-
5 (4) 4 (5) 3 (5) 2 (3) 1 (0) 3.6 starsAverage score of 17 user reviews
-
The PSVR itself just can't keep up with this exciting action game. 0
Despite reaching consumer hands in 2016, virtual reality still seems trapped in a perpetual infancy. The hardware of the headsets is being slowly iterated on, with new options like the Oculus Quest or the Valve Index releasing every handful of months. In the interim, major software releases have slowed to a crawl. It’s what makes something like SIE London Studio’s Blood & Truth somewhat exciting. Some money got thrown around to make, on paper, one of the most exciting VR action g...
2 out of 2 found this review helpful. -
Insomniac's take on Spider-Man is exciting, refreshing, and, in a word, spectacular. 0
It’s easy to be reductive about the state of AAA development these days. The idea that more and more big games are taking the approach of taking elements from this game and that, spinning them to fit the theme and narrative the developers are putting forward, and booting them out the door holds water at first glance. And at first glance, Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man seems to continue the trend. It’s an open-world game with towers that you check out to get map data, var...
3 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
While the poor presentation is hard to ignore, Fire Pro Wrestling World has the heart (and gameplay) of a champion. 0
Like a plucky underdog against a dominating monster, Fire Pro Wrestling World is rough around every edge relating to presentation and usability, but if you’re able to get past all of that, there is championship gold hidden beneath the surface.One of the biggest strengths of Fire Pro Wrestling World is its character creation system. It’s simple enough that anyone can start to go in and create themselves, their original characters, or duplicate real-life people or fictional characters,...
3 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
Far Cry 5's narrative massively and overwhelmingly detracts from an otherwise enjoyable stealth-action game. 0
In late 2016, Ubisoft’s chief creative officer and man arrested for sexual harrasment Serge Hascoet made the rounds with a quote, saying that the company will focus less on scripted narrative and more on “living worlds.” The idea, he went on to say, was to create games to be “anecdote factories,” where the moment-to-moment gameplay driven by the player’s actions in the world becomes more important than any overarching narrative the game has.I’m unsure if...
5 out of 5 found this review helpful. -
Need for Speed: Payback has flashes of brilliance, but they’re held back by a myriad of poor design & narrative choices. 0
Venerable street racing series Need for Speed has offered arcade-style racing thrills since 1994. Since then, the series has gone through multiple evolutions and refinements, from the cops-and-robbers gameplay of Hot Pursuit to the first glimpses at open world driving in Underground 2. Current series helmspeople Ghost Games’ latest, Need for Speed: Payback, a vaguely crime-adjacent thriller that’s lacking in both crime and thrills, simply doesn’t hold up to the series’ st...
3 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
Bringing back excitement and adventure, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is an excellent addition to the franchise. 2
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End was an event. It’s still one of only a handful of games that I’ve seen an advertisement for before a movie. And Uncharted 4 certainly was a success, selling 8.7 million copies to date, according to Wikipedia. Another cursory search indicates that Uncharted 4 won the most Game of the Year awards from assorted publications for the year 2016. Needless to say, Sony was probably pretty happy about Uncharted 4.I thought it was solid, if not particularly mem...
5 out of 5 found this review helpful. -
While far less than the sum of its parts, Get Even’s flashes of brilliance make a decently enjoyable experience. 1
There are certain areas of The Farm 51’s Get Even that, with enough refinement, could easily stand out on their own. The game’s environmental storytelling, dense mystery, and a few imaginative gameplay mechanics each worthy of praise on their own. However, these genius aspects lie muddled inside of a game filled with bloated encounter design and incoherent “choice” aspects so deeply that the strengths can’t support the game’s many weaknesses.Get Even follows t...
4 out of 5 found this review helpful. -
Watch_Dogs 2 seems more spinoff than sequel, learns some lessons, and trips over similar pitfalls as its predecessor 1
Allow me to get one statement out of the way early here, so you can decide whether or not you want to keep reading: I really liked Watch_Dogs. Maybe most of it comes from playing to reviewer's interests, but Ubisoft's 2014 techno-thriller open world game managed to synthesize near-future dystopianism and dense underworld dealings and conspiracies in a way few games attempt.With a change of scenery and 2 years of real-world technological advancement, Watch_Dogs 2 moves from a revenge tale from th...
7 out of 7 found this review helpful. -
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is unapologetically weird, unabashedly over-the-top, and it's utterly fantastic 0
I don't think anyone could have possibly imagined the end result from the dramatic reveal teaser of a Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem crossover. I remember an incredible amount of late night discussions with friends, drawing in additional characters from spinoffs such as Devil Summoner and Persona, imagining possible scenarios, all star clashes between Demifiend and the forces of Black Fang, The Dawn Brigade staring down YHVH, and Ike dancing crazy.Needless to say, absolutely none of that hap...
