Forbes's Reviews
All told, this is a reasonably good first effort and a worthy attempt to imitate and iterate on one of the finest games of the last generation. Lords of the Fallen will hopefully be commercially successful enough to lead to a sequel or, better still, a more ambitious and more unique project from Deck 13/CI Games that builds off this game rather than simply tacks on to it.
[I]t's been a long time since I've had a game feel relatively off-putting at the start, and then slowly reel me in until I couldn't help but love it by the end. I went to the party, got hammered, made out with a lampshade and went home, full of warm, fuzzy memories. It was an absolutely ridiculous experience that I would heartily recommend to anyone.
Destiny may have seemed like a total letdown a week after launch. but I think what it does bring to the table is enough to have attracted a large, passionate playerbase, and the game is going to have legs well into the future. We're living in an age where for better or worse, many games eventually evolve into what we hoped they'd be at launch. If current trends hold, that's going to be Destiny too, but two months from its debut, it hasn't had a half-bad sprint out of the starting gate either.
On balance this is another good outing for Skylanders, although not delivering as much ambition and creativity in the video-game as in the toys. Provided families can enjoy both physical and virtual elements of the game there is still much to celebrate here, and plenty of value.
It's not until you see it in action in the hands of fans and players that it starts to make better sense. Testing the game out with my own children was a light-bulb moment for me, as I watch them moved seamlessly from playing with the toys on the carpet to placing them on the Infinity Base and continue those adventures on the screen.
If you have already been bitten, hopefully metaphorically, this season is unlikely to disappoint. Although the rushed, relentlessly downbeat ending of "No Going Back" may feel like a somewhat necessary clearing of the board for a new cast and new dilemmas in the third season.
It may not shake up the series like the initial console port did, but the game has been refined and distilled into something pretty great all the same. I have an unsubstantiated hunch that there may yet be one more expansion coming, given that D3 has sold 20M copies across all platforms, so we may see more variants of this game yet. For now, enjoy Ultimate Evil as either your 4th go-round in the D3 universe, or your first.
Cry Wolf may not have been as strong as some of the episodes before it, but it remains an appropriate capstone to an excellent series that once again proves that Telltale is one of the most interesting companies in the video game market today. I can't wait to see what they do with Game of Thrones.
Like Grand Theft Auto V before it, sometimes it's not enough to simply be big and well-made. Watch Dogs feels like a collection of promising concepts with nothing solid holding them together. Aiden Pearce should have been that something, but instead, he's just a character meant to sell cool looking hats in collector's editions. Perhaps that can be rectified in a sequel, but for now, Pearce is pretty big issue, and so is his propensity to kill people in boring, cover-based shooter-y ways.
[W]hile it may be true that The New Order doesn't really bring that much new to the table, and isn't exactly "retro" either, it does take some of the best of both new and old games and blend them together into a really fun mix. This may not be an instant classic, but it's one of the better first-person shooters I've played in a long time.
SuperGiant has created a world brimming with sophistication, mysteries, and tech-heavy sci-fi charm. It's a world with serious staying power should they decide to revisit it. It meets and then promptly blows right past every high watermark you'd expect a digitally downloadable title to reach.
The deeper handling, pop-out arcade style graphics on a scale unseen before in the series, the social network friendly Mario Kart TV and Miiverse features and of course the heavyweight Mario moniker itself are Nintendo's best chance to date of turning round the Wii U's fortunes. Quietly underpinning all this is the best Mario Kart experience I've has since it's revelatory introduction some 22 year ago.
Meanwhile, the attempts at humor and being "gritty" come off as juvenile. And in a market saturated by far more interesting fantasy adventures, we need a far less generic story to work with. There's a good game hiding within Bound by Flame. It's just not this one.
Child of Light isn't a terribly deep RPG and it isn't a particularly stand out platformer, but it's a game that blends everything into a really unique, beautiful, and surprising experience. It's particularly impressive coming from a major publisher like Ubisoft, and I hope they continue to let this type of creativity drive their games.
Some of the scares in Daylight are genuinely chilling, but their shock value fades quickly. And after the opening hour or so, the hospital itself seems to become a character, which adds a needed layer of interactivity and suspense to the mix. But between dull writing, last-gen graphics, and limited game mechanics, Daylight devolves into nothing more than a glorified maze simulator with mood lighting.
Luftrausers is a beautifully balanced exercise in frustration and release – a simple but excellent instance of what can be done with slippery physics, simple graphics and a lot of guns. A lot. Deeper and longer games are on the market for $9.99, but few will match Luftrausers' addictiveness or its knife-sharp balance of frustration and elation.
It's just plain (hopelessly addictive) fun. Obviously, loot based dungeon crawling kind of has to be your thing, as even with all the new changes to gameplay, it may still feel rather repetitive to outsiders. But I have to imagine that barring any unforeseen issues that may not have cropped up yet, both past and present Diablo fans will be very happy with Reaper of Souls, and with how the game has improved a thousandfold since launch.
Infamous is a good game. I don't know about great, but "good" is enough to be the best in the series, and the best exclusive PS4 has to offer right now. With 100% completion and new missions to come there are plenty of worthwhile hours to be spent with the game, and it's definitely worth picking up if you're a fan of the series or the genre. The powers are innovative and a lot of fun, I just wish there was a bit more to do with them, and a more compelling story that perhaps took itself just a little more seriously.
Titanfall is a great game and an incredible amount of fun. Combat is creative, exciting and never, ever static. It lacks depth past its core concept however, and hopefully that's something that can be rectified well ahead of the inevitable Titanfall 2. But right now, this is the game the Xbox One needs, and it's the first true must-have of the new console generation.
A strong story, excellent writing and voice-acting, and the fact that the game really does look and feel like an episode of the show, makes South Park: The Stick of Truth a truly great video game experience. It's the first game I've played in 2014 that's really kept me glued to the screen from start to finish.