Christian Donlan


246 games reviewed
79.3 average score
80 median score
84.1% of games recommended
Are you Christian Donlan? If so, email [email protected] to claim this critic page.
9 / 10 - Torchlight II
Sep 24, 2012

It's a colourful, heartfelt and well-judged spin on one of the most reliably engrossing genres knocking around.

Read full review

8 / 10 - Rogue Legacy
Jul 17, 2013

The roguelike gets an inventive jolt of genetics in this gloriously witty dungeon crawler.

Read full review

Jul 22, 2013

These issues aside, Vanguard's created a decent blaster which offers a couple of moments of genuine bullet-dodging glory: Halo's touch-screen debut is good-looking, colourful, and fun. It's all rather bittersweet, really. If Spartan Assault was terrible, nobody would ever have to know about it, since the combination of release platforms makes it a bit of a curio from the off. In the end, it's actually pretty entertaining stuff. Here's hoping it eventually gets ported around a little.

Read full review

No Recommendation / Blank - Hammerwatch
Sep 24, 2013

Kite the good fight.

Read full review

9 / 10 - Borderlands 2
Oct 15, 2013

Compared to the dull, empty-eyed stoicism of so many triple-A games, it's still a welcome blast of idiot humour, too.

Read full review

A tale endlessly retold, wrongs endlessly righted, a map endlessly tweaked and embellished and folded back on itself. If, heaven forbid, this was the last Zelda ever, I couldn't think of a more fitting tribute to the series' strange ritualistic preoccupations than this cheerful, slight, and ultimately rather strange game.

Read full review

4 / 10 - LocoCycle
Nov 17, 2013

Ultimately, the whole thing is depressing more often than it's annoying. Twisted Pixel's lineage suggests that LocoCycle is made by talented and creative designers who had a handful of potentially entertaining ideas to play with. The implementation is rushed and slipshod, however, ignoring fundamental problems and expending limited energy on the wrong things. What you're getting for your money feels a little like somebody else's office in-joke: you can sense the well-intentioned laughter, but you can't really join in.

Read full review

Nov 18, 2013

Beneath the warm familiarity of 3D World lies one of the strangest Mario games in years - and that's wonderful news.

Read full review

8 / 10 - Resogun
Nov 28, 2013

Resogun really is that rare kind of arcade game that feels like an entirely different beast when played on the toughest setting. It's also the closest the PS4 launch line-up gets to offering a genuine next-gen thrill. Granted, Housemarque's not offering the shock of the new, perhaps - all of the developer's best ideas are actually reassuringly elderly - but it's working with energy, enthusiasm, precision and love. Oh, and voxels. Look at them scatter!

Read full review

7 / 10 - Peggle 2
Dec 8, 2013

Peggle 2 is still a wonderful game, but to a super-fan there are too many things that feel miscalibrated. In a way, that's more damaging than the suggestion PopCap isn't sure what else to do with Peggle: it suggests PopCap needs to rediscover itself.

Read full review

9 / 10 - Samurai Gunn
Jan 26, 2014

Hectic local multiplayer madness ensues in this punkish flurry of colour and violence.

Read full review

9 / 10 - Luftrausers
Mar 17, 2014

Luftrausers is a breathless arcade delight - video game dogfighting has rarely been better.

Read full review

9 / 10 - Transistor
May 19, 2014

That those challenges are housed in a weird trans-dimensional coastal getaway where you can kick a physics-enabled beach ball about or lie in a hammock is just one of many unusual things to enjoy about Transistor. Enjoy the artful approach to science-fiction, enjoy the hoops Supergiant's jumped through to position you in the right place to engage with its combat, and you can even enjoy the very fact that the game often struggles to get its deeper messages across. After all, if the developer had something straightforward to say, it might not have had to make a game in the first place.

Read full review

Jun 23, 2014

While Valiant Hearts struggles to make sense of itself as a game, in its odd, playful innocence and in its focus on four friends (and a dog) it at least offers a fleeting human perspective on a new kind of war that turned out to be far, far worse in its mechanised violence than anybody was quite expecting.

Read full review

Jul 14, 2014

Lifeless Planet is bold and memorable and oddly sweet in the earnestness of its message and its preoccupations. It's a truly efficient payload. Fire it up and be transported.

Read full review

New 'n' Tasty! is angry because it holds a cartoon mirror up to the injustices of the modern world: to every clothes factory that falls down or blows up because corners were cut in the race to make 99p T-shirts, and to every water supply privatised in the name of hamburgers or fizzy drinks. Graphics lose their luster. Design tricks become predictable and then forgettable. Injustice, it turns out, rarely goes out of fashion.

Read full review

Ultimate Evil feels like a good place to stand back and see what Diablo 3 actually looks like now, with the auction house dead and the first expansion bedded in. There has been time, hopefully, for players to set aside the game they wanted Diablo 3 to be and understand the game that it is.

Read full review

6 / 10 - Gauntlet
Sep 28, 2014

Sadly, the biggest problem with this whole package may be that Arrowhead has already made a truly great Gauntlet tribute anyway, and it was Magicka. There was a game with the freedom to choose its own first principles, while still having Gauntlet's mean-spirited playfulness baked into it. The difference, I suspect, is between being creatively inspired by the spirit and ethos of a legendary design, and being cast as a kind of well-intentioned caretaker.

Read full review

8 / 10 - Roundabout
Oct 5, 2014

Kuru Kuru Kuruin meets gleefully silly FMV in this wonderfully tactile arcade game.

Read full review

Civilization has always had something to say about this stuff (and civilisation has always had something to say about this stuff) but Beyond Earth goes further than ever, suggesting that even if we do eventually live on Pluto, the distractions will have joined us there, and will probably have multiplied. When we get into space, the real danger - and the real wonder - will be the fact that we have brought ourselves along.

Read full review