95 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.
People say Dead Space 2 is 'more of a shooter' than the original. I dunno about that; I just finished playing both relatively close to one another and they seem like the exact same thing to me. There is one major difference: I found the original to be okay-ish while I had a pretty lousy time playing the sequel. Enemies feel faster and more aggressive than before, an exaggeration of something I already thought was…
I don't know what Dead Space is trying to be. The controls are very slow and clumsy and the camera is jammed in so close it creates a disorientating effect that has to be intentional. This signifies it is meant to be a horror game. But then it keeps throwing fast enemies at you in action setpieces for which the clumsy controls, claustrophobic camera, and tight corridors are not suited at all. The obvious comparison…
Hot Shots Golf Out of Bounds has a lot of weird irritants. The load times are not great and there is no way to get to any of the menus during gameplay. While golfing, the only way to return to the main menu or access any options is to soft-reboot the machine. A lot of the game's attempts to be cute are really obnoxious-- NPCs will wander around the course in front of you and then run out of the way when you hit the…
I had never played an EDF before this, though I had been hoping for a PC version for a while now. Luckily, despite the ultra low-budget and Japanese nature of the game the PC port turned out pretty well. Keyboard and mouse feel just fine and performance is great. The UI is entirely keyboard driven, which is a slight annoyance, but forgivable. It's surprisingly hard to describe the appeal of the game without…
Read the full review Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair
I already had the original Hard Reset, but this "remaster" was 80 cents on Steam despite being almost brand new. The graphics aren't really improved, although the game still looks great despite being about five years old. Instead, Hard Reset Redux is both an excuse to release the game on PS4 and as a way to fix the very flawed original. It almost works. In Redux the difficulty and enemy placement is reworked, which…
Instead of creating one 'main' character as in most RPGs, or creating an entire party that is relatively faceless as in Icewind Dale or Legend of Grimrock, you create two main characters. While this is intended to service a multiplayer campaign, it creates an interesting situation for single player. RPG players tend to let such created protagonists act as vague ciphers for themselves, but having two at once inspires…
While I and about 50 other people would have adored a total throwback, DOOM takes the probably wiser approach and reimagines itself as a sort of AAA-budgeted take on what was once the domain of independent and modestly financed European developers: the "throwback shooter". Which is to say that the focus is not so much on capturing what Doom actually was, but instead how the mainstream tends to remember Doom as. The…
In short it is a moderately improved version of Dark Souls 2. Of course its flawed core is still the same, and it's not as though they redesigned all the level layouts. So it's still easily the least of the Souls games. However, every part that was outright bad in the original release is either fixed or massaged. One of the most egregious parts of the base game, the run up to Velstadt in the Undead Crypt level, is…
Read the full review Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
The spark of Clint Hocking's vision for Far Cry 2 exists in Far Cry 4, but it's buried under the weight of about thirty six Assassin's Creed games. The world is still a very emergent sandbox and a soup of different AI behaviors are able to interact in potentially amusing ways, but unfortunately the game deprecates that avenue at any opportunity in favor of filling out checklists. Want to unlock the only silenced…
Cryostasis was considered pretty baffling when it first came out, but I think it makes more sense nowadays. Essentially it's a survival horror FPS sort of in the vein of Doom 3 and mixed with 'walking simulators' like Gone Home and Firewatch. Your time is split between walking through a derelict ship shooting monsters once they've spawn in and slowly uncovering the mystery of your environment and its past. However,…
Cryostasis was considered pretty baffling when it first came out, but I think it makes more sense nowadays. Essentially it's a survival horror FPS sort of in the vein of Doom 3 and mixed with 'walking simulators' like Gone Home and Firewatch. Your time is split between walking through a derelict ship shooting monsters once they've spawn in and slowly uncovering the mystery of your environment and its past. However,…
