OnlySP's Reviews
It comes down to what you're looking for in a game. If you enjoy challenge, I think you'll find the game to have that for you at times. It rewards exploration with powers and life upgrades, but punishes it with a singular checkpoint system. It's short in length, depending on your skill set, or recognition of possible patterns in boss fights. Their use of lore is appropriate and measured, but again, being a short experience, most players will want more of it. The visual style is an impressive feat from a small team, but for my tastes needed some additional refinement. But that strong Icelandic voice over is all win.
This all sounds like a lot of harping on a series that I feel has been nearly brilliant up to this point, and one that I still recommend highly despite my feelings about its closing presentation. I recognize that not only is life strange, but so are expectations. Undoubtedly this will not meet some people's. "Polarized" indeed.
Misery loves company. And many companies are loving misery these days. Two of the most famous pieces of media currently, Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead, originate in literature, both have adventure game series created by Telltale Games, and both exemplify this line of thinking. They each delight in making their fanbases miserable. In the books (graphic novels) and on the television shows, your favorite families are torn apart and scattered across the world, and your favorite characters are murdered, sometimes seemingly on a whim.
For a game that draws on the essence of a 80s or 90s horror flick, it takes many of the identifying tropes and defenestrates them.
The beauty of The Witness is that the puzzles transcend language itself. They pull you through a broad range of emotions – anguish, despair, desperation – but, once you finally solve that seemingly impossible puzzle, you can raise your fists in the air, victorious, and maybe taunt the game a little bit.
It's recommend that you level up your survivor skill tree to 12 before beginning expansion – with good reason. The infected roam freely in the pastures, your enemies have guns, and there are fewer places to hide. I ignored this recommendation and started with a survival level of 5. It's not impossible to start the story this way, but be prepared to die. A lot.
Set in a rural post-societal America, The Flame in the Flood is one part Noah's Ark, one part Oregon Trail, and two parts grit and determination.
Do you want to know what Superhot is? It's pure mind-control and a little bit of the ol' ultra-violence packaged into an addictive game mechanic. It's, well, super-hot.
Using various narrative and visual devices, The Town of Light serves as an interactive historical textbook. With roughly 2-3 hours of gameplay, it covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, yet its execution seems to cloud its intention.
Combing simple, carefully crafted scenery as the base to hide all its secrets, this game uses its horror undertones to give every puzzle a sinister touch and to literally open doors that tell you nothing about where you are going next.
Instead of headbanging gleefully as I progressed from level to level, I found myself banging my head on my keyboard.
It could be my own fault for not preparing well enough, or maybe I’m an awful player, but I would not recommend – at all – playing through Automatron at level 15.
The series is known for its humor and weaponry and both are used to great effect here. Qwark and his sidekicks, along with the enemies, all have fun personalities amplified by clever writing and excellent voice performances. Though the game relies heavily on combat along with its platforming, it's a family friendly game in both action and character presentation.
It was my mistake; I followed a path that I was sure would help the rebellion's cause by abandoning my friend Lapino and, instead, going on a quest to find the ultimate weapon to defeat the Empire. Things didn't go as planned, and I accidentally destroyed the entire world. But then I was alive again.
P.O.L.L.E.N makes use of its subtle, narrative details masterfully, seamlessly integrating them into the alternate, sci-fi world. It’s not enough to find a couple of cassette tapes and charge through to the end. From post-it notes on white boards, to TIME Magazines, to personal drawings tucked away in a character’s closet, every detail is carefully selected to bring depth to the characters and do some world-building in the process
I’m not the most strategically-minded person, but a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of gal. I just want to run in, guns blazing, and figure it out from there. Tutorials? Who has time for that? Offworld Trading Company said I did, and they not only sat me down and made me pay attention, but they did it in a way that didn’t leave me confused at the end.
DOOM 2016, whether you call it an expansion of existing lore or a rebooting of the story for a modern audience, is a good game. It's not great though, as the run-and-gun pace and gore can only sustain gameplay for so long in a limited setting. It makes up for some of the repetitiveness, however, by providing fast and often tense battles that, even on the PS4, maintain a mostly high framerate.
The radioactive fog gives Far Harbor a different feel from the Commonwealth. The mood is too sinister to just call it gloomy. While the island is infested with new mutants, there is no need for one to hide in every dark shadow when the fog will slowly poison you to death.
Homefront: The Revolution's development history is a troubled one, filled with financial issues, switching of studios, and team shake-ups. Considering this was a sequel already built on a faulty foundation, the signs did not bode well for this entry in the series. And indeed, the end product isn't a good one. The trouble with it is that it's not an entirely bad one either. For all the numerous faults, both on the creative and technical side, there's a good game hiding somewhere inside; a good game that simply can't overcome all the negatives weighing it down.
35MM might start off at a slow pace – a really slow pace – but under-the-radar character and story development, and unsettling action sequences build to a climactic revelation that will make you feel sorry for even thinking about not finishing the game.