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The game has an intriguing premise and I want to believe the developers had some intelligent ideas behind what they're doing, but between the painfully shallow strategy, the laboured (via translation) writing, the mundane, uninspired presentation and the shonky interface and UX, there was nowhere left for me to go to find something I admired about this game.
I can’t give it much praise at all – Tiny Racer is a bad game.
Fairy Tail is pure comfort food for people who, like me, count the JRPG as the favourite genre.
In some ways, Destroy All Humans! shows its age, being a remake of a game that's now 15 years old, in a genre that's grown a lot in those years. But it's also got a sense of humour and parody of American life that feels more relevant today than when the original game first came out.
I had a lot of enjoyment with Hotel Sowls, which lasted for its entire run time and never overstayed its welcome. Its one of those games which cares about quality over quantity, and the control over tone and mood which Studio Sott exhibits is genuinely admirable. This game goes highly recommended to the inquisitive, the curious, and those for whom your standard video game characters and settings are proving just a tad predictable. You won’t have any idea what’s up ahead in this hotel.
Not everyone will be able to stomach Carrion's atmosphere and gleeful violence. But those that can will find an experience that is beautiful in being so grotesque.
There's nothing else quite like Rock of Ages out there. It's a mesh of things that shouldn't work together, and that's why I suspect no one else has tried to replicate the mad genius of ACE Team's work.
From the gentle subversion of the nature of progress in roguelikes, to the razor-focus on a sweet, paternal-style relationship between a robot and his ward, told with minimalistic elegance, Void Terrarium is a mature, different, and interesting take on the genre.
TroubleDays is fine, all said. It’s a fairly brief romance visual novel with a really gorgeous character model and pinup-worthy key art. Narrative and characterisation is all over the place in the attempted service of humour, and the cheap localisation is distracting at times, but let’s face it, if you’re going to play TroubleDays it’s for one particular reason and, lack of nudity aside, you’re not going to be disappointed in what you get back out of it.
A wild misfire with every narrative element it attempts, and it boils down to this: Sucker Punch decided to do a historical epic inspired by Kurosawa… and produced something that fails as both history and as a pastiche of Kurosawa.
I feel that there will be a discussion about that ring-based combat system and some of the world design elements, but through it all, I do think that most people will simply love the deadpan, dry, droll and refreshing humour, and a general return to form for Paper Mario at what it does best.
People who come to it looking for a quality SHMUP are going to be disappointed. It's functional, but that's really not the point. The point is the fan service and pin-up aesthetic, and while Waifu Uncovered is limited there, as a cut-price hour or two of fun, as someone who enjoys anime and fan service, I had more fun with this than I should probably admit in public.
What is available here is a fun game, and I certainly didn’t hate the time I spent with it. But it could also have been so much more.
It’s a crowd-pleaser, a game which welcomes you to have it your own way, focus on the things you enjoy, and leave a play session feeling good. It is a heavenly JRPG – one which has the love and insight to make the necessary changes and improvements to the formula, while keeping the strange idiosyncrasies which make the genre what it is.
This year's edition might be iterative on the track, but the off-track improvements show that Codemasters hasn't yet run out of ideas yet either.
While Deadly Premonition 2 is not for everyone (and potentially offensive to some), games as an art form are better off having works like this to exist in parallel to mainstream entertainment.
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is is the most charmingly twee thing on the Nintendo Switch. It is simple, clean, bright, colourful, wholesome, sweet, and, for people that remember the original on the Game Boy Advance, nostalgic.
Horror is an intensely difficult genre to get right. You need to draw players in and immerse them in the experience to the point that they have an emotional connection to the game, and then hit them with things that are not just grotesque, but also deeply unsettling. Horror needs to engage the brain as it engages the more visceral reactions, and that's very hard to do. Infliction: Extended Cut doesn't get there. It's simply too pedestrian and rote to really work.
All of this puts me in a difficult spot with Assetto Corsa Competizione. On the one hand, it’s my favourite racing experience, hands down. It just handles beautifully. On the other hand, from features to gameplay modes and with regards to almost everything that doesn’t specifically involve racing, Competizione is substantially behind its peers, making this a racing experience that only the most hardcore of hardcore racing fans will get much out of.
There's still a lot to appreciate about this one, and it's wrapped up in such a lovely package that, if nothing else, it makes for an excellent lazy Sunday afternoon experience.