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Nice hand drawn art style, awful story and puzzles. Has maybe the dumbest adventure game puzzle to date in that a cockroach blocks your path. Potential GOTY award categories - Overall Worst Game, Best Style, Worst Puzzle of All Time.
On a purely technical level, AC: Syndicate is far and away the best AC to date. It plays well without all the mission annoyances that plagued previous entries and in general it's a very very good video game. That said? I kinda dislike it. Apart from Evie, who is usually relegated to second banana to the much more boring brother whose name I can't even be bothered to remember, the whole thing lacks any sort of real heart or charm. It's a purely by the numbers sequel, designed to fix a lot of the series' problems without actually moving it forward in any significant way. And yes, I've seen the game's "weird moment" sequence, and no, it did nothing for me. We saw all that back in the much, much worse AC III. This is just circling the drain on the series actually telling a proper story and is utterly a by-the-numbers Ubisoft sequelfest. Thank God this series is taking a break.
On the strong recommendation of adventure game expert Mento, I picked this up on a PSN sale and I'm mighty impressed with it. It's a smart, lengthy traditional point-and-click adventure game, with an army of interesting characters and a cool little world to explore that's directly inspired by the likes of Sierra's King's Quest and Quest for Glory games. I'm constantly surprised by how sharp it is. The game uses a blend of feel-good tropes and archetypes, but presents them in a fun, spirited way that feels fresh, save for its overindulgence in popular lines from other media. I do wish the creators felt confident enough to stick to their own blend of intelligent humor and creativity instead of the sometimes constant barrages of homages, but I definitely like certain aspects of it, such as one short segment that has a character traveling through the various ages of adventure gaming in full 16-bit, 8-bit, and text adventure glory. All that said, I'm not sure I'd have ranked it as highly as Technobabylon or Tales from the Borderlands last year. TheBUTT (as Mento has dubbed it) relies way too heavily on others' material for it to feel like its own thing, and the pacing is sometimes dreadfully slow. It's another one of those games that pokes fun of X gaming convention and then proceeds to force the player through countless renditions of said convention. In this case, that's usually "do these three tasks" over and over and over again. It's frustrating, because shortening the amount of puzzle-solving wouldn't have lessened the quality of the game and might have freed up the designers to explore more of the world and characters. Maybe that'll happen in a sequel. As it stands, Tales from the Borderlands and Technobabylon both stand as better examples of creating their own niche in the adventure gaming world - they stand on their own merits, not those of the games that came before them. As it stands, I'm really excited to see where the team behind TheBUTT goes next. I want to play a dozen more adventure games like this.
OK, yes, it's repetitive to a fault and the side stuff is kind of boring, but holy crap, this game got its hooks into me hard. I'm not sure how fondly I'll look back at it (by this point, I'm pretty burned out on it), but the initial ten hours or so of this game flew by. The patched driving feels pretty okay, though it's still a little slippery, and while the hand-to-hand combat is kind of bland, at least it deosn't reach Batman levels of absurdity. Plus, those engine sounds! MMM!
While it's still very much a Ratchet and Clank game, this is probably the most streamlined experience of the bunch. It's pretty great.
A silly, wonderful, pleasantly easy game. This is exactly what I want out of Dead Rising.
As a game, Uncharted is a stupid amount of fun. The 3rd person actiony gameplay is pretty much what you'd expect from the series, featuring a blend of Ubisoft-ish tower climbing with action sequences that feel on par with something like Max Payne 3 in terms of fun and scope of the set pieces. There aren't many variations on enemies and there's really not much of a leap forward rom 2 or 3 in terms of the way the levels are designed, but as a whole, it's a damn fine actioner. That said, I'm sorely disappointed in some of the cliched writing. Without spoiling things, there are two major writing tropes that the game relies upon that betray the otherwise excellent dialogue and moment to moment character actions. It's a stain on an otherwise great game, one that's made even more disappointing after the huge jumps forward in storytelling in games like Witcher 3 or Tales from the Borderlands.
There are two halves to WD:M. The standard-ass Walking Dead tried-and-tired group of survivors we aren't given time to care about do the game no favors, as do the villains with no motivations whatsoever other than being murdery. That half of the game is frustrating, especially given the reaction to Walking Dead S2, which you'd think Telltale would have learned from. But the other half, which tells a quiet, personal story about Michonne's haunted guilt about her two children's fates and not being able to be there for them is remakrably good and should have been the focus throughout. There are several ways Michonne's guilt can be played up, and a choice at the end becomes remarkably hard even when the right answer is very clear. I don't quite get why Telltale insists upon making their games so dependent on their previous tropes, but if they learn anything from WD:M, it's this - focus on the personal stories your staff are capable of telling. Screw the "being a game" part of your work. Tell me a few really good stories from only a handful of characters. Give me focus. Give me depth, not numbers and shock value moments. We've had enough of those that the surprises have worn thin.
