Digital Chumps
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Tt Games did a wonderful job with bringing the world of Harry Potter to life through the LEGO Harry Potter Collection and remastering the experience onto the PlayStation 4. The games certainly show their age, but they’re still a blast, especially if you’re a Harry Potter fanatic.
PlayStation 4 owners can now experience one of the best Tomb Raider adventures ever made. Plus, they get some worthwhile content to boot. Not a bad deal for a year’s wait.
Weeping Doll is a brief presentation of experiments that do not work in virtual reality. Its theme is neither frightening nor coherent, its puzzles are mundane and straightforward, player movement is disorienting and inelegant, and its visual aesthetic imitates the vision of a person with a dangerous blood alcohol concentration. Weeping Doll blunders its format worse than Digital Pictures' full-motion video projects miscalculated the Sega CD.
Windlands' swinging and soaring facilitates a manic relationship between serenity and stress. It's either a holiday bounding across lush vistas or a white-knuckled, vertigo-inducing parkour utopia. Windlands isn't terribly inventive, however, its considerable accessibility options and presence inside virtual reality's honeymoon do well to suppress effective objections.
With Dark Souls' formidable reputation undisputed, other characteristics slip into transparency. Humor, long rumbling under the surface, receives a more stable focus in Ashes of Ariandel. Expectations are bent, defied, and destroyed in ways that are designed to simultaneously humiliate and impress series veterans. After five games and six pieces of downloadable content, it's hard to imagine a more suitable approach.
Batman: Return to Arkham is a good collection that has considerable upgrades in a lot of areas, especially with DLC and other nice value add-ons. It does fall short a bit with graphical issues and frame rate, but nothing that would detour you from playing both games again on the PS4. The two original games are still some of the best adventures out there and worth any sort of graphical trouble, especially for those who have never tried them.
PlayStation VR Worlds is intended to raise belief in its accompanying hardware. And it does; once for each of its five technical showpieces. Afterward that high is only reached through a vicarious transfer from newcomers, positioning VR Worlds' potential as a dramatic flash instead of an imposing statement.
Pixel Gear seeks enrichment from the path of least resistance. Its virtual shooting gallery is adequate enough to qualify as a game, but its vacant ambition prohibits sustained engagement or durability. The bare minimum is a discouraging target. Pixel Gear's gunplay is not capable of aiming any higher.
DICE made a perfect game with Battlefield 1. It has a competent campaign that properly does justice to The Great War and a deep, fun multiplayer experience that reminds us why Battlefield does it better than anyone on a massive scale.
Ace Banana demonstrates that virtual reality experiences can be as creatively bankrupt and technically destitute as the most cynically conceived mobile games. It's an untended facsimile of wave-based survival that specializes in unreliable control, dubious assembly, and the induction of nausea. If critics are concerned that virtual reality may be a fleeting gimmick then Ace Banana is their core example.
Competent virtual reality creates a profound shift in the way games immerse players. Past the novelty, however, comes the demand to have a material effect on the virtual world. Being a witness is fine, but becoming a participant is better. Job Simulator, perhaps more than any other PlayStation VR launch title, neither dwells in abstracts nor resides in stasis. Its cartoony confines are genuine, and player agency, however modest, feels authentic.
Virtual reality is an apt home for Battlezone's class of tank busting pandemonium. Appropriating its arcade doctrine, filtering it through 36 years, and then projecting it as a full-priced product may have been a reach. As an experience, Battlezone VR is neatly matched to its hardware. As a game, however, it doesn't (yet) have quite enough firepower to oppose any presumed opposition.
When Arkham VR works, I am Batman breathing in the ambience of Gotham City. When it fails, I am a human being in my basement struggling to convince suspicious technology to behave correctly. This creates a curious dichotomy, one that actively embraces virtual reality's capability to magically transform the world while also bearing the burden of hardware in its infancy. Whether or not Arkham VR can find balance may come down to a set of personal preferences and, to a certain extent, luck.
WWE 2K17 has clear focus with what makes for a good wrestling experience. The visuals, the options for gameplay and the beautiful atmosphere of the game make this wrestling title worth your time. The controls do bring the gameplay down a bit, though, as they feel stiff and linear for the most part. Regardless, the rest of the game shows that Yuke’s and Visual Concepts has certainly started to point this series in the right direction.
SuperHyperCube leverages virtual reality as a space for three dimensional thinking. It may be the most straightforward game of PlayStation VR's launch, but its intelligible nature makes it no less effective at creating panic. SuperHyperCube is fast, smooth, and, right now, an ideal entry point for virtual reality gaming.
Thumper wraps a trip through spectral hell, the sensation of travelling down an interminable barrel of a gun, and a pounding rhythm game into an articulate package. It condenses to a sensory rampage that feels as concerned with survival as it is as consumed by perfection. Hitting notes on highway isn't a new concept, but performing it under the threat of phantasmal horror, and somehow empowering progress, positions Thumper as a modern apex.
Chase is a very brief but also really enjoyable game that is worth picking up.
Gearbox did a fine job here and the new goodies and content are a huge plus. I do wish the other content from the Megaton Edition were here, but this is still a great addition to your digital library.
An overall solid sequel and a great game, with some evolutionary game design from previous titles in the series that may or may not appeal to you.
The death of the Dreamcast. The birth of PlayStation VR. Rez's singular orbit stays outside of a mercurial industry and remains as powerful and as relevant as it was fifteen years ago. By its architecture and through its nature, there isn't a time when Rez won't be beautiful. PlayStation VR, as it happens now, is the best way to experience it in 2016.