6 out of 6 found this review helpful. -
It's one step forward and two steps back in this rebooted prequel of Mirror's Edge 0
2008's Mirror's Edge feels like, love it or hate it, a game that turned heads. DICE, better known for their work on Battlefield, releasing a parkour-focused first-person platformer was already a wild idea. It being released during a banner year for EA, following up on games like Burnout Paradise and Dead Space made the idea seem shaky. While Mirror's Edge was certainly not as universally acclaimed or commercially successful as other headline games that year, it's one that people still hold a rev...
8 out of 8 found this review helpful. -
Uncharted 4 loses its pulp adventure roots, which results in a solid, if less memorable shooter. 0
Some games feel like an event. The advertising budget tacks on a few extra zeroes, publishers shell out for developers with an extensive pedigree, and everything just whips up into media firestorm, where on release everyone gushes about it, pats themselves on the back, takes a bit of a vacation, and then the cycle resumes for the next “event” game.Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4: A Thief's End feels like an event. It's one of two games I can think of where I saw an advertisement before a ...
7 out of 7 found this review helpful. -
Fire Emblem Fates doesn't feel as worthy a successor as it should. 0
Fire Emblem Fates is the very definition of a mixed bag. With some interesting additions and intelligent subtractions from the gameplay systems that result in one of the better playing Fire Emblem games, it seems to come at the expense of moving forward with the wrong lessons from the past game, Fire Emblem Awakening.All three versions of the game, Birthright, Conquest, and the forthcoming Revelations all begin with the same first six chapters. The universal introduction borrows liberally from A...
9 out of 9 found this review helpful. -
Emulation issues and lack of historical perspective aside, Rare Replay is worth the price of admission. 0
Rare Replay may just be the best valued video game anthology of all time. There's really no getting around that. And for that, even with what issues there are, it's incredibly difficult not to recommend it to anyone with an Xbox One. And even with these issues, the quality of the games included, as well as the flair and panache included in the presentation, make this collection outstanding, but a half-step away from true greatness.It is incredibly clear that at the heart of Rare Replay is a flas...
8 out of 8 found this review helpful. -
Competent, yet bland, you will probably either love or hate UNIEL. Possibly both. 0
Soft Circle French-Bread's latest (North American released) fighting game, Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late is a highly competent, beautifully animated, and intricate fighting game. It's also unbelievably complicated, oddly paced, and rather generic. Even more than most fighting games, I would definitely call it not a game for everyone (myself included), but at the same time, the game is decisively proficient enough that for those who it is a game for will find it more than to their liking. The &ld...
3 out of 3 found this review helpful. -
inFamous: Second Son sets an incredibly high bar for next-generation open world games. 0
Seriously. This game looks great.I'm not entirely certain at which point in Sucker Punch's inFamous: Second Son's incredible opening I realized I was not actually experiencing a sleep-deprived hallucination at around 4:30 AM, and yes, this was actually a game that I was playing. Drop-dead gorgeous, astonishingly fun, and surprisingly touching, Second Son is an experience that shouldn't be missed.For starters, Second Son is easily one of the best looking games I have ever played, bar none. If thi...
4 out of 4 found this review helpful. -
With one or two great ideas notwithstanding, Contrast is a boring, muddled mess. 0
Somewhere, buried deep, deep in the heart of Contrast, is a spark. The spark of a fantastic idea, one that could, with the right fuel, conditions, and maybe just a little luck, ignite into a tremendous fire. However, like a metaphor that begins to spiral out of control, Contrast smothers that spark with enough wet tinder so that all that remains is just that, a spark.In Contrast, players take the role of Dawn, an imaginary-friend-meets-guardian-angel who can shift in between the physical world a...
1 out of 1 found this review helpful. -
Dangan Ronpa's characters can be hit or miss, but the dark and ultra-slick mystery is worth experiencing. 2
(Disclaimer: I played the game using the translation patch by Project Zetsubou. In addition, I will attempt to remain as spoiler free as possible, but some will be inevitable.)High school. A time of raging hormones, weirdly inflated self-worth, and the conflicts that occur when those two things meet. Needless to say, I do not reflect on my time in high school as a positive experience. However, compared to the students of Kibougamine Academy in Spike's Dangan Ronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no...
6 out of 6 found this review helpful.
Use your keyboard!
- ESC
Log in to comment