Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Replica is a strong concept played out a bit too broadly for its own good, but it’s just smart – and certainly timely – enough to get away with it.
Clearly others are adoring this, so read around. I certainly will be now to try to work out what on Earth was going on last week. But I completely didn’t get this. It has a few decent puzzles, all of them boringly repeated. It looks lovely, when it remembers to, but mostly doesn’t.
The Chernobyl VR Project is meaty and ambitious, and definitely sets a precedent for this sort of thing: armchair tourism taken to a whole new level, and especially valuable when it works hard, as this does, to educate as well as stimulate.
Even at its worst, Furi is something rather special.
It’s fun, spooky, peculiar, unique, and most of all – and I use this word very carefully – interesting. That’s something games too often are not. The Room Two unquestionably is – a properly interesting experience.
‘Better’ isn’t the correct operative term, I think. ‘Different’ is, and honestly, that’s exactly what I wanted from DLC – a good reason to play through XCOM 2 again. As a total package, it’s substantial, even if not the equal of the Enemy Within expansion for XCOM 1
This is good VR. Let there be more of it.
This is, for children, adults, anyone, a really lovely thing, funny, silly, and tremendous fun to play. If you've a kid who just got into Star Wars via the new movie, goodness me this can't be recommended highly enough. But at the same time, and I've been the one fighting off saying this for years longer than many others, it's getting stale. I
Mighty No. 9 is the best Mega Man game I've played in years, but all of the problems it has come from that too. Whether the gaming scene of 2016 needs a modern Mega Man is a more ambiguous question, perhaps answered by the old adage: be careful what you wish for.
Current VR is a technology which, for the time being, is positively defined by being able to look around a believable place but not necessarily do a whole lot else. It is very, very good at making our senses believe that the unreal is real, and ABE VR takes merciless advantage of that.
It makes me too sick, and because the underlying experience collapses from operatic space disaster into rinse and repeat all too soon, I am not minded to endure that awful lurching sensation. Despite that, some of my VR confidence has been restored. Maybe this thing can happen after all.
I like the idea of Valhalla and some presentation gripes aside, I like its execution. It’s no great revelation but a pleasant surprise, and being a mundane bystander going about their day instead of the plot-critical centre of the universe is an under-explored concept.
In the end, Breached is just too small in every aspect to feel satisfying. I’d love to see this fleshed out into something with more ambition and more purpose. As it is, even at the reasonable price of $7, it feels too fleeting.
I happily add 35mm to the swollen pantheon of RPS’ highly-recommended games from the first half of 2016. It is janky at times, but it is something special.
All in all, I found it difficult to get into Crea in the same way I did for its forefathers. It would be easy for me to say that part of that is down to fatigue with the genre – I have been through it all before, after all. But that is not the main problem I have with this latecomer. The fact is, it just does everything less well.
For a fleeting second I felt about 12 years old again.
There’s too much stuff on screen and I keep dying without knowing quite why, and then respawning without realising it because my pug is so damn tiny.
I unlocked a pug with a Santa hat! (Which is odd, given this game was released in May, so Christmas branding seems rather premature).
It’s a lovely thing, is Captain Forever, full of gentle tactical cleverness and aesthetic wildness.
This is a disaster, and the biggest surprise about it is that Ubisoft thought it worth releasing.