PCWorld's Reviews
A few of my complaints from last year remain - the user interface could still use some beautification and the tech web is borderline impenetrable for first-time players. But Firaxis has made some smart choices with Rising Tide. It's starting to distinguish itself from Civilization V finally, and not just in terms of the way units look. Playing Rising Tide - especially on a water-heavy map - feels appreciably different from previous Civ games.
Prison Architect is a mostly-honest and unflinching look at our modern society and its approach towards prisoner rehabilitation...or lack thereof. It's a fascinating game, in no small part because it so expertly casts a real-world debate in video game terms and in doing so forces players to examine their own beliefs. And it's a hell of a lot of fun, besides.
It's an unconventional game with interesting ideas—questions we don't ask often in games, mainly because most games aren't interested in this sort of dialog. We subsist mainly on a steady diet of summer blockbusters, and it's not often a weird art house game like The Beginner's Guide comes along, let alone gains any traction.
SOMA is not the horror game I expected from Frictional, but it's an excellent piece of science fiction that feels of a piece with stories by Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick as much as Frictional's...
Dropsy's a pretty good point-and-click, but more importantly it's clever and weird.
Unfortunately [Corpse of Discovery] is broken. This is one of those instances where I find the idea of a game more interesting than the game itself, not least because I quickly tired of trying to first-person platform at a herky-jerky 12 frames per second crawl. I'll try and update this review if it gets fixed, but in its current state Corpse of Discovery is nigh-unplayable.
It's not that Mad Max is bad. It's just the latest in a long line of Ubisoft-template open-world games.
The fact is, The White March Part One is good fodder for those coming in fresh and a fine addition for those looking to replay, but isn't compelling enough on its own for you to come back to Pillars of Eternity if you've already finished the game.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong isn't the best RPG Harebrained Schemes has put out, but it's still a great game in its own right.
OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood is the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 of side-scrolling skateboarding games. And yes, that's a good thing.
It's more than a bit silly and mindless but, well, the whole aRPG genre is a bit silly and mindless. Victor Vran strips out some of the complexity of its peers, but makes up for it with a dynamic combat system and incredibly modular character customization. And the most awful hats. And stale jokes that are so stale they're almost funny again. Almost.
I have a few quibbles . . . but in general this is a grand start to what I hope is a grand adventure. Long live the King.
The Talos Principle almost staged a last-minute Game of the Year upset on PCWorld last December, and for good reason—it's one of the best puzzle games ever made. And Road to Gehenna is that most boring and yet occasionally most earnest of compliments: "More of the same."
It's not enough though. Traverser is also proof that all the pretty graphics in the world can't make up for staid mechanics. I want to love Traverser. Taken piecemeal, I do love Traverser. But it's not enough to have great ideas—you need to execute on them too. And Traverser doesn't quite nail the execution.
Lego dinosaurs. If those words get you excited, great - I recommend you look into Lego Jurassic World for a few hours of dumb, mindless collectible-hunting and light puzzle solving. If they don't get you excited, give this one a miss. With this series, it really is that simple.
Technobabylon's cyberpunk world isn't groundbreaking, but there's still plenty to love in this point-and-click adventure.
The Witcher 3 is probably the best open-world RPG ever made, but it still falls prey to some of the genre's worst traps.
With Project CARS, the simulator aspects are co-opted and somewhat compromised by a desire to simultaneously appeal to the arcade racer crowd - without actually being an arcade racer.
As a history buff, I've read a lot of books and watched a lot of films about World War I, but there's something different about experiencing that sort of event from the first-person perspective. Verdun isn't necessarily going to enthrall every shooter player (though I personally love the crack of its bolt-action arsenal), nor does it fully capture the horrors of World War I. I'm not sure any game could, at least with our current technology.
Kerbal Space Program isn't just a fantastic space game. It's one of those games that makes you glad you play on PC, because it could only come to exist on PC.