Crawl spent a long time getting to where it is now, and the results speak for themselves – it's the best time you'll have knifing your friends in the dark, betraying all bonds, and desperately trying to escape the clutching tentacles of the abyss.
Depending on your luck with the randomly placed key-cards and robot AI (whether you get the T-800 chasing after you or the Furby with one droopy eyelid that doesn't blink anymore) it will take somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour or two. And when it ends, it ends. As soon as you escape the police station it goes straight into a white dissolve and a logo splash screen. No epilogue, no wrap up, not even a voice over.
There is obvious talent at work behind Phantasmal. The lighting and setting are amazing and there are some great ideas buried way underneath all the bugs and issues. I hope they can learn from the mistakes of this title and release something that lives up to the potential that they display.
As something that Capcom essentially had to be shamed into doing as a sort of post-launch apology, it’s a different story. The blemishes are raw and sore, the flaws impossible not to gawk at. This is what took another five months? It’s a damned shame that only adds to the increasingly sad story of Street Fighter V -- an amazing fighting game that is almost impossible to recommend.
This is filler, pure and simple. This is contractual obligation padding out a Season Pass. It isn't terrible, it isn't offensive, but it isn't much fun either. The greatest value of this DLC won't come from actually playing it, but in watching some YouTube physics wizard design the perfect Brahmin slaughter house, or a machine that automatically launches bowling balls at a captive Raider. This is DLC designed to manufacture ten-second .webm files. If you're not absolutely crazy about the settlement building aspect of the game (or trying to build an online empire of clickable content), this is a hard pass.
As a product for humans though, I can't see Wasteland Workshop as anything but a bad buy. A cynical ploy to pad out the “value” of the Season Pass and maybe milk a few weirdos like me who just can't resist neon lights. If you have the Season Pass, I guess you might get some use out of this. If you were waiting to see if you wanted this al a carte, you would be better off going with Automatron. At least the robots haven't turned on me... yet.
Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault is proof positive that one good idea can’t carry a title. The central gimmick is a good one, but there is just no reason to subject yourself to a game so unambitious and condescending.
There is no reason to waste your time on a game as unambitious as Shooting Stars!
You'd be better served experiencing Five Nights at Freddy's 4 the way it was obviously intended to be enjoyed. By going on YouTube and watching some twenty-five-year-old, dressed like a fourteen-year-old, scream and cry his way through the game like a seven-year-old. The game truly has come full circle.
Hawken has never been a terrible game, but it has never made a case for itself as anything more either. This console version puts up even less of a fight. If you're broke and bored this summer and looking for something to sink some hours into, Hawken on console could be a reasonable pastime. But there is no getting around the fact that this is the worst way to play an already mediocre game.
If Dungeons 2 was just a competent dungeon builder held back by a few technical bugs and some bad interface design, it might be something worth checking out. As a dungeon builder horrifically Frankensteined to one of the lamest RTS experiences I've played in years, its an unfortunate monstrosity that should be safely avoided.
I feel so badly for this game in a way. It seems so close to being something special and wonderful, but is just undermined at every turn by baffling design choices, poor controls, and frustration. Maybe some of these issues will be addressed in a future patch and Rain World will become the game it feels like it should have been. Someone else will have to let me know. As far as I'm concerned, my days of being a slugcat are officially behind me and I won't be looking back.
If you are absolutely starving for more Fallout 4 content, Far Harbor will give you another impressively large landscape to explore and some great side content to dig into. If you were already tired of Fallout 4 and hoping the expansion would provide something unique enough to justify coming back, this isn't it.
This is the kind of game where the people who are going to play it and love it already know they are going to play it and love it. If you have treasured memories of liberating Venus from the filthy capitalist pig-dogs in 1998, feel free to call me an asshole and just go and enjoy the game. If you missed it back in the day and are toying with giving it a try for the same reasons I did (soviets on the moon with flying tanks), you can probably take a pass and not miss anything.
There is so much heart and so many great ideas in Nefarious that I want to see it as a better game than it is. I want to be able to recommend it as a hidden gem in Steam’s massive collection of throwback indie titles. But I can’t. It’s a sloppy game that feels in many respects half-done. All the heart in the world can’t make up for something that just isn’t fun to play.
As it is, this is a game with a disposable single-player campaign, multiplayer matches that crash or disconnect as often as they complete, and a slew of fantastic mechanics that only rise to the surface in a single game mode out of a half-dozen.
A City Sleeps feels like a half-made game. Perhaps if they had a little more time or budget to add a few more Dreams, and even out the experience for players of all skill levels, it might have been something special. As it is, A City Sleeps is strictly for hardcore shoot-'em-up fans and people who are intensely curious about the future of rhythm games (an interesting Venn diagram for sure).
One thing I will say for it though – when you drain your last ball and you're asked to input your initials for your score, Riz Ahmed's character wistfully says “they're asking for a callsign...” as the three-letter faux-LCD screen blinks.
The Five Nights series either needs to start answering some of the questions its set up, or at least find some more interesting ones to ask.
If you never got the chance to strap on a mask and make some dirty money, The Big Score might still be worth checking out. If you're a seasoned criminal wondering if it's time to get back into the life, you won't find much to pull you back in.