VG247's Reviews
Doom The Dark Ages will get your blood pressure up. It will test your reflexes, your problem-solving skills, your aim, and your ability to solve problems on the fly. It’ll probably test your patience a little, too, when the chugging, uninspired, padded-out sections in the middle start to wear a bit thin.
The original Oblivion’s a great game, and this remaster’s a good re-packaging of it. It’s an excuse to fire up an Elder Scrolls title that doesn’t feel a million miles from contemporary yet again, but I’m still not sure we needed one.
They say art is all about eliciting an emotional reaction; if you can do that, all the effort expended in creating it was worth it. I think Clair Obscur does that with aplomb. If you have ever loved role-playing games, ever, you owe it to yourself to play this. It has the capacity to touch you.
Promise Mascot Agency’s a good time. Uniquely charming enough that it doesn’t fall into the trap of being as dry as Michi’s ideal Saturday night, but with enough rough edges that it’d need to work on itself a bit before it could run for mayor of whichever cursed town all of the truly great games inhabit.
Khazan is the perfect example of a game that's more than its individual components. The game does re-use a lot, but the gooey core of the game is so engaging, so fun, that you don't really care.
It reminded me a lot of The Chinese Room’s Still Wakes the Deep in this way - well-crafted, unquestionably good fun, but with a story that feels like it’s probably the weakest part of the thing, either because it’s leaning a bit too heavily on genre tropes or holding back from actually committing to delivering on the elements that could go beyond that.
I’m actually at the point where I’m enjoying finding little problems with the game, because - most of the time - I know that means there’ll be something interesting on the other end of it. That is high praise for any work of art, but in a video game… it really feels like something special.
Split Fiction, just like Hazelight's projects before it, will not only have you belly-laughing throughout the experience, reminiscing about games, movies and literature the game regularly reminds you of, but it’ll also tug at your heartstrings and have you wiping tears from your eyes.
As ever with Life is Strange, the vibes of this game are perfectly suited to the story it sets out to tell — even if the details get muddled sometimes.
This is not only a great Dynasty Warriors game, but also a nice chance for historically-curious folks to hop on board.
The best quests, narrative moments, the funniest moments, and best side characters can be found here. There's one Polish guy who I guarantee will steal the hearts of thousands. Please hang in there. There is gold buried in this game, and it's not even that hard to prospect out.
If you’ve the acquired taste for RPGs that want to bully you, humiliate you, and laugh at the fact you call yourself a gaming masochist (we're not judging), SMT5 Vengeance is for you.
It’s incredibly grounded, and something I wish we would see more of in sci-fi. Citizen Sleeper’s world belongs to its junkyard scavengers, grubby engineers, repair technicians, cargo haulers, and everyone else on this ramshackle asteroid belt.
If you’re looking to delve into a supernatural story laden with satisfying, tactile puzzles, then Fear the Spotlight is a grand way to spend four to five hours of your time this autumn. Though, if you were hoping for something that would keep you on your toes and have you losing sleep, you might be better off waiting for the other titles that publisher, Blumhouse Games, has up its sleeve.
I found myself enraptured by this game. Hooked on its combat-cum-strategy and constantly awed by the sights I saw, entertained by the steady flow of upgrades and the structure of the mission layouts. It broadened my horizons a little bit, if a game can do that. That can't be a bad thing, can it?
In the end, it all works - it’s just very different. The subtle whiff of compromise in order to launch the game far and wide is there - but compromise is just fine if the end result works. It does.
The Star Wars galaxy absolutely evokes the same sense of wonder, and has been recreated with just as much love and care here. Mos Eisley is no less real in the public consciousness than Rome in the time of the Caesars. At once familiar, but widely open to interpretation. And probably just as dangerous.
The cliche with EA Sports games is that they’re always an iterative step. But, outside of the mid-console generation graphical similarity, there’s a lot that EA Sports FC 25 does which isn’t iterative. The big changes brought about by FC IQ, Cranium and Rush make for an interesting gameplay refresh which gives new impetus to both competitive online modes and long-underserved offline careers.
Black Ops 6 isn't just a strong new entry in a massive franchise that feels like going to Burger King and getting exactly what you ordered. It's the most confident Call of Duty has been in years, with both Raven and Treyarch taking a few well-calculated chances where they could afford to do so, and trimming the fat off the core 'Twitch FPS' experience that regular customers come for year after year.
It’s a colourful, accessible epic that pushes its console to the limit, with all of the mechanical depth and invention, artistic design, whimsy, and spirit of adventure that you expect from a first-party Nintendo adventure.