Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Smite is an enjoyable experience and fun to dip into. It was also useful when I wanted to scratch a MOBA itch (which sounds like some horrible ailment) and didn't have the level of concentration I still need for Dota. There's a refreshing exhilaration which comes from being down on the board instead of up in the sky and it might catch an audience who bounced off other MOBAs or found them dull or frustratingly complex.
I don't find it quite as exciting as Warlock II, which has such an unusual and habit-shattering structure, but they are very different beasts, despite appearances.
Despite Loot 2.0 and Adventure mode and the Crusader, Reaper of Souls doesn't quite reinvent Diablo 3 and the reason is simple. The core concept underpinning this experience, fun as it is in passing, makes for a game that plateaus quickly. Diablo 3's central problem is that it lacks long-term appeal and, despite Reaper of Souls having the best of intentions, it seems some things just can't be fixed.
Singular of vision but faltering in execution and in need of some fleshing out – something's missing here, in terms of exploration and progression, but what is there is really quite special.
The game is clearly enormously detailed, a real passion piece, and one I fought and fought to enjoy. It didn't work out for me. I suspect it may for others.
I am sure that one day a F2P game will make me slap down some real world spacebucks. But not this time.
I'm perhaps not quite as in love with this series as I was after episode 1, but I badly want to find out what happens next, and I badly want to play episode 3 again to see what I might have missed.
Moebius is an utter disaster of a game. An entirely unlikeable or vacuous cast, a contempt for women like I've never seen, and indeed almost equal contempt for men, gibberish puzzles, ghastly animation, flawed conceits, the stupidest plot idea I can remember, and the whole thing scored with lift music. It's as if the moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 got an agent, and a starring role as an entire game.
It feels good to finish on a complaint. When I was writing about Path Of Exile a few days ago, I felt a bit mean finishing on a sour note, but The Hobbit left me feeling a bit grumpy. Admittedly, burning through a Lego game as quickly as possible isn't the best way to play, and I'd probably feel more fondly toward this one if I'd dipped in and out over a period of weeks.
I do like Trials Fusion, but I don't adore it and want to have little dirt-bike babies with it.
For a certain crowd of challenge gamers and speedrunners, this is your new devotion. You'll laugh and cry and swear and, I hope, create works of beauty through world records and live runs. For the rest of us, you'll need to judge whether the incredible style, absolutely extraordinary soundtrack and stellar highs are worth the lows that will make you want to snap your keyboard in half.
After a series like Blackwell, there's going to be plenty more waiting for whatever comes next.
The game ultimately falls between the stools, being neither quite mischievously obscure art game nor ingenious pure puzzler. But what it has is marvel – momentary, perhaps, in comparison to the game's overall length, but rare enough in itself. Surely that fleeting experience alone is worth a look and a listen.
For those willing to invest time into the New Game +, into the covenants and the raiding of other players' worlds, there's far more to uncover than I'll probably ever see. As I said at the beginning, Dark Souls II is a very good game. These have been some of the reasons why as well as some of the reasons why I don't think it's quite as great a game as I'd hoped it would be.
I want to enjoy it more: the hybridity of the game is daring and to be applauded. There's obvious passion and idiosyncrasy here, which aren't things you can always say about games spat from the cogs of AAA development. But delightful though it looks, and as winsome as its talking mice are, the combination of frictionless overworld and my frustration with its battle system left me feeling enervated. A less than fabulous fable, then, with a not so fairytale ending.
Warlock 2 is a smart and appropriately chaotic strategy game which really feels as though it has an identity of its own, rather than being made up of borrowed parts (er, other than its own).
On the first playthrough, it's distracting that Daylight is one-note tonally, unconvincingly written and acted, and unwisely tethers progress to increasingly drearily combing environments for every last scrap of 'oh no something terrible happened here once and everyone's dangerously mental' paperwork. On the second playthrough, it's oppressive. At a guess, self-awareness of this is why the game's so short, but by God another pass on the writing and more care about voice-acting would have made the world of difference.
The Walking Dead explores survival and suffering to great effect, and it continues to do so here. It's disappointing, however, that when the setup created an opportunity to explore a society built among and upon that suffering, the game failed to scratch beneath the surface.
It's not that more Men Of War is unwelcome, or even that Assault Squad 2 isn't an essential addition to my collection of real-time tiny men games (it is), it's just that I'd like to see something else done with the template. World War II is a fine source material, but the fabulous battlefield simulation produced by this engine could do so much more.
I do not believe Transistor is everything it could've been, but it's still close enough that I won't hesitate to recommend it to basically anybody. I critique because I love, and that second part is especially true in this case. Transistor's got brains, heart, and a knack for always knowing just what to say and when to say it. And also, perhaps more importantly, it knows precisely when it's better to say nothing at all.