Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
The key is, I do enjoy playing it. I'm still far from finished, but have played for an awfully long time. For a tenner, that's a lot of game. It's somewhat obnoxious, but special for just getting on with being a game.
It's beautiful, no doubt. The pixel art is wonderful, and the soundtrack is splendid. Looking at just the screenshots, I'd be reaching for my wallet. But the core game is just so tedious. By the fifth chapter, you're literally wandering through near-identical scenes of desert, and at this point I'm honestly wondering if maybe this is the point?
Be that as it may though, this is still a good crack at the Quest for Glory formula that, like Roehm, has little stomach for infamy but doesn't do a bad job at reluctant heroism. If you remember the original games fondly, you're almost certainly going to enjoy it, even if it doesn't quite reach their level. If you've never played them, the whole set of originals can be had for ten bucks at GOG.com (with a VGA remake of the second available elsewhere). It's impossible to recommend playing Quest for Infamy before or instead of those, but do keep it in mind for when you're done, and enjoying the knowledge that there are, finally, more games like them both out and on the way.
Against strong odds, Larian have fulfilled the early promise and the extra time, effort and money has all been invested wisely. The sausage has become a steak, succulent and flavoursome, and I have a new toy to play with and return to over the coming months and years.
I'd love to have seen Rebellion weave more WW2 history into their solo campaign, and put a bit more love and novelty into their online play modes. Other than that, mark me down as a satisfied customer.
Ultimately, A Story About My Uncle is a pleasant but wobbly experience which only takes a few hours to finish. The checkpointing can be a frustration, the voicework is idiosyncratic, the prettiness can tip over into twee-ness and the story's conclusion lacks punch. In the moments when it finds its feet you get glimpses of a pretty platformer with a great sense of momentum. It's a shame, then, that the way the action and the other elements of the game are integrated keeps stopping that momentum dead.
The enjoyment I have got out of the first month so far has been worth the cost of the game and there's also still plenty to do. I'm only halfway to the level cap and when you hit that you'll get access to things like the 40v40 PvP Warplots which feature customisable and destructible fortresses. It'll be the strength of the updates which will govern whether I'd recommended subscribing long-term, but so far Wildstar is looking great.
Every tone it attempts is struck with confidence and talent, from creeping horror to outright terror to reflective serenity. Give it a moment and you'll be stuck with it until you're finished.
Like its protagonist, Murdered is dead on arrival. But if you do play it, gather an audience and have some fun. Sure, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but it's the best way to endure this particular afterlife.
Adam: Wolfenstein – BETTER THAN IT HAD ANY RIGHT TO BE Alec: Quite right too.
There are some bum notes both tonally and strategically, Tropico old hands will find the bones of the things over-familiar, and despite having tons of things to fiddle with ultimately it's hard not call it a lightweight game. I really think it has to be, though.
The title is evocative, don't you think, and even though the graphics are functional rather than fancy, the music and the sound of solitary engines in the vast loneliness capture something of the magnificence of travel and expansion. It's a game that really does impress with its scale and part of the cleverness of the automation is that it lets you sit back and enjoy the worlds you colonise or subdue.
There's plenty to admire in Krillbite's debut but, like a child itself, it's messy, loud, confusing and it grows up far too quickly. The length is the key isssue. For all its efforts to get inside both the player and the characters' heads, Among The Sleep doesn't linger long enough to leave a mark or more than a fleeting memory.
I think this is the best episode yet, despite being a little on the short side, and despite having repetition at its foundation it does a bloody good job of both concealing it and dragging me deeper into the game's murky world. I know that I'm being sheep-herded to a fairly fixed conclusion, and I'm now enjoying the neon snarl of the ride enough to be entirely comfortable with that.
Then I remembered. Those things aren't a game. The game is sloppy controls which cause you to constantly do the wrong thing accidentally with disastrous consequences; is inconsistently interactive world design; is a cover system whereby you get stuck on scenery or it guesses incorrectly where you want to move. The game is insta-fail stealth missions, wave-defense missions, escort missions, missions where what the characters say and what the objective is don't match up. The game is five crashes to desktop, including two which required me to reboot my machine before it would reload. The game is restrictive objectives which don't make use of the possibilities provided by the open city or the hacking mechanics, and checkpoint positions that force you to re-watch short cutscenes or re-perform rote actions after every death.
Much like life, Always Sometimes Monsters is brilliant but flawed. There's strong stuff in there, made only better by its rarity within games.
My own love affair with baseball started with the book Moneyball and Out Of The Park was the next step, long before I grew attached to a team and lost the months from April onwards to late night live broadcasts from distant timezones.
Like so much of the game, it dreams of being epic, but ends up just feeling slight – RPG action that would love to be in the same company as The Witcher and Dragon Age, but instead has to sit with the likes of Game of Thrones: The Game in the pile of adventures that are better than they feel they have any real right to be, past their terrible openings at least, but which offer little reason to burn money or the midnight oil on.
The Last Tinker is mechanically uninteresting to the point where it's impossible to recommend, but being there, wandering around, properly taking in everything I'm allowed without being moved along, that's where it's noteworthy.
There's a lot of room amid this content for people of every skill level, with an additional nightmare mode for players eager for punishment from the off, and a modified campaign purely for co-op.