Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
For Dead Rising enthusiasts who haven’t played the original, this is a good opportunity to spend some more time with Frank West, as well as take on probably the best bosses in the series. But the design flaws that were small niggles ten years ago will be much more glaring – maybe even unbearably so – for newcomers coming to the series in 2016.
I want to recommend it heartily but I can’t. Not quite. The lack of licenses doesn’t bother me in the slightest – and it really is stripped down, with just two Premier League teams and no Bayern Munich – but the lack of bells and whistles that exist elsewhere in the same game really does. Imagine Lionel Messi playing in that Colardo Caribous strip from back in the day. That’s PES 2017 on PC.
I have, despite my gripes, but it’s less than the sum of all those parts that I couldn’t help but see the edges of as I played, and I was longing for more engaging combat long before the end. Even if the galaxy continues to grow, I don’t think I’ll return even.
Despite its sometimes very obvious limitations, Event[0] feels like the start of a beautiful friendship.
So desperately, it seems, the developers wanted to recapture the magic of this series that they forgot the context of its many successes. Master of Orion and its sequel were bold games, forward-facing and bar-setting at the time, and you can’t simply recreate a game that’s over 20 years old and expect it to have the same impact. If it wasn’t for its name, Master of Orion would be forgotten in a year.
I had a lot of fun with Hue. It was frustrating sometimes, but most puzzle-platformers are, and it would be boring to get every level right first time. Its faults mostly lie with being over-ambitious in terms of tone and narrative, but I think I'd rather see a game overreach than be content with mediocrity.
At least at the start of the expansion, this is a new high point for World of Warcraft. Proof that Blizzard still has plenty of juice to squeeze out of it. Proof that even when the Legion is relegated to farm status, there’ll be many more adventures to have, and that they’ll be worth the wait. And proof again that while Blizzard can’t hope to please everyone, it’s not going to stop trying its best.
Reigns is glorious. The power of choice, distilled to its essence, heavy with consequence, and a game that clearly delights in its cloistered malevolence. May it reign forever. But… maybe on your phone rather than on your PC.
Ultimately, it’s competent, but without the systems or story being on the same level as the aesthetic Seasons After Fall will soon fade from memory.
If you're the kind of person who wishes it still was the eighties and likes the idea of revisiting a button-mashing romp, warts and all, you'll find a lot to like about this one. But even so, you might find it wearing thin after a while. After all, even the Age of Nostalgia must come to an end.
It’s definitely bloated, needing a brutal hand to strip out a few dozen of the weaker puzzles. Because in there are challenges that are not only good, but sometimes great. Really satisfying to solve. It’s that they’re too frequently diluted down by a series of chambers far more entertaining for the brief banter between TOM and Ava at the start than the process of completion. As such, it falls a good distance short of the two mighty games it emulates.
Firetop Mountain itself becomes a little 3D board, rather than the hulking, ominous sprawl of fond imagining.
The fact that Squeenix are continuing to grant us the role of a surrogate James Bond in playgrounds as varied and swish as a luxury Thai hotel, is good enough for me.
People are going to like it, because it achieves what it sets out to do and because it can yet be mined for greater efficiency of construction and weirder or more specialist designs, but right now I’m not expecting the break-out mega-success of a Factorio or Rimworld. It just doesn’t have the flex. Not yet, anyway, but the slick, compulsive, ever so slightly bland Project Highrise is certainly a strong foundation for the community to take it somewhere weirder and wilder.
This is a fantastic game for generating anecdotes, as I found when I first played it way back when, but it’s also an enjoyable challenge.
It’s utterly beautiful, and it sounds so wonderful, but in the end it feels too hollow. As a piece of visual art it deserves extensive celebration. As a game, it needed to be slightly more: slightly more purposeful, slightly more involved, slightly more communicative.
There is something here for fans of the genre (if it is a genre). The world is big and each faction has a hefty handful of quests that you’ll need to work to deserve. There’s also instant co-op, which means tougher missions, like taking out a well-guarded fort, can be approached with mates. Likewise, the broad strokes of fantasy – the undead, magic artifacts, sea monsters – might be enough to intrigue you deeper into this world of pirates and tradesmen.
Metrico+ really needs a lot more focus. It's throwing an awful lot at the wall, and while there's certainly a great deal of smarts at play here, they're not united, not well contained.
While Worms W.M.D. might evoke the halcyon days of Armageddon, it’s more than capable of standing on its own as another high point for the series.
The Final Station is a simple game, which is always just compelling enough for its duration. I’ve come to think of it as an efficient, low budget horror movie: it has a high concept it can’t afford to show directly and so it wrings as much as it can from the mystery and the satisfaction of piecing the plot together from snippets. It’s only a shame that its action suffers more from never having a particularly interesting concept of its own.