32 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.
I’m terribly disappointed in RAGE 2 so before I go on and on about why I think it sucks, here’s what I liked, in bullet point form: - Enemy heads have a huge hitbox and pop in a satisfying manner - The ground punch attack feels great - It looks good and there’s no loading once you’re in the world - The cars sound meaty - Exploring the world is fun even if a lot of the map markers are just boring “kill everything”…
Let’s make a recipe to describe Wolfenstein: Youngblood: Take Wolfenstein: The New Colossus Chop it in half Move it along from the 1970’s to the 1980’s Triple the collectibles Give it to the people who made Dishonored Add an extensive weapon mod system Add two player coop Add microtransactions And take out the story There. That’s about right. Youngblood is a new non-sequel in the Wolfenstein series, much like The…
This game is on a long timeline for me. I played and loved Shadow of Mordor. I call it the best Assassin's Creed game. And then Shadow of War was released and was riddled with loot boxes, so I passed on it. Then, 9 months later, they removed the loot boxes and microtransactions, so I was back in again. And it's fine. It's more of Shadow of Mordor, which I loved, but there's so much of it. I played about half of it…
I wish this game were better. I loved the vibe of the setup, but getting into actually playing it really sucks. Shockingly stiff action for a game that wants to fluidly juggle shooting and melee. It absolutely fails to create compelling gameplay so much as something you tolerate to get further into the game. Just not fun at all.
When I was a teenager, a game called The Bouncer came out. It was an early PS2 game, when the PS2 desperately needed new games. But the reviews and chat around the Babbage’s was that The Bouncer was bad. Short, repetitive, linear. A good looking but dumb beat-em-up. I didn’t play The Bouncer, largely because of this reputation but also because I was pretty broke. The Quiet Man is a The Bouncer for this generation. I…
Suicide Squad is a fun game surrounded by a lot of crap. It's a $70 game with a battle pass. It's rotten with cosmetic microtransactions. The story mode is more or less a tutorial for the seasonal battle pass-linked gameplay loop. And yet, this game is a lot of fun. The action is fast and varied. it absolutely refuses to let you stand still. If you like to see numbers go up, they go up and there are a lot of…
Is it rude to call this game cute? Maybe but I'm finding it hard to describe in other words. Yes, it's a survival horror. Yes it's eerie. But it's predominantly cute. Cute because its narrative is a love story. Cute because it's a pretty good copy of PSX horror games. Cute because it's an afternoon in length. Cute because it's not hard. Cute because it's intuitive. I really liked it. But also it's cute.
This game just speaks to me. Super fluid high speed FPS, looks incredible, and Sonic Mayhem soundtrack. It is as sick as it sounds. When I first saw it, I thought it was a rogue-like. It's not. It's a traditional linear FPS campaign. That's probably a failure of the marketing but I'm glad it wasn't run-based. This game rules. I want to sing about it. My biggest criticism is that it's short. I could've played twice…
Star Wars Outlaws is great. It's doing all the Star Wars stuff you want out of the non-Jedi magic side of this universe. It references the movies that you like, without being overbearing about it. It casts its own shadow on the franchise. It does pretty much everything right. It's a shame that Massive are going to the Division mines for the foreseeable future. I don't think enough people gave Star Wars Outlaws a…
Death Stranding is a game where you figure out how to deliver cargo from one point to another without destroying it. That's the game. I shuffled cargo around in my backpack. I optimized my delivery routes. I built structures that would make deliveries easier, like bridges and ladders. I managed my balance while climbing mountains and crossing streams. I fell on my ass and my cargo flew everywhere. I slipped in a…
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…
