26 public written reviews
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What do you think of when you picture bodies of water in video games? Whether it’s the Dopefish from Commander Keen, the terrifying drowning music from Sonic the Hedgehog, getting repeatedly eaten by sharks in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, or Soma just in general, someone might be given the mistaken impression a healthy fear of the water is requisite for working in the video game industry. As someone who grew up…
There was a time when a year seemingly couldn't go by without a Ratchet & Clank game. Insomniac Games released a whopping thirteen Ratchet & Clank games between 2002 and 2013. Thus, even a three year absence at the start of Sony's latest console generation was notable, even if the intention was to use the latest game as part of promotional efforts for the recent animated movie. Concerns that the result would come…
Note: this review covers both Birthright and Conquest Rather than be the final entry in a series rapidly declining in popularity, Fire Emblem Awakening proved to be one of the 3DS's biggest hits. The introduction of new mechanics involving unit pairing, a more robust social link style system that allowed you to marry units and create child units, and greater ability for users of different skill levels to customize…
The highlight of the game was easily the opening cinematic Hyper Light Drifter is a game that seemed built for me. I'm a sucker for unique art styles. I adore the Dark Souls series. Games like Metroid and Zelda putting an emphasis on exploration are among my favorites. Unfortunately, I found this game to be a victim of a disjointed design ethos. Hyper Light Drifter attempts to take elements of a number of different…
Still so beautifully dumb... It takes a certain audacity to reboot Doom. It’s freakin’ Doom. Doom was the game that popularized the FPS genre. It is the Mario of the PC. It is maybe the single most controversial game in history. The efforts just to release a Doom sequel in 2005 were mixed at best, and that game had the benefit of having co-creator John Carmack involved. This Doom been in development hell since 2008,…
After Uncharted 3 seemingly concluded the series while giving its audience the impression Naughty Dog had about run out of ideas, I found myself among the many fans okay if Uncharted was laid to rest with the console it had helped define. Fortunately, Naughty Dog took the time and care to design a sequel that not only properly concludes the adventures of Nathan Drake, but manages to refresh the series to reflect the…
So after eight years, five games (three actually titled “Dark Souls”), over a hundred bosses, and thousands of broken controllers, we‘ve come to the end of the Soulsorne series for the time being. And even as the series ends, these games remain so unique, so unrivaled in what they do, and so treasured by fans that half of me wishes this series kept going. Yet as the credits rolled, I found myself both immensely…
Oxenfree makes it quickly apparent it was developed by ex-Telltale employees. Night School Studio’s first game is very much a product of its creators’ previous work experience. It would be in error to simply label it as a Telltale game in all but name though, as Oxenfree at minimum represents the kind of evolution in game design Telltale has been sorely needing for the past few years. Oxenfree tells the tale of five…
Outside of Nintendo first-party titles, there haven’t been many games that have really taken advantage of the Wii U GamePad. During the system’s short lifespan which is already coming to an end, only Nintendo first-party developers have seemingly had any inkling of how to utilize the peripheral. One of the few exceptions is the 2015 release of Affordable Space Adventures from Nifflas’ Games. While in some regards…
Like many others, I consider 2014 a bit of a down year for video games. Bayonetta 2 has been the singular 2014 game I’ve tended to recommend to friends as a “must play.” So now in 2016, with my 2014 backlog down to a mere handful of games, I need to admit I was mistaken. The Talos Principle is not just one of the best titles from that year, but one of my favorite games from recent times. While many have summarized…
I love mystery games. I love detective novels. I love adventure games. On paper, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is going for something I should love. Instead, I found the game to be kind of a mess. While the game might be one of the best looking titles in recent memory, it feels closer to a loose collection of concepts with no connecting tissue to make it a complete video game. Ethan Carter plays much like a…
With the recent influx of old-school, isometric RPGs, I had found myself in the mood to give one of them a shot. Shadowrun: Dragonfall attracted me for a couple of reasons. Its cyberpunk setting is a little less played out than the likes of Pillars of Eternity. The game being both shorter and having a more controlled structure than the vast open-world RPGs of recent years felt rather novel. Despite having recently…
Cibele brought back a lot of memories of early online dating. While the story of Cibele is unique to Nina Freeman, it is familiar enough to anyone who had similar online dating experiences when it was more associated with online chat rooms and MMOs. OkCupid, Tinder, and a slew of other services may have brought online dating to a mainstream audience, but there was a time when exploring romance digitally was seen by…
