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5 (4) 4 (3) 3 (7) 2 (2) 1 (0) 3.6 starsAverage score of 16 user reviews
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Damn Londoners 0
Frostpunk mixes survival and city building genres with a steampunk imagining of the late 1800s during the onset of an ice age. You are ‘The Captain’ of a refugee expedition that has fled London to resettle in the extreme north and have made your stand against the cold at the site of a large coal-fired heat generator; a heat source that becomes the hub and focus of your attempts to survive.The starting population is small, and you must make choices about how you will use your people t...
2 out of 2 found this review helpful. -
digital katabasis 0
Set in a cyberpunk imagining of Berlin in 2048, State of Mind is a story-driven 3rd person adventure game with a series of mildly challenging puzzle elements that punctuate the narrative flow.The protagonist is Richard Nolan, a somewhat narcissistic and once award-winning investigative journalist whose professional and personal circumstance has taken a turn for the worse in recent times. Nolan also recently experienced a serious car accident, with the primary impact to him being an apparent loss...
2 out of 2 found this review helpful. -
Impressive commitment to historical, thematic, and environmental detail. Let down a little by stability. 2
Kingdom Come Deliverance (KCD) is a huge open world RPG with a lengthy and exceptionally well written narrative, a commitment to historical detail and themes, and very well realized characters.rhapsodic landscapesSet in 1403 Bohemia (to the west of modern day Czech Republic), KCD’s player character is Henry, a blacksmith’s son who begins his life in the village of Skalitz. Under the liege lordship of minor noble, Sir Radzig Koblya, the village of Skalitz is primarily a silver mining ...
4 out of 4 found this review helpful. -
Watch the (wonderful) anime instead. 0
Steins; Gate is 95% a visual novel. That's to say that player interaction with it is overwhelmingly limited to just clicking the mouse to move on to the next line of written dialogue. The remaining 5% of the experience might be considered as game play but only in the most simplistic terms.Having already watched the full anime series, I can say that Steins; Gate the video game follows the narrative of the anime very closely for the vast majority of the game.And, as was the case with the anime, bo...
2 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
Fascinating fictional history let down by poor pacing in mid and late game 0
As was the case with its predecessors, Mafia 3 wants to tell you a story of epic and grandiose proportions while also setting the game in an open game world environment not dissimilar in layout and scale to titles from the GTA and Saint’s Row franchises. Unlike them however, Mafia 3 doesn’t revel in wacky themes and satire, nor does it encourage sandbox gameplay. If anything it is most reminiscent of Ubisoft titles like Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in terms of overa...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
Would have worked better as a short film 0
The first thing that must be said to anyone considering purchasing the The Bunker is that it is a very short adventure FMV "game". If played through slowly and methodically it can be stretched out to a three-hour experience and I use the word 'experience' because in all honesty The Bunker barely qualifies as a game in the typical mechanical sense. Game play (such as it is) is limited to clicking a button to proceed from room to room; hunting for interact-able objects on static backgrounds, and Q...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
Ambitious and inconsistent attempt at epic sci fi RPG draws from many previous games but improves on none of them 2
Imagine KOTOR with its third person view and three party member group dynamic (except with a bigger game world and without the Star Wars IP)Imagine the sci-fi stylings of Mass Effect (except without the great Bioware characters and intricate storytelling).Imagine the Witcher 3 and its slightly sluggish and animation-prioritized brawling combat.Where the circles of this Venn diagram overlap, The Technomancer exists.That doesn't mean that this game is as good as any of those titles.Categorically i...
3 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
Inconsistent and ultimately disappointing 0
Quantum Break is slightly broken. It isn’t a mess. It isn’t unplayable. The game play is entirely serviceable and it functions without bugs. When I say is ‘slightly’ broken, I mean that Quantum Break is not a synchronized product. The various parts that have been put together to make ‘Quantum Break’ the video game/tv experience individually range between 'below average' to 'good' but collectively they do not fulfill the potential or ambition that is otherwise ...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
In the world of Syndicate, your chip is worth more than your life 0
I first played this when it was released on Xbox 360 back in 2012. I remember it being a solid four star kind of game but as I had also recently played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, my expectations going into Syndicate (2012) were heavily influenced by the experience I'd had with DX:HR and were not fully met as a result.But I don't want to be too down on Syndicate because there's a lot about it that I really like. On the game play side of things, there's some really cool systems in the single playe...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
Unexpected delight of a game. Looks like Policenauts but couldn't be more different in tone. 3
There's a polar bear called Pat in this gameHideo Kojima’s ‘Snatcher’ and ‘Policenauts’ video games were released on multiple platforms in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. They respectively drew from Cyberpunk and Sci Fi genres and told interactive cinematic stories from a first person perspective in a mostly anime art style.In terms of its visual presentation and game play structure, Read Only Memories is extremely reminiscent of these titles but this is where...
10 out of 10 found this review helpful. -
Kojima's treatise on space exploration, set inside a Lethal Weapon movie (with Gundams) 1
Policenauts came from the same mind that brought the widely known Metal Gear Solid series. However, it was never released outside of Kojima's native Japan and until 2009's English language patch it wasn't really an accessible proposition for western gamers.At its core, Policenauts is a detective story that seems to draw inspiration from an unlikely combination of cinematic influences and genres. For instance, the game starts with a film noir cyberpunk setting that immediately screams ‘Blad...
3 out of 4 found this review helpful. -
Deus Ex, DeuEx, DeEx, DEX 1
It’s May 2015 and 15 years ago next month, Deus Ex was released.Dex is a game that been in beta for quite a some time, finally released earlier this month and is, in both name and in scope, a compressed version of Deus Ex.Specifically, much like Deus Ex, Dex is a cyberpunk themed RPG set in a dystopic near-future city where the player character finds themselves caught up in a fight between oppressive authoritarian forces and an underground resistance movement. There are installable body mo...
4 out of 4 found this review helpful. -
Ethan Carter and Blackwell Legacy did it better 0
Murdered: Soul Suspect is neither a ground-breaking nor is it a stand-out experience with other games like the Vanishing of Ethan Carter and the Blackwell Legacy working to the same premise while looking and playing better. I paid £10 ($15) for this, which is the absolute maximum anyone should really pay for this game. Had I paid full price at release then I would have felt robbed.The best things that can be said about Murdered: Soul Suspect, are that the characterization of the lead chara...
2 out of 2 found this review helpful. -
You bloody ripper! 0
Even if it can look a bit intimidating to those who have never had the sport explained to them, cricket really isn’t all that hard a game to understand on a basic level. Many cricket video games in the past have successfully simulated the sport, albeit in a correspondingly simplified and basic way.The Brian Lara games were known for being relatively accessible and fun to play but too easy to master. More recently, International Cricket 2010 made a big step forward and for several years has...
5 out of 5 found this review helpful. -
Visually impressive but completely lacks heart. 0
For a game that leaves such a weak impression overall, there are a surprisingly large number of individual components that are impressive in this game. Most notably, the combat depth and variety is pretty excellent and the ‘pawn’ system really allows you to complement attack strategies between player and NPC(s) in a way that surpasses other games in the genre (with perhaps the exception of Dragon Age).The art style is uninspiring but the environment design is highly competent with a ...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
less than the sum of its parts 0
This review was written after my second stab at getting into Dishonored, a game that I didn't feel particularly absorbed by the first time around back in 2012 and, in fact, I put down after 2 hrs. On the advice of a friend I took another look at it recently. On balance that was good advice and I had a mostly positive experience.The most immediately impressive thing about this game is the beautiful art style and excellent world design. What also becomes clear rather rapidly is while the emphasis ...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful.
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