Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
The most bizarre combination of ambition and the complete lack of it in one game. Astonishing, but flat.
Need For Speed Payback is really very terrible indeed
Battlerite takes the best part out of MOBAs, making the joy of teamfights accessible to anyone who's only interested in that element of the genre.
In many ways, I feel the same way about Football Manager 2018 as I do about football in 2018. I love the sport, but I found so much of the talk around it and the personalities involved more than a little bit tiresome.
Already, New Mexico makes ATS significantly different – that much more varied, more of a place to explore, rather than just one to tick tourist traps off the list.
It's a game about raising your own level and mastering one of the finest combat systems ever put on a screen. It might be standing on the shoulders of Souls, but it's got its eyes on a very different destination.
Hand of Fate 2 wisely switches away from Hand Of Fate's purity, which saves it from repetition but discards its trump card in the process.
Given how bad it could have been – hell, was expected to be – it's quite the pleasant, sometimes harrowing, surprise.
Origins handles its creative inheritance more elegantly than some open worlders, not least because unlike, say, the first game's Altair, its protagonist actually feels like he is of this realm rather than merely in it. And if the levelling and to-do list grate, the series has never offered a society and a landscape so worthy of close attention.
In a week that has seen speculation about the future of this type of big budget singleplayer game, for all its flaws, this is a reminder of how powerful and vital they can be.
Engare is definitely too short – more levels would have been very welcome. And it's definitely very simple. It's testament to what a smart and interesting game it is that neither of these things put me off. In fact, it's a game that just kept putting a smile on my face as I solved each level.
If a slick, beautiful shooter is keeping you up at night for a month, isn't that sometimes enough?
Overgrowth feels like a mod created for a wacky physics sandbox where all the openness and experimentation has been pushed to the side, and everything else has been twisted around a forgettable, barely present story and a series of brief and ugly levels. I'm just glad that, at around two to three hours long, it's incredibly short.
This is a game that, despite its derivative nature, manages to delight in the details enough to make me remember why I loved the games that inspired it to begin with.
With the combat system and the way it's actually trying to make a point with its exploration of social issues, The Fractured But Whole does improve on its predecessor in some ways, but it quickly starts to coast, relying too much on familiarity to get by.
The Evil Within 2 feels like something of a departure from the first game, but also an extremely fitting follow-up.
By God, it's delicious.
Gosh it's fyn. It's ytterly ridicyloys, bombarding yoy with new items like nothing else, jyst constantly asking yoy to go have some fyn. "How aboyt trying that level with this?!" Okay! "Now this!" Syre thing! And that's enoygh.
As frustrating as that can be, it was why I found myself punching the air in jubilation after difficult bosses. And they're all bloody difficult – but I wouldn't have it any other way. If that sounds enticing rather than off-putting to you, then I can unreservedly recommend Cuphead.
Suspicious Developments have distilled that chaotic kinaesthesia into something much smaller, smarter and spacier, which is absolutely to be praised.