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So maybe life isn't strange, but at least the game tries.
Attila is a solid, innovative entry in the series marred by some inexplicable performance issues. Assuming that the performance issues get worked out, Creative Assembly may have a keeper. As their recent history has shown, though, that's unfortunately far from a given.
The primary characters are more fleshed out now that the story is occupied with making us sympathetic to them rather than showing off Westeros and Essos. As a result, this is a game that now feels more confident and standalone than it did a couple of months ago, more of a work that justifies its own existence than it does a dull, flimsy tie-in being hawked by HBO for marketing purposes.
The end result is something that feels like little more than the finished product of a well-oiled entertainment machine—a safe appeal to a mass audience. This is unfortunate since there is genuine joy to be had in simply navigating Techland's fictional city. If the same attention was paid to narrative development and visual design as has obviously gone into the player character's movement, Dying Light's world would be much more inviting.
What matters most is not the story, but the telling—and that much, Grim Fandango has mastered. Thank goodness it's no longer unplayable.
The quest to bind together stories of science and love isn't always an easy one to take on, but ultimately Gravity Ghost gets the job done. Drifting through space and learning the subtleties of planetary movement is fun and relaxing, and the story's charm works well enough to suggest larger meaning to a ghost's journey through the cosmos.
For a time, revisiting Resident Evil was good. And just as quickly as I was hooked in, I played P.T.
Outside of the flying woes, Gat Out of Hell is content to let you be an all-powerful demigod or goddess. The game is just plain, hammy entertainment. It doesn't aspire to teach you a great moral lesson—outside of "don't fuck with Ouija boards," which is pretty sage advice—and it's not trying to wow you with 60 FPS photorealism. Gat out of Hell, like its predecessors, is that essential reminder we need from time to time that, yes, sometimes it's okay for videogames to be dumb fun and little else.
You can destroy your smile again with the game modes of old in a new graphical package. If you're looking for the next big, huge, mind-blowing iteration that jumps us forward fifty years in shape-on-shape violence, then it isn't here. I don't need to navigate a three dimensional pomegranate with my mine-laying drone in order to enjoy myself. In fact, it takes away from that enjoyment. You might feel differently.
Elegy For A Dead World is a great provocation with some wonderful ideas behind it, but I'm not sure where the draw is after the first fifteen minutes. It is a game that could be wonderful with the inclusion of local or networked multiplayer (co-writing about these worlds would be magical) or a little more direction from the designers. That said, as it stands it is merely a set of good-to-great ideas that cohere in a form that failed to capture my imagination.
[T]he best moments in Temple of Osiris are with friends; when a typical aha moment meets the domino effect of all your friends coming to the same realization you have, there's nothing quite like it. And if the package is a little slim, it's because it's been trimmed of most of its fat, never slowing down enough to let you idly wonder about what else you could be doing with your time. For that, my regular group of friends and I are grateful.
While The Shivah also explores the reconciliation of faith and practicality, its corny climax can't match The Talos Principle's matter-of-fact ending, which argues that our chosen perspective will limit what we discover in one way or another. Thank God the puzzles are worth it.
I realize now that I wish that this game could make me feel like an outsider in a strange town: That feeling is America. And The Crew has none of the licentious anticipation for the fictional pile-up, nor any of the guilty pleasure of rubbernecking—American pastimes, both. The missions never just say "Get to Wyoming," and then let me plot my own foolhardy, American route there. They don't even let you look at the map. Just trust the waypoints and go.
In a nod to the post-credits gimmick of comic book blockbusters, A Bird Story reveals itself as foreplay for Gao's next game. This shameless preview raises the question of why anyone should take the game's human-animal bonding as anything more than a tease. Earlier in the game, the boy and the bird are launched into space for a close-up of the moon, a shoehorned reference to Gao's To the Moon. Despite its well-meaning qualities, A Bird Story doesn't have the maturity or confidence to inspire much more than crying and buying.
These little quirks and irritants don't make it a bad game. It is, in fact, good. But without them, it could have been great.
Tales develops an interesting world filled with rich characters that was imprisoned within the shoot & loot framework of Borderlands and Borderlands 2. Free from those constraints, Tales is already well on its way to telling a damn good story, and that's the best kind of loot there is.
I can't argue with the logic behind a handheld Smash Bros—people will buy it, people will love it, Nintendo will make money and everybody will be happy—but I might have to wait for the upcoming Wii U version, where even the secondary screen that I hold in my hands will be significantly bigger than the one on the 3DS. It's not the game's fault, of course. The game is big. It's the picture that got small.
Ghosts of nights hunched in front of a television, slowly spiraling up the Tower of Babil; squinting at blurry Chocograph pieces; running FATEs in hopes of an Atma drop. We live in these games for a spell, in a liminal universe—ones constructed for profit by Square-Enix, of course—but also co-constructed by ourselves. Little wonder that Curtain Call feels a bit like home.
I’d love to have seen a more radical take on each title’s conventions in order to play a mash-up that’s truly different. As an advertisement for each legacy franchise, though, Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright is a solid showcase for what both do better than any other game, if only by default.
Wolfenstein: The New Order doesn't transcend either of its genres. It's another first-person shooter that's also just another victorious Nazi alternate timeline. It's proficient enough at both action and world-building to merit attention, though. It may not be a world I want to hang out in that often, but I'll at least try to save it once.