Geoff Thew
When Blizzard announced they were making a digital CCG, we all expected it to look and sound beautiful, and there was little doubt that it would be well-balanced, but I don't think anyone anticipated this level of sophistication and subtle brilliance. Its turn-based nature and straightforward mechanics make this one of the most immediately accessible competitive games ever devised, but at the same time its depth is positively cavernous.
Gravity Badgers is a mess of a mobile game that has no business being on Steam. The art and music are piss-poor, the puzzle design — if you can even call it that — shows absolutely no thought and requires even less effort to solve and what little humor there is dries up almost immediately.
Adventure games thrive on compelling stories and a solid sense of logic, and Violett has neither. More criminally, the logic underlying the game's systems seems to be broken, making it nearly unplayable.
The most insidious thing about Moebius is that you don't know how wretched it truly is until the very end. Sure, it's tedious, stupid, ugly and glitchy, but you don't really grasp it until all of that culminates in the last act.
Contrast is a mess. It's ugly, tiresome, insipid and occasionally insulting.
Journey of a Roach is a bog-standard adventure game built around a single kind of nifty idea. It attempts to ape the style of games like Machinarium, but fails to emulate any of that title's wonderful charm or design sensibilities.
It's a shame that a mechanic as promising as playing as a toddler — and all the repercussions surrounding it — is underplayed here, as tied in with a psychological leaning in horror, Among the Sleep could have offered a fresh take in what is a painstakingly underused concept in games. [Hardcore Gamer separately reviewed the PS4 (2.5) and PC (2.0) versions. Their scores have been averaged.]
Though it's got many of the building blocks for my ideal prison game (is that a weird thing to have?), 1954: Alcatraz is a disappointment. A few great ideas are drowned in a torrent of design flaws and technical problems.
Next to games like Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All Star Battle, Unlimited World Red is a real disappointment.
The Witcher Adventure Game takes everything from the tabletop game of the same name and digitizes it, with a great deal of attention paid to aesthetics. Unfortunately, the board game being emulated here is poorly-designed, and the gorgeous visuals sometimes get in the way of its functionality.
Though I feel incapable of giving Blackguards the fair shake it would get with fresh eyes, that's ultimately nobody's fault but the developer's. Early access works for emergent play – games like Rust and Starbound where no play session is the same and every update changes the dynamics – but it's ill-suited to more linear, directed experiences.
There’s no end to the criticisms that can be leveled at Fahrenheit, but it’s hard to deny the game’s eminent playability.
It's likely that we will remember République for being the game with the some of the coolest collectible items in video game history rather than being an awesome experience.
There's an audience for Strike Vector, but that audience needs a lot of patience and a high tolerance for failure. It wants to beat you into the ground, and makes no effort to hide that fact.
Lethal League is built on some neat ideas, and its simple mechanics and funky aesthetics make it quite appealing and accessible, but it isn't capable of holding players' interest for long. With few characters and no modes to speak of, there's not enough here to satisfy fighting game aficionados.
I don't regret playing Always Sometimes Monsters. It gave me a bit of perspective on what it's like to live without some of my privileges, and also gave me cause to think about who I am, what I value, and where my life has gone so far.
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a good point and click adventure game, and its 20th Anniversary Edition is a very bad port. Technical issues abound, the high-definition graphics look far worse than their DOS forebears, and nearly every change that's been made is for the worse.
That's kind of the crux of the problem: everything in The Charnel House Trilogy is too obvious. You see most of the scares coming a mile away, it's super easy to see through the psychological tricks that it tries to employ and once you understand what's going on with the train it doesn't feel particularly ominous anymore, no matter what tone the graphics and music might otherwise set.
When it works, Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty is a beautiful, quirky, and devious puzzle platformer that deserves a spot alongside the likes of LIMBO, Another World and the original Abe's Oddysee in the gaming canon. Unfortunately, it doesn't work nearly often enough.
Hand of Fate isn't perfect, but its various systems click together with rare elegance. Few antagonists are quite so compelling or vexing as The Dealer, and his theatrics help to sell the game's odd conceit