DarkZero's Reviews
After the brilliant Dirt Rally, I was a little wary with Dirt 4 and the return to the broader spectrum of off-road motorsports that I thought it might bring back the issues fans originally had with the series.
Bulletstorm is a nice little 8-hour time-sink where the player has to never think and can just go about blowing people to bits. Sure, it hasn't aged well but the combat side works fine and there's a bit of replayability if one wants to attempt to get every Skillshot, or try to see how far you can get with a couple of friends in the wave-based multiplayer mode. However, it is certainly a shame to see such little effort put into this new release even though it is perfectly OK.
Disgaea 5 Complete certainly appeals more to people who have never played the game over the fans that jumped into it first on PS4. What is great is that nothing is sacrificed on it's move to Nintendo's new hybrid system, so those fans who like the idea of playing the game again with a portable aspect will be happy with the transition.
All in all, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is a welcome upgrade for fans that own the previous iteration (they even get a discount), and an especially meaty experience for newcomers, even if the story will be far ahead of their level of understanding. With Injustice 2 and Tekken 7 falling in the same month, it's been a heck of a comeback for modern fighting games.
The Town of Light is a beautiful title, with great sound and reworked voice-overs that improve on the original release, but it needs harder puzzles, some work on the camera and maybe be a bit darker to give the flashlight some purpose. Besides that, The Town of Light accomplishes what it promises, and is a game people need to try, because it is something different to experience within the video game medium.
The episode, and the game in general, is not bad.
Injustice 2 is a bigger, better, more beautiful follow up to Gods Among Us that improves on the irks of the first game to make it a polished fighter.
Overall, Dragon Quest Heroes II is easily the most lovingly-recreated celebration of fanservice since Hyrule Warriors. There is an undeniable charm in its presentation, dialog and audio cues, and the shift towards more gameplay variety than the average Musou title is greatly appreciated, even if it isn't the biggest step forward.
Deck 13 took what they learnt from working on Lords of the Fallen and added their own ideas to allow The Surge to be more than a pure Dark Souls clone.
Overall, "average" is the perfect descriptor for Akiba's Beat. While there is nothing particularly bad about it, it does little to stand out among the most recent releases that truly revitalize the JRPG genre.
Little Nightmares is a thrilling game of horror built around its twisted and fascinating location.
This series has been disappointing so far. This episode is probably the best yet but the glitches and just general lack of improvement in the writing mean that it is still substandard. The last episode would have to be incredible to draw everything together into a meaningful arc which lives up to its predecessors.
Dawn of War III brings with it a campaign that starts off on the slow end, but eventually warms up to be an enjoyable, if fairly standard, single player mode.
In the end, regardless of the varying degrees of innovation, The Disney Afternoon Collection still represents some of the most treasured third party titles of yesteryear, and solid proof that not every licensed game should turn out to be disappointing garbage. That's a lesson today's developers should learn, just as this collection should be checked out by nostalgic adults and curious kids alike.
Nonograms are nice little time-killers, especially on the go, which is obviously lost on a PC. Secondly, a touch screen is easily the best way to play. It makes everything so much easier to control, being able to fill in complete lines at a time with a single stroke, which is much harder when using a mouse. In fact, I disliked using my mouse so much I grabbed my graphics tablet and used that instead – much better, but unfortunately a luxury not everybody has access to. Honestly it just feels wrong to play picross on a PC. Using such a large screen for small, simple puzzles and not being able to take them with you is really awful and I can’t say I’ll ever be playing a picross game on the platform again.
I went into Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom with a lot of hope that it could successfully achieve all it was set out to do with this unique blend of arena based fighter injected into an action-RPG. The indie studio had a lot of ambition and heart for the project, but it disappointingly doesn't manage to pull off all these cool ideas together into a coherent package.
The story is paper-thin, going into no more detail than 'some magical gems that are used to power portals have been knocked all over the place; find and replace them'. Even then that would normally be fine – we don't need a reason for everything we do in games, such as running to the right and stomping Goombas, but usually games like that instead provide a challenge as the motivational tool that keeps us going. Sadly, Snake Pass fails to deliver there too.
Without a doubt, Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 Remix is the definitive collection of the landmark crossover series. While the PS4 re-release of these games don't offer the most substantial upgrades from the PS3 editions (aside from slightly faster load times and 60 frames a second during gameplay…sadly, all cutscenes remain in their original 30 fps rendering), the sheer convenience of having all these games under one collection (not to mention one console) is as tremendous as the value. Old fans and newcomers alike owe themselves to step into this adventure spanning multiple worlds (and games).
I found it a ton of fun and terribly addicting to the point where I just consumed it in about 2 days and I hope many others enjoy it just as much because I believe the best outcome from its release is that Yooka-Laylee facilitates the second coming of the 'platformer'. Not only does it show off the familiar mechanics we love but it plays off of them in both the gameplay and story, making jokes about the established traits of old-school games by having Yooka's humoring of the NPCs and Laylee's dry sarcasm almost be the voices of the player as they comment on the fact that the Pagies could just slips out of their cages and so on.
Telltale have surprised me before, and for Clementine's sake, I hope they manage it again by the end of this season. Otherwise, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier may join the series with a whimper, rather than a ferocious zombie bite.