Adrian Morales's Reviews
One recurring thought I had throughout my time with Trek to Yomi was how much a game’s art style truly influences the experience, and that is where Trek to Yomi thrives. When looking at the game as a playable homage to classic samurai films and less of a gameplay experience but more of a visual experience, fans will find that Trek to Yomi is a great time.
Ultimately, Rainbow Six Extraction is a forgettable experience with a solid foundation that will hopefully be built upon in the months and years to come.
In its current state, however, Lords of the Fallen proves that Hexworks still has a bit to go before it learns the same lessons that many souls-like developers have in terms of quality-of-life adjustments and making sure that it strikes the right balance between challenge and frustration. Right now, it seems like Lords of the Fallen is taking the worst elements of every souls-like game and making those elements its main catalyst for difficulty, which is a bummer because everything else is so good. For the souls-like hardcore, Lords of the Fallen will be a fine conquest, but for the souls-like beginner, there are better entry points to the genre that offer a more well-rounded exploration into what souls-likes are capable of.
If you can stick through some wooden voice acting and awkward animation, there is a decent B-movie thriller here that is easy to digest if you’re looking for some video game pulp horror this Halloween season.
I name-dropped and compared quite a few games to Biomutant in this review and it is because Experiment 101 has clearly taken influences from so many games and attempted to incorporate it all into Biomutant. However, in the pursuit of taking so many concepts and creating something unique, Biomutant winds up feeling derivative and dated. It never does anything exceedingly well but also never does anything terribly bad, it simply exists in the middle and its biggest success is being an average game with a good combat system.
Soundfall is a treat for musically inclined gamers, but its weak mechanics hold it back.
Atlas Fallen had promise, but nothing that this game strives to accomplish ever lands very well or feels fully realized. Between a lackluster story filled with generic and soulless voice acting and a combat system that loses its momentum well before the credits roll, there is rarely a moment where this game feels memorable or worth the time to finish. There is some good stuff on the surface of Deck13’s new IP, with its beautiful vistas and interesting world-building and aesthetic, but digging past the surface of Atlas Fallen shows that it is mostly hollow underneath.
In the face of an IP filled with rich themes with something important to say, Frontiers of Pandora ignores the point entirely and goes on to have a gameplay loop where players spend most of their time killing otherwise docile animals to make arbitrary numbers go up so they can be as immortal as possible within the confines of the game. This would be business as usual for any other open-world gameplay loop, but it's embarrassingly ironic and tone-deaf for an Avatar game. Sure, anti-pollution sentiments are there because it's impossible to make an Avatar spin-off without them, but they're there superficially and treated as a checkbox for players to complete - ultimately ringing hollow. A betrayal of Cameron’s themes with the Avatar IP, seemingly stapled together as an attempt to get a slice of the highest-grossing film of all time’s pie, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora isn’t just generic; it is downright cynical.
Skull and Bones is a bloated game that does manage to swim instead of sink, but not without many caveats. In an attempt to separate itself from Black Flag and stand out from the likes of Sea of Thieves, Skulland Bones doesn't so much color outside the lines as much as dogmatically stick to a tired formula while burying its strongest attributes under mountains of redundancy and half-realized concepts. For those who crave a game set during the Golden Age of Piracy, there are definitely things here to enjoy, but get ready to do a lot of digging.
Tower of Fantasy does very little to stand out from other gacha games and can't find its footing in either gameplay or story, making it quite a mess.
Skatebird had potential, and I hate to drag it down, but I simply did not have an enjoyable experience with it.