130 public written 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.
To give some credit to The Falsebound Kingdom, this was not what I expected when I booted up a Yu-Gi-Oh! game. I was expecting some kind of card-based strategy game, yet this features no cards (although I presume the monsters in it are the ones depicted on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards). Instead, the main characters get trapped in a fantasy-themed simulation where they have to stop (or support, depending on your character of…
The Momotarō Dentetsu series is a long-running Japanese series of board-game-like video games. It’s a roll-and-move adventure all about navigating Japan. A station is picked at random and your aim is to be the first to get there. Succeed and you’ll get a load of money, but if you’re the furthest away when this happens, the God of Poverty will follow you and mess you up. I got frustrated fairly early on as the first…
I enjoyed the first Alan Wake a lot. Even though the gameplay wasn’t anything special – it was a decent action game – there was something about the atmosphere that captured me. It told the story of a writer that ends up getting his horror story twisted by a “dark presence” and finding himself getting trapped in it. A sequel was eagerly awaited and then teased inside Quantum Break, although it still didn’t come until…
The first mainline Legend of Zelda game that features Zelda herself as the main character, while also taking some inspiration from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and incorporating aspects of those into a more traditional 2D Zelda, with the style of the Link’s Awakening remake and a map heavily inspired by A Link to the Past. It’s quite an amalgamation of different Zelda concepts, but it all blends…
Split Fiction is the latest two player co-op from Hazelight Studios. The developers started this journey with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – which was a co-op game designed to be played by a single person controlling both characters with a single controller, and somehow managed to get emotion out of how you control the game. A Way Out started the full on co-op, a game that can only be played with two players. This…
This is a really bizarre choice for a game. Knows as “Donald Duck: PK” in Europe, this is a game based on an Italian comic book series where Donald Duck becomes a superhero called Paperinik, and was the first time the PK name was used in an English language version of the character (he’s usually called “Duck Avenger” or “Superduck”). That said, the character’s origins were changed and PK is now short for…
For a kids license title, I do have to give Rugrats Royal Ransom credit for having meaningful difficulty levels. The easy mode is extremely easy, while the tough difficulty is surprisingly tough. Some of this is due to changing the level design and having to do more of the levels. That said, it’s not perfect, as some levels are just longer without any difficulty and part of the difficulty is just having annoying…
As the GameCube version of the original came out after the PS2 version, it meant that Legends of Wrestling II came out a mere six months after the first. While yearly sports games have the excuse of people wanting the latest rosters, this is just a case of Acclaim getting a few more names on board, the big one being Andre the Giant. The biggest change is that the HUD is a bit clearer so you can tell how the game…
Dead to Rights is an over-the-top third person shooter that never seems to figure out what tone it wants to be. The plot is crazy, yet played oddly straight. It involves Jack Slate as he tries to figure out who killed his father. As he murders a load of staff in a nightclub, he eventually catches up to his target only to find him dead, so he gets framed for murder. As Slate is the one of the few “good” cops in a…
BMX XXX is an infamous game that marked the end of Acclaim. While this was in development, Acclaim were struggling, especially in the extreme sports category due to so many people (themselves included) making sub-par clones of Tony Hawk’s games. So Acclaim’s big idea was to make Dave Mirra 3 full of vulgarity and nudity, eventually causing all the professional BMX riders to disassociate themselves from the project.…
Despite having the number V be the basis of the game’s logo and box art, this was the start of Mortal Kombat ditching numbered titles for a while (before eventually returning to it with the last three main games: X, 11 and 1). Mortal Kombat isn’t my thing, but this version does seem to cater to a single player a bit more, yet is still lacking the option to just let you pick an opponent to fight. The Konquest mode is…
Ultimate Muscle is a popular manga and anime series, called Kinnikuman in Japan. However, people that grew up in the 80s or 90s in the US and UK (and likely some other places) have probably played with Ultimate Muscle toys, usually called Muscle Men or just MUSCLE (a backronym for Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere). They’re the little rubbery wrestling figures that came in loads of strange…
