These reservations aside, Road Not Taken is fresh, interesting, beautifully presented and demonstrates an intricacy of design that will obsess a certain type of player. It's an acquired taste, though, despite its popular ingredients.
The combined effect of this maze of vivid, diverse, shifting scenes is memorable. You are Alice, touring wonderland, seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. In Hohokum, it goes an awfully long way: it's deep, it's wide and, perhaps most importantly, it's temporally long. This is a game that sticks with you long after you switch it off.
Despite the game's dipped-nose poise, its obsession with speed and clocks, it rewards those who take their time, who perfect their technique on each stage, and who savour an arcade game that's been lovingly embellished and expanded to its full and likely final potential.
Hyrule Warriors rewards thoughtful play and demands a strategic approach that transcends the brute force combo-strings of its moment-to-moment gameplay. The marriage of Zelda and Musou is an unexpected success, then - a game that recounts the Zelda myth not just in a new way, but in a whole new language.
Pocket fighter.
Shinji Mikami has yet to make a poor game, and The Evil Within does not blemish his record. But neither does the game enchant and disrupt in the way that Vanquish and the others managed. This is Mikami revisiting his past glories and, as such, it's both a delight and a disappointment.
There is some value in The Legend of Korra, both as a game and as a tribute to the cartoon on which it's based, but it falls far short of its potential on both counts. Perhaps the third-person combat theatrics for which the studio is known are not replicable on a small budget. You can't blame the IP, which offers a rich vein of material. Regardless, this is the first major blemish on the studio's reputation; a misfire that means Platinum's name no longer guarantees quality.
Despite these creative flourishes, Sunset Overdrive never quite surpasses the chaotic physics of Just Cause, the coherent style of Blood Dragon or the assured sense of place of GTAV – nor does it manage to draw its story and systems toward a coherent, impactful point.
Activision would have us believe that the latest title in the series is a bold re-imagining. It's not, but it's still blistering entertainment
An awful childhood gets a surprisingly arcadey revisit in this blistering action roguelike.
It's principally aimed at the series' fans, but the mesh of interlocking systems ensures that its appeal runs deeper than fan service.
Elegy for a Dead World makes good on its title: it offers us dead worlds, filled with the debris of imagined and vanished civilizations. Through the game's scenes you walk alone, under the dread emptiness of outer space, all that harrowing solitude. And yet, as you write and send that writing out into the ether in search of a reader, you may well find contact and connection. If others read your work, your observations, your story, your sense and if they find truth or solace in your words, here is a framework designed to let you know, in turn, that you are not alone. In this sense, it is truly a game about humans' desire to write.
Nevertheless, Spencer Mansion ultimately fails as a locale because of its implausibility. It is a place that has been designed in service to the designer's puzzles, rather than vice-versa and, for this reason, feels fake and contrived, characteristics that undermine the horror rather than heighten it. As a product of a unique moment in the medium's technological evolution, Resident Evil HD is a fascinating place to revisit. But for many contemporary visitors it will be an unpleasant stay, not because the game's inhabitants are unusually hostile, or because its idiosyncrasies are unfashionable, but because its formative designs have simply been bettered.
Nevertheless, Citizens of Earth succeeds in rediscovering something of the ingenuity of 1990s JRPGs in its playful twists on genre cliches. And as a kooky and inventive contemporary re-imagining of the Super Nintendo-era role-player, this, like its protagonist's campaign, is but a near miss.
Unmechanical Extended meets its ambition: the designers fully explore the potential of the template and do so with elegance. But perhaps, in the new context of the newer consoles, that ambition wasn't quite enough. This is a slight, simple, often delightful game that displays moment-to-moment ingenuity but which now obviously lacks a broader conceit to bring its ideas together.
'The sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,' reads Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, from which the game takes its name and setting. It already knows that you will take up the challenge and bravely attempt to measure these caverns. The better question, and the one that Sunless Sea asks in countless ways is: how?
Ultra's label insinuates that this is the ultimate realisation of Housemarque's original vision. In truth, it's little more than a re-skin, and the seasoning of novelties adds little of enduring substance. Instead, the original remains a classic. Its somewhat sterile charms are undiminished by time, and so space cadets will find much to love here, in the bustle of a perennial galactic rush hour. Veterans, however, need not apply. Whether that's testament to Housemarque's delivery of an original that could not be improved by tampering, or its new custodian's lack of vision, is another question.
Dead or Alive: Last Round doesn't have the contortionist special moves required to master its Street Fighter rival, making this the more immediately accessible game by some margin. But neither does it have the mascots of Capcom's stable (it's telling, perhaps, that the most recognisable characters here are borrowed from Ninja Gaiden and Virtua Fighter). But at its deeper levels, it's an equally engaging and challenging proposition as its rivals, a quick tempo test of dexterity and reaction that, at its best, transcends the mildly grotty aspects for which it is best known.
Its elegance, precision, humour, and challenge make Bloodborne irresistible. Ultimately, the horror is secondary; wonder is the true transfusion on offer here.
The arcade-like structure and mounting pile of perks and weapons gives Tower of Guns an irresistible, if brief, appeal. There's tremendous fun to be had questing up the tower, amassing buffs and improvements to both your character and their weaponry, and racing against the clock. But soon enough, the repetitious enemy and environment designs begin to tire, and the initial bullishness of the evolving guns feels a little conservative; nothing goes quite far enough. Tower of Guns fails to reach the heights it might have reached, then, but provides an enjoyable run all the same.