Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
It's a step forward for the series and a step toward Total War: Medieval III. I hope the improvements here will inform that game, should it be on the drawing board. These gloriously attractive strategic sandboxes may be about the journey rather than the destination, but without a clear destination in sight, and without a shared objective to tie their factions together, they can become unwieldy. As a template for Total Warhammer, Charlemagne seems like a snug fit.
It doesn't have the cleanness or the slow-burn escalation of your old-school C&Cs or the first Warcrafts and StarCraft, so certainly don't approach it as a return to the old ways, but if you want a giant sci-fi army bashing buildings and monsters to death while a crazy lightshow rages, Legacy of the Void is hard to argue with on that basis.
When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.
But if you were hoping for a new squad-based game with the finesse of XCOM, or the many tactical choices of Jagged Alliance 2, this is not it. Mordheim is dumb. Mordheim is flawed. Mordheim tries hard and doesn't succeed. This is not a happy Christmas, everyone, but the misshapen horror of Faschnat. It's your present from Krampus.
If you're the sort who shies away from bullet hell twin-stick shooters, or finds the permadeath of roguelikes to be too punishing, I think Nuclear Throne might be the game to try. It might well ease you into those troubling waters. I tend toward those instincts too, but this is so immediately accessible, so ridiculously replayable, and so satisfying to get better at, that it transcends. And if those sorts of games are your thing and you've not already delved in during development, then flipping crikey, get this immediately. And blimey, I'm tired.
Put simply, I'm looking forward to more.
For all of the wonderful craft on show, Siege doesn't contain any surprises. It executes its plan to perfection but there's no room for deviation.
Twenty minutes. No cost. You'll laugh. Bargain.
It's a triumph of a game despite some flaws, and certainly one of my peak gaming moments of 2015. Bright, cheerful, ridiculous, and most of all, absolutely determined to ensure you have fun.
The lack of improvements in areas that have stagnated, most notably dealings with the media and team talks, is frustrating though. There are seeds of good ideas in the drift toward an RPG-like system of relationships and stats, but they're slim and seem half-conceived in some areas. In fact, where the game is improved it may well benefit in Touch (formerly Classic) mode more than in the full-fat simulation. And for the first time, I'm considering spending my time there, and in the entertaining new multiplayer draft mode. I probably won't stick with the multiplayer until Christmas, let alone next season, but at least it's something new to sink my teeth into before settling into the usual decades of toil.
When I reviewed the ill-fated PC port of Arkham Knight, I said that the Arkham games were my go-to AAA series. On this form, they've got stiff competition. Here's hoping Syndicate isn't an anomaly and that the future of the series will be something other than history repeating itself.
It just adds to that sense that Hard West is a turn-based strategy game with a strong core surrounded by a fragmented, uncertain exterior. I'd say it's definitely worth picking up if your XCOM and Jagged Alliance itches currently feel unscratched, but expect something to dip in and out of, not some grand timesink opus. The best times with it will come from playing it on maxed-out difficulty in Iron Man mode, and its wounds system – whereby the injured are weaker in the short term but even stronger in the long term – turned on. Make the central battles as long as involved as possible, because that's where Hard West has the surest footing.
While the destructive potential of weapons and cards alike in some cases increases as you level up, it's much more about finding the ones you like best rather than having a de facto edge. Sadly, this in turn means that unlocks can be quite underwhelming, especially as weapons are all bound to obey the movies' pew-pew and dead behaviour. A new pistol or rifle might look different, but bar a few explicitly short-range/higher damage variants, it feels broadly the same as anything else. You don't feel empowered by your new toy, but instead have to get on back out there and keep doing the same thing.
In ye olde days, Call of Duty games would throw a famous quote up on the screen whenever you died, to provide a moment of reflection between attempts. Now that I've laid Blops III to rest, I've found a quote that seems like an echo of my thoughts and feelings. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
[T]he state of your ship is what keeps you going. You fight more to earn more to buy more. In this way it is a very transparent game. But also a repetitive one, and overall, a mixed bag. I know a game is not capturing me when, as a reviewer, I keep checking my "hours played" stat on Steam to see if I can fairly say: "OK, that's enough". Still, I recognise there are always those who want more space sauce, who won't mind fighting on a 2D plane, and who will be much more possessed by upgrading their own "Wobblenaut".
Right now I feel there is still tons to mine from the game; if nothing else, despite hitting level 28 after 50 hours, I can see skill unlocks which require me to be almost level 50, and most of the in-game map remains unexplored. If I want it to, this is going to keep me busy for at least the rest of the year.
[I]t's undeniably repetitive. I like the game a lot, and in a large part because of its simplicity. But it's certainly walking a fine line, possibly limiting how many times someone might want to take another trip down its randomly generated tower knowing they've encountered many of its surprises. Still, that doesn't seem to stop me from wanting one more go. Which is probably the most important thing.
There are plenty of upgrades and the way that you can mix and match them to create new attack types is fantastic, but enemies and objectives are locked into a handful of templates, and those dungeon-rocks all start to look the same after a while. Even so, I've had a tremendous time playing. Galak-Z is a smooth, polished and compelling arcade shooter that trades in tension and tactical awareness rather than screen-clearing power-trips.
Randomly generating your locations for missions is a good idea in many games, but it carries the huge risk of creating dull spaces. In Dragon Fin Soup they're almost uniquely so, with laborious chopping of foliage leading to dead end after dead end, rather then hidden treasure or bonus finds. It's just not the sort of game that lends itself to the notion, and the result kills off just about any desire to continue playing I was left with.
Some of the additions in Afterbirth break whatever thematic cohesion might have existed more than what has come before. Laser-cyborg Isaac doesn't quite fit with my reading of the game but then, what the hell, maybe it's just a game about shit, blood and tears after all. And it's a fantastic example of the form.