Josh Wise


108 games reviewed
69.4 average score
70 median score
67.6% of games recommended
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Apr 5, 2021

If only Naka, staying true to form, had given the whole thing a dose of high speed; his work only holds together when it hurtles past our eyes, growing vivid with velocity.

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5 / 10 - Outriders
Apr 9, 2021

The best time I had with the game was a ten-minute stretch that contained (a) no crashes or bugs, (b) the right level and world tier-essentially, a measure of enemy toughness-and (c) a harmony of tactics, sorcery, and gunfire.

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Apr 14, 2021

In that image lies the appeal-and for some the off-putting twinge-of Oddworld: a bleak and black-hearted concoction, laced with snickering humour and shot through with hope.

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Taro's approach is of a restless rarity; he swaps genres as though trying to scratch an itch.

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9 / 10 - Returnal
Apr 29, 2021

Complex systems are made simple, by committing their clutter to muscle memory, and play-good play, at any rate-requires that you, like Selene, ride its enigmatic loop.

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May 5, 2021

Reaching the credits, I sat back, exhausted and disappointed at where the series had ended up.

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May 10, 2021

Though it comes with a crop of upgrades, and its graphics have been brushed to a smooth shine, what it offers, despite its title, is the joy of the old.

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8 / 10 - Mundaun
May 18, 2021

The game isn't above jolting you with the odd jump scare, but it's far happier to politely trouble your sleep.

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7 / 10 - BIOMUTANT
May 24, 2021

If the DNA of Biomutant sparks a re-evolution of some of the genre's dull spots, perhaps we can forgive the dull spots present here.

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The fun of playing these games, especially these days, lies in the director, Ryuchi Nishizawa, whose approach to genre was one of precise and genial disregard.

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Jun 8, 2021

In vesting each weapon with the click and whir of a plaything, it gives you a way into the texture of its landscape, and before long you're swept up.

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Jun 10, 2021

If I didn’t feel the sugary twinge of sentiment in Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, it is down to its pastel starkness.

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6 / 10 - Stonefly
Jun 24, 2021

It’s to Flight School Studio’s credit that, though the clashes at the game’s core left me underwhelmed, the whole thing didn’t feel hollowed-out. This is down to Annika, who sits at its heart and drives it on.

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Jul 3, 2021

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is bound to the template set forth by The Legend of Zelda, but, rather than offering reflexive glibness, or inking the affair with irony, its critique wraps warmly around its subject, like a scarf.

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Wings of Ruin may not make a hardened hunter of you, but nor does it want to. It would rather bring you along for its own wondrous ride.

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Jul 14, 2021

We begin to see our hero’s life as a line—darting and looping instead of living.

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It’s not quite that I had forgotten how good it was—more that I needed the intervening years to realise it.

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The humour is thankfully intact, but the mysteries grow as ornate and heavily threaded as Sholmes’s overcoat.

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5 / 10 - The Ascent
Jul 31, 2021

Its skyline is happy to quote at length from Blade Runner, but the poetry is in short supply.

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6 / 10 - Last Stop
Aug 11, 2021

Burroughs and Holland do hit on a fine idea: that, if we could peer into the other lives sharing the pavement, like idle channel surfers, we would surely register a jarring shift of genres.

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