PCGamesN's Reviews
Approach it with the view to completing the campaign and sightseeing New York with friends and you'll have a blast. But this isn't a world you'll be living in for years to come.
The Walking Dead: Michonne is supplementary at best. It's a sidestory that fills in a brief gap in a much bigger narrative. There are hints of more interesting things to come, but as of the first episode, this is far from essential for either fans of The Walking Dead comics or Telltale's other episodic games. It's a diversion, and not a great one.
Rise of the Tomb Raider truly makes you feel like Lara Croft: a bow-wielding, mountain scaling, bear-slaughtering, cave diving mad lady with more curiosity than can be healthy. And that feeling is just wonderful.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here: Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is the greatest RTS I have played since I first started flirting with StarCraft II.
XCOM 2 encourages a holistic kind of thinking that was never really necessary in its predecessor.
Why would I want to drive a car or shoot an assault rifle? I just dropped a tank out of a cargo plane and, while surfing on said tank, blew up a jet that was in pursuit with a rocket launcher.
But while the overfamiliar flavour may mean Fallout 4 doesn't quite stand tall, it does mean you can guarantee what you're getting and that's a damn fine game. Its combat is the best Bethesda have ever produced: involving, kinetic, and exciting.
Legacy of the Void, in true Blizzard fashion, doesn't break astounding new ground but does build expertly on what's come before. With an ending so ridiculous I couldn't help but love it, including three of the finest levels ever put in a strategy game, and a plot that never lets up on twists and went brilliantly unspoiled in marketing materials thus far, I don't know how else I would have put the series to rest. No matter your experience with the RTS, StarCraft 2's campaigns are only matched for value and fun by one another.
Cities: Skylines was kept fresh thanks to its army of modders, but After Dark tweaks every single element of the game so that, once you start rooting around the budget panel and customising districts, it starts to feel new again. And it will probably feel new all over again once the modders get their hands on the expansion.
As an exercise in empathy, Beyond Eyes is brilliant. As Rae muddles through her self-induced socialisation period, you'll see her sense of adventure overcome her fear of the unknown. Its message is loud and clear - to let life in, with all its risk and upset, so that the good can enter too - and its conclusion Watership-Down uncompromising. What's more, it's occasionally fun to indulge in a small-scale kind of exploration that encourages you to feel out the entirety of your environment rather than cast your eyes about for enemies and items. But for the most part the execution is too simplistic, and the frustrations are too frequent. Beyond recommendation.
Daily Challenges and split-screen multiplayer and pro-versions of tracks and a really cool soundtrack are all other things that OlliOlli 2 has going for it. It's an improvement on the scrappier feeling original, introducing that one tiny combo-blending manual trick that transforms the game into a profoundly new-feeling and lovely thing.
None of the separate parts – the platforming, the construction, the light strategy – stand out as particularly refined or able to stand toe to toe with games that just focus on one of those things, but Q-Games has put them all together in a package that is much more than the sum of its parts, hiding its flaws under the satisfying pace and multitude of unlockable rewards and newly discovered recipes. With every completed level, the call of the soup drove me forward, onto the next planet, seeking greater profits and fat customers.
Well, I'm still ambivalent, even after working through things in what has maybe become a longer review than planned. For the moments where the procedural stuff just works perfectly, creating a bastard-hard but ultimately memorable level, and for the world itself, which is lovely, The Swindle is worth dedicating a couple evenings to. It won't steal your heart though.
The fetch quests and backtracking grate, but A Knight to Remember is still a fairly strong start to King's Quest. Even though it's a self-contained story that leaves few loose threads, I'm keen to return and see Graham grow into the famous Knight he's meant to be. So much has changed in 21 years, but it's good to be back in Daventry.
At the moment, you're getting a fair amount for less than £10: two campaign worlds right away, each with 12 challenges, almost 260 Steam Workshop challenges and the ability to make your own. And it all works, which makes a nice change. If you have a burning desire to build lots of silly bridges or help tiny vehicles make some crazy leaps of faith, Poly Bridge can scratch that itch already.
The low price point means it's not a massive gamble to buy into Five Nights at Freddy's 4, but considering you've likely played the previous three games and have now spent around eight hours keeping homicidal animatronics at bay, there's nothing about this fourth game that begs for you to return. Instead spend the cash on a bag of snacks and some drinks, and watch someone else shriek loudly into a microphone for you.
The core of Legions of Steel – not the tutorial, not the barely present premise, not the shoddy presentation – is strong. The Machines could pose a bit more of a challenge, but the scenarios and the conundrums I needed to solve tickled my brain in all the right places. It's so spartan, though. It's missing that spark of personality and something that ties all the scenarios together. And it's in desperate need of a great deal of polish.
Yoshida and his team has cemented FFXIV's place amongst the MMO titans that dominate today. They're not going anywhere - if any new MMO is going to see a decade plus lifespan, it's this one. Don't wait another second - Final Fantasy XIV, along with Heavensward, is an MMO you need to be a part of.
But you'll keep bothering. Because there's no question that Guild of Dungeoneering is a tightly-conceived, devilish little game, keen to show dungeon crawling conventions the trapdoor. It takes what it needs from the best in CCGs and tactics and folds them into a structure that's clever and consciously underivative. It's a deck I intend to keep playing with.
When the servers are active and you can get into a multiplayer match, then Rocket League is brilliant. This is a game where you can chase a ball while driving on the ceiling, as fans cheer from their seats in sleek futuristic stadiums. This is a game where a goal is accompanied by an explosion and an aftershock that sends every car hurtling backward. It's fast, explosive and completely ridiculous, and it's horribly frustrating when whole days go by without it working.