Neil Bolt's Reviews
There's a lot of well-produced content packed inside Call of Duty WWII's bunker, but very little of it is exciting, engaging, or original. The World War II setting papers the cracks, but constant mixed messaging about that historical conflict reveals the game for a gimmick.
There's a perfectly fine racing game somewhere in this mess of half-baked ideas. A fun arcade racer has been drowned in enough ‘one more thing' additions to fill the entire run of Columbo, and the result is a rather unpleasant muddle of bland story, stop-start driving, and player control being ripped away just as things get juicy.
Friday the 13th is a technical horror show redeemed by a fairly enjoyable core multiplayer experience. The nagging problem with that is that the stars have to align for players to achieve that experience in the first place. Time and effort will likely help make Friday the 13th a stronger package in the future, but time may well not be on its side if the player base dwindles rapidly.
PaRappa The Rapper Remastered is not quite the hero’s welcome PaRappa deserved. I wanted to believe, and there’s evidence here of why the game is fondly remembered, but this particular dog has had his day.
Dreamfall Chapters is a hard sell for all but the most devoted fans of The Longest Journey. Story aside there's little else that encourages investment of your time. Troublesome tech niggles alongside poor pacing and inconsistent puzzling sits some really intriguing characters and two worlds filled with narrative wonder. That you have to outpace your boredom to reach the juicy bit of Dreamfall Chapters' rich story is perhaps the biggest obstacle of all.
An endless runner that at least dares to try some different ideas, Corridor Z still unfortunately remains very much stuck in the mud of its two overplayed tropes found in its chosen genre and theme. It is, however, still a fairly serviceable runner that’ll whittle away a few minutes a day for a short time.
In Too Deep suffers greatly from an over familiarity with both post-apocalyptic worlds and Telltale's own formula. If not for Michonne herself, this would be a truly disastrous start to the latest entry in this partnership.
Too short to go anywhere storywise, a lack of genuine peril, and devoid of character development, ''Assembly Required'' is easily the weakest episode of a Telltale series post-Walking Dead. The world it exists in continues to shine, but anything original flounders.
Another competent karaoke game to add to the ever-increasing pile. Limited in original ideas and possessing a poor range of variety in musical terms, NOW That's What I Call Sing is a rather underwhelming addition to the genre.
Gunscape could be a good game creator with a healthy lifespan, but a high price point, unoriginal concepts, and muddled ideals are just the tip of the iceberg that looks like it will sink the game's lofty ambitions.
Bedlam tells a really interesting and genuinely funny tale. So it's a shame then that few will stick round to hear all of it because the game itself is so lacking in joy.
The basics of F1 2015 are unquestionably solid, but the basics are pretty much all it has to offer.
While its mixture of Arthurian legend and the more flesh and blood trail of destruction left by Jack the Ripper is a great hook, Du Lac and Fey: Dance of Death's technical misfires prevent it from being something more meaningful.
The idea of Soccer Story is good on paper, but as the saying goes, the best teams don't play on paper. A cutesy, goofy facade can't mask the messy, frustrating game underneath.
Infernium is a vague, inconsistent jumble of a game, and that bleeds into its horror all too often. A shame really because what Infernium tries to do with its setting and storytelling is refreshing. This may be a trip to Hell, but it needn't play like it.
This is definitely a Dead Rising game, but it certainly isn't the Dead Rising it once was. This is the greying, shuffling husk of a lovably naff series, turned horrifically bland.
Age has slowed this old soldier down, despite some snazzy new upgrades to its core. The best and worst thing about Rogue Trooper Redux is that it plays exactly like a modernised PlayStation 2 shooter. It's decent enough, but 2000 AD fan service aside, there's little about it that stands out in a sea of other shooters that are 'decent enough'.
While the fun selection of characters teaming up to destroy hordes of demons and soldiers is a hoot, Warriors All-Stars is otherwise a weak, uninspired jumble of a Musou.
While nothing remarkable, Shadow Blade: Reload does at least do a solid twitch platforming job. When it’s hitting its lightning stride, it’s actually quite fun, but too often it trots along being bland and unimpressive instead.
Dangerous Golf is a fun combination of sport and puzzling that has an unfortunate number of small faults to it. There’s potential for the future of developer Three Fields here, but this will just be a stepping stone to it rather than a building block.