Steven Santana's Reviews
While I enjoy the arcade flavor of gameplay with high score chases and B-movie acting, all three Dead Rising games are not suited for the current generation. Zombies are played out, well beyond their shelf life and now devoid of any interesting storytelling. Beyond the zombie genre, the loading times and hard save system can’t help but show this series’ age. Some off-the-wall characters keep things engaging, as does the curiosity of seeing what weapons are most effective against crowds, but overall they are best left as fond memories than contemporary experiences.
Despite that problem, and the overall roughness of Verdun, I still find myself enjoying it. I can’t stand to play it for more than an hour or two per night due to the default match length currently being thirty-minutes. Sometimes it can be a very boring or frustrating game — one where I die much more often than not and barely get to engage with the enemy. Other times I can pull off a long distance shot to take down an enemy or make it through the enemy trench unscathed. Those moments are great, but it doesn’t make the lack of a large player count or the lack of teaching its mechanics any easier to deal with. Verdun is at its core a good game, but one that is hard to recommend beyond a niche audience who enjoy punishing and somewhat accurate World War I shooters.
The more I think about my time with Hyper Light Drifter, as well as my continued journey in New Game Plus, the more I realize how much I like this game. Every aspect of it contains a high bar of quality. The sound work, composed by Disasterpeace, is subtle, but will crescendo at just the right moments. The graphics are a throwback to a bygone era of gaming, but also effectively convey a real and lived in world rich in mythology and fantastical events. Combat has a solid foundation that it builds upon, and enemies are fun to fight or watch plummet to the abyss below thanks to a disappearing platform. Hyper Light Drifter is a game you should not miss out on.
The trials in Tricky Tower can significantly extend your game time due to their difficulty and quantity. However, beyond that single player option you can either engage in battles against friends locally or online, or try to see how many blocks you can stack in endless mode, and that’s it. Tricky Tower is a simple game, but the luck factor for success in a majority of the game modes can cause much more frustrating than something where the player’s skill has a larger affect on the outcome.
Nothing redeems Ghostbusters from coming across as an overly priced tie-in to the movie’s release in theaters. If you thought bad licensed games were a thing of the past, you thought wrong. Though the game is only bad in the sense of how boring it is to play, if commits the worst gaming sin of being mediocre. It’s not good enough that you enjoy playing it, and it’s not bad enough that you can enjoy its awfulness. Instead its smack in the middle and totally passable because of it.
MXGP2 isn’t going to convert anyone over to motocross, but it will happily entertain anyone who is a fan.
While it would be interesting to see the results of making the opposite storyline decisions, I won’t because that would mean having to relive moments where I wanted to throw my console out the window.
Remasters, remakes, and ports are nothing new, and Deadlight is one of the few games from last generation that deserves it. Releasing on Xbox 360’s Summer of Arcade in 2012, Deadlight later made its way to PC with little fanfare. Now, on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Deadlight: Director’s Cut has a chance to impress new players with its take on a zombie apocalypse. The art style helps to mask the age, but it can’t stop certain gameplay mechanics from feeling rough on these consoles. Those complaints aren’t enough to keep me from recommending this solid experience, especially given the additional content and low launch pricing.
Despite the increase in graphical beauty, neither game is something you should be going back to if you have already played the original. For those who have not yet dipped into Dead Island‘s melee frenzy, this is the best deal you are going to receive, especially considering the ability to tap into One Punch Mode if you find combat monotonous. The extra content and inclusion of a 16-bit throwback sweetens the deal, but the core games remain a repetitive affair of going from point A to point B and leveling up to continue the process until it ends. Given Techland’s recent effort with Dying Light which improved upon the foundation they set in Dead Island, and Deep Silver’s difficulty in finding a home for Dead Island 2, this might become the last release for an underwhelming series.
There is simply not a lot to like about Homefront: The Revolution. It is hard to divorce this game from the development hell it has been through, which is even acknowledged at the opening of the credits. Having gone from THQ, to Crytek, to now Deep Silver, this was a game plagued by development teams that stopped working before it was finished. Despite all of their work, the game does nothing worthwhile, and isn't something I would recommend to anyone.
Despite the late game bullet hell elements and frustration of certain levels, Soft Body does succeed at the meditative aspect with its clever combination and stacking of gameplay elements as it progresses and usage of simple shapes, color, and sound to create a very pleasing and enjoyable game.
Shadwen is a decent game at best and mediocre at worst. While not bad, it fails to build upon the mechanics it presents. What you do in the third chapter is largely the same as the final chapter: grappling to higher platforms, killing guards, and moving crates to help Lily move forward. Nothing new is presented, and what is already there is never combined in clever ways. About midway through a new enemy type is introduced, one that can only be killed by falling crates or air kills, but even that fails to introduce a significant change to the pace of gameplay. I really like its solution to failing midway through a level, but even that mechanic can’t save an otherwise okay game.
The Park is a great piece of psychological horror, one that doesn't dip into jump scares or excessive grit. Instead it introduces a playable protagonist you can't rely on, in a discomforting situation that smartly paces itself and holds back from excess. For anyone who wants to feel perturbed and have a hard time sleeping immediately afterwards, The Park is definitely for you.
The varied and meaningful skill tree system is the best part of Wasteland 2, as it pushes you to create a very defined set of characters. Assigning skill points is consequential, and while that level of permanence is not felt in the narratives decision making, the combat and unique factions you come across will be enough to push you forward. Wasteland 2 is a great CRPG ported to consoles, and while you may find some technical hiccups, the overall experience is well worth it.
The difficulty is never so punishing that you feel like you can't improve, and playthroughs can be short enough that you are never too far from just restarting a run fresh in order to succeed where previously you failed. The lore is shallow yet entertaining and battles infrequently unfair, but I keep finding myself wanting to play just one more run to see if I can perform better than last time on my way towards utopia.
I was left wishing that it had done more, instead of repeating its few gameplay challenges again and again.