Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
It feels a bit eager at times, a UI that is maybe too minimal and trusting. If your scrolling comes to rest on one of these days for even a short while, it’ll launch right into that day. There’s no clicking to confirm. But you eventually get used to this, discerning the day by the drum beats that accompany each drag of the mouse wheel.
Thea 2 is interesting in a ‘may you live in interesting times’ sense. An imperfect thing that I can’t help but feel affectionate towards.
It’s the best Total War game, the best historical strategy game released so far this year, and its stories are so compelling I’m as excited to read about other people’s anecdotes as I am to create more of my own.
This is the game Surviving Mars should have been in the first place.
The parts I like far outweigh the parts I don’t. I’ve got my weirdo NPCs, my Ark hunting, my Whoopinkoffs and Dimbledicks. I’ve found every Ark, now, but I still plan on gambolling between side activities. I still want to explore, even though I wish I was exploring a world that had been less generically destroyed.
With that in mind (among other crimes) it would be easy to see him as the charlatan he is said to be by his enemies. But there are also moments that reveal a more complicated and conflicted man. In a short game full of haughty songs and jokes about willies, that’s an impressive achievement.
I’ve been very positive about A Plague Tale so far, and it is indeed a good game.
If you don’t mind button bashing through some brawls, just to see more of these good fellas solving bad problems with their strong fists and stern words, Yakuza Kiwami 2 is ready, once again, to get ridiculous.
This just wasn’t for me. Ultimately, there’s only so excited I can get by the prospect of being (let’s all say it in Chod’s awed whisper) an entrepreneur. Maybe I’m just becoming more prone to escapism as I age, but there’s just not much of a thrill for me in getting really, really efficient at flogging grape juice and tables to people.
I wish my adventure on the Helios hadn’t ended so abruptly and I feel a wee bit short changed, but I’d still be really pleased if they announced an add-on
This is a remarkably good fighting game, and it feels like a disservice to the craftsmanship of its creators not to acknowledge that.
I think it’s a generally inoffensive game with extremely charming presentation that’s badly suited for the ritualistic plonking down of oneself in front of a chunky desktop PC
If you prefer your pleasures somewhere on the periphery of your attention, you’ll find there are plenty to pluck off the branch here.
Plutarch said of Alexander the Great: “when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” If anything, my experience of Imperator: Rome has left me feeling the exact opposite: I want to weep, as I know I will never find the time to conquer everything this game has to offer.
This is a good adventure game! It’s actually an incredibly clever adventure game doing lots of very subtle smart things! It has its issues, but don’t we all.
The thing is, the problems are there. I don’t know if I can recommend this to someone who isn’t a word nerd. But at the same time, what Inkle have achieved in Heaven’s Vault is tremendous. I don’t know what to compare it to, because there isn’t anything.
It’s going to take a heck of a lot for anything to beat this game to be my favourite of 2019. What a splendid treat.
Really, if you’re a fan of good stories and good characters – and have a spare 50 hours to work through three games of cases – this is a pretty good bet.
It’s all ever so tranquil on the surface, and never once made my cortisone levels spike, but there’s a fierce brain throbbing away beneath those sedate low-poly models.
Photographs is a very novel experience (well, a very short story experience, fnarr), lovingly crafted, if not fully composed. I don’t love it as a puzzle game, but it’s a vignette of vignettes, and I like it for that.