48 public written reviews
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Black Isle Studios 's 1999 RPG Planescape: Torment was a singular experiment for the popular Infinity Engine : one that strongly emphasized quality writing, role-playing and deeply philosophical ideas in a strange, almost alienating setting and pushed what was then standard to the genre - in particular, combat and showy cutscenes - to the sidelines. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that it was a game only…
In a curse-ravaged kingdom, bereft of hope, a single savior emerges from the wilderness to provide salvation before all falls to permanent darkness. This is the rough outline of the plot to Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (which really has a title more befitting of a Touhou spin-off), the latest game from small Indie studio Bombservice and the first of theirs to be available on Steam. However, it is also the…
Ratchet & Clank occupies a strange part of the video game players' minds in this day and age, where each new iteration becomes less and less observed. Despite being as good as it ever was, and that there are a large number of people who harbor a great fondness for the series as one of the PS2's early breakout hits, it seems to have fallen off everyone's radars. An imminent multimedia relaunch of the franchise, which…
It's hard to begin to describe Full Bore without discussing the plethora of sources it draws from to create a puzzle game that is, on the whole, actually fairly distinctive. It's partially a SpaceWhipper : that sort of non-linear exploration-heavy 2D platformer where avenues can be investigated in an order of one's choosing and you have a map that tells you what rooms still have points of interest to discover. It…
If there's one thing recent Kickstarter projects and acclaimed Indie games continue to prove is that there's a lot of money in mining nostalgia. This doesn't necessarily suggest that any such project is inherently avaricious: it's more that the larger developers have, for far too long, dictated the fashions and trends of the gaming industry without properly assessing whether many older genres died because people…
If there's one thing that Kickstarter has proven, it's that people are very fond of the games from their past. Many of its greatest video game-related successes have been due to game creators wishing to revisit a glorious era of their past, and asking a long-dormant fanbase to once again rise up and help make a new game in that mold a reality. Double Fine led the way with the beautiful Broken Age , a game…
Weapon Shop de Omasse is the last of Level-5 's Guild series to see a US/EU release, but the reason for its delay was not necessarily because it was most extensive or complex game. Rather, it's a game that relies heavily on traditional Japanese comedy (and thus had a lot of text to translate), as it was penned by the prominent Japanese comedian Yoshiyuki Hirai of the manzai duo America Zarigani. Level-5 began their…
The one thing that can be said without a shadow of a doubt about Might and Magic X: Legacy is that it is an old-school CRPG and proud of it. It uses a very specific vintage format of the quad-directional tile-based dungeon crawler with a four-person party, far closer to the Xeen games of its venerable CRPG series (which would be Clouds of Xeen and Darkside of Xeen , or M&M IV and M&M V) than the panoramic movement…
Grow Home has a fairly basic objective: Grow the enormous star plant, ride its shoots into floating rocks filled with glowy green mineral sustenance the plant can absorb, and continue to climb the beanstalk to its ultimate destination above the clouds. The QWOP -like controls are both frustrating and endearing, presenting its metallic hero B.U.D. (short for Botanical Utility Droid) as some sort of unsteady but…
I'm in an unusual position here, reviewing a game that was regarded highly at the time but presently sits between two iterations in the long-running and long-in-the-tooth Assassin's Creed franchise that were very poorly received indeed, making Black Flag something of an aberration in retrospect. While I believe to some extent that all games should be reviewed in a vacuum, based entirely on their own merits and their…
Murdered: Soul Suspect begins with the protagonist getting hurled out of a third-floor window and shot several times as he lies dying in the street. Perhaps an unusual way to start any game, but then the goal is for your ghostly form to track down your killer and resolve whatever unfinished business is preventing you from passing over and being reunited with your dead wife. Fortunately, being dead means not having…
Wolfenstein: The New Order once again drops its beleaguered action hero Captain B.J. Blazkowicz into the most audacious World War II alternate historical fiction since Inglourious Basterds . It's fair to say that speculative fiction has approached the concept of "what if the Axis forces won World War II?" perhaps more than any other conceit (it even has its own dedicated Wikipedia page ), but The New Order has a lot…
