PCWorld's Reviews
Far Cry 5 offers a fun, vivid take on rural Americana, but doesn't dig into the questions its setting raises.
Full Throttle is a relic of the time when games first really crossed the 2D/3D tech boundary, when designers devised a new set of rules for making games—with mixed results.
Delicious, mindless fun filled with some empty calories.
Tyranny is flawed, but more in the vein of a future cult classic than a failure. It's got great ideas, just not the depth to let them shine.
Headlander's retrofuturist aesthetic is creative enough to make up for the fact its underlying mechanics are anything but.
I don’t want to disparage The Turing Test too much. It suffers by nature of comparisons with other similar games, but perhaps unfairly. With its lightweight puzzles and plot, The Turing Test is one of those “Great-For-An-Afternoon” games, the ones that scratch a specific itch and go down easy. In this case, it’s the “I need something like Portal, but I’ve already played Portal” itch.
Song of the Deep is gorgeous and has some creative ideas, but lacks the polish to make it a must-play.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole builds off its predecessor's excellent foundation, with deeper combat, a stronger story, and vulgar jokes galore.
Titanfall's second outing has more to offer than the original, but the novelty's worn off a bit and the singleplayer campaign waffles between brilliant and boring.
Gears of War 4 struggles with pacing issues and a bland protagonist, but it works well as a passing-the-torch installment bridging the old and new trilogies.
Shardlight is pretty damned decent though. The story’s a bit more straightforward than some other Wadjet Eye games, it ends a bit too abruptly, and a few of the secondary characters needed fleshing out, but all-in-all it makes for an engaging six or seven hours in a world with some great ideas—a bit like Dead Synchronicity, except with an ending. Very grim. Very adult.
Suspense is an important tool, in horror. Suspense is what makes scares work. Five, ten, fifteen minutes of excruciating emptiness makes the eventual jump scare effective because we're lulled into complacency. The pacing in Layers of Fear is numbing, with "scares" coming at you so often they quickly lose their potency.
I enjoyed myself, though. The ABC Murders makes for lighthearted detective fare, clean and colorful like a Saturday morning cartoon. And make no mistake—when I say it cribs from Frogware's Sherlock Holmes games, I don't say it with any malice. I'd love to see more classic mysteries turned into adventure games, and Frogware just happens to be the current studio to beat.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided feels exactly like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, for better and worse.
The fetch quests need to go. Or they need to be dressed up better. Either way. I thought Dying Light was over-reliant on them in its first incarnation, and that was in a pre-Witcher 3 world. Playing The Following, I often found myself pulling open the map, looking at how far I needed to go to reach any objectives, and simply quitting for the night. Not a great feeling.
Transformers: Devastation is a B-tier game that succeeds only by expertly capitalizing on its source material and your nostalgia.
Improvements to combat and a raft of new visual gags don't make up for Shadow Warrior 2's flaccid story and aimless levels.
Same great art, same tense tactical battles, same bewildering sense of scope emanating from such delicate pieces. I never knew slow pans across landscape paintings could instill such awe, and yet certain sequences in The Banner Saga 2 support tension that belies the game's humble budget.
It's not that Mad Max is bad. It's just the latest in a long line of Ubisoft-template open-world games.
Fallout 4's setting and conceit are strong as ever, but it feels quite a bit less daring and honed than its predecessor.