Sands Of Salzaar is an army-building, slashy action RPG whose personality and spectacular battles carry it through some pacing and clarity issues.
Between its threadbare design and shocking number of bugs and major glitches, Mechajammer is an unfortunately miserable experience.
It could still be friendlier to newcomers, but Age Of Empires 4 is an assured step in a genre whose comeback is long overdue.
This strategy battle game has a lot of potential for co-op, but single player has you spinning a few two many plates (and maps, and vehicles) for it to be really enjoyable.
I can't fault Dice Legacy's style, but this deckbuilding puzzle game disguised as a city builder is mostly an exercise in furious, tooth-grinding frustration.
Narrative design as genetic engineering, it will live in your head like an imaginary friend.
just don’t feel in control. Each fight feels like my only real option is to repeatedly block until my opponent decides I’m allowed to hit him now. I haven’t mentioned the non-combat parts either, in which you explore the caves looking for supplies to patch up and improve your armour at campfires. There are a few environmental puzzles, which would be fine if they didn’t sometimes boil down to leaping off things until one of them doesn’t kill you.
Cutting out the parts that became tedious would quicken the narrative enough to undermine it, but those parts became so laborious that they dragged it down instead. Perhaps I missed the point entirely by playing it alone – it is eminently obvious where a second player would fit in to its design – but if I had a lover here right now, I don’t think this is the game I’d choose to play with them. I’ve been in my own haven for far too long.
So I’m in danger of overrating Across The Grooves. It’s fairly short, and at only a couple of hours long, you could dig up all its alternative scenes and endings in a long afternoon. It’s more linear and structurally simple than I’d expected, and I was definitely expecting more from the main music. But while it hasn’t truly touched me as deeply as Eliza or Watch Me Jump, it’s given me an unusual angle on time travel and a lot of feelings and thoughts to process. It’s even helped me a little, I think.
The Falconeer’s limitations kept it from fully winning me over. But it’s bloody impressive when its stars align.
Post Void is a masterpiece of compulsive motion and hypnotic, irresistible sounds. It does something to my brain that I’ve never experienced before.
It feels unappreciative to wish that there could be even more of it, but it’s like that perfect cup of tea. You’ll always want another one.
I’ve enjoyed Yes, Your Grace. It’s a pretty game, and the story and subplots have some nice details and solid surprises.
I can’t, in short, say anything bad about Savage Vessels that isn’t heavily outweighed by everything it’s doing that’s rewarding and exciting.
As many players of Mutant Year Zero observed, that game was largely a puzzle game with a small shootout at the end, and Corruption 2029’s structure is very much cut from the same cloth.
It could have been longer, it could have been more substantial and dramatic. But it’s a good way to relax for a few hours.
I do enjoy Minilaw. I find its mistakes frustrating precisely because it’s otherwise a tonne of fun to play. It looks gorgeous, the sound and music are first rate, and when it works, gunning attackers down feels great.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York is essentially a collection of subplots for their own sake, largely set in stone. But they’re written with talent and confidence and I would gladly read some more.
If you’ve been waiting for a full-on simulation with all the bells and textbooks, and nothing less will satisfy you, Mechwarrior 5 isn’t going to cut it. For everyone else though, it’s bloody excellent.
It’s an accomplishment, and it’s certainly better and more original than the vast bulk of games in the physics-gimmick subgenre, but I respect it a lot more than I like it.