With its close-hugging third-person camera and its mood of air-locked foreboding, it's hard not to judge The Callisto Protocol through a lens tinted by Glen Schofield's earlier creation, Dead Space. And while its more violent tendencies diminish the tension somewhat, there's still plenty to recommend here.
With its striking production values and next-gen rat rendering, it's hard escaping the notion that A Plague Tale: Requiem is, like Microsoft Flight Simulator before it, more of a tech demo or portfolio piece for Asobo Studio. But for fans of the original, the prospect of more of the same – only bigger and flashier, and without the 'Allo 'Allo! accents – is certainly enticing.
Most video games that model themselves on H.R. Giger's biomechanical monstrosities are purely aesthetic. Scorn wears its influences not on its sleeves, but inside them; a mass of ooze and darkness and gnarly, desiccated things; a grimly singular puzzle, but perhaps one that didn't need the combat to deliver its horrors home.
There just isn’t enough juice in the combat, the cover shooting, or the endless hoovering of collectibles.
If only Dalcò, rather than honouring his heroine by smothering her search for truth in confounding gloom, had abided by her love of illumination.
If these games shaped or changed you, you might find the notion of their being shaped and changed, in turn, an unwelcome one.
If you squint, you could be playing Outriders—with less satisfying shooting, granted, but with a superior world grafted onto the action.
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.
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.
Taro's approach is of a restless rarity; he swaps genres as though trying to scratch an itch.
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.
The puzzles compel, while the narrative stalls, and there is something worthy in that mismatch. I only wish that breakup at its core yielded something worth holding on to.
Far more than the combat-whose charm ebbs away on a tide of repetition after the first few hours-the draw of The Falconeer is its suggestion that, while we may be shaped by our stories, they don't pin us down, that the mere act of living is to take flight from the past.
Sadly, that string of hours, spent clambering up towers and defogging the map, bounding across the fields in a hopeful, happy loop, was the last of the fun on offer.
It was clearly forged from a love of Solitaire, and even its failures feel like restless, riffled expressions of that love.
Faced with a declaration as longing and impatient as "It's About Time," I can't help but think, Is it?
With the license gone this is the beginning of a new era, but it feels like business as usual - for better and for worse.
An open-world Hawaii and a generously spirited racer, chafed by always-online irritations and a lack of originality.
A Legofied open-world racer of bright humour and drift-heavy handling, scuffed by baggage and busywork.
Fluid platforming and frenetic combat, with some lovely spectacle and a dull story.