36 public reviews
The views here are this user’s only and are not representative of Giant Bomb's thoughts and opinions on the discussed video game. GB's official reviews reside at giantbomb.com/reviews.
Nice try, Irrational. Ken. Seriously, the utmost respect to you guys for even trying to pull together so many ideas and ambitions into a singular product, but it's fractured; BioShock Infinite feels like pieces of many different versions of a game stitched together into something that struggles to maintain coherency. Knowing about the game's storied development history has probably heavily influenced that last…
AHHHHHH Lara just fell onto a piece of rusted rebar. It's okay, she got it out. Wait, she's bleeding out. It's okay, she put her hand over the wound. OOOOOOH Lara just stepped onto a bear trap. She's fallen and she's in pain. It looks like that might have broken something(s). Wait, no, it's okay, she's gotten up. Ouch Lara's fallen from a thing. That was a huge fall. It's okay. She's okay. Oof? Lara just parachuted…
DmC kinda came out at a bad time. Now, more than ever, are we actively discussing sexism, crassness of anonymous internet types and a general lack of social elegance, or rather social standards, in video game culture. And then here comes this sodding game, with its crassness and its rudeness, like a 16-year-old boy with silly delusions of unearned respect and infinite greatness and is seemingly unaware of the…
H otline Miami is a game set in the late 80s in Miami and is like if the movie Drive were a game on the Gameboy Color that was banned from every acre of land on this planet. Hotline Miami is about entering a room full of Miami gangsters and dying from the Miami gangsters and then restarting the level and then reentering the room full of Miami gangsters and clocking the first Miami gangster with your fist, taking his…
Approximately 80% of XCOM: Enemy Unknown are these adjectives: INTENSE VISCERAL HORRIFYING WHITE-KNUCKLE ASS-CLENCHING TENSION-FILLED TENSE HANDS-COVERING-ANXIOUS-GASPS INSANE PRAY-TO-THE-RANDOM-NUMBER-GENERATOR-DIETY DESPERATE And there's another 20% and that's fun, but let's talk about the 80% first. GRRR TAKE COVER POP SOME MOLES XCOM is, with little to no reservation, a terrific and hugely important…
“A Max Payne game by not-Remedy? Such dribble. I do not condone such sacrilegious language. Such a sequence of words is and forever will be prohibited,” you spit out to the Internet. “Yes, yes, yes,” the Internet says. A loud agreement was finally in order – Rockstar, this not-Remedy, would definitely not be able to make a proper Max Payne game. A Max Plank game? Maybe. A Mark Plum game? Definitely, but not a Max…
Thank god for Skyrim crashing from time to time, because that's the only reason I stop playing to do other, real-life things, like sleep. It's that good. “I stop playing only when the game crashes.” that's a gold quote to put on the back of the box. For all its major and minor failures and all the little things that Bethesda continues to screw up on, Skyrim is a helluva of a game, a game that pulls you from a…
Cyberpunk Badass (You) Throws a Concussion Grenade into a Room Full of Guards and then You Get in There and Tase and Augment Their Beat Asses to the Floor The Game It's the dream video game that we all constantly experience in our sleep. It slips in and out as a distant thought, bringing a semblance of joy to our insignificant lives, before facing the reality of modern society once more. But wait! Dream no more.…
You know what this game needs? A sequel. The Witcher is, at times, pretty darn awesome . The seemingly unrelated plot threads click and snap together and seemingly innocuous decisions you made hours ago suddenly reveal themselves as huge, far-reaching choices with ample consequences. The Witcher is surprisingly innovative in regards to how it handles this key element that everyone seems to make a really big deal…
This is silly. A review for Portal 2 ? Why? The game has a known quantity of fantastic – it's a lot of fantastic. Did you expect less? Unrealistically expect much more? Portal 2 is fantastic and I suppose if you want a reaffirmation of that statement of fact, then sure, read on. Valve did a lot with very little with Portal . Compromised of no more than ten people involved in Portal's development, it put together a…
Playing Empire: Total War's at launch had me thinking: “Does Creative Assembly have any idea just what they got here?” The potential for something completely amazing was there. Under all the bugs and all the egregious AI problems, there existed a landmark title, where in some alternate universe, Creative Assembly tried to do everything and man, they pulled it all off. After an extensive line of patches, and the…
As everyone looks back at what developers had to offer in 2010 in this pretty rad medium called video games, it's a little shocking that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has largely gone unmentioned. Its scale, its amazing sound design, its incredible atmosphere and its sheer moments of breathtaking chaos as the world around blew up around you was something to truly behold. With the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2:…
