16 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.
It’s rare that a sequel to such a derivative game manages to exceed the legacy of its predecessor and truly become something unique. Saints Row the Third is one of those games. What started as a relatively humble rip-off of GTA: San Andreas in Saints Row 2 has since morphed into an amazing and ridiculous power fantasy that takes the open-world genre to new extremes. Emphasis is on “extremes”. No one is putting…
Vanilla is not an adjective I would use to describe Saints Row 2. In fact, Saints Row 2 is not the vanilla open-world crime game that it seems to be in its trailers. Quite the contrary, it is a marbled neopolitan with shades of vanilla, odd, and cra-cra equally represented throughout the whole of it. It manages to find a balance in these elements, but it never forces you to play the parts that you don’t want to with…
I was super excited when I heard that Hotel Dusk was getting a sequel. It was a neat adventure game with an interesting story and compelling characters. Sure, there were some problems with the minigames (they tried too hard to utilize all of the DS’s features) and the story got a little too far up its own butthole as it went on. However, it still managed to deliver a heartfelt mystery story that had quite a few…
Dawn of war is an amazing RTS game that manages to offer up some compelling battle narrative alongside its violent conflicts with various space creatures. Those violent and bloody conflicts make up Dawn of War’s short but sweet single-player campaign. In traditional RTS fashion, new units are trickled down throughout the missions and new strategies emerge to keep up with the ever increasing difficulty. My particular…
Rocket Knight Adventures Rocket Knight is a light-hearted romp of a game. It’s short and saccharine, but it isn’t a wimpy game. To the contrary, Rocket Knight is an old school game’s old school game. It’s a 2D-sidescroller game meant for multiple playthroughs and high score chasing on higher difficulty levels, and if you’re into that sort of thing then this game is for you. However, I’m more of a play once and get…
Holy crap, where to start with this game? It's not only a great baby's first action-rpg, it's also a challenge for seasoned veterans of the genre. And that's where Bastion's strength lies. It truly is an all ages game; the closest video games have ever come to Pixar quality. Not only can the youngest of the young play this game and enjoy it, but older gamers can find an incredibly deep and satisfying story that…
I know what you're thinking, “colonelpopcorn, why did it take you a year and a half to play this?” I'm glad you asked anonymous internet person. I didn't have a DS at the time, no job, super into the Xbox 360, there was a flood, tornado, smaug. I DI'NT DO IT OFFICER! Anyway, I was being lazy/poor, that's why. Ghost Trick is an adventure game in the vein of Phoenix Wright. No, I am not kidding, this game about…
I just finished Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. What started out as a breezy adventure game quickly turned into a commentary on death, inevitability, and how much control a video game player actually has. I'm getting ahead of myself. If you don't know, EP is a game by Superbrothers and Capybara games. I wanted to find out a little about the Superbrothers but they/he/she don't seem to know that some of us don't…
Super Paper Mario had a lot to prove to me, it was on the one hand a continuation of the RPG style Mario games. On the other it was borrowing very heavily from honest-to-goodness Mario platformers. What kind of mixture would these two titans of game design combine to create, and does its borrowing from titans make it a titan, as well? Super Paper Mario is that mixture, but whether or not its a titan is a question…
Beyond Good & Evil is hailed by many as a classic that never was, a hidden gem that was buried under the rough that was the games industry circa 2003. Rough not only because there was a lot of samey FPS games, licensed games (the ones that set the trend of them being bad), and sports games, but also because there were a lot of games to distract people from the bad ones. For every Enter the Matrix you had Prince of…
Costume Quest may be the greatest thing to happen to video games in a long time. After all, what good is a medium of entertainment if you don't have seasonal stories. You start out as either Wren or Reynold and get dumped out into the neighborhood wearing a robot costume with your candy-corn-costume wearing sibling in tow. The sibling you are not controlling then gets kidnapped and taken to be eaten by an evil…
The opening statement to this review should clue you in on my hatred for the house of Hironobu Sakaguchi and all its shabby, unkempt denizens. Let's face it the RPG in Japan as we know it is in dire need of revival and/or renovation, with overindulgent cutscenes, overly complicated battle mechanics, and an unwieldy length that would rival any Final Fantasy delay. These traits are all commonly shared between modern…
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, the first game in Naughty Dog's platforming action-adventure series, is a brilliant refinement of the Super Mario 64 3D platforming formula. It takes concepts made famous by Mario 64 and successfully brings them over to the PS2 without copying it wholesale. Loved: Buttery-Smooth Gameplay: At the time of its release Jak and Daxter wasn't a particularly innovative game, in fact…
I really wanted to like Second Sight a lot, after all it was made by Free Radical, the dudes behind one of my favorite franchises "Timesplitters". That franchise's crazy sense of humor (absent from this game) really made it easy to like, and a blast to play with friends and family alike. Rather than rely on their FPS development prowess to make a decent third-person shooter with an interesting psychic element,…
So, I'm like a million years late playing this wonderful game and reviewing it, but it doesn't much matter because I think this game will stand the test of time. That sentence may sound presumptuous or like hyperbole, but as long as 3D platformers don't kill anyone's baby I think it will. Psychonauts starts mildly enough with no apparent conflict in sight, save for the young protagonist, Raz, sneaking into a summer…
When I played through the first Gears of War, I was blown away by the awesome gameplay and the memorable characters. However, the story was definitely lacking in coherency and pacing, with the latter being especially like a train wreck. And while Gears 2 has somewhat better pacing and a better plot in general, it still goes a little too fast to be coherent. One level that stood out to me in particular as poorly…
