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There’s an interesting premise at the heart of What Remains of Edith Finch – explore a house and get to know a bunch of characters by invading their personal space and seeing how they died. And the short stories themselves can be interesting, particularly the shifts and changes they bring to the otherwise standard first-person gameplay. But there’s very little attempt made outside of these short stories to actually connect the player with its many subjects. Too often I felt like I was simply going through the motions.
Flinthook sucks you in until you look at your clock and realise it’s 2AM and you’ve been playing far longer than you thought.
A Rose in the Twilight continues Nippon Ichi’s excellent run of games that seem to exist specifically to torture young girls.
Drawn To Death is an interesting idea that has been poorly implemented. The art style is fantastic to look at, but it’s at odds with the gameplay and isn’t helped by a lacklustre HUD.
Persona 5 is an absolute masterpiece and like many other reviews, I can’t help but echo the positivity here too. If you’ve never played a Persona game, play this one and work your way back. If you have played a Persona game then I imagine you’ll be playing this now and loving every minute of it. Buy this game, it’s one of the best RPGs in the last 10 years.
It’s a mess. A glorious mess, and one well worth taking a chance on but the faults are too much to ignore. What could have been a masterpiece is simply a great game worth playing if it’s your kind of thing. But there are enough elements here to promise a sequel. If that’s enough for you to invest your time, by all means do so.
I really wanted to like Yooka-Laylee. I don’t. Instead of taking a beloved style of game and updating it for modern times (à la Doom last year), Playtonic essentially created a game that could have been from 1998 and released it in 2017. The result is a mess of poorly implemented game mechanics that the games industry fixed two decades ago.
Has Been Heroes is an ultimately frustrating game. There’s the core of a great idea here with the lane-based strategic combat. Unfortunately developers Frozenbyte have piled on too many complicated systems for it to ever feel fun.
Rain World is so very close to being something special. Its aesthetic is haunting and its dynamic AI creates a world that feels real, as opposed to one that exists purely for you to overcome its challenges. Unfortunately it’s a game undone by poorly implemented controls and a series of strange design decisions that undermine the type of game it wants to be.
The Sexy Brutale is a fantastic adventure game. Its core time looping mechanic works in every way imaginable. Figuring out how to save the wonderfully eccentric party guests from the equally as wonderfully eccentric staff is brilliant.
Old Time Hockey is a great concept poorly executed. It’s marred by some dodgy controls and a series of baffling design decisions. What could have been a neat throwback to old fashioned hockey is instead a massively missed opportunity.
Gary reviews Square Enix & Platinum Games’ third-person action game Nier: Automata [VIDEO DISCUSSION].
Snake Pass is a game that evokes both satisfaction and intense frustration, often simultaneously. Guiding Noddle through the fifteen levels on offer is a great experience, though it is marred by some issues with controls, checkpoints and a wayward, sometimes difficult to control camera. There’s also nothing quite like it.
A demo that should have been free instead costs $6.99 on the Playstation Store. Whether judged as a game or a chance to explore the Ghostbusters firehouse, it’s not worth it.
Everything comes together to create a really great stealth gameplay experience.
There’s some major inconsistencies in terms of quality in certain companions, certain portions of the writing, and definitely in the overall pace of the game. This is completely outweighed by the ludicrously interesting world in which it’s set. If you can forgive the above flaws, and are prepared to read a novel’s worth of text in its 30-35 hour run-time, you’ll end up like me – playing until 3am, doing just one more quest and revelling in navigating the ridiculously wonderful Ninth World.
It’s not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, and hardcore first-person shooter fans can find a lot to love here, but it can turn into a bit of a slog the further into the game you progress.
Once Firis has passed the exam and the game drops the time limit, Atelier Firis turns into a pretty good JRPG with some deep crafting mechanics but a fairly lacklustre combat system. To get to this point, however, requires a fairly substantial time commitment.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a very monotonous game. Solid gameplay mechanics quickly give way to empty repetition as the game never really varies its core gameplay loop at all during its running time. Regardless of your specific mission objectives, you’ll never break free from the endless cycle of clearing out buildings populated by the same enemies you were fighting ten hours ago.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is an excellent robot hunting game. When you’re in the thick of fighting one of its fantastic robotic opponents it feels like one of the best games you’ve played all year.