Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
I would love to have been able to love this. But I cannot. It all works, nothing hurts, but it offers nothing that speaks to the heart. As such, I just cannot recommend it.
With a party of four, it's an enjoyable diversion and the four classes are well balanced and complementary, but the traps, layouts and enemies aren't quite disruptive enough, and even on higher difficulties the routine of combat tests endurance rather than creative solutions.
There's no story worth hearing, there's no immediate hook that makes this different from anything else, and nothing special about the combat or the questing to make me care.
For all its mechanical similarities to the RPGs of yesteryear, it's that character, wit and playfulness that most capably satisfied my nostalgia and made me look forward to whatever InXile put their minds to next.
As much as the awkwardness, the wobbly writing and the ghastly attitudes often pushed me away from Risen, I'd still take its offbeat ambition and clumsy ambition over a slick, impersonal Diablo or a focus grouped Bioware effort. At the same time, sharper, caveman-free writing and a big spend on more accomplished voice-acting would be redempetive – would transform Risen from appealingly odd and into truly impressive. But maybe what's special about this would be lost if it were able to pursue norms. Perhaps it needs to be as weird and awkward and unpleasant as it is. Perhaps that's why I like it so much, even when I hate it.
If you're in the mood for a rail-related mallardy and have already got tuberculosis, tendernitis, and wagonorrhea then it's unlikely you'll regret your purchase.
Planetary Annihilation is a slick, modernised RTS, engineered from the ground up to appeal to the fast-paced, competitive, hotkey-loving esports crowd. For people like me, it is a bruising gauntlet of defeat. But even I can see the appeal. Putting aside the fact that to play online you need a quad-core processor instead of a brain, the game itself has a huge amont of character.
If you think you're up for it, go ahead and enroll at St. Pigeonation Institute and start looking for the bird of your dreams. The experience will be even stranger than it sounds.
Runers is cute and clever, despite its uninspiring surface, and I can well imagine it occupying the same comfort gaming berth that The Binding of Isaac did for me a couple of years ago, and Realm of the Mad God before it.
It's enormously clever, and very often inspired in how it delivers this cleverness. But for me it was simply too fast, too busy stumbling over itself to do the next even more difficult thing, that it forgot to ensure I'd fathomed the previous.
In time, it may prove the definitive Sims, the last gasp for the series or anything in between. For now though, while its primary changes are good, the trade-off is hard to recommend.
I do think it suffers from significant tonal misjudgements, but it does a very good job of keeping me busy, keeping me pushing pennies into the slot, and keeping me fed with micro-anecdotes that, though they might dissipate immediately, are instantly replaced by new ones.
Despite its flaws, I'm extremely glad that such a thing exists and that I overcame my initial sneery cynicism. If I had a slider to turn that particular internal setting down in my brain's menu system, I'd probably be able to enjoy films that don't fill me with anxiety and existential dread as well.
Chapter 2 is a big step up from the already decent Chapter 1, and delivers lots of rewarding answers on the plot, while introducing enough to make the final chapter worth waiting for, however long that wait might be.
If you didn't think much of the games initially, there may not be enough in Redux that will change your mind.
It's such a colossal shame, but I am certain not one that should put you off playing Mind. The puzzles are genuinely great, and it's just so unrelentingly eye-warmingly beautiful, that it wins out. As visual, explorable art, it's masterful. As a puzzle game, it's rewarding and taxing. As a narrative, it's a car driving into a lake. But in this case, two out of three is really rather good.
It's unquestionably smart, almost intolerably cute, and splendidly novel. I'm not quite convinced the balancing is right, and think the levels become too cluttered, too quickly. But it remains completely lovely to play despite it.
I wish it were more literary or theatrical in its presentation and style, but perhaps that would distract from the aspects that I admire. A fair few people have reacted to the brevity and lack of resolution by suggesting that the game is unfinished but that doesn't seem to be the case at all. It may be a little rough but Unrest is deliberate in its approach to the idea of playing roles and even though I don't entirely approve, I will defend to the death (or mild shouting) Pyrodactyl's attempt to introduce new elements to the conversation.
But instead it's the rusting chassis of an ARPG, after it's been stripped down for parts and left, abandoned in a disused yard, where it really ought to be forgotten.
And that's Halfway's fatal flaw: undermining its own potential for tactical reasoning, whether that's via abrupt enemy spawns, unknowable hit-percentages or those frequent instances when the cursor tool-tip stubbornly claims an enemy is out of sight in defiance of what appears to be the case on screen.