Couldn't quite get to 50 in 2020 for various boring reasons but I'll make more of a go of it this year.
Showing 1-10 of 61 items
PC - 4/5 Looks simple but is actually a really nicely tuned driving game with a nice mellow soundtrack. Initially challenging as it's hard to monitor your speed and the undunlation of the track but once you get into it, nailing a drift is so satisfying and you genuinely feel a connection with how fast you're driving. Going through a stage smoothly is an excellent feeling. So close to a 5 this one, just felt a bit baggy towards the end of the campaign with the 20-stage seasons. If possible I'd have had the same number of races but maybe one more short 'super-season' at the end; the Group A cars were just about doable for me in terms of speed but going past the limit one last time would have been a great way to polish things off - like the Lakeland stage/Stratos in Sega Rally.
PC - 4/5 Initially weird and confusing as someone who doesn't know my Osea from my Erusea, once it gets into its stride it's really compelling. By the time I got into an F-35 the flying felt great and I was just shooting down stuff left and right, and the ridiculous action move finale really brought things to a close nicely.
PS4 - 5/5 Now this was a journey. There's 2-3 games worth of stuff in here; I don't just mean in the sense that it's long (123 hours for the true ending) but it genuinely shakes things up more than once in terms of both setting and how you actually play it. It remains a grid-style dungeon RPG throughout but it swaps between being a 'normal' one where you map everything out meticulously and fight a boss to one where you have to react to the landscape and watch out for landscape features and enemies alike. The final stretch in the postgame is a marathon crossed with a sprint that could have been sold on its own, I've not played a DRPG like that before. I can't really go into much more detail as it'd spoil things and there are some things where seeing them yourself is a lot of fun. Story ended up delivering as well; it has some of the nasty tone changes as seen in previous Izumi games (though it's not as bad as some previous efforts) but a bit more editing to rein some of the stuff in would be nice next time around. Or maybe a therapy session for the guy, I think he's got a couple of Akira Tsuchiya-style unresolved issues. Anyway, great dungeon crawler, highly recommended for anyone familiar with the genre. Not one for first timers though - although system wise it's actually very accommodation, not only is the difficulty level a bit uneven, but the whole thing's a bit sprawling in terms of maps and systems for someone not familiar with the genre. Hope to see another one, with a bit less than a 4 year wait this time around.
PS4 - 2/5 Story's fun once it gets going, some good setpieces and technically really great for 2016, apart from some really old-looking TAA. I also liked the ending. But man, what a pain to play. The controls are dreadful; it's apparent that actually interacting with the game rather than watching it flip between 500 painstakingly performance captured animations is definitely secondary. Once you turn on the option to lock on to enemies rather than aiming manually (which seems to have taken its cues on responsiveness from Perfect Dark Zero) it's playable but it really struggles with anything more complex than holding forward on the stick and pressing X when a hand hold or a gap appears. The driving was just abominable. I also can't remember the last time a game was so fucking pleased with itself either. It's constantly talking about how gorgeous all the views are and how amazing all the action bits were and once I noticed I couldn't see it as anything apart from a direct order to the player to be impressed. Docked another mark for that.
Magic Potion Millionaire - PC - 3/5 Decent little platform dungeon crawler. The pacing isn't quite there, though: it takes too long for the stat inflation to really start for the player compared to the enemies, and there are probably a few too many floors on each dungeon. The enemies which can't be hit with bullets are really aggravating too. Excellent soundtrack, and the music player is nicely designed as it lets you flip between the original track and the loop they cut from it.
PC - 3/5 This was a 4 until the last two levels, where the game stripping Sam of all weapons AGAIN, a slog of an indoor mission and a dreadful last boss just sucked the life out of it. It's a bit of a shame as for a while in the middle of the game it did feel much more like a Serious Sam game, with the weird humour, some surprisingly varied battles and the occasional fun secret. Special shoutout to the rocket launcher, which is completely awful and yet they give you loads of ammo for it. Still worth it, I think - there's a good few hours of fun in there between a slow start and a weak end.
PC - 2/5 Fine, I guess. A fun idea with a story that initially looks interesting but then just kind of falls apart, and then the game stops because that's all the guy had made. The action's good when you get tuned in but there's a slight randomisation on each attempt which just constantly threw me off. Good soundtrack.
PS4 - 3/5 AKA Man Versus Camera. Once it gets going it's a great ride, going across a vast landscape, taking on unique bosses with great style and better climbing than Uncharted. The camera and horse control are really infuriatingly bad, though - you can mitigate it somewhat by holding down L2 the whole time but really. Loses a mark for covering the ending cutscene with back office credits. I don't give a flying cack who's responsible for marketing activations or the IT department for the EU localisation team, don't literally cover up what's happening with their names.
PC - 3/5 Charming, really nicely presented. The premise/gimmick of the game is that you're reading a storybook and the whole thing is presented as such. I particularly like the single narrator reading all the spoken lines like it's Jackanory. The bit where you actually play it feels quite messy though - the main issue is the way it handles actually moving Quill the mouse. It's tied to the direction you're holding your head; this seems sensible at first but I found it difficult to judge where I was moving from a standing start, and if your head drifts tracking the action then your movement drifts with it. Also it just kind of stops halfway through the story and it doesn't look like there's going to be a sequel, which is a shame.
PC - 2/5 Very old school VR - not a surprise as it's of the same vintage as stuff like Job Simulator. Some fun interactions but mostly trial and error, often against the clock, and the lack of other stuff to do means that it just feels really limited. Short, too, even with the extra levels. Controls with the Index controllers were also super wonky, never fun to have stuff stick in your hand while you drum your fingers against the controller to try and make it realise you've opened your hand.
