Luciano Howard
A game made by those behind The Stanley Parable that quite frankly is a repeat of the first trick, done badly.
After around one and a half hours the game is over. Nothing much changed for me in those final thirty minutes - finishing the game was almost like a chore. The scenes and the interactive aspects didn’t add much to the overall story, which was pretty much done by the hour mark.
The stories being told are delightful in their own right, fully enveloped in searing atmosphere and wonderfully spine-tingling.
So, to sum up what SingStar: Ultimate Party is I can safely say what it is not. It is not the ultimate party. If it were, life would be very dull indeed. What it is is a way to collate certain music videos in one place in exchange for payment as opposed to finding them for free via various other methods. It's a chance to sing into your smartphone rather than hear singing from it and a chance to see shapes turn blue or gold or stay white. It's a chance to record yourself singing without pressing play on the video recorder and a chance to have other people you don't know rate your singing to prove once and for all to your wife/mother/friends that you bloody well can sing. Does all of that make the game worth playing? Not a chance.
The Grand Tour Game doesn't deliver what's needed as an interactive experience and makes you long to watch the show without the irritation of anything else. As an experiment, it provides Amazon with plenty of useful results, all of which indicate something very different is needed to combine TV and gaming media.
Micro Machines as a brand is still great fun but you'll find that's sustained only for the briefest of moments.
Erica is a novel concept which fails on almost every count, unfortunately, and can't as such be recommended at all.
Vertical Drop Heroes is a remake of a browser-based game from the turn of the decade. It does procedural and roguelike in a quick and fun way but ultimately is only for fans of this genre. What it does it does well, but that is limited.
A triumph of hype and tech over engaging gameplay. The latter is short-lived with No Man's Sky.
A bit too short, a little fiddly and a little less than invitingly re-playable to recommend to many more than the concrete fans or curious WiiU owners intrigued by the last hurrah of a dying platform.
If you like a lotta chocolate on your biscuit join our club
Entropy wins out in the end
A premise that had me at hello, but a game which I couldn't wait to finish. It's a puzzler with high production values but it doesn't hit the right beats and consequently suffers for it.
The Crew 2 does what it does with solid assuredness. It's just a shame that what it does is so bland and middle of the road.
Interactive entertainment is the holy grail of many game developers-cum-movie makers, and in #WarGames we have another nice idea flawed by the story being told and the lack of clear interaction granted to the player.
If you stick with it you'll find a decent racer here but getting past the inane narrative, broken progression systems and longing for racers past takes some doing.
Mario is back for some more sporting fun and if you can find him some pals the potential value and fun are endless. If not? Your mileage will be limited.
A brilliantly done driving simulator, but without any serious single-player campaign to go alongside the online timesink.
It's Destiny Year One's last hurrah. It's good but that new game proper is needed quickly.
Everything adds up to what could have been.