I enjoyed this quite a bit, but it definitely has its share of problems. First and foremost, it does a pretty bad job of teaching you how to play it. In fact, it seems to hold your hand and walk you through a playstyle that will inevitably require a mid-game restart and fails to even acknowledge the satellite coverage system which is by far the most important tool for keeping the game over state away and is the only…
This is a nice, fun little game that I beat to my satisfaction within 3 hours of playing. In it you are a little robot man who is sent to an alien (but relatively familiar-looking) world and tasked with making a giant plant grow high enough to reach your spaceship, which is located at 2,000m above sea level. In order to make the body of the plant grow, you must climb onto the sprouts budding from it and guide them…
I'm a Sonic apologist. Both Adventure games are guilty pleasures of mine, Sonic Generations was one of my favorite games of 2011, and I have a sick fascination with Sonic 2006 that somehow results in me loving how awful it is. On a sliding number scale I'd say I think it's entirely possible for any new Sonic game to be highly enjoyable, but I also don't want Sonic to make love to me. That's about where I stand, and…
Ratchet: Deadlocked was not part of the Ratchet & Clank HD Collection, but they did end up porting it eventually and throwing it onto PSN as a standalone download. Now, the HD Collection had its problems, but for the most part they were minor aesthetic bugs and you had to know what you were looking for. The HD port of Deadlocked is another story. Within the first twenty minutes you'll see the main villain's gums and…
NOTE: THIS IS A REVIEW OF TUROK REMASTERED FROM NIGHT DIVE STUDIOS, NOT THE ORIGINAL RELEASE I had an N64 as a kid, but I never did play the Turok games. I think I rented the first one once or twice, but the controls really threw me and I never got very far. Moving with my right thumb and aiming with my left felt awkward and clumsy, especially with that cheapo joystick. Given the oft-noted flaws of the game and its…
This game starts with an unusual, but surprisingly fun premise: After Return of the Jedi, instead of Luke Skywalker vanishing to become a chubby old guy who hates 'doing The Joker' he sets up a Jedi School and trains 'padawans' to rebuild the old days where the Jedi were the defenders of the galaxy. As one of these students this amounts to, at least initially, being a Jedi beat cop solving petty crime throughout the…
First off, this is a review of the HD collection and not the games themselves. I just want to say upfront that: All three of these games are amazing and worth playing for just about anybody. Currently, none of these games work properly on a freely available PS2 emulator, so there is no way to play your (legal, naturally) PS2 copies in HD. So unless you're happy with a blurry, 480i mess this HD collection is the only…
After the modern masterpiece that was A Crack in Time the series sort of went to pot with the probably-decent-for-kids co op action puzzler Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, questionable tower defense spin off called Full Frontal Assault, and a mediocre game called FUSE which didn't even have Ratchet OR Clank in it! Into the Nexus was an attempt to correct these mistakes and make another 'real' Ratchet game. It's also a…
The original Shadowrun Returns was a decent game, but it had many constraints laid upon it that made it somewhat unimpressive. The linear and surprisingly modest chapter-based storyline was more reminiscent of a latter-day Final Fantasy than the classic CRPG revival that was promised, and since every party member was an anonymous hireling there was a feeling of impersonality to the whole affair. Dragonfall seeks to…
Okay, so, at the end of Tools of Destruction Clank was taken away by aliens called the Zoni and now Ratchet is looking for him. It turns out that an alien gave Clank a soul because his destiny is to look after a giant space clock that controls time. The alien is... sort of Clank's father in a weird, abstract way? The bad guy from Up Your Arsenal wants to use the clock to do fairly nonspecific bad stuff. On his…
Read the full review Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
I really, really like Ratchet games. This one stinks. The whole idea, it seems, was to put out a small, download-only Ratchet & Clank game at a budget price. On paper I think this is an excellent idea, as I feel previous games in the series often bloated themselves with unnecessary features and minigames in order to justify their price point. Strip away all the chaff and give me a handful of solid run & gun levels…
Read the full review Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
When Age of Decadence first hit the radar in around 2008 I think most people took it as an independent studio's spin on the classic Fallout formula in the wake of Bethesda's decidedly non-isometric, realtime FPS revival of the series. And given the desert post-apocalyptic setting, the top-down camera, the emphasis on reactivity, the turn based combat, the very GURPS-esque character system, and the near-identical…
