Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
It’s Winter is short and without much to ‘do’, which is clearly a problem for some folks who want to feel they’ve wrung the most value out of their spending money, but I wouldn’t want it more complex and I certainly wouldn’t want it longer: that would break the spell.
There’s plenty of stuff I’d change, especially tonally and in terms of international relationships, but I played it happily until I couldn’t see straight.
I am not incredibly enthused to fight more baddies in Outward. I’m not that excited to speak to more of its cardboardy NPCs. I’m not looking forward to getting up from my chair to do some light cardio while I wait for my character to warm up by a campfire in the middle of a snowstorm, so I don’t get diseased and have to trek to the nearest village for a herbal tea and sleep for a day before I’m healthy again. But that travel, maaaaan. It absolutely nails it.
It has so much potential, and is close to being an decent game. I want to love it, and maybe one day I could. As it stands, though, this needs a lot more time invested in it.
Yes, Sekiro hurts. But look at this smile as well. Shadows Die Twice is a beautiful, masochistic misadventure. Some of its boss fights are so stupendous, I dare not speak about them. It is a test of mettle and nerve that proves From Software are still winning the arms race against us cheesey rats.
I find it better to approach this as a good waste of time, a detailed disasterworld to saunter through for a couple of weeks.
Trüberbrook isn’t bad, but it feels like a wedding cake with a couple of tiers missing. Beautiful icing, great craftsmanship on show, but somehow not all there.
But this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of “Oh no, how will I ever do this one!” so quickly followed by, “I AM A GENIUS!” It’s a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one
There is just SO much to do, to explore, so many secrets I know I’ve missed, and bits I want to return to. This is completely splendid.
The best bit of The Occupation is creeping around and scrabbling through paperwork, and that bit is bloody brilliant.
There is a demon, and I’m going to kill it. With style. I’ll shoot and slash and somersault, chaining together increasingly outlandish combos while listening to electro-metal where I only catch the odd word like ‘sword’ or ‘death’.
I just kept thinking of so many different ways this could have been a much more ambitious take on a cheerful anachronism from an ancient 16-bit era. Sadly, I appear to have been the only one.
Vignettes is a toy. And that is why it’s completely splendid.
Dawn Of Man’s great triumph is that, a dozen hours after I’d picked my first berry, forging my first iron sword felt like an immortal accomplishment.
Its jigsaw pieces, jolly and randomly-scattered as they might be, only assemble in a finite amount of ways.
Objects In Space goes from being “space sim with fun buttons” to being “space sim with heart”.
I’d say it’s the best Trials game because it’s the one that works that hardest to teach you how to be any good at Trials.
If nothing else, this is a game where you, a gorilla, can punch a man so hard that he crumbles into his constituent parts, and then pick up his arse and hoof it at one of his mates. I don’t know what else to tell you.
I want to want to spend more time with it, because there are bits of it I really enjoy. But it needs more than the world map to change a bit, or have seasons, or better social interaction. It needs changes to how it actually works, which is a lot to ask. But the biggest fight I’ve had with Anthem so far is against Anthem.
The result is a very decent puzzle game, that occasionally has completely inspired puzzles within it. If it could have focused on the buttoned levels, gosh, it’d have been a real classic. As it is, it’s a calm, gentle game, with intermittent moments of brilliance.