Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
This strategy battle game has a lot of potential for co-op, but single player has you spinning a few two many plates (and maps, and vehicles) for it to be really enjoyable.
A punishing battle royale with melee combat that frustrates before it elates, but rewards perseverance. Also it's got excellent grappling hooks.
An adventure with cool combat and a wonderful, wacky world. Doesn't shake things up as much as you might expect, but it's still a fun journey nonetheless.
I can't fault Dice Legacy's style, but this deckbuilding puzzle game disguised as a city builder is mostly an exercise in furious, tooth-grinding frustration.
Cloud Gardens is a competent, unique puzzle game and a contemplative, relaxing dreamscape, all rolled into one small package.
1200 years before your dad did that booze cruise to Calais, a viking travels to Paris for some solid assassination fun, and all the usual flab that comes with it.
Twelve Minutes' time loop puzzle is layered and weird, but its short time limit doesn't find the sweet spot between tense and frustrating.
A time-looping shooter with funny dialogue and a very powerful boot, where stealth is just the thing that goes wrong before a good fight.
A raucous shooter that goes beyond its portal gimmick, with first-rate arenas and gutsy gunfights.
Deck Nine's new standalone effort Life Is Strange: True Colors has the most interesting power and likeable cast I can remember in a Life Is Strange game. I just wish it did more with its own story.
One man’s musical mission is an audio visual delight, but there’s not enough room for expression or mastery.
It takes a little time to warm up to Tales of Arise's main characters (ironic, when two of them wield the powers of hell itself), but once you're over that hump, you're left with a charming JRPG powered by a battle system that never slows down.
It is playful. It's fun. It's climbing inside a giant wedding cake, riding flying letters, taking part in a giant cooking show with eggs that are excited to be boiled kind of fun.
Cyberpunk 2077 is huge, sprawling, complex, and deeply flawed. It’s at its best as a fairly straightforward singleplayer action game, with likable characters and thrilling capers in a fascinatingly detailed open world that looks better than any game before it. It’s at its worst if you want it to be an RPG, an approach-as-you-please Deus Ex successor, or a polished piece of software. I enjoyed my time with it a lot, and I even want more of it, though I’m going to spend years complaining about its flaws. I’ll enjoy the complaining, too.
just don’t feel in control. Each fight feels like my only real option is to repeatedly block until my opponent decides I’m allowed to hit him now. I haven’t mentioned the non-combat parts either, in which you explore the caves looking for supplies to patch up and improve your armour at campfires. There are a few environmental puzzles, which would be fine if they didn’t sometimes boil down to leaping off things until one of them doesn’t kill you.
Chronos: Before The Ashes feels like a cash in, with nobody bothering to ask “does this really need to be ported over?”. Without VR it loses the magic of being in your living room knocking shit on the floor, and exposes the game as a very lukewarm soulslike.
Cutting out the parts that became tedious would quicken the narrative enough to undermine it, but those parts became so laborious that they dragged it down instead. Perhaps I missed the point entirely by playing it alone – it is eminently obvious where a second player would fit in to its design – but if I had a lover here right now, I don’t think this is the game I’d choose to play with them. I’ve been in my own haven for far too long.
The sight of a gang leader brutally shotgunning several enemy goons is only improved by some sick swing high-hat hits on an old fashion kit while horns parp happily. In these moments Empire Of Sin is a world I want to live in, but ultimately not a world I really want to manage.
An imaginative, fun action game that has a nice story about family and personal growth at the heart of its epic adventure, and a good sense of humour, where you turn Aphrodite from a gracious tree back into a bitchy hot girl.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the guns feel great and the maps are equally well designed, but I need more, Treyarch. I can’t even customise my Operator, and there’s like, hardly any to choose from really. It didn’t take me long to unlock practically every weapon and see every map, and I can’t envision myself sticking around for too much longer if the game doesn’t get updated pronto. And I think this is the heart of the issue. It’s like Cold War has stalled on the way to a patch it scheduled in advance to save time, and we’re now just awkward passengers growing more impatient as we wait for it to lurch forwards.