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Modern board game design greatly de-emphasises the importance of dice rolls in favour of systems that are more predictable and strategic, and I've got to say that I much prefer this brave new world of strategy over luck that we have in our board games now.
My overwhelming experience over the entire course of Grumpy Reaper is that it's pleasant as a casual puzzle game.
This game simply drips with atmosphere in a world that manages to transition from one darkly beautiful sight to the next.
The lack of overall options and content creates a shallow feeling that EA Sports UFC 2 can never quite shake. It is more pronounced in the career mode, where there was perhaps the greatest opportunity to do something interesting with the source material, but outside of the original tournament the game never shows much personality in that mode. The same can be true of the other modes as well.
In the end, Trackmania: Turbo is a beautiful game that tries to set itself apart from the pack. It's definitely better than most, and it's clear that Nadeo have become rather accustomed to making these games. As the first TrackMania to make its way onto the PlayStation 4, I do recommend it if it is your genre of choice. But note that, thanks to the uninteresting campaign track designs, how long the game can hold your attention for is definitely proportionate to how much time you might be willing to pour into the track editor.
There are those that enjoy it for its quirkiness and originality, and then there are those that simply find it too different to really resonate. For my part I really appreciate what Idea Factory has achieved with this game, and, while the theme is quite dark, it’s presented in that same bright and cheerful, satirical space that we’re so used to with this developer/ publisher that it’s charming and irreverent. It’s always nice to play games like that.
More often than not, I enjoyed my time with Kingdom Wars 2: Battles. It has some rough edges and there is clearly room to improve, but what is there has more innovation than the first hour or two with the title might suggest and I found myself having more fun with it than I have with most other RTS games of late.
This game has been more meaningful to me and had a greater emotional impact on me than any game I've played since Nier itself, and as far as I'm concerned that means it's as close to perfection as games can get.
Sheltered is like a premium version of Fallout Shelter, and it's a far more thematically compelling proposition. I love that it makes you be quite ruthless in your efforts to keep your family alive, but then allows you to feel awful when they die. It's less humanising than The War of Mine, which is the most readily comparable game out there at the moment, but it's intense for its own, valuable, reasons.
At first glance, Polaris Sector does not look like anything terribly new or innovative. While it does not reinvent the proverbial strategy genre wheel, credit is due for some of the more innovative systems and balanced, clean UI. If you like to design and manage complex civilisations and cities, this title's probably going to leave you wanting just a little more.
Casey Powell Lacrosse 16 scores high in all categories, with thousands of customisation combinations available for both the players and the rules/difficulty, crisp graphics that I imagine represent the actual locales quite accurately, and the feelings of excitement and competitiveness that linger long after one puts the controller down.
The solution is always obvious, and never elaborate enough to be truly entertaining. In other words it’s pointless busywork.
What’s left is a competent, but wholly remarkable and uninteresting hack-and-slask JRPG. There’s plenty of loot to reward the grind if you can handle how overwhelmingly generic the experience is, but, I wasn’t really going in for loot. I wanted a game that was like Muramasa: The Demon Blade; a game that would take the aesthetics of classical Japan and really do something with it. Instead, Sadame proves itself to be vapid and uninspired in the extreme, and so very disappointing as a result.
It’s irredeemable.
Being based on a novel I was hoping for a better standard of story and in being short at only around nine hours, Trulon is also far shorter than I went in expecting for a JRPG. This doesn't make the game bad. I did enjoy the characters and the battles at first, and it is still an enjoyable Sunday afternoon game. I just can't help but think this one could have been more.
It lacks the amount of narrative control over the story that Mass Effect provides, but in most other respects The Division accomplishes the things it sets out to do. It might not be the textbook definition of fun, but the bleak world is interesting, the combat is engaging and I found progression rewarding. That is a recipe for success despite a few other smaller warts along the way.
For a game that is 13 years old, it's surprising how well the game holds up today. The game is enjoyable as the strategy is solid. It's a little strange that NIS would decide to bring this game to PC ahead of its more complex (and modern) successors, since these games don't generally rely on the knowledge of previous titles to enjoy them, but nonetheless Disgaea remains a very worth tactics JRPG indeed.
Senran Kagura: Estival Versus is great fun, combining the rawest of Japanese-style raunch humour with a tight and mechanically sound combat system. Frankly, I don't think there's much else the developer could have done to nail the brief on what this game set out to achieve, and the PlayStation 4 has a new king of exploitation entertainment on it.
If you're keen for one of the suspenseful thrillers manageable with just images and text, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc comes highly recommended. The story stands alongside any mystery film or novel, and the writing lets you understand and even befriend the characters before you're forced to see them pushed to their psychological limit.
Lacrosse 16 captures the soul of the sport. In the moment-to-moment play this is a fast, energetic, entertaining sport and that is exactly what Big Ant have offered in its take on it.