Read the full review Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation
Drive a car, smash into things, blow stuff up, run over people at will. A silly vehicle game like this should, at the very least, be mildly amusing and distracting, but Wreckless manages to make all of this incredibly dull. Bizarrely, there’s also a full city to explore, yet you pick missions from a menu and can’t deviate much from the set path that the missions require, something made even worse by how the large…
Monopoly is a terrible board game, and while this might look like a minigame collection from the name and box, it’s just the board game. That said, I do have to give compliments to the main mode of Monopoly Party: it makes Monopoly mercifully shorter. In the Party mode, everyone now rolls and moves at the same time. Events that cause interaction are still done in order (as well as when someone rolls a double and has…
While the main Baldur’s Gate games are large RPGs, the Dark Alliance spin-off series is more of a hack n slash with a lot of similarities to the Gauntlet games, including co-op multiplayer. It still has RPG elements like levelling up and choices in conversations, but these are very muted and don’t lead to much difference in the game itself. For the most part, you’re wandering through corridors killing a large amount…
The third in the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series of games – one that doesn’t like keeping the same name for more than a couple of games. Jedi Outcast was given to a new developer after the first two internally-developed Dark Forces games, continuing the story of Kyle Katarn. Raven Software took the helm this time, who had recently made the wonderful Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. While Elite Force was clearly…
Read the full review Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast
In a very similar story to Crash Bandicoot, Spyro was a PlayStation-exclusive franchise owned by Universal Interactive that had a successful trilogy on PS1. However, due to exclusivity deals ending and the original developers wanting to move on to new stuff, the task of a fourth game ended up in the hands of a new studio for a new generation, with development rushed for a quick release, something extremely evident…
Before 2003, I had zero experience with Metroid, but after seeing the reviews of Metroid Prime – which was releasing close to my birthday – I ended up getting both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion for my birthday, both of which were wonderful games, and Retro Studios did a truly tremendous job translating the Super Metroid formula into 3D, even if it did cost them all their other games (which Nintendo cancelled so…
With Agent Under Fire doing well for EA without having to be an adaptation of a Bond film, EA carried on with making new adventures for Bond, this time with Eurocom, who made the fantastic The World is not Enough on N64. There’s also a greater feeling of “legitimacy” due to the use of Pierce Brosnan’s face (although not his voice). It does a really good job at capturing the tone and style of the films, but how does…
Hunter: The Reckoning is based on a Tabletop RPG series called World of Darkness, which has had other video game adaptations based on Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The video game of Hunter: The Reckoning is not an RPG, though, and is instead a Gauntlet-style twin stick shooter/melee game where you and three friends cut your way through hundreds of hundreds of undead monsters. The game is…
The early Harry Potter are rather odd in that there are so many different versions of them. With Chamber of Secrets, the GameCube, Xbox and PS2 versions are the same, but you’d also find completely different versions on PC, PS1, Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Colour. These aren’t just adaptations to different platforms, but they have very different gameplay, different level design and include or exclude different…
Read the full review Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Starting originally as a game for the Nintendo 64, this Die Hard game eventually made its way out on the GameCube (and then later PS2 and Xbox). One of the first notable things is that John McClaine looks and sounds nothing like Bruce Willis, which is a shame as everything captures Die Hard really well. The story feels right, John’s quips are written in the right way, the villains are interesting and there are some…
With Sega going multiplatform, it was a good opportunity for them to re-release some of their classic games on other platforms. One of the first major ones was Sonic Mega Collection on GameCube, which brings all of Sonic’s Mega Drive outings (standard console, no add-ons) with a few bonuses. There’s a good amount of extras to go through, like one full comic, a load of covers, a history of Sonic and the intro and…
A game that was originally planned for the Nintendo 64, Resident Evil Zero was moved to the GameCube and was given similar graphical treatment to the Resident Evil Remake. This Resident Evil adventure also remained a GameCube exclusive until 2016. It takes place before the first game and tells the story of STARS member Rebecca Chambers and an ex-US Marine called Billy, who is wanted for murder. This time, though,…
