Eurogamer
HomepageEurogamer's Reviews
As someone that simply waits and arranges the location of towers, I felt as if I was incidental. Any other character in the game could just as easily have replaced me, and the plot would remain largely the same. Still, there's something special about waiting. About that patience. As I saw wave after wave of alien soldiers ground to shreds by my turrets, I was sad. I wasn't out for blood. I wasn't revelling in the destruction of my enemies. I was defending myself. I was waiting.
We're so conditioned to expect sequels to cram in more features in an attempt to be noticeably different, but there's a quiet confidence to Grimrock 2 that is utterly beguiling. Bigger, bolder and utterly sure of itself and its intended audience, Almost Human may be looking to the past for inspiration, but it's created one of the best pure role-playing games of the year.
Shinji Mikami has yet to make a poor game, and The Evil Within does not blemish his record. But neither does the game enchant and disrupt in the way that Vanquish and the others managed. This is Mikami revisiting his past glories and, as such, it's both a delight and a disappointment.
Costume Quest 2 isn't a long game - it took me around six hours to complete, including almost all the side quests - but even a short game can outstay its welcome, and while there is still a great concept at the core of Double Fine's Halloween series, if anything this sequel is even further away from nailing it than its predecessor. Shallow and repetitive, Costume Quest 2's winsome appearance and occasional wit never quite obscure the busywork at its core.
F1 2014's a strange game, then, and one I can't even accuse of being just a casual reskin. It's a quantifiable step back for the series, saved only by the fact that what's there remains a satisfactory companion piece to this year's season if you're fortunate enough to have a decent steering wheel. There is at least one other new layer of authenticity for this year's game, though; charging full whack for what amounts to a slight downgrade is the kind of one-sided deal that would do even Bernie proud.
The rhythm of combat remains the same, though it's hard to complain when it's riffing off such a heady beat, where chimed enemy attacks are lithely dodged into slo-mo pugilism, where impossible combos culminate with a 20-foot boot weaved from hair crashing from the heavens and where spinning amidst the avalanche of colour and cartoon violence is Bayonetta herself, stopping only briefly to wink at a player exhausted by the unrelenting joy of it all. Bayonetta 2's biggest disappointment may be that it's an iterative sequel, but it's not such a problem when it's iterating on genius.
What we're left with is a flimsy framework - a sort of clothes horse for content - rather than a truly great racing game. DriveClub is patently intended to attract a global, interconnected audience of fiercely competitive racers but, to quote the increasingly obscure 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. And, unfortunately, Evolution hasn't quite built it.
Kuru Kuru Kuruin meets gleefully silly FMV in this wonderfully tactile arcade game.
A shorter, sharper campaign would condense the high points more potently, and some better characterisation would make the plot twists hit harder. But if you're looking for a game that really sinks its teeth into what makes this iconic movie monster endure, look no further.
Evidently, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments isn't about rights and wrongs so much as it is about interpretation and judgement. Being right all the time is a fitting tribute to Homes' monstrous ego, and it's also an interesting premise for a detective game - a more effective one than it might initially seem. However, the lack of character development and some lacklustre supporting players result in a feeling of detachment from a game that only excels if you are invested in it. That's a shame, because there was potential for Crimes and Punishments to be a truly great detective game, instead of just a mechanically sound one.
I find myself thinking back to a Gabe Newell quote from the book Half Life 2: Raising the Bar, regarding the game's large portions of missing content. "It doesn't matter what we cut, so long as we cut it and it gives us the time to focus on other things." I feel like this outlook is more pertinent than ever; there are too many games being released these days for them to waste players' time in the way Battlemage does. Editing in game design is as important as it is in writing or filmmaking. Get to the point. Respect both the time and financial investment of your audience. Above all else, don't send me chasing after the goddamn lorry.
As soon as I finished The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I started it again and was greeted by that same warning. "This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand." Originally I thought it was telling me that I was going to be challenged by what followed and that I shouldn't expect any help in figuring it out. And I still think that. But I also suspect The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which rarely uses a word more than it has to, is making a broader point when it says it doesn't intend to hold your hand.
Sadly, the biggest problem with this whole package may be that Arrowhead has already made a truly great Gauntlet tribute anyway, and it was Magicka. There was a game with the freedom to choose its own first principles, while still having Gauntlet's mean-spirited playfulness baked into it. The difference, I suspect, is between being creatively inspired by the spirit and ethos of a legendary design, and being cast as a kind of well-intentioned caretaker.
Pocket fighter.
There's plenty to see and do in Mordor when you're dead; all that's left, in the words of a wise old wandering wizard, is to decide what to do with the time that is given to you.
It's going to be a busy season for racing games, with sim hopeful Project Cars, ambitious online "CarPG" The Crew and the social score-attack of DriveClub all jostling for attention. Horizon 2 sets an intimidatingly high bar for those games to meet on every front, but in one aspect it seems unbeatable. I can't imagine any of them are going to feel this happy.
That, perhaps, is FIFA's defining contradiction. EA can quite fairly claim to have again delivered the best football game ever made. But every year the developers seem to have less of an idea what that means.
These mostly minor issues aside, Wasteland 2 is a great sequel. It's very clearly made with love to be true to the original game while still learning from the games that followed. In going for something so unapologetically old-school it does sacrifice the ability to do anything new with the format, as Divinity: Original Sin managed to do in many ways; that game's flexibility does arguably make it the better of this year's two old-school, turn-based computer RPGs. This hardly matters, though, because if you like one you're almost certainly going to like the other. Both are great games that set out to stick their fingers in the same quivering part of your brain and make it throb like it's the 1990s. Choose magic, choose a shotgun, or better still, find time for both; computer RPG fans haven't had it this good in ages.
But in the white heat of the Strike playlists - or in Heroic mission runs with a friend, or in the unheralded arrival of a public event whilst tooling around in Patrol - Destiny blazes a clear trail through the middle of the desolate no man's land that, for years now, has segregated the bombastic emptiness of shooter campaigns from the frenetic slaughter of multiplayer. And it does so with a poise and depth that its few peers - games like the charming but scrappy Borderlands and Far Cry - cannot match; a poise and depth that will keep people playing it for years.
Hyrule Warriors rewards thoughtful play and demands a strategic approach that transcends the brute force combo-strings of its moment-to-moment gameplay. The marriage of Zelda and Musou is an unexpected success, then - a game that recounts the Zelda myth not just in a new way, but in a whole new language.