and exploring the outskirts of space. But because of everything that doesn’t fall into those categories, it feels this voyage was ten years too late.
I get that this review, when taking the pure scoreboard statistics out of context, sounds overly harsh. Please allow me, then, to add the context. When you take simple toy avatars, drop them in a child’s playset, introduce catchy music and a theme song that gets stuck in your head, and you deliver simple and repetitive gameplay, all in two minute long levels that keep you moving along, then something wacky happens. You end up with something extremely fun. You end up with What the Bat?.
The end result of Foreclosed is, as I said, “ish”. It is a mixed bag, a good little game that stumbles to some fantastic moments. It’s an interesting game with some overall design issues. You breathe in a visually stunning world, both in design and in execution, but struggle to care about the who and why with a story that doesn’t pick up much after the opening act. Foreclosed is a game that absolutely has moments you will enjoy, but it will be deleted from your data banks not long after.
While Don’t Nod is no stranger to titles that focus more on exploration and emotional pull, they rarely do so with such Annapurna levels of “indie”. Yet that is exactly what Jusant is: a silent, emotional, walking sim where the true puzzles are collecting all the remnants of the civilization that has been lost, and the mystery of what exactly happened. In this, Jusant is as beautifully presented and told as any before it, but I just couldn’t escape the feeling that I have already played this game, five other times, every year.
All this said, I couldn’t help but be pulled from my enjoyment. As fantastic as a puzzle experience it is, as many flowers as I see it deserves, I was often left wondering, “Isn’t VR past this?” Like the VR Experience games before it, hasn’t seven years worth of progress been enough to move on from Escape Room puzzle games, or Food Simulators? These are great for introductory games to virtual reality, but The Last Clockwinder isn’t presented as an introductory experience, it’s presented as a premiere experience.
Describing SEASON: A Letter to the Future to a colleague, their reply was, “sounds boring”, and that is totally fair. In description, it does sound boring, but it is so in the same way that a puzzle is boring. Watching someone hunt for pieces and slowly make progress can be boring, but not nearly so for the person putting it together. Looking for a piece where there may or may not be one, discovering that one you need, figuring out how the picture forms, building snapshots of key areas that later become this bigger world. That is Season‘s sweet spot. That’s its letter to the future.
Olija never sets out to be more than it is. It plays it safe, delivering an action platformer with a traversal mechanic and never straying too far from what works. But Olija has an undeniable depth of charm and character that some higher budget productions just can’t grasp. Olija is a tale that deserves to be heard at least once.
I can’t say that I disliked A Tale of Paper. In fact, I can very much say that I enjoyed my short experience. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get the why, I didn’t get the where, I didn’t get the who. It is a solid game that, on paper, just isn’t as memorable as those that have come before it.
Marvel’s Avengers does so much right when just being a game, but ultimately fails when trying to be the game Crystal Dynamics wants, which is an obvious Destiny clone.
Not the prettiest game on the market: Check. Absolutely needs Quality of Life improvements: Check. Comes complete with a plethora of wonky glitches: Check. However, it finds that sweet spot where the hook just plain works. The reward of leveling and loot, the stress of scanning the treetops when you hear that Preda-purr, and the satisfaction of systematically wiping out an entire fireteam; it all just works.
Covert is a great little heist adventure if you are a fan of couch co-op titles and have family or friends nearby. The often hilarious back and forth interactions are casual enough to include mostly anyone while never devolving the fun into frustrated arguing or finger pointing.
2MD VR Football Unleashed All-Star is not meant to replace Madden. However, it is so confident in the experience it is, they put it right there in the title. You aren’t going to spend two hours in the game, playing through an entire season, nor are you meant to. But two minutes? Two minutes to become a legend? Two minutes to become a football all-star? Yeah. I’ll take that. You aren’t going to stop from being in the zone, staying loose on your toes, using your hand to wave your WR open, pump faking, nothing that is actually a move inside the game, and that’s ok.