Gamepur's Reviews
Elden Ring is just about everything that a player could want from a Soulsborne game with the scale turned up to 11. The areas in between dungeons, NPCs, and monsters all feel perfectly natural for the world, and allow FromSoftware environmental storytelling to shine, something that many open-world games fail at. When you are deep in the bowels of a castle or dungeon, you realize that FromSoftware’s excellent level design is still alive and well.
Monark constantly strains within the confines of expectation, unable to push its ambitions through.
While the difficult combat might not be for everyone, fans of open-world RPGs will fall in love with both the world and the story of Horizon Forbidden West. Despite some middling side-content, Horizon still holds its own against every other open-world game on the market.
The multiplayer offering is equally broken, with the same gameplay mechanics married to a lack of variety and strategy. Its maps are varied, strategic, or fun enough to be replayed and its take on existing or new game modes for the genre are half-baked. Every fun moment CrossfireX offers is squandered by a couple of cons.
The maps and subsequent warfare takes place on a massive scale, and players will lose entire days while attempting to piece together fragments of The Old World. Total War: Warhammer 3 is immersive, bloody fun that can be fully realized in fantasy form without drawing too close to the woes of actual warfare.
While Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires didn’t blow us away by doing something fresh with the franchise, that’s never been the point with Musou titles. The game gives you more of what you want: colossal battles in which you regularly rack up thousands of kills and see epic rivalries between great leaders emerge and die before your eyes.
SNK used to be a dim segment of the fighting game community during the PS3/Xbox 360 era, but The King of Fighters XV shines bright on modern systems with stellar graphics and fighting that can appeal to anyone, not just the hardcore. This game firmly cements SNK’s place in the genre once again after two successful titles before it.
with a fun mechanic at its core, harking back to the golden age of 2D platformers while giving the model a fresh coat of paint with its stylish pixel art. The music was the first thing I loved about it, but thankfully it’s more than just that: Grapple Dog certainly has style, but it’s got the substance to back it up too.
Sifu is a complex, albeit rewarding action game that packs one mean punch. It’s a little too hard for its own good at times, but taking the time to overcome its challenges can be pretty fulfilling. That said, the game is grossly drenched in exoticism, which kind of puts a damper on things.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a frantic game about violence and tension. The most defining moment for its gameplay is running away in fear from a larger Alpha Pokémon, whilst you haphazardly toss Pokéballs at smaller, unsuspecting Pokémon in your path. Despite the grind, I felt motivated to catch these mons, rather than dreading random encounters like in previous games.
OlliOlli World is everything a great skating game should be. It merges tight controls with a world you’ll want to explore and adds in an infinitely-listenable soundtrack and soothing visuals. The story might not blow you out of the water, but it doesn’t have to when the skating is this good. If you’re a fan of the sport or just like good action games, this is a must-play.
To some degree, this feels like an early access game in everything but the release schedule and pricing. It has its core down. It knows exactly what it wants to be. However, everything around that needs more polish before it’s ready for primetime. So, even though I didn’t really like my time with the game, I guess I believe in Dying Light 2? I truly think I’ll look back in a year or two — when memories have faded — and think past me was dead wrong for giving it such a low score.
Rainbow Six Extraction players have themselves mutated since the game’s launch. It gives us hope that those still playing understand the game much better than everyone did on release day. This isn’t a game you can pick up and run into as you would Call of Duty. It demands your respect, and in return, it respects your time. If you put in the effort to sneak through a mission, save your allies, and extract alive, you’ll reap the rewards.
Windjammers 2 is a curious case — it’s inviting to all players with its easy concept, but becomes a steep rabbit hole of skill creep as you discover its ins and outs.
Early in 2022, Nobody Saves the World seems like a must-play and the perfect evolution of nearly every idea Drinkbox Studio has developed since its founding more than a decade ago.
If it sounds like I am hard on Halo Infinite’s campaign, it is because I am. I expected a lot from 343 Industries and Microsoft, and I am left feeling somewhat disappointed. With the multiplayer being spun off into a free-to-play standalone with its own monetization, we are now paying full price for this campaign, and it doesn’t live up to the price tag. Yes, the actual gameplay is superb, but that alone cannot carry an entire campaign.
Influences from other games are quite present in Solar Ash — Tony Hawk's line-following, Super Mario Galaxy's wraparound camera, Shadow of the Colossus's massive bosses. While those together may seem incongruous, they come together to make it an exciting, fast-paced platformer that gives you the tools to move smoothly and complete the challenges before you. It's so satisfying to nail those obstacle courses, clear anomalies, and topple skyscraping Remnants. The roller coaster of Solar Ash is well worth riding.
Battlefield 2042 is an unpolished buggy mess that has kept my attention for days. It has its fair share of quirks, bugs, and performance issues that need to be fixed, but it really presents the player with something that can’t be found anywhere else in the FPS market. There’s nothing like loading into a game with 63 teammates as infantry, jets, tanks, helicopters all push the same objectives.
Ironically, despite trying to plow a very different furrow to the base game, that same rule applies to the Vaas: Insanity DLC that many folks use for Far Cry games in general. If you enjoy the combat then you will enjoy this. While it is interesting to see Far Cry explored through the lens of a roguelike, it all adds up to little more than a few hours of reasonably repetitive entertainment which is unlikely to bring any new players into the Far Cry fold.
Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t stray away from the successful roads that have been paved in past years. The fifth title of the Forza Horizon series offers an incredible amount of depth, and its gameplay finds the right balance between simulation and just pure fun.