As Infogrames are mainly known for cheaper, budget games, I was quite surprised as to the amount of detail in this NASCAR game. It starts off with some kind of news presenter explaining that NASCAR is far more than the high level events that are the main part of NASCAR people know about, but rather loads and loads of smaller leagues. This game focuses on some of those as you start from almost nothing and slowly…
Set in a fantasy land where magic has vanished and colour is seen as an act of rebellion, you play as Skye, a dwentil herder that ends up finding a mysterious object that lets her cast magic. She gets chased by the evil forces of Necroth but ends up meeting a few friendly voices, such as a sarcastic gargoyle named Draak. The adventure takes her though a few realms as she tries to restore the Great Rainbow to bring…
Medal of Honor was once THE war first person shooter, until the EA failed to keep the franchise relevant once Call of Duty 4 came about. The series began on the PlayStation with Steven Spielberg (creator of Boom Blox on the Wii), Dreamworks and EA. By the time of Frontline, Dreamworks Interactive was sold off to EA and was rebranded as EA Los Angeles, and the franchise became a multi-platform game on the next…
After Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge, Blitz Games were eager to make another one with the same style of gameplay. Hasbro turned them down, so Blitz decided to make the game anyway, just without Frogger, replacing Frogger with Zapper, a cricket who springs into action when his younger brother (who Zapper is currently using as a TV aerial) gets kidnapped by a magpie called Maggie. It’s up to Zapper to make his way to…
This is a surprisingly interesting 3D reboot of the classic arcade game Defender. It has design elements that are from the arcade game, but slowly builds upon it with new stuff – perhaps a bit too slowly. The tutorial covers some of the basic stuff from the arcade game: shoot aliens, protect colonists and pick them up to return them to bases. The way the aliens move is even reminiscent of the arcade game, which does…
In this generation of consoles, both sex and gore were extremely popular, with Nintendo themselves even trying to get more adult games on the GameCube. So it’s no surprise that a game like BloodRayne came about, where you’re a sexy half vampire eviscerating monsters like strange spiders, Nazis and worm creatures that burst into humans and replace their head and spinal column. The Nazis are a very handy way to allow…
As you might expect, Shrek Extra Large is a pretty bad game. But what may surprise you is that Shrek Extra Large is also a really good game at the same time. Originally released on Xbox, with developers DICE (a Canadian branch, not the main Battlefield studio) using some brand new rendering techniques that became industry standard, this GameCube port came with some additional levels. It’s ridiculous, annoying, dumb…
Edgy sports games were a big trend in this era, and one core point that many stuck to was that every single character had to be someone everyone would hate and nobody would want to play as. Which is a rather odd choice. Like other golf games, Outlaw Golf uses the swing via analogue stick mechanics but also does it in a way that’s halfway towards the classic button tap a bar method. After you finish aiming, you press…
Tiger Woods finally makes his way to Nintendo platforms in a serious title, instead of the whacky-but-fun CyberTiger on the N64. This unfortunately uses the analogue stick swing method of golf games, and manages to make it even worse by removing any kind of feedback from your swing. As you start moving the stick, the HUD vanishes and you only know anything from how your ball lands. I found it immensely difficult to…
When it comes to Pandemic and Star Wars games, everyone immediately goes to the Battlefront games. But before Battlefront, they made another Star Wars game that very much gets overlooked, probably partly because the name was later used for two animated TV shows. It’s a shame as The Clone Wars is a fantastic game that captures the spectacle of the film extremely well, starting with the battle on Geonosis (the only…
Sometimes it’s very clear when a game is built out of love for a franchise, or if the license was thrown in because the developers or publishers (usually publishers) because they think it will make more money. If you took out the logo from the title screen, I don’t think a single person would identify Combat Zones as a Top Gun game. A huge part of that is due to the presentation, or lack thereof. When you start a…
While many people loved Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, it was clear to see that people wanted a bit of a change, not only had there been three Tony Hawk games with the two minute structure, but many, many clones. For Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, Neversoft chose not to tinker too much with the core gameplay that people loved in 3, but altered the structure and removed the time limit, making it more of a free roam with…
