Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Detroit is a perfect game to livestream, or play with three mates and half a bottle of tequila – but if you tell me you genuinely think the story is well done, I will immediately be sus that you, yourself, are an android poorly trying to replicate human behaviour.
Frog Detective 2 is a game you can hold in your head all at once, and cherish. I think it’s great.
It’s got heart, that puppy, but it needs more brains.
I do wish Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory had been a bit more daring in the attempt.
I think it is good. It was a slow burn for me, for sure. And I agree there were ups and downs, especially in the emotional pacing of the earlier episodes. But they really earned this ending.
If you’ve been waiting for a full-on simulation with all the bells and textbooks, and nothing less will satisfy you, Mechwarrior 5 isn’t going to cut it. For everyone else though, it’s bloody excellent.
I had a genuinely good time with it for at least 75% of the time I spent playing it. If you’re actually into the series as a whole, I imagine you’ll have an even better one.
There’s slow-burn greatness in Phoenix Point. It’s a game where you might be exploring a site, bracing for ambush, but instead find an abandoned theme park dedicated to a novelty boy band of hedge fund managers called the Lucrative Lads.
For better and for worse, Shenmue III is a perfect continuation.
I’ve absolutely loved this. It’s so refined, so well crafted, so supremely gory for something with such deceptively simple presentation, and has a difficulty pitch that feels always challenging, but remarkably fair.
If you can look past its obvious pacing issues – and some of its more gratuitous character designs – Atelier Ryza is a solid slice of JRPG comfort food that goes down easy and might just leave you asking for more. If you’re part of that in-group – and you likely know if you are – you’re in for a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Bum-bo may have to deal with a lot of crap, but it’s all well worth pushing through.
Its saving virtue is that it is a right biggo, a thoughtless blast of blockbuster ‘splosions, a popcorn game, the grand kahuna you can point to when some bore starts burping on about how single player is dead
Overall, despite all the frustrations, I enjoyed being a broody detective cat. I just wish the game itself was as strong as the story it was trying to tell.
In all the time I played, nothing really of any interest poked its head up from behind cover.
I’ve not been a professional games reviewer for that long, and I’m not ashamed to admit I was frightened by the prospect of offering my opinion, publically, on a work of this size and importance. Truly, this is a Monday to hate more than any other.
It’s an accomplishment, and it’s certainly better and more original than the vast bulk of games in the physics-gimmick subgenre, but I respect it a lot more than I like it.
Given the scarcity of successors, then, I see no reason why Microsoft shouldn’t just keep making this game bigger and bigger and bigger, lumping all the bits together every few years and slapping it down with nicer animations, until it’s got ten thousand missions and includes “Dudley” as a civilisation because they ran out of ideas. That would be fine by me. Long live the (Age of) King(s)
I can’t really recommend it beyond its being a pleasant enough child-friendly diversion, but it feels cruel even to judge it that harshly. There’s certainly a good afternoon or two of harmless fun in it. There’s a split screen mode too, with its own maps full of co-operative and competitive challenges, which I can absolutely imagine annoying my sister on.
A staggering technical achievement; a deliciously gooey shooter; the most accurate mud simulator outside of actual mud; a great advert for the healing power of peaches. However you approach Red Dead Redemption 2, there’s something to impress here. And on PC, it’s at its most impressive.