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The combined effect of this maze of vivid, diverse, shifting scenes is memorable. You are Alice, touring wonderland, seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. In Hohokum, it goes an awfully long way: it's deep, it's wide and, perhaps most importantly, it's temporally long. This is a game that sticks with you long after you switch it off.
It's a rusty cutlass in the heart of a sequel that, otherwise, is progressive in small but welcome ways. The series still lacks a worthwhile identity of its own and is too quick to run away from its piratical setting in favour of more familiar fantasy archetypes, but for surprisingly hefty chunks of Risen 3 I was drawn in and entertained, at least until another clumsily staged battle soured me again. For those who have been able to cut through the clutter and clumsiness of the series so far, this may well be a small hurdle, and you'll discover a commendably deep and full RPG for your trouble. It's just a shame that such a fundamental feature as combat takes the shine off what could have been the sequel to make Risen popular beyond its small audience of devotees.
Ultimate Evil feels like a good place to stand back and see what Diablo 3 actually looks like now, with the auction house dead and the first expansion bedded in. There has been time, hopefully, for players to set aside the game they wanted Diablo 3 to be and understand the game that it is.
There's plenty to like in Firefall, but not much to love - and that's the passion it needs to evoke in order to get you spending on those Red Beans that will open up the game's more interesting tools and let you progress faster, both upwards through the levels and through the world itself.
These reservations aside, Road Not Taken is fresh, interesting, beautifully presented and demonstrates an intricacy of design that will obsess a certain type of player. It's an acquired taste, though, despite its popular ingredients.
There's something worthwhile here, even if it's the unusual power fantasy of being able to haunt an aristocratic family from the safety of the rafters.
In Gods Will Be Watching, I feel bad not because of what I've done in the game, but because I feel like I'm the one at somebody else's mercy, and I have no idea what that person wants. This may well be deliberate, and if so this failure to communicate its intentions either makes Gods Will Be Watching a work of unusually cruel genius, or a work of astonishing clumsiness. Maybe even both at the same time. Either way, it's impossible to recommend to anyone but the most masochistic players.
Among the Ruins is The Walking Dead doing what The Walking Dead does well, but it's spinning its wheels when it should be racing towards the finale. As far as Clem's story goes, it's hard to fight the feeling that what began as an exciting opportunity for the writers has now become something of a millstone when it comes to plotting. Can the final episode recapture the power and drive of her brutal first episode, as well as plot its way to a send-off as beautifully appropriate as Lee's at the end of the first season? We'll find out in a couple of months, when The Walking Dead: Season Two concludes in "No Going Back".
And yet if Abyss Odyssey stumbles, it at least does so while attempting a genuinely thrilling, high-wire juggling act of game design rather than simply milking obvious and proven gameplay features. For all its missteps, it remains utterly unique, absolutely gorgeous and delightfully eccentric. If you can stick around long enough to understand what's going on and what's expected of you, and make your peace with Abyss Odyssey's slightly over-reaching nature, you're left with a game that more than repays your patience.
New 'n' Tasty! is angry because it holds a cartoon mirror up to the injustices of the modern world: to every clothes factory that falls down or blows up because corners were cut in the race to make 99p T-shirts, and to every water supply privatised in the name of hamburgers or fizzy drinks. Graphics lose their luster. Design tricks become predictable and then forgettable. Injustice, it turns out, rarely goes out of fashion.
Light should be better than it is, but it was doomed from the start. Very few great stories have come from such an uninspired setting, and hiding all empathy and humanity behind a haughty desire for a slick minimalism doesn't help. Light is admirable insofar as its visuals and music create a sharp world with a brilliant artificiality about it. That works, in a way, with its narrative, but it can't stop the whole thing from being just plain boring. You go where you're told and do what you're told even while you're told that the thing you want most is your own freedom. It doesn't make sense on any level.
Lifeless Planet is bold and memorable and oddly sweet in the earnestness of its message and its preoccupations. It's a truly efficient payload. Fire it up and be transported.
MouseCraft is always, noticeably and unapologetically, Lemmings meets Tetris - and like the mice of its title, it seems happy to scrabble about in the twin shadows of its genre-defining inspirations.
Certainly, I have no hesitation in recommending Original Sin to RPG fans old and new, provided that you're up for a challenge from very early on and don't expect to romp through, Diablo-style. While Skyrim is obviously more freeform and immersive, and the likes of Mass Effect are more cinematic, Divinity: Original Sin is hands down the best classic-style RPG in years.
With its delicious score system taken into account, Astebreed is well-constructed, well-presented and well-balanced. A certain amount of delight comes from the novelty of a 32-bit-esque indie game, as it offers a welcome change from the army of sprite-based titles of the previous few years.
This game rewards the most patient of tacticians. If that's you - if you're the person with enough time units of your own - it will certainly satisfy. Xenonauts knows exactly who its audience is, exactly what it's aiming for and, while it may never achieve a wider appeal, it will capture that audience in a very familiar act of alien abduction.
But then, low-level disappointment hangs over Rise of the Dark Spark in a constant fog. It is, at best, a functional shooter that asks little of the player and offers the bare minimum in return. Though it pains me to say it, if there's to be another Transformers game to coincide with the inevitable fifth movie, a little of Michael Bay's bullish mayhem would go a long way in livening up this increasingly dull formula.
While Distant Worlds may be a paragon of its style, I can only recommend it to a select few: those with beefy computers and plenty of time to really dig into the meat of this stunningly elegant and impressively wide-ranging bit of software.
Still, it's hard not to be impressed. The fact Intercept is due for release as a standalone product later in the year suggests Guerrilla intends to offer continued support. The meagre number of maps means repetition soon kicks in, but the gorgeous visuals, frenetic carnage and demanding teamwork make for the tightest Horde variant since Mass Effect 3's. A surprisingly good time for all.
There is gold in these old genres, and Shovel Knight is a successful dig.