With sequels, it’s easy to get a feel of what to expect – more of what its predecessor offered, while improving on aspects that didn’t pan out the way as the developers intended. This is usually, if not always, the case. With Super Mario Galaxy 2 , you won’t know what hit you. It’s a freight train of surprise, a paroxysm of ingenuity, an endless stream of balls-out craziness. There probably won’t be a better game…
Here we go, this is it. With Napoleon: Total War , Creative Assembly has the most stable Total War to date and the one brimming with the most potential for some truly amazing future installments. It has everything going for it and it’s very much evident here in this standalone sequel/maybe an expansion/a $40.00 sequel thing but still maybe a standalone expansion. Creative’s been a bit vague on how they’ve tried to…
Early on in the game, you’re going to find a video recorder. Your friend, Sinclair, explains just what you do with it and how it works, eventually explaining how, “Usin’ that camera’s a bit like tellin’ a joke. Each time ya tell it the same way, it gets a little more stale – so you gotta change it up to keep it fresh.” It’s almost painful just how accurately Sinclair sums up BioShock 2. It’s largely the same game,…
Nathan Drake is the perfect man. Everything he says he says with irresistible charisma, every other line that comes out of his precious lips are either sarcastically funny or funnily sarcastic and he’s built, but built in a way that looks elegant, sleek and still very manly. All that talk about him being a fallible everyman is total crap. Look at him; he personifies everything any male human being aspires to be –…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as just a game, and not the genocidal product of pure, maleficent evil it’s been made out to be since the infamous announcement of IWNet, is really, really good. The single-player campaign is unflinching and uncompromising, and bravely goes deeper into its own fiction, leaving behind any semblance of authenticity in favor a campaign more defining and personal. Its multi-player is a lot…
One of Borderlands best qualities is its incredibly blunt approach to everything it does. It never tries to explain how vending machines spew out guns, how the economy makes any sense, how bandits repopulate cleared areas without much reason, how vehicles just warp into existence with a press of a button and it just kind of goes on. It’s so fixated on its leveling and loot experience that it forgoes all reason and…
Dead Space: Extraction is a game that doesn’t trust you. It assumes a few things. It: 1. assumes you are an inept jackass who can’t play games for squat, you worthless swine. 2. assumes you play games on the Wii people buy. Those kinds of games. 3. assumes you rode and loved Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin . It rips direct control away from you and forces you to watch a 6-hour long sequence of events play out,…
When playing through Batman: Arkham Asylum , there were moments when I couldn’t believe this game was this polished and this intelligently designed. Rocksteady Studios had only one other game under their belt prior to Arkham Asylum , which didn’t make huge waves critically, but three years after their first release, they’ve come out with what is easily one of the best games of the year. It’s not one of the best…
It’s kind of nice Professor Layton and the Diabolical box took so long to reach North American shores. A series that revolves around solving all sorts of brain teasers and puzzles can get exhausting and if Diabolical Box arrived just a few months after the original’s release, I probably wouldn’t have been looking forward to it. So, after 1.5 years of mental refreshing, it’s just about time to dive into another…
Read the full review Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
So, great, Monolith's releases an expansion of sorts, but this time, and this is important, F.E.A.R. 2: Reborn is entirely canon, making this incredibly important if you want to keep up with F.E.A.R.'s narrative. Spoilers: Paxton Fettel is back. That's seriously it. You play as one of the replica soldiers and through the usual visual trickery and strange vision quests the F.E.A.R. games like to do, you've…
Two non-canonical expansions, corporate pugilism over who owns what and now it’s finally here: A true sequel to the unabashedly and gloriously over the top F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. This is the first F.E.A.R. game Monolith has taken development duties on since the release of the original classic and… it’s a vastly different game. F.E.A.R. 2 feels different in the feel of its shooting, the action and how…
A compilation like this gets a perfect score practically by default, since all three games sit comfortably as some of the best games on their respective consoles. You have what is personally my Best Video Game Ever, Metroid Prime, coupled with its relentless sequel, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and the Wii installment that capped off this trilogy, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Metroid Prime: Trilogy is a lot of game. To…
