Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Most of the time, Elite works. The excitement, even the boredom, of the game is still preserved for me as something I am happy to have paid for. But it would be a poor reviewer indeed who did not mention that the sim's rough edges have not been satisfactorily sanded down.
Tower of Guns mixes up its shooting with platforming and freedom of movement, but Ziggurat battles its way to the top of the pile by scratching my Isaac and Serious Sam itches simultaneously.
Warhammer Quest fits snugly onto a very specific shelf in my gaming library. It's not a game I'd miss if it were gone but, like a crossword puzzle or a Peggle, it's a perfectly acceptable side dish while my mind is multitasking. It's advantage over a crossword is that it doesn't require the attention of my linguistic lobes so I can more easily listen to people talking on a podcast while I'm playing.
[I]f you like games about getting better, where you're mastering deep systems and having your skills progressively tested, then Ground Zeroes is the best 50-hour demo you'll ever play.
The philosophical side of the game won't be for everyone, and you can largely leave it alone or skim the texts if you really don't get on with it. I really enjoyed digging into the archives so I'd recommend giving it a good go, but ultimately it shouldn't get in the way of enjoying the excellent puzzle side of things.
What we've got here is a mildly absorbing romp through an extremely generic setting, delivered with no sense of aplomb.
It's an accessible wargame and a good place to start for those familiar with the fiction and looking to make the jump to hex-based warfare.
With that said, don't take away too negative an impression of GW3:D. Though what it adds doesn't do much for me, what it brings from GW2 is simply brilliant, looks better than ever, and has never been on PC before – and everyone should try Pacifism mode at least once in their life. Parts of GW3:D are wonderful. But the most telling thing is that they're all contained in 2D rectangles.
All told though, no previous Telltale game has made me feel this tense and this wary. It's dangerous. Its pacing is nothing at all like the show's, but its ever-looming dread very much is. I only hope the rest of the series similarly refuses to pull punches.
Far Cry is a series still struggling with that balance, between offering you the freedom to do what you want while enforcing the limitations to make what you want meaningful. I think it's also only a game away from needing a gritty, Bond-style reboot back to its Far Cry 2 roots.
Tales From the Borderlands might not pack the emotional punch of The Walking Dead at its best, or the style of Wolfamongous in full swagger, but it's bloody good fun.
It's only £4, and I'm in no doubt that what felt to me like a cynical result didn't come from a cynical place. My guess is it came from too small an idea, too ambiguously delivered, created with a passion that doesn't reach the player.
Ultimately, I have hugely enjoyed my time with it so far. Occasional bugs aside, Blizzard are terribly good at this by now. The mood in my guild has been buoyant, and while a ten-year-old MMO is not the most accessible prospect for a brand new player, significant efforts have been made to make it somewhere that everyone can join, enjoy and call home.
Whether This War of Mine truly succeeds in saying anything more than 'war is hell' I don't know. Equally, I'm not at all sure it needs to. We play a lot of wars, and it is surely only fair to sometimes be reminded that war is not really about a muscle-bound American man saving the day. It makes its point very well, in that it is harrowing, it is careful, and its increasingly deadly Groundhog day approach supports rather than disrupts the atmosphere of extreme strife. It's without doubt effective and impressive at what it does.
With Inquisition, BioWare have handled the narrative and consequence of conversation and action with more assurance and depth than Telltale, while also constructing one of the finest and most forward-looking CRPGs ever made. And I'm as delighted and surprised as anyone.
Not a disaster then, but Unity is Assassin's Creed reverting to type despite its glitzy surface. For that reason, and not for the belly-aching about performance and paygating, Unity is probably one to skip.
I said Valkyria Chronicles wasn't just a brilliant game, but a brilliant Sega game. There's an element of wishful thinking to that, but for me Sega has always been one of those developers that occasionally touches perfection – and with unexpected, original games. The mechanics Valkyria Chronicles uses are potentially dissonant, but the game is a unified whole as well as a work of real craftsmanship.
There's no doubt that come this time next year, I'll have played FM 15 more than just about any other game. It's a fixture in my life and this version isn't fundamentally flawed, but on the surface it's a baby step in the ongoing process and the majority of the changes feel like the edges of systems that are still working toward career-long implementation.
It's an unusual game, not because of its content, which is all fairly typical, but due to the precision within which excess has been surgically removed. A shame that the cuts from that surgery are sometimes a little too messy because there's a clever core here and it deserves an audience. Light on content but with enough sharp ideas to keep me coming back for several days, Crowntakers is pint-sized and happily enjoyed in moderation.
Given it's much broader of content than the original and still packed with surprises I've yet to uncover, let alone master, Rebirth very much lives up to its name. I do feel it makes some stylistic misfires that let the side down, but perhaps that doesn't matter. Just one more go. Damned forever.