Christian Donlan
Drag and drop with a blessedly empty head in this total charmer.
The Temple of Osiris is a welcome throwback, and for the five or six hours it took me to barrel through the campaign, the rest of the world blinked away as the sands swept in and the ancient machinery started to turn. As with Osiris, I'm not sure Lara's reassemblage has gone entirely to plan, but the spirit remains intact - and the spirit is still strangely powerful.
For a game I've complained about a lot, I was pretty engaged with it at three in the morning yesterday, of course, shoot-'em-up headache setting in and an annulus of empty teacups starting to form. The problem, ultimately, is a philosophical one. I'm not sure if Lucid really gets the mentality behind this series, and that makes for a perfectly serviceable shooter when the lineage requires something more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lumino City is an interesting design sketch, then, but the real building work is yet to be done.
And yet beneath the mis-steps and the schmaltz, and beneath the dictatorial heft of the soundtrack - gorgeous and emotive, but laid on a little too heavily throughout - there's still that fascinating glimpse of a boy making the best of a lonely childhood. A boy in search of escape - escape from the empty world he's been granted and, perhaps, from the predictable narrative that's been imposed on it.
At best, Mobile Suit Gundam: Extreme VS Force is a competent but dull beat-em-up with a few neat mechanics, and at worst a cluster of battles mostly controlled by the game’s AI, with only a small amount of help from the player.
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.
A strong sense of character is let down by poor controls, fiddly implementation, and bugs.
Does the successor to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus live up to its lineage? It does so much more.
Inspired and transporting, this is a game unlike any other.
The Papers, Please creator offers up an intricate and mesmerising puzzle game with a rich and detailed sense of place.
Housemarque has just made the game of its career.
Speed and gleeful violence merge in one of the most delirious feats of game design ever.
Tetris gets the Tetsuya Mizuguchi makeover, to dazzling effect.
A quest to find phone signal leads to a glorious game of exploration and reconnection.