Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories Reviews
Its shortcomings far outweigh its merits, but what merits they are - Disaster Report 4 is silly, humane and utterly charming.
There are still glimpses of the original's charm, and the potential of an earthquake-surviving simulator is made clear, but this tonally awkward, disaster of a game doesn't get close to realising it.
In paring down the campy charm of the series before it, Disaster Report 4's more serious tone often crumbles like the very buildings you find yourself running away from.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories has solid ideas, but very few that manifest themselves properly.
Disaster Report 4 Summer Memories fails both as a survival game and a visual novel. It suffers from many technical issues (sometimes it feels like a PS2 game) and a slow pace.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Disaster Report 4 depicts a strange and consequence-averse crisis, in which you’re usually little more than a hapless observer.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is not a good game. Its design is archaic, its presentation is lacking, and its story is nonsensical. But anyone who enjoys janky, weird games will very likely have a good time with it. It might not be quality, but it's often very entertaining.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is a hard-fought project that captures your attention thanks to interesting characters, violent scenes, well-written situations during a global disaster and great gameplay. So in this case the graphics and bugs doesn't matters.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is not the most refined game you'll find in 2020, falling short on multiple technical levels, but its blend of personal dramas and crisis management with slivers of wit and absurdity makes for a surprisingly impactful disaster movie-inspired experience that is arguably one that's difficult to find elsewhere.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is an absolute mess from start to finish. The puzzles that stand in the way of your progress are almost universally illogical leading to an experience that frustrates throughout. This would perhaps – at a push – be worth persevering with if the story were engaging enough, but the tale told here is so silly that it could have been generated by pulling plot twists out of a hat. Throw in a creepy vibe, crummy production values, and dodgy controls, and you're left with an unmitigated disasterpiece that you should avoid like it's got the coronavirus.
If I had to sum up this game in one word the best I could do is two words and a hyphen: half-baked.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories took a long time to reach us - more than nine years, to be exact. That said, it's undeniable that this game features interesting characters, a degree of freedom that's worth the praise and multiple endings that will get players to return to it over and over again. Unfortunately its technical execution is very far from ideal and the heavy, clunky and unstable way it runs will definitely put many players off, which is a shame because Disaster Report 4 gets a lot of things right.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
If you can fight past the technical shortcomings – which, it's worth stating, are pretty considerable – then you'll find an experience that's totally unique on Switch, and that's no mean feat when you consider the depth of the console's library.
With the game finally completed and released to the world after nine long years, Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories marks the return of Granzella's cult classic series about surviving natural disasters. This time around, the team has traded action set pieces in for a more personal look at the human toll of horrific events—but they've done so without injecting enough humanity into that new direction to make it truly work.
Initially meant to be released in 2011, Disaster Report 4 was not worth the wait. The Switch version of the game is a complete mess (old-timey textures, frequent FPS drops...) and the experience is not very captivating overall, gameplay-wise. The only appeal of the game is in its atmosphere, paradoxally slow-moving and contemplative.
Review in French | Read full review
While Disaster Report 4 is a very stiff and jerky game, it is at least entertaining. Just don't try to play it twice.
There's a certain earnestness to Disaster Report 4 that can be charming, but that charm only goes so far, and the game's dull mechanics and poor design overstay their welcome.
What players might expect out of Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories and what it actually is are two entirely different things.
I see great potential in Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories! I do think that there will be patches to fix the frame rate, and maybe even DLC chapters continuing the story.
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is a unique, sometimes earth-shattering experience. It doesn’t get everything right but it’s the nearest you’ll ever want to get to an earthquake and that works for me.