Kill Screen
HomepageKill Screen's Reviews
[Y]et the most frustrating thing about Heroes is that the problem it addresses doesn't even need to be solved. Zelda's solitariness isn't lonely. It's directly in line with the tradition of the epic (if somewhat scaled back for our postmodern skepticism of metanarrative).
Quote not yet available
Still, glorious though Anno 2205's cityscapes may be, a game that justifies the banality of numerical mechanics through visual sensation alone is inevitably one that provokes the question of whether or not it needed to exist at all. From this respect, Anno 2205 might have more in common with Photoshop or Illustrator than with its predecessors; for me, its most compelling purpose wasn't doing something, but making something. Whether or not that makes for a fulfilling experience is an open question; that Anno 2205 could be so much more is not.
These are their choices more than yours. One could argue that there's inconsistency between the player's ability to mold a protagonist of her own making and the game's propensity for predetermined resolutions, but at the very least the rocky relationship between the two adds an element of uncertainty to the equation that aligns quite nicely with the themes of a television show notorious for shockingly killing off main characters.
More isn't bad just for its faults and repetitions. It's worse than that: Bloodborne was pure—and The Old Hunters dilutes it.
After a few hundred times, even the most fantastic version of blowing something up gets tiring. It's an appealing action because it isn't complicated, but the least complicated thrills become banal far more quickly than complex ones. Just Cause 3 is engaging because it gets the first half of this so fully.
For all its polish, it brand-name polish, it lacks that creative energy found in building battles from faded toys and dumb ideas. Battlefront imposes limits and gates on an expansive universe, reigning in instead of expanding the possible ways to become part of that world. As such, the game remains mercenary in its goal of selling an experience solely on those feelings we have about that galaxy far, far away. Instead of offering a chance to inhabit that space, Battlefront only shows us Star Wars at a distance, perfectly preserved in small pocket dioramas tucked away behind the rose-tinted glass of a toy shop window.
Mini Metro submerges its formulae to create a space for more organic play. Like a city that leaves its streets to pedestrians, pushing highways underground and elevating trains overhead, the game seeks to avoid the anxious hustle of a traditional simulation by reducing clutter and keeping things at a more intimate, human level.
Fallout 4 does one thing so well that you can mostly forgive, if not ignore, its awkward treatment of the player character. Bethesda's team creates maps that are a joy to explore.
"Polarized" is otherwise so linearly story-driven that the puzzle play of its dream sequence feels a little out of place.
Gavin Volure, played by Steve Martin on 30 Rock, once called Toronto "New York without all the stuff." Lovely Weather is Animal Crossing without all the stuff.
Void & Meddler is a headgame, like a lot of good cyberpunk. What is actually happening to Fyn? What is real and what is not real? Is her experience one long narrative of a night of suicidal ideation? So little is revealed in this first chapter that it's difficult to say. And in its stubborn refusal to adhere to convention or basic narrative, Void & Meddler lags significantly.
Despite relative improvements in presentation, WWE 2K16 ultimately makes a crucial mistake when it comes to understanding professional wrestling: the fiction is a lot more fun than the reality.
The defining characteristic of Yoshi's Woolly World—teed off by that alliteration in the title—is its aesthetic: yarn and glue. That woolliness bridges the gap between stereotyped gifts from grandma and the twee squeak most every Etsy storefront seems to be trying to wring out of you. This game is bright, soft, fuzzy, and unabashedly so.
My eightsix hovered between control and chaos, ready to spin out on every oversteer. The atmosphere was there, the game was there, the history was there, in that moment. Yet in Need for Speed the handling, the fun, the art, all of this, they are so stacked under layer after layer of meaninglessness, multi-faceted surfaces that gesture at everything and deliver nothing.
I have played a lot of Destiny with friends and with randomly assigned partners, but it's sort of like being on a car ride together. Halo 5, on the other hand, is full of tense moments of planning and frustration and awe. The same multiplayer mode played in the same environment will never feel the same twice. Which begs the question: If a Halo Moment occurs and a friend isn't there to tell about it, did it happen?
[A]s the player spirals towards the haunted house, and continues spiraling downwards ever afterwards, the sheer weight of The Park's curdled hope and joy denies the optimistic ending of its double from down under: in the end, grief and loss cannot be grappled with. Sometimes it cannot be withstood. The monsters win, the humans lose, and the uneasy fact is that both those creatures are the same person.
By the end I questioned the very choice to play; participating in the game felt like consenting to the retraumatization of a vulnerable young person about whom I genuinely cared.
The titular vermin of Vermintide may come in a horde, but they're all unique, in their weird, chittering way. It almost makes me feel bad about the carnage I've spent the last ten hours dealing out to them. Then again, there will always be more.
It's worth enduring because what's most impressive about the game is how different it really is. Plenty of puzzles or action games make great use of genre tropes that already exist, honing their own specific play-styles, but Nova-111 wants to skip all that and teach its players new ways to think about time and turns.