22 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.
There is a big qualification on this mildly positive. The Sinking City is a flawed game. It has a lot of tedious running around town. The action is terrible. Some of the side quests are good, and some are just really boring item hunts. A lot of the building interiors are copy/paste jobs, especially on those tedious item find quests. And the ending is absolutely awful. What I had fun doing was solving cases, which is…
Hyper Light Drifter is a game that looked cool on Kickstarter, but I passed on backing it. Then it came out and it still looked cool, but I'd read a lot of comparisons to Zelda and notes on high difficulty, so I passed. Zelda's not a series I have a lot of love for, and I'm not attracted to games that get a lot of buzz just for being difficult. However, when it got a lot of love during the Giant Bomb game of the…
Way back when, there was this cool game called Uplink. It was a hacking simulator. You bounce your connection off of hacked machines, hide your steps, steal data. It was sort of close to how real hacking works, but it was just different enough and directionless to a point that it was kind of overwhelming. It was a hard game. Hacknet is something of an Uplink-inspired indie game. It's terms and tools are much closer…
When Mark of the Ninja came out, it got a lot of positive attention. Klei was well-known for the Shank games, but Mark of the Ninja was supposed to be head and shoulders above it. I bought it and played the first level, and promptly put it in the backlog for something else. That was a mistake. It's an incredible stealthy 2D platform/action game. It easily does some of the best representation of senses that I've ever…
I knew it would take me some time to get through AC4, and it did. There were times when I wanted to stop playing, not because the game is difficult, but because it got real tedious in the middle. I've learned that when I'm playing an Assassin's Creed game, I absolutely have to reign in the desire to do everything, and just play the game. Collect things until that gets boring, then do something else. The first…
I don't hate Thief. Let's get that right out of the way. But it's such a weird game for being a seemingly straight forward AAA title. I feel like Thief would've been a better game if Dishonored didn't exist. Not just that Dishonored is better by comparison (because it is), but it feels like Thief and Dishonored had a lot of parallel construction. Once Dishonored was released, well before Thief, it's like the…
I think I've played about as much of this as I need to. Saints Row 3 is the last complete original Saints Row. Saints Row 4, though almost as large as SR3, was more or less a rehash of SR3 but with a Matrix twist. Gat Out of Hell is SR4 except on a new arrangement of a smaller landmass. It's not Steelport, it's an original map, but everything looks and feels like the previous two games. It feels like we've been…
Regardless of how well or poorly you personally received the ending of the original Mass Effect trilogy, following those games with a non-reboot, non-sequel game in the same universe is going to be a tall order for anyone. Mass Effect: Andromeda ( as reported by Kotaku ) had a difficult development, and it shows. But the biggest factor for whether or not you'll get some enjoyment out of this game can be boiled down…
... then is it really Red Faction? I guess the "Red" in Red Faction this time comes from the obvious Communist era tones in the artwork and "for the people" storyline. Red Faction 2 doesn't take place on Mars. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the first game at all, really, and that's okay with me. I love/hate Red Faction. I hate it because the AI was awful, the geo-mod was not entirely impressive or overly…
Daikatana has a storied history which is covered sufficiently in the wiki and elsewhere. This review will concentrate on the game itself, rather the history behind the game. Daikatana is mediocre at best. There is simply no better way to put it. The level design is uninspired. The sounds are mostly weak and inappropriate. The flow of the game is choppy. The texture work is busy and looks as though entirely too much…
Then you'll like Bioshock 2! They're really rather similar. The biggest difference is that since you are playing as one of the first Big Daddies, instead of your options being "rescue" or "harvest" little sisters, your options are now "adopt" or "harvest", with adoption requiring you to either drop off the little sister at a port hole for a small amount of ADAM or you set them down near a corpse and defend them from…
This is my third time through the entire game. I've owned it since release but just recently bought it on Steam for the convenience of being able to install and play it on a whim. Here's my bottom line opinion on Republic Commando; it's the second-best Star Wars first-person shooter. Just below Dark Forces. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the best game to come out of the prequel trilogy, and doesn't…
I don't know how I made it through this one. I'm going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off. It's visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway through you get a crossbow that kills every enemy in one shot. Combined with the ability to slow and pause time, this is basically god-mode. Even…
I don't know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you'd think this would've been a no-brainer. F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket whose team is grabbed by Armacham, juiced full of experimental drugs, and then sent on a mission to stop Alma while chasing down leads on the how…
I've said this before but Dark Forces is probably my favorite Doom clone. It brought the Star Wars universe with all its diverse locations and creatures into a two-and-a-half dimensional game with an engine capable of faking 3D environments and set pieces. It didn't and still doesn't get near enough respect. Let's get the negatives out the way first. Though there are 10 weapons, nearly all of them fall into two…
Please note, I did not finish this game. I know it's a faux pas to write a review for a game you didn't finish but I'll explain why. Darklight Conflict, on the surface, looks fun. It's got some nicely done box art, and I'm a big fan of space dogfighters so it looked right up my alley. Beauty, however, is only skin deep. The game starts with a mandatory, unskippable series of tutorial levels. They start with basic…
When Shadow Complex was announced a couple months ago, I was somewhat torn by it. It was described as a metroidvania style game, which I like. It's developed by Chair, who made Undertow, which sucked. But the lead designer at Chair also made Advent Rising, which I liked! But Advent Rising and Shadow Complex are based on properties Orson Scott Card is involved in, whom I do not like. The hype coming out of E3 was…
This is one I started before, and just now finished. Except that Colony Wars was one of the first games I ever owned on Playstation, so really it's taken me about 10 years to finish it. I got Colony Wars way back when it was new to complement my new Dual Analog controller. This was before the days when it was the Dual Shock, and the analog sticks had indents on top rather than rubber domes. I still have this…
If you haven't heard of this one, you're probably not alone. It won a few indie game awards but it has kind of been under the radar. It's also somewhat difficult to describe. To put it simply, it's a first-person fighting game that takes place in a very surreal environment. It's colorful, beautiful, and full of interesting creatures and people, whom you get to punch in the face. A story exists, the voice acting kind…
NOTE: This review was written for Fable: The Lost Chapters on Xbox. Unfortunately, The Lost Chapters page won't let me write the review for xbox, just PC and Mac. Here's a classic. I just got this one last year because it was $5 and it was completely worth it. I'd heard others praising Fable back when it was released but for some reason I let it slide off my radar. It's an action RPG, with a whole lot more added in…
I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I've been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it's taken me to finish a Silent Hill game. I spent the last four hours (or so my wife says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it's lack of health items and somewhat…
If you google "epidemic psx review" you'll get a couple of 1/2 star reviews citing this game as the worst of the worst. In reality and historic context, it's not that bad. Epidemic is the definition of "corridor shooter". You never venture outside. The environments consist of sewers and labyrinthine offices. Most of the 7 missions are key hunts. There are maybe five puzzles in the whole game and three of them are on…
