Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Despite my uncertainty about some of the specifics, it's a game that has me firmly in its clutches and I'm happy to be there. Maybe it's a hug rather than a clutch.
In Kerbal Space Program, we have a perfect game of experimentation. Checking to see what goes wrong and correcting your next trial accordingly. When struggling with my first launches and landings, and the tricky controls, I was close to believing it was a game of impossible luck. But it is so far from that as to make the initial belief laughable. Instead, it is about accruing and applying small units of knowledge, one on top of the other.
Wizard Wars is a smart piece of design and worthy of far more attention than you probably imagine a free-to-play multiplayer spin-off deserves.
[F]ifteen quid, lots of bullets, lots of steampunk Nazis and some monsters too. If that's (still) your poison, you can't go far wrong with this.
WWE 2K15 is a lot like the WWE itself – burying its female performers, mishandling its roster, screwing up its own booking and failing to establish characters. I say that as a fan. But maybe if we want a daring, innovative wrestling game, we'll need to wait for somebody else to jump into the market.
It's a shame the same anything-goes mindset doesn't apply to the mission structure and the story, because the dryness, repetition and general rudimentary air is what will ultimately keep me from coming back for more, but if you want a few hours of XCOM-lite with cyberpunk trimmings and the option for co-op, you could do a lot worse than Shadowrun Chronicles.
Kalimba is relatively short if you're looking to just rattle through the story mode – I got through the it in a couple of hours – but the longevity comes from the repetition and the desire for that perfect run. I am now going back through the levels trying to get gold on all of them and make my totem pole glorious.
We may have to wait for the revolution, but Blackrock Mountain is business as usual for Hearthstone. And business is good.
I had hoped that Act 2 would be the addressing of Act 1's shortcomings, and deliver on its strengths, what had seemed so heartfelt and novel. Instead it's an incredibly pretty, superbly voice acted, crap adventure game.
The Assignment and The Consequence are dark, they're frightening, they get the blood pumping, and there's nothing else quite like them around. You'll know when you've been Tango'd.
Though I dearly wish it would calm down, and it's too messy to be as classic as its forefather, Dungeons 2 is the tinkerer's cave I've been waiting for.
I'm frustrated that there's a great game here, laid a little low by grind, by sub-racing game insta-death factors and irritating, quote-drenched dialogue. This is, at heart, a small and simple game which tries to make itself bigger with unnecessary frippery rather than expanding its worthy core. It's perfectly serviceable as a land-based remix of FTL, but your next great, chaotic adventure Convoy is not. Yet.
No numbers, no inventory to speak of, but so much to do, so many ways it can play out and plenty of snowballing consequences. Its superficially simple 2D art occasionally flares into high prettiness too. We might not have Red Dead Redemption, but Westerado is an enormously satisfying consolation prize.
The structure of the game helps, but GTAV's singleplayer is not simply a case of making the best of a bad situation. I've been surprised over the past week how much I've enjoyed revisiting these storylines and missions, after first playing them on XBox 360 at release.
It’s just numbers getting bigger. It’s the cynical serpent curled aroundthe heart of every social game, every action RPG, every MMO, every gambling machine, but at least it makes no pretence that it’s about anything more than that. There’s this thin veneer of Monopoylisms with a touch of sardonic Fallout nonchalance and lazy references to famous figures, but it’s just set-dressing and it knows it. This is an experiment in how venal we can be.
Whatever time was wasted traipsing across the same screens repeatedly, I sure as hell don't regret the twenty-odd perfect shots that happened along the way. The beauty of Titan Souls is that if you enjoy the demo, you'll find more of the same in the full game, with consistently inventive enemy designs.
So it's such a galling shame that the game lets itself down so badly. A collection of poor puzzles is frustrating (one in particular required me to email the developer to get past), but forgivable in this lovely daft genre.
So yes, an awful lot of what makes Dungeon Keeper Dungeon Keeper is in here, and I respect the hell out of that, but there's a certain degree of elegance missing due to the micro-intensive method it's chosen to move the dial towards.
Etherium is unlikely to work its way into anyone's list of strategy favourites but if you're a fan of traditional RTS games, its short bursts of action might be as welcome as a cool pint of H20 during a drought.
Dreamfall Chapters sheds some of the baggage associated with a traditional point and click adventure, but when I found myself in a miniature stealth section combining inventory items around an interactive but almost invisible hotspot on the floor, I wished it were travelling even lighter.