Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Don’t be fooled by screenshots to this effect. Glittermitten Grove is nothing but misery. Build, wait for meters to refill, endure, repeat, self-loathe.
It’s pure agony at this point that they’re re-running the exact same bloody plots yet again for a third five-part series, as if they weren’t miserably worn out before even Telltale scooped them up off the floor and blew off the crust and fluff.
Together for Victory doesn’t simply buff the Commonwealth nations to make them more viable however – it gives them more options and more nation-defining decisions, especially in regards to creating an alternate history. It’s an entirely different focus, and a welcome one. There’s more room now to carve your own path, as Hearts of Iron IV takes another step toward being more than just a World War 2 game, instead becoming a 20th Century sandbox.
Singleplayer felt so mechanical, so repetitive – whereas with humans and no unlocks to pursue in multiplayer, it felt tense and organic.
This is an incredible game. I started it with no expectations at all (as I mentioned before, I can’t even remember why I’d flagged the game to look at), and have come away from it as one of my favourite games of 2016.
You’ll have a good time with Dead Rising 4. But you won’t feel as though you earned it.
The Wood Elves are a worthy addition to Total War: Warhammer’s burgeoning list of fantastical armies. Distinct and terribly tricky, they make the game feel new again, while forcing half-arsed commanders like myself to up our game.
If you’re interested in the games these tables are based on, you might get more out of them than I have. Hearing a Fus Ro Dah sample when a ball is saved doesn’t do anything for me, and if I have to hear a Nuka Cola reference one more time I’ll tilt the table so hard my computer will slide right off the end.
For all its enthusiasm, openness, and Red Bull product placement, Steep can’t overcome a mountain of small problems.
Slick, beautiful, gently challenging and supremely well designed, it’s a stunning piece of work. Oh, and I need to make sure to remember to mention the music – ambient gorgeousness, which you can hear here. Sometimes I get annoyed with a puzzle, have to walk away for a bit, but when I come back I wonder what I was thinking. Perhaps that sort of approach is more suited to a phone, but this remains a game that plays very well on PC, and looks utterly stunning in its conversion.
There is no deep understanding here, you won’t have your mind changed, and it certainly doesn’t have any of the emotional impact of Papers Please. But within its own barmy universe, it works! It’s a good chunk of fun, and easily survives at least a second play to see how much you can mess with people’s lives.
Full-fat survival games often fall flat because of a general lack of motivation – you are simply surviving to build, or to get better stuff. It’s grind by another name. And while the Division cannot in any way boast that it is free of grind (it is a gnashing monster of grind), the survival mode itself is much more focused
This has an intensity that vanilla Skylines does not have, this race against time element, this coping with cataclysm factor. You don’t have to play Scenarios – you can just have disasters as a randomly-occuring risk in a standard game. But the Scenarios do provide a backbone to something that sometimes seems a bit stuck on the fence between ‘game’ and design tool.
Is it currently fun? Undeniably. It’s gross, silly, and more than a little thrilling, and while the matchmaking system is a bit rubbish, there are always plenty of active servers to choose from manually, ensuring that you won’t have to spend much time looking for a game. But for that single mode to remain fresh, a frequent injection of new stuff is going to be necessary. Thankfully, Tripwire have already confirmed a mace and shield weapon combo that’s on its way, which should be great for tanks, and some new monsters are in the works too.
Like Cities: Skylines, Planet Coaster gives new life to the management genre, and even if the launch version does little to improve what I've played during the beta, this would still be essential for anyone who dreams of packing in their old job and running a theme park.
American Truck Simulator is my game of the year. Again. If we get more states in 2017, it almost certainly will be my game of the year then, too.
Really, what this is is The Martian compressed into a fraction of its length, with minor interactivity in a few key scenes. It feels like it should be a promotional freebie for the movie, not a $20, 40-minute game that actually costs more than the bloody Blu-Ray does.
[T]his is more than a triumphant return – it’s an improvement on the original in almost every way, and as close to a masterpiece as anything I’ve played this year.
Muddled? I am. There’s so much going on here, but I never really feel like I’ve got a proper grip on it. It feels like a puddle the size of the Atlantic – this vast concept, but too gossamer to sink in deep. Huge stories, but minor roles in them. Exquisite detail, but all going by too fast. And yet, pretty good with it. Just not as good as what’s come before.
Compared to the variety offered by the alternatives this year, I don’t see why either Battlefield 1 or Titanfall 2 won’t scratch the same itch, and then some. This raises a far more worrying question for CoD as an ongoing and risk-averse phenomenon: how long can it afford not to innovate? At some point even the faithful, even those incredible knife-wielding ninjas, will tire of running over the same old ground.