Sayonara Umihara Kawase (also known as Yumi's Odd Odyssey) is the latest in the Umihara Kawase series, which began as far back as 1994 as an entirely inexplicable Super Famicom game . Twenty years and several sequels later, very little has changed. Kawase is a young woman with a very unusual problem: she is trapped in a surreal world of oddly-shaped floating platforms, hostile bipedal fish and everyday objects like…
Toki Tori 2 can be a deceptive little game -- one that hides its true colors until the player is already deep into their adventure. What you see is a bright and cheerfully cartoony game starring the eponymous spherical bird Toki off on another journey to save his friends, but the core is still an extremely deliberate and thoughtful puzzle game that can often require the player to think several stages in advance and…
It's hard to avoid the reality that the recent spate (and don't worry, that's as close as I'm getting to a shovel pun in this review) of "nostalgic" pixel-focused, 8-bit-reminiscent action games has all but rendered the format trite at this point. If that's the case then, at least for the time being, I'm happy to make Shovel Knight the retro genre's swansong. Though from all appearances it aspires to little more…
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky: First Chapter might have an ostentatiously long name, but is at its core a solid, no-frills throwback to an era when JRPGs ruled the Earth. Originally released in 2004 for the Japanese home computer market, the sixth The Legend of Heroes game follows its forebears closely in an effort to appeal to an extant fanbase, similarly to how each subsequent Dragon Quest takes careful…
Read the full review The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
When I bought and completed NES Remix new those few scant months ago, I was left with a lukewarm feeling tinged with happy nostalgia and mild disappointment that said nostalgia wasn't better utilized. Now we have its sequel, NES Remix 2, which despite having a suspiciously brief development cycle since the last game does at least see a few improvements to what is now becoming the standard "Remix formula". NES Remix…
Level-5 's The Starship Damrey is a perfect example of a doing a lot with a little. Part of Level-5's Guild 02 series of smaller 3DS eShop downloadable games from prominent veteran game designers, The Starship Damrey was conceived by writer Takemaru Abiko and designer Kazuya Asano , the duo responsible for many of Chunsoft's series of "sound novels" - 16-bit horror-themed visual novels such as Kamaitachi no Yoru…
Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall is the new campaign from the original developers of Shadowrun Returns , Harebrained Schemes. The long-awaited "Berlin campaign" is a full expansion, providing a new 15+ hour campaign and various additions to the game's editor assets, and was released on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store for $15. It requires the original game to play. The campaign itself is a little better put-together…
Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall is the new campaign from the original developers of Shadowrun Returns , Harebrained Schemes. The long-awaited "Berlin campaign" is a full expansion, providing a new 15+ hour campaign and various additions to the game's editor assets, and was released on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store for $15. It requires the original game to play. The campaign itself is a little better put-together…
Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall is the new campaign from the original developers of Shadowrun Returns , Harebrained Schemes. The long-awaited "Berlin campaign" is a full expansion, providing a new 15+ hour campaign and various additions to the game's editor assets, and was released on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store for $15. It requires the original game to play. The campaign itself is a little better put-together…
I'm a big fan of Picross . The venerable numerical picture game has long since been a mainstay puzzle sub-genre for Nintendo consoles especially, making its debut (in the West, at least) with Mario's Picross for the original Game Boy. Since then, every subsequent Nintendo portable has been the home for some manner of mathematical paint-by-numbers, and the 3DS has an embarrassment of riches in this regard with the…
NES Remix initially seems like a bizarre concept; a WarioWare -inspired history lesson through Nintendo's early console history. When examined closer, however, it becomes apparent that this is a game meant to homage a lot of NES classics through a retro-gaming conceit that has existed previously with the developers' Retro Game Challenge franchise, based on a popular Japanese TV show where a comedian plays through…
The largest fundamental problem that could be leveled against New Super Mario Bros. U is that it is the newest iteration in a series that has decided to eschew the gradually more elaborate creativity of the core Mario series in order to produce something akin to Mario's more passive spin-offs: by choosing to simply take its cues from classic 2D Mario games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World it has become…
