PCGamesN's Reviews
It's been a shame to watch all of Perils of Man's promise go to waste. It got its hooks in me, made me eager to jump down the rabbit hole, but it just led to disappointment.
It is, perhaps, not a very good adventure game, but – and this is despite the first act – it's a compelling bit of interactive fiction. Uneven, but compelling. I want to know what the deal is with the train's destination, Augur Peak and… and that's about the only question I can repeat here because all the other ones that are rattling around my head like a bag of bones are great big bloody spoilers.
If the rest of the game had been crafted with the same care and attention given to warfare, StarDrive 2 would be an impressive 4X game. But its annoying tone, eccentric AI and the shallowness of the empire management casts a shadow over it. If we weren't in the middle of an unexpected flood of 4X games, then its take on space conflict alone would make it worth playing, but at the moment there are just too many alternatives.
All of this makes Titan Souls a tough game to recommend. Personally, I found it a chore, becoming so caught up in my frustration that it became difficult to enjoy the detailed pixel artwork, take in the soundtrack, or even find satisfaction in finally killing a boss. However, I think there are players who will love this game. It is an unforgiving, unrelenting challenge that almost no other game offers.
Obsidian had a daunting task before them: to make a spiritual successor to a series of games that are inextricably tangled up in nostalgia, over a decade after the height of those games' popularity. This is not the Baldur's Gate of 2015, it's Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, the best parts of the lot of them wrapped up in something new and brilliant. And before you venture forth, don't forget to gather your party.
Visceral have create a perfectly good functioning Battlefield game in Hardline. It shoots as good as the best of them, the car-chases are fun, and the small tweaks made to the core formula are very welcome. But a little refinement does not mask that this is a very similar game to what we bought in 2013; despite the strong efforts to make a variety of new game modes, you can't shake the feeling of playing classic Battlefield. And quite honestly, Battlefield without tanks and jets is only half as fun. Curiously the single player campaign is the most interesting element, which is surely due to the studio's strength in solo-play design from their days on Dead Space. That's not enough to make it an essential purchase, though. Players new to the series may find the urban setting interesting and will certainly benefit from the refined mechanics. Series veterans, however, are best sticking to what they already have.
Starships may not be a grand epic like Civilization, but its stripped back design fulfils a purpose. If you normally struggle with the multiple complexities of a 4x strategy game, Starships is a great introduction to the genre. It even offers step-by-step advice at every point if you need it. But for anyone more advanced than total rookie, after a handful of campaigns you'll have seen everything Starships has to offer. Without the usual 4x depth or any multiplayer, Starships lacks the level of replayability. Even though it's priced accordingly, that's still its open exhaust hatch. A couple of afternoons after buying, Starships is likely to be lost among the debris of your unplayed Steam collection.
I wanted to like Hotline Miami 2. I adored the first game, and everything the trailers promised - new weapons, enemies, mechanics, and violence, oodles of violence - looked excellent. However, it's just not as enjoyable. The first game felt like a focussed blast of adrenaline. Hotline Miami 2's always stopping and starting, its new characters feel rough and buggy, and the new reliance on guns restricts how you can approach combat.
Cities: Skylines is absolutely the best city-builder I've played since SimCity 4. From macro to micro, from the sprawling transport networks and city-wide policies to the fine-tuned districts and street-level detail, it impresses. Its size and flexibility creates a fertile space for experimentation, making each new map, or even each new plot, a place to try out new plans for a hyper-efficient green utopia, filthy industrial powerhouse or anything in between.
It is, across the board, an improvement on Rome II, despite some issues that have been carried over. And not just Rome II at launch, but even when comparing Attila with the Emperor Edition, the new kid puts on the best show. It's a confident marriage of setting and mechanics, with a historical and environmental narrative influencing each faction, pushing them into engaging situations. And you can burn the world, which is fun.
Frozen Cortex deserves a place in your inbox and your heart: while its stark simplicity might feel cold or even cruel at first, Mode 7 have in fact boiled the Synapse formula down to something perhaps more beautiful, burning away its impurities to leave hard diamond.
Evolve is really good fun. With its four-player co-op matches sharing so much base DNA with Left 4 Dead, it's great that it feels like something completely different. It still shares that pace - extended moments of quiet followed by massive bursts of excitement - but provides it in a very different manner. There's not a huge amount of content in Evolve compared to many unlock-led games, but by keeping things tight the game always stays focussed on what's important: the thrill of the hunt. The almost absence of variety in the map design may well hack down Evolve's lasting appeal, but what's here in the main game is perfect for many great hours.
As a sandbox for building stupidly large cities, Cities XXL can be a fun diversion when performance issues aren't rearing their ugly heads. But once the buildings are plonked down, there's little to do aside from plonking down more of them. The management aspects are shallow, and made entirely redundant by how easy it is to reach Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth. And there's a serious dearth of good reasons for veteran Cities players to return. They've seen it all before.
Sunless Sea does demand a lot from its captains, though. Patience, mainly. It's a slow, deliberate game, where a journey across the map can take an age, and where secrets are unfurled without haste. But the sea offers up a veritable bounty of rewards, and absolutely the best writing in any video game since, well, as long as I can remember.
Grow Home is utterly lovely. It's welcoming and sweet, and its simplicity is as elegant as BUD is adorably clumsy. Little experimental treats like this are worth a dozen Far Creeds and Assassin's Crys. More of this, please, Ubisoft!
I'm pretty happy with this version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, but it is a bit harder to recommend when the Complete edition is on GOG with even more missions and a map generator.I can cheerfully recommend it to people who may never have encountered the game before. But if you're a Heroes of Might and Magic fan, who never needed high-definition anything to enjoy these games, then the chances are that GOG already had you covered, and there's not much for you here.
After quite a bit of meandering, Life is Strange offers revelations, along with dialogue that isn't trying to ape how a teenager might sound. Or maybe the awkwardness is just drowned out by Chloe and Max's sincerity. And, in the tradition of all good TV pilots - it owes as much to TV and cinema as it does to other games - there's a cliffhanger that's going to force me to come back.
Despite taking cues from other open world games, ones nobody could ever accuse of being fresh, Techland has molded these borrowed parts into something that is occasionally formidable. Dying Light never quite shakes off the spectre of these other games, but it doesn't play it as safe, presenting a world that is infinitely more deadly and fraught with tension. It is at its best, though, when the game doesn't get in the way of itself; when there are no calls on the radio or breaks in combat for a rest and a cup of tea.
I've been hammering away on the keyboard without writing anything positive for quite a few paragraphs, so I feel that it's necessary to emphasise that I do genuinely love Grim Fandango, and I think you should play it. Again, if you already have. It's loaded with some of the best adventure game one liners; a gripping, winding plot that only slips up three quarters of the way through the game, and then improves drastically afterward; and a vibrant, bizarre world that, for all its weirdness, is extremely easy to get attached to. It's just not a very impressive remaster.
Still, these are flaws in an otherwise tremendous offering from Petroglyph. It's the most purely fun, accessible RTS I've played in years. Whether it will stand the test of time like Company of Heroes or StarCraft is a question for five or ten years from now. What I can say now is that Grey Goo is a superb, cheerfully inviting real-time strategy game. It's one I can recommend to both fans of the genre and people who have felt shut-out from RTS gaming these past few years.