Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
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.
Regardless of its limitations, Exodus still deserves its place among its underground comrades. In many ways it’s better, and I’m very glad they didn’t just repeat the same subterranean journey again.
I’m 32 puzzles in, and that’s taken me a good long while. That there are 68 more of these to go, plus another 60 that have been released since the game’s initial release, makes me a very happy little man.
Apex goes so much further, reaching into every corner of a well-trodden formula and lavishing it with saucy new ideas.
Ultimately, Rainswept has a good story to tell. A sad story, one of grief, loss, murder and small-town cruelty.
It reeks of development hell, as demoralising to play as I imagine it was to make. Yes, clearing a map of its icons can be readily distracting, and it fulfils this role at least.
The setting is too tame, and the fighting much too familiar to soar – but if another dollop of Far Cry sounds appetising, tuck right in.