DarkZero's Reviews
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.
Toukiden 2 is a packed title that sacrifices complex depth, but in exchange continues to offer people a faster, more easy to understand hunting game for anyone who does not gel with the methodical style of Monster Hunter, while also bringing a fun single player story.
For those who already owned both Danganronpa games in handheld or PC, this PS4 collection offers little-to-no additions, and becomes a case-by-case basis of whether it's worth dipping in again. For newcomers, this is a bargain price for two of the most memorable adventure games in years, featuring all sorts of stylized artwork and utterly insane twists and turns. It may be more of an extracurricular than a mandatory course, but this collection tour of despair is still worth enrolling in.
Simply put, Dead Rising 4 is going to upset the serious hardcore fans of the series who have enjoyed its quirky mechanics over the years.
Nier: Automata is a brilliant, slick action RPG pumped with so many cool and distinct features, and a story that that I could keep talking about all day, but let's not spoil what should be experienced, nor bore everyone with mechanics and finish up the review with a final statement.
In the end, Nights of Azure tries to prioritize style over substance, which should be enough to gain the attention of its target audience, but a bit more tightening up of the latter would have been preferable. Whether the grinding gameplay is enough to enjoy a saccharine sweet girl/girl romance plot will depend on the player's tolerance, not to mention their own priorities for a game like this.
Berserk is a nice fit for Omega Force's Warrior/Musou series, but I was left a little disappointed that they took a step back with the gameplay.
In the end, while there is a flat story with a protagonist that lacks any real personality, they aren't big enough issues to spoil where it matters most.
So the gameplay presents this strange oxymoron of being pretty easy, but still unfairly difficult because of the random element, which is never a nice way to add a challenge, but maybe that's the message all along – life isn't fair.