It seems the modern venue for JRPGs is increasingly becoming the handheld arena, with studios creating compact adventures that don't necessarily require them to abandon strong narratives or striking artistic styles in order to tell the stories they wish to tell to the regrettably smaller audiences that still wish to hear them. The serendipitous result of this necessary technological scaling-back is that these RPGs…
Zelda games are a tricky bunch to scrutinize as each has an intrinsic high quality simply on the virtue of them being a Zelda game. Nintendo does not skimp on the quality and production values of each title of their secondary flagship series, so it's easy to consider adding the proviso that a specific element is disappointing "for a Zelda game", with the implicit acknowledgement that the game's presentation and core…
Zelda games are a tricky bunch to scrutinize as each has an intrinsic high quality simply on the virtue of them being a Zelda game. Nintendo does not skimp on the quality and production values of each title of their secondary flagship series, so it's easy to consider adding the proviso that a specific element is disappointing "for a Zelda game", with the implicit acknowledgement that the game's presentation and core…
Shadowrun seems like such a great idea on paper: Taking the evocative dystopian world of William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash , with their paranoid hackers and corporate stiffs making their livings in a sprawling futuristic urban landscape seemingly trapped in permanent night, with only the intermittent neon sign, electronic billboard or computer monitor for illumination. Add to this melting…
Project X Zone is definitely a curious beast. The concentrated efforts of Banpresto (creators of the Super Robot Wars games, among other often anime-influenced titles) and Monolith Soft (Nintendo RPG developers extraordinaire) to combine three publishing empires' worth of franchises and characters in a Strategy RPG akin to something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea sounds like quite the elevator pitch when you…
Project X Zone is definitely a curious beast. The concentrated efforts of Banpresto (creators of the Super Robot Wars games, among other often anime-influenced titles) and Monolith Soft (Nintendo RPG developers extraordinaire) to combine three publishing empires' worth of franchises and characters in a Strategy RPG akin to something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea sounds like quite the elevator pitch when you…
There is a certain burgeoning philosophy that I and several others are starting to embrace regarding how much "game" modern video games truly require in order to succeed as entertainment. In slightly less ambiguous terms, how necessary it is in this enlightened modern era of video games to include the type of scenario where the game might momentarily halt its narrative flow to indulge the player with an extended…
Swedish Indie game developer Nifflas has been cultivating a small but vocal fanbase for his Knytt series: a collection of freeware platformers designed to emphasize the exploratory aspect of the Metroid s and Castlevania s they are influenced by first and foremost. His newest, Knytt Underground, feels like the culmination of everything Nifflas has learned in his years of working on this series; a bold attempt to…
Lara Croft's been through some shit in her storied career as a beloved video game character. Angel of Darkness , sure, but I also mean figuratively. The newest Tomb Raider game, from studio Crystal Dynamics who have been developing for the series since its last reboot, has chosen to retell her origin story with this in mind: How the archeologist heroine acquired her ruthless survival streak that's been at the core…
How far are you willing to go to save the woman you love? Would you fight a series of enormous monsters with nothing but a sword and a chain? Would you stuff monster flesh (not a euphemism) down her gullet to keep her from transforming into a tentacled monstrosity? Would you dust off that Wii for one more Japanese RPG from Operation Rainfall? These are questions posed by Pandora's Tower, an Action RPG from…
Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, beyond having an unwieldy name, is something of a dark horse among tri-Crescendo's library of more straightforward RPGs, like Eternal Sonata or Baten Kaitos . At times it has the slow cadence of survival horror: The foreboding darkness of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo is an eerie environment to stage a game, with protagonist Seto constantly requiring the use of a flashlight and…
Read the full review Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon
I was concerned I couldn't give this game its due respect in review form, considering how odd an overall package it is and how much of its appeal lies both in- and outside of its nostalgic 16-bit JRPG trappings and absurd sense of humor. I believe I have found an angle that works: Everybody Get Up, It's Time to Slam Now Barkley, Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden (occasionally referred to as Charles Barkley, Shut Up & Jam:…
Read the full review This preservative of the 16-bit era is a stellar delight.