Telltale’s “The Walking Dead” might be the game most credited with starting the recent Renaissance in story-driven video games. Since then, Gone Home, Life is Strange, Cibele, That Dragon, Cancer, and a slew of other games have continued to advance both the complexity of stories told in more mainstream video games and the emotions and topics a mainstream video game can be okay to invoke. It is unsurprising then that…
XCom 2 is a fantastic game and easily a Game of the Year Candidate for 2016. If only it was that simple to summarize XCom 2. XCom: Enemy Unknown was a wonderful surprise back in 2012. It rightfully won numerous Game of the Year accolades thanks to its combination of relentless challenge and addictive gameplay. Four years later, Firaxis has released a sequel that in many tangible ways improves upon an already…
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a game that is really difficult to score. While the sequel to Trigger Happy Havoc was released several years after the original in Japan, the U.S. ended up receiving both games in 2014. The original game possessed one of the most inventive and entertaining narratives in recent memory, yet suffered from dull, uninteresting gameplay that didn’t quite mesh with the story. Instead of…
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a game I finished last year, but I didn’t review it at the time. I also recently finished Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and wanted to review it. In order to properly contextualize my thoughts on that game though, I think it is best that I start with Danganronpa. By now, many of you have heard of the premise of Danganronpa. You play the role of one of a group of students who have…
Damn this game has a good title sequence. I just had to get that out of the way. Every time I booted up Xenoblade Chronicles X, I always let that first bit play out.And by the time I was finishing my over one hundred hours with the game, I needed something to keep me going. Xenoblade is one beautiful mess of a game. There are elements of it which were my favorite in an RPG of this generation, and elements that were…
First released in 2010, Just Cause 2 was a bit of a cult classic. In a pre-Saints Row the Third World, it served as maybe the most enjoyable open world game to just dick around in. It certainly had its warts and suffered from bugs and content issues, but you got the feeling that given both proper time and resources, it could serve as the framework to a truly great game. Sadly, numerous baffling design decisions…
It took AC: Syndicate to make me realize something: I enjoyed Black Flag for all the reasons it wasn't an Assassin's Creed game. I loved ship combat and customization, freeing slaves from plantations, and just in general exploring the world. On the other hand, story missions were mostly dull and forgettable, there were a number of unenjoyable side activities like chasing down shanties and bell diving, and the…
While many enjoyed the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, I was not a big fan of it. I can admit that it was a well-made product, but the different elements of the game just never really came together. Even those who liked the game often admit the narrative that largely focused on 21-year old Lara Croft's transformation into a hardened survivor clashed with gameplay that often felt so close to Uncharted you could palette…
So who bet on the Borderlands game being the better Telltale game this year than Game of Thrones? When the two games were first announced, the temperature in the room was that Borderlands looked like an obvious cash grab, especially with its release in such close proximity with the pedestrian Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. Despite trepidations, what we got was Telltale's first entry since Walking Dead that is on that…
It has been one... strange journey for this game. When Dontnod Entertainment released Life is Strange Episode 1 back in January, it was hard to believe come October there would be more buzz surrounding the game's final episode then the bigger budget, big marque Tales from the Borderlands which concluded the same week. Dontnod had a single prior game under its belt, the incredibly forgettable Remember Me. And thus…
I swore I wasn't going to buy this game, but damn it Atlus, you got me again. For background, I love Persona games. I also love Persona music. I wasn't really that excited for Dancing All Night. I didn't so much dismiss it due to it being the third Persona 4 spin-off (fourth if you count Ultimax), as the previous spin-offs have been great efforts. I would go so far to argue that Arena/Ultimax is among the top 5…
After Ground Zeroes, I had mixed expectations going into The Phantom Pain. I didn't like the new, more serious tone at all. The plot devices in Ground Zeroes were gross, insulting, and exploitative by any measure. To top it all off, the idea of an open-world Metal Gear game based off the generally agreed upon weakest entry in the core series, Peace Walker, didn't sound in the least bit exciting. One hundred and…
How do you recommend a game without revealing almost a thing about it? Reviewers often struggle with how to write about a game as spoiler-free as possible. With most games, you can describe gameplay, graphics, music, and other aspects of the content in vague, generalized fashion. I am kind of at a loss to how to that with The Beginner's Guide.Professional reviewers have an established level of trust and a track…
