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Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.
Red Barrels's game is an immature and hateful slight at anyone who dares to believe in a divine creator.
The developer's ambition to make a triple-A title without the resources of a larger studio gets the better of them.
The developers veer beyond the cartoonish nature of the TMNT television series and straight into the absurd.
This series reboot fails to replicate the cleanness of the original games’ racing mechanics.
If nothing else, Three Rings could have put in the extra man hours to salvage Romance Dawn from the germinating trash heap of poorly actualized One Piece games by at least paying tribute to Oda's spirited creation. Yet, since they abstain from doing so, apparently with almost every fiber of their being, they've put forth a product so systematically undercooked as to make even the most unflappable One Piece zealots question their faithfulness.
The mere suggestion of indie misery will captivate industry insiders and tantalize anyone else who may or may not get what Davey Wreden is going for.
No wonder the game leans so heavily on pop-culture references, as they help to distract from the relative emptiness of the game itself.
A plethora of technical limitations transform this game's quest for verisimilitude into a kind of farce.
The game appears to be a product of magical thinking, as if throwing together watered-down tropes from games like The Witcher might somehow yield a finished product.
Coupled with the rest of the game’s failings, it becomes apparent that whatever more complex aspirations Alone in the Dark might have wanted to realize, it didn’t have the resources to achieve them. Its greatest achievement is that, rather than releasing in some broken and clearly unfinished state, it has managed to reach the level of being merely bad instead.
The game’s dedication to graphical fidelity feels like a blinder to thinking outside the box in every other regard. It can’t help but feel like intensive overcompensation for inconsistent, tension-less stealth, one-note combat, level design that doesn’t reward exploration, generically fleshy enemies, upgrades that don’t reward experimentation, and ineffective jump scares, from enemies that get cheap hits in on Jacob every single time, regardless of how well-prepared the player is. Much has been made of the fact that this was meant as the heir apparent to beloved survival horror series Dead Space, a game that, 12 years later, can still induce goosebumps just from its terrifying attract sequence. By contrast, if not for its graphics, The Callisto Protocol feels like a relic from 1998, undone creatively even by the decaying likes of Shadow Man.
Poison Control rarely goes beyond the cheap laughs to be had from its story.
Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players. Worse, Hired Gun turns its back to all that’s promising about Games Workshop’s fiction, such as the various spinoff novels that offer insights into a demented upper-class nobility as well as life in the Underhive, choosing instead to tell a meaningless, mostly incoherent story about archetypal characters who are unmemorable at best. Late in the game, a momentary detour featuring an iconic Warhammer 40,000 monster, one that’s wildly out of place and acting against its bestial nature, serves as a baffling example of how unmoored this game is to its own property.
There are plenty of military engagements in Breakpoint, but none of them are particularly engaging.
As the game never really switches up its formula, it's not long before fatigue sets in.
The game's first-person-shooter sequences aren't just dull and familiar, but also clunky, given the touchy VR controls.
It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.
The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.
Before you know it, Starlink turns playing with toys into something that feels an awful lot like work.