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Make & Break is at its best when injecting variety into the campaign, not only mixing up the environments but the game modes.
Few of the game's problems would be insurmountable in the face of an engaging narrative.
Metaphorically speaking, the developers at Pugstorm have left more than half the carrot buried in the soil.
Though you encounter familiar configurations of levers and passageways and other obstacles, the mansion’s rooms all feel distinct, subtly interconnected in a way you likely won’t even notice unless you hit the load screen and see that every puzzle is coherently plotted on a zoomed-out side view of the mysterious mansion. Creaks hums along smoothly and pleasantly without calling attention to itself, to its sporadic detriment but mainly to its strength.
The game feels like the brainchild of students who were into debate club as much as programming.
A successful tech demo that allows one to truly feel like Iron Man, the game is also a strong superhero narrative in its own right.
The game displays a thorough, haunted understanding of what cruelty for cruelty's sake can do to the soul.
The most impressive thing about the game is still the strength and specificity of its vision.
While the plot and characters in Desperados III may be familiar, each scenario feels distinct.
Its occasional pizzazz, including Shoji Meguro's blissful J-pop soundtrack, is undermined by how hard it often is to actually look at the game.
The game's attempts to distinguish itself from other first-person shooters ultimately feel superficial.
The scarcity of the game's puzzles is frustrating, because, slight repetition aside, every one of those puzzles is cleverly designed.
The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.
It retreads the same ground of the prior games' fetch-quest-driven, backtracking-filled action-adventuring.
The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.
There's considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.
The game's campiness doesn't extend to the shark combat, which flounders as a result of it mostly hinging on button-mashing.
Saints Row: The Third is a game with an identity crisis, both within the context of its story and outside of it.
It has just enough bells and whistles to suck you into its world, but not enough to compel your immersion.
Its characters already lacked personality, and the 3D makeover is mostly successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.