That Level-5 , purveyors of such quality products as Professor Layton and the Dark Cloud series, and legendary Final Fantasy Tactics designer Yasumi Matsuno were teaming up to produce an RPG was, to put it mildly, information that piqued my interest. Crimson Shroud was originally part of a four-game compilation in Japan spearheaded by four very diverse talents in what amounts to a company-funded game jam project,…
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series began its life with a flawed but promising progenitor; a game with ideas but not enough confidence to venture beyond the small group of repeating missions that led to each of the game's set-piece assassinations. Assassin's Creed II managed to do what all video game sequels aspire to; not only be bigger and better, but use what its developers had learned from the mistakes of their…
Darksiders left our anti-hero War contemplating his options as his brothers (and sister) caught the last few express meteors to Earth to help in what promised to be an Alamo style stand-off between the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and apparently every other force in the universe. Darksiders 2 doesn't quite pick up there, however, electing to roll back the clock a few years before the first game begins and follow…
I've never read Moby-Dick. My knowledge of Herman Melville's classical literary text begins and ends with that broad Futurama parody and the fact that Captain Picard likes it, or conveniently did by the time he was having a similar crisis as the book's central character Captain Ahab. Probably doesn't say a whole lot about me, but even with that base level of knowledge it was hard to avoid how prominently that novel…
When I first started playing Disaster: Day of Crisis, I had no idea what to expect. I'd heard of its troubles in procuring an American release (sadly, four years later, it appears it will never transpire) and had seen the episode of the Two Best Friends YouTube show gently mocking some of its more outrageous elements and unfortunate foibles. Yet I was pleasantly surprised with the type of game it turned out to be. I…
Adventure games are deceptively difficult to create. What first appears as a simple series of environments laden with hotspots and easily scripted "Item A used on Item B creates Path Z" instances would seem to put the genre amongst the easiest for coding neophytes to put together; a truth not unsupported by the fact that there have been plenty of Indie point & clicks over the years, thanks in part to very…
Spider-Man, as his 60s cartoon theme song is often wont to tell us, is able to do whatever a spider can. However, this particular Spider-Man is also able to do whatever a Batman , a green-haired danger-seeking photojournalist , an electricity-infused hero (not Electro) and various others can as well. The lack of confidence in trying anything too new with the Amazing Spider-Man, Beenox and Activision 's latest movie…
Avadon: The Black Fortess is a turn-based strategy computer RPG from Spiderweb Software , the creators of - among other things - the Avernum and Geneforge franchises. Spiderweb's been making their own brand of strategy RPGs in the mould of classics of the genre since the mid-90s, very much staying on the fringes of the PC gaming world and catering only to the hardcore crowd who wanted more of the games they used to…
Wadjet Eye Games wants to live in a world where the adventure game genre never suffered the Black Death of FMV-ridden, incredibly obtuse puzzles that robbed it of its vitality for so long. It's content to pick up where the adventure game's golden age left off, with the gloriously rendered sprites of LucasArts ' (then LucasFilm) and Sierra 's stalwart heroes exploring well-realised worlds following well-told stories.…
Never let it be said that I don't occasionally leave my RPG comfort zone for something a little more faster-paced and visceral. Sega 's Binary Domain is a near-future (2080! Mark your calendars!) third-person shooter that follows a "Rust Crew" - a SWAT-like task force from a multinational organization called IRTA that monitors and enforces a global law that prohibits human-like robots - as they traipse across a…
As Monolith Software's Wii opus approaches its North American release date, I figured something should be put up here on Giant Bomb to help advise those who are still on the fence about this game. Specifically, the ones pondering the purchase of a Wii to play it on. I could quite easily recommend the purchase of a Wii, either now or when they become even cheaper after the imminent advent of the Wii-U, due to a quite…
Hell, I've written extensively about The Last Story in recent weeks, so I might as well collate all that information into something useful for those still pondering the purchase of this game, whether they're European or Australian citizens who have heard almost nothing about it or those on the North American continent who are eagerly anticipating its XSEED -produced summer release. The Last Story is an Action…