I almost gave Persona 4 5 stars. I was dead set on giving this game this immaculate score, but then I jogged my memory back all the way to the zeroth second. Social links don’t tie into the main story very well, if at all, but still. The middle of the game started to get predictable, but still. Dungeons have their own visual motif, but they aren’t really different from one another on a gameplay level. But still . I…
I jammed a shiv into a dude’s eye, wiggled it around to really, really dig it in there, and then pulled it back out before he was finally given solace, because man, I wanted him to feel all of that. The Chronicles of Riddick : Assault on Dark Athena has that. Brutality seems to be a common theme with Starbreeze ’s body of work, and they spare no details to the imagination with their kinda-maybe-sequel to Escape from…
Read the full review The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
BUYER BEWARE : The first thing you need to know is that Empire: Total War is suffering from a ton of bugs and technical problems. CTDs, lock ups and in general, the game isn’t working for a lot of people. I’ve yet to run into a single significant issue, so results will vary. This review is based off of the update. For 10 years now, Creative Assembly has been churning out Total War games, with each installment…
Lost Planet is a prime example of Capcom’s development procedure. Build a game and then stitch on some context to add texture and reason to the world you’re involving yourself in. Well, granted, this how most developers prioritize, but Capcom’s incompetence in this field is glaringly obvious right from the opening cut-scene. The narrative plods, crawls around and dares you to not guffaw. Still, it’s something you…
Here's the deal with Legendary: I got this game for free many moons and months ago and then simply forgot I had this game. This game was so rote and so boring, that I quite literally forgot that I owned this jumble of code. Legendary is not particularly bad – it's just insanely boring. It's hard to recall anything that happens in this game, because it's so unforgettable. Really, if there is one thing I will…
Or you can just watch my video review -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdR-X3dj18 Yes, it is a shameless way to garner hits. Mirror’s Edge is first and foremost, a platformer. Sure, you can shoot a gun, but for the most part, it’s all about jumping over and across stuff, hoping you don’t miss your mark and die. That pretty much describes what a platformer generally is, but DICE attempts to do it all in the…
Ubisoft decided to toss away the memorable, time-warping and ret-conning universe they established last generation with Sands of Time, Warrior Within and Two Thrones. It's another fresh start for the franchise and good lord, what an amazing way to start from square one. The game starts with the new prince caught in a sandstorm, while the narrator questions the relevance of a single grain of sand, which may or not be…
It’s tough to not associate Valve with quality at this point, so it’s no surprise to see that their latest, Left 4 Dead, is completely awesome. It successfully blends the cinematic and grandiose qualities of their single-player epics with the social and competitive chaos that’s associated with all great multi-player games. Even more, all of this is set in the midst of a zombie apocalypse and all the potential dread…
If Dead Space was 2 hours long and cost $5, then it would've been a great game. Instead, what EA Redwood tried to do was stretch the game's base ideas to the point that it became a 12-15 hour hike. EA's definitely succeeded in that respect, but the end result is a game that constantly recycles its ideas and concepts to the point that repetitive becomes a massive understatement. There's also a lack of genuine,…
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway finally gets it right. What right, exactly? The story. Gearbox’s third entry into their innovative (I’m being serious here.) tactical WWII shooter tells a gripping, emotionally resonant narrative, that really might conjure tears from the more sensitive. There’s a weird trade-off that comes with this, though. For all the improvements in storytelling, the tactical gameplay that was so…
Penumbra started as a mere tech demo, but has since then blossomed into an episodic series. Frictional Game’s trademark physics interaction and defecate-inducing levels of horror are what made the two episodes so successful. So, it’s surprising to see Frictional take a step back with Penumbra: Black Plauge’s expansion pack, Penumbra: Requiem. This new installment in the series focuses solely on puzzles, with the…
Spore starts off at a disadvantage. With such absurd expectations and ridiculous excitement over the course of three years, Maxis couldn't have hoped to meet the expectations of excited on-lookers. Shockingly enough, Maxis falls short on many aspects of the game. As much as Will Wright's latest brainchild doesn't live up to a lot of what it sets out to do, it is still a grand, fun and a surprisingly…
