Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
If the game itself were as much of a mess as the port, I'd happily ignore the whole thing but Rocksteady are still capable of spectacle and style. Given the choice of one big budget collectathon series a year, and that's often all I can find time for, I'd pick Arkham almost every time.
For all of my complaints, I'd like to see more. More explorations of the weird places that we scrap, shoot and claw our way through as we play games. More short stories. More horror. If Funcom want to flesh out their Secret World with a few more side projects, I'll be a the front of the queue, even if I'm not convinced I'll enjoy the ride.
It's a shame that the skaven act so much like zombies rather than having their own distinct traits. But if Vermintide can act as the catalyst for a trend whereby at least one in every three zombie games is now a Skaven game instead, it will have served a wondrous purpose. The 'tide' suffix is excuse enough to have hordes of ratbeasts running mindlessly through the streets and it could happily be attached to 'Daemon', 'Corpse' or 'Green'. That said, 'Greentide' sounds like an off-brand toilet cleaner so perhaps that one would need a bit of a rethink.
else Heart.Break() helps you to see programming for the magic it is. It may have made me feel I had neglected an entire realm of the world. But it also showed me that it's never too late to learn.
Forget your Just Causes, your Uncharteds, your Battlfields and your Call of Duties – Broforce comes closer to capturing the beautiful chaos and heroic misadventures of a big budget action movie than any of them.
It's absolutely true to say that you get out of Sword Coast Legends what you put in, but right now there just aren't enough reasons to put much in.
TL;DR: Life Is Strange is really, really good.
That I love the game even with a Virtual Boy palette is testament to how lovely it is. Very lovely. And very smart.
It's rare for a puzzle game to be truly original, but Mushroom 11 can claim that accolade. It applies its originality in smartly traditional ways, employing 2D physics puzzles in a new style. It's glitchless, which is a rare treat, especially for a game that lets you break your blob into many parts and jam them in between rotating cogs and swinging platforms. It's one of the best puzzle games in a very long time.
The whole thing can be polished off in a long day (that's what I did), and in certain sections I was enjoying the old-school run-n-gunning. But just as often I was being frustrated by glitches, poor enemy AI (which is pretty unforgiveable after they mock it for being such in the early levels, and then never improves), or aching repetition.
Hearts of Stone reminded me exactly what I loved about it the first time around, and all I could think when the credits rolled was how much I look forward to firing this game up in a few more months and concluding both Geralt's final adventure, and one of the PC's finest RPGs. Give or take a few giant bloody spiders. Grr.
It still comes up short on character compared to the best Civs and, of course, Alpha Centauri, but it's without doubt less anodyne than before. Diplomacy, however, seems to me like a significant misfire even without the bugs – the question of your place in this new world, and in relation to your rivals, remains unresolved. I suspect Beyond Earth's road to recovery has only just begun.
As well as being the most unabashed Transformers fan-service games have given us yet, it's also a slick, exciting, hyper-fast punchy-shooty game in its own right. It's dumb as a box of Dinobots of course, but it's not even trying to be otherwise – and that's why its simple, colourful enthusiasm for robot-bashing is so infectious.
So there Sublevel Zero lies, this peculiar mix of instantly entertaining and disappointingly hollow. Tidying up the crafting, and making it meaningful, would add a lot. And gosh, it desperately needs a rethink about those unexplained, unpredictable dead-ends. But heck, I want to keep on playing anyway. I feel like so much more could be added to it, and I rather hope to see that happen. As it is, I'm suspicious it won't hold people's attention long enough for the £11 entry fee.
[T]hose who haven't got it by now may be quite happy to continue ignoring it. I think this would be an enormous shame. If this is you, I want to tell you that it is a game worth playing.
There's a chance the bugs could be patched out, although this really is in a sort of Arkham Knight place where pulling it and finishing it is the better option. But even if it ran without constantly breaking, it would still be a really dreadful adventure game. A gorgeous one – some of the most lovely animation I've ever seen in a game – but just so poor.
So did I enjoy it? Kind of. I think I appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, and then that appreciation was tinged with a wish that it could have been more. More clever, more surprising, more deep. But more importantly, it made me think, made me worry about people I care about, made me uncomfortable. And for that, I think, it deserves praise.
Life Is Strange is still a strong candidate for my game of the year but this episode raised a bunch of problems.
After Dark is, I think, the best possible outcome for Skylines: successfully sticking its hand out for more cash but doing nothing to puncture goodwill in the process. Cue more swearing at EA HQ, perhaps.
I wish there were more, particularly relating to team management and the persistency of the world, but this will do. It's not as clean and clever as fellow fictional ball-handler Frozen Cortex, but the messiness and violence really do add something. There's nothing quite like recognising that you're not going to score in the last turn of a half and concentrating all of your efforts toward obliterating the opponent team instead. Especially when they're High Elves.