Swingerz Golf, or Ace Golf as it was called in Europe (due to a stronger meaning of “swingers” here), is a golf game that tries to straddle the line between silly fun and simulation. It has a colourful cast of characters and crazy clubs to choose from, yet features rather regular courses to play on. It looks decent for the most part, but I really think that extending the colourful nature of the characters over to…
With an impressive opening cutscene, narrated by Patrick Stewart as Xavier (even though this isn’t based on the films) and a large cast of playable characters, X-Men: Next Dimension starts off very promising. The moment you get into gameplay, though, all that hope is lost and you just have a slow, frustrating 3D fighting game. The controls are rather strange. The control stick provides Tekken-style 8-way movement,…
I’m not the biggest fan of the Mario Party franchise, and Mario Party 4 seems to focus a lot on the particular aspects I hate, mainly the sheer randomness. A lot of this is due to the board design, as each board has areas that you can’t reach without reaching a junction that randomly decides which route you’re taking. This means just aimlessly going round in circles until the game decides to let you go the way you…
After Perfect Dark, most of the team that worked on it left Rare to start their own studio, Free Radical Design. They developed TimeSplitters on the PS2 which was entirely multiplayer focused, with a few very simple single player/co-op levels where you collect an object then make a beeline for the starting point. With TimeSplitters 2, Free Radical decided to add in a proper single player campaign that brings the…
Casper as a character is instantly recognisable to me, yet the only Casper thing I think I’ve seen is the 1995 live action film. Still, you don’t need to know much for the game: Casper is a friendly ghost, and in Spirit Dimensions, he’s tasked with saving the spirit world from the evil Kibosh. While it’s structured much like a 3D platformer, it’s a flight-based shooter. When I did research on Casper: Spirit…
For fans of Robotech, Battlecry seems like a game that is a decent adaptation. It uses the voice actors from the show, but tells a new story where you experience the events from the show from the perspective of a new character, Jack Archer. The cel-shaded look not only captures the style of the show really well, but also means that the game still looks really nice now. Robotech centres around special aircraft that…
Backyard Sports is a series that started off as PC shovelware and eventually became notorious on the Wii. They’re simplified versions of sports games with kids playing them. Backyard Football actually has an NFL license, so you can also play as chibi child versions of actual players. There is some thought put into the game. It features a cast of children to pick form, each with their own backgrounds, strengths and…
This Namco Museum is mostly a port of the N64 version, with six more games added. There’s still no fun extra features, history or anything like that, but some of the new games make it into a far more entertaining package. Pac-Man: It’s still Pac-Pan, and it works well. Pac-Man Arrangement: One of the highlights of the collection. This is a fantastic version of Pac-Man, with the visual style changing every few levels…
While Knockout Kings 2002 skipped the GameCube, the 2003 edition was exclusive to the GameCube. For the most part, it’s sort of a port of Knockout Kings 2002, but it has new boxers, new modes, new rings and even a brand new mode, so it still has more changes than a lot of yearly sports titles. Knockout Kings is a fast and frantic boxing game, with a dynamic camera that keeps the action taking up the full frame and…
With EA’s 2003 sports titles opening with random people saying the EA sports slogan, it was nice to see NBA Live 2003 opening up with its own rap song, much like Madden 2002. It really is quite amazing how something as simple as intro and menu music can affect the atmosphere of the game, but it really does help NBA Live 2003 a lot. The actual game also feels really nice to play. Movement and passing is fluid and…
After three Tony Hawk’s games (and the fourth due out very soon after this), you would think that Activison themselves would be able to learn what Neversoft did and get other companies to mimic the style successfully. While Pro BMX 2 is very much a Tony Hawk style game, it feels like a massive step backwards, like it was made in between Tony Hawk’s 1 and 2. It technically works fine, but it’s missing much of what…
As far as plots for fighting games go, aliens coming along and letting all the monsters loose is actually fairly logical. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee is a one on one fighting game where you control hulking beasts duking it out in cities, causing all sorts of collateral damage – or even using buildings as weapons. The destruction is really what sets it out apart, and you can even have the destruction persist…
