Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Maid Of Sker is more frightening when it’s not trying to scare you.
I thought Röki was going to be a cute and throwaway little puzzle game with a light adventure wrapping, but Polygon Treehouse have gone so much further, and so much deeper than I was expecting. Like all great folklore stories, there is a quiet devastation lurking beneath Röki’s picturebook world, elevating this mythic tale of gods and monsters into the pantheon of all-time adventure game greats.
Necrobarista realises that there are no objectively correct answers to the questions it raises about mortality, loss, and how to live a good life. In giving these two characters their different resolutions without presenting either as better than the other, it manages to acknowledge that while simultaneously giving both a satisfying conclusion.
If you’ve always fancied painting a big map in the colour of WAR, but get intimidated by complex UIs, there are certainly worse places to start. That said, I’d be more inclined to recommend something like the aforementioned Unity Of Command, which cuts right to the heart of large-scale strategy without a single mini-game in sight.
I like the world and the writing, and I especially like how it can click its heels and conjure up a story – as long as you don’t get bogged down in overlong battles. It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, and if any of this sounds interesting then an early access visit might well be worth your while.
Persona 4 is a twisting tale of dreams gone rogue in a town sapped of purpose. It brings personal demons to life in gaudy but plausible ways, and uses this to rejuvenate the dog-eared framework of a town-and-dungeon fantasy RPG. Unceremonious as it is, the PC port leaves all of that peculiar magic intact. It’s just a shame that the insight and empathy on show here doesn’t extend to everybody.
Disintegration has a lot of room for improvement, but I enjoyed my time with it, and it succeeds in finding a balance between its shooting and strategic elements. It’s the kind of game I hope gets a sequel, one which is bolder in pursuing its ideas, and not just in its character names.
Worst of all, so much of the effort that’s gone into making the very deepest locales seem melancholy and strange is wasted, as there’s no sense of scale. Thanks to handwaved technology, Morai is capable of diving in her regular suit even at abyssal depths, and there’s no real sense in having to travel to get there. The madness-inviting vertical isolation of the deeps, the monstrous cold and the pressure, are all absent. These lonely pits feel like any of the other levels: roughly oval patches of water, about so high and so wide, with a certain number of fish spawned within them. It’s not that I’m unimpressed, or ungrateful, you understand. I just think the developers set themselves a near-impossible task.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else not warming to it swiftly.
Eco Lifestyle adds some of the most interesting stuff to The Sims 4 I’ve ever seen.
It’s as close to a perfect restoration as you’ll get, and the treatment these genre-defining games deserve.
Christ. What a thing. Monster Train is at least as good as Slay The Spire. You really should try it.
To me it feels far more like an expansion pack than a whole new game, slightly improving the cutesy graphics and adding in a couple of extra construction materials, but even then it all overlaps a little too closely with the original. A sequel to a game that already looked awfully similar to another series seems like something that should have iterated a great deal further by now. I certainly recommend checking out people’s most elaborate and daft bridges on YouTube – as for creating them yourself, it’s harder to get excited about.
Valorant’s gunplay feels just as weighty and precise as CS:GO’s, with a structure that hits all the same highs and lows. Abilities sometimes let you outsmart people rather than simply outshoot them, and I’m excited about playing in a squad of friendly and coordinated pals. If and when they fall away, though, I expect I will too.
In the end, I’ve abandoned every single one of my campaign playthroughs shockingly early, and returned to the sandbox mode to muck around with the things I learned in the wars. And admittedly, I’m better every time I return.
It’s the underlying systems which let everything else down, and which felt incoherent to me. Some games only become fun once you work out what they expect from you, and I spent most of my time with Wildfire wondering if I was playing it wrong. Maybe I was, but if there was a fun way to play it, I never found it.
My only real major disappointment with Atmomicrops is that the advertised simulation bits turn out only to be a few light nods to the genre. It’s got some simulation-shaped aspects, sure, but they’re flimsy plastic ferns in comparison to the very much alive and dynamic creeper vines of its shooty-dodgy core. This said, the farming does make fighting more interesting simply by providing a worthwhile distraction, leading to almost unbearably chaotic instances of frantic multitasking. As long as you know what you’re getting into, and are up for sewing a few hours of practise in before you reap the rewards, I think it’s well worth your cashews. Which I’ve only just realised are a play on ‘cash’. Ooh.
On paper, Crucible was built for me. It’s a MOBA-infused hero shooter with an emphasis on mobility, with a diverse line-up and some interesting new ideas. In reality, I’d rather play any of the many games that grapple with just one of Crucible’s heads, and pulls it off far better. This hydra might be sprawling, but none of it looks healthy.
Oh Saints Row. It is not you that have changed, but I.
It’s a robust piece of design that you could well consider a triumph, given just how many ways in which the concept of an ARPG based on a construction game phenomenon could have ended in disaster. And I’m confident in recommending it as worth its price to even the most jaded click-stabber, especially one with even a passing familiarity with Minecraft. But the fact it’s been executed so competently leaves me wishing the developers had been a bit more reckless, frankly.