Here's the thing about platformers: If you can't trust the jump, you don't have a game. Jak & Daxter has terrible jumping for what is meant to be a top-tier 3D mascot platformer. The timing on the double jump is so incredibly specific and odd-feeling that even in the final hours the most basic of jumps were harrowing. Just about every jump in the game is placed to require a double jump, and the execution of this…
The Ratchet games are some of the best shooters you can play on a console. This seems unintuitive since they are half-mascot platformer, but it works because it uses lessons from the 3D platformer genre effectively. Being a mascot platformer, it wants you to do a lot of jumping around. So instead of hiding behind cover and aiming down the sights, the game forces you to dodge and weave around enemy projectiles (there…
Read the full review Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
I have no idea what happens in this game, even though I beat it last night. First off-- the interface is awful. It's not built for a mouse, with its text lists hidden under tabs and buried inside menus. Usually with PC games you can blame bad UI on console-oriented development, but I'd hesitate to use the word 'consolized' here since it's even worse cycling through all of this on a gamepad. Additionally, without…
Black Flag opens with the pirate protagonist washed ashore, shipwrecked on a gorgeous and lovingly detailed Caribbean island. It's an inviting escapist fantasy location with enough incidental detail to suggest a lived-in history and culture. It made me want to canvas the area and search for secrets. Incidentally, every single object of interest is immediately marked on your minimap, meaning I didn't exactly have to…
While I'm something of a Risen 2 apologist, I'm not going to sit here and say it was a great game compared to the fantastic first Risen, let alone the brilliant Gothic series. The combat was something of a mess, the factions and politics therein were dumbed down, there were fewer choices overall, magic was dialed way back, the Caribbean pirate theme caused visual variety to suffer, and exploration was hampered by…
The expansion pack for SiN is better than the base game, but not by as much as you'd hope. It still has issues with unfairness in the later half, where suddenly health becomes an incredibly rare commodity and the not-so-quick quickload key gets pressed about as often as the fire button. The boss fights at the end of the game are probably the worst the game has to offer-- dodging their attacks requires luck at best.…
SiN is a hot mess. Stylistically it apes the self-aware stupidity of the mid-90s action movie (think "Escape from LA" instead of "Escape From New York") and draws gameplay inspiration from a mix of Duke Nukem and Goldeneye 007, combining ego shooting and objectives to complete. The action is surprisingly fast, kinetic, and fun. The hero, John Blade, moves at a generally satisfying speed, the most common enemy types…
There are quite a few games based around sniping, and the concept has always sounded terrible to me. But, as it turns out, Sniper Elite III isn't exactly a 'sniping game' as you might expect. Instead it's a stealth action game that pivots on sniping, but includes a pretty wide repertoire of actions to the extent that one could theoretically complete the whole thing and rarely use the rifle at all (though I wouldn't…
Prey is an interesting game. It's one of the last mainstream FPSes to be made for PC with consoles as an afterthought. It's a 3D Realms game that took over a decade to make, but when it was released wasn't a complete trainwreck. It's a game that was one of the biggest releases of the year when it came out, but is now forgotten and obscure. While it's not exactly rare, it's a hard to get game for something that came…
Wolfenstein is a fantastic FPS and in my opinion the best game in the Wolfenstein series, although that might say more about the rest of the series than it does this solidly above-average production. That said, it wears itself thin over time and has some issues that keep it from being as good as it should be. The first thing you'll probably notice if you're playing the PC version is that the port, like many…
This review has spoilers for the first Deus Ex game, if you care. People like to say, "Invisible War is a good game, but a bad Deus Ex game." But they're wrong. 100% wrong, in fact. Invisible War is a pretty good Deus Ex game. And a terrible video game. I say this because the game offers up a reasonable facsimile of the Deus Ex formula you want, but everything is so botched that you no longer want it. Going in, I…
This is a nice little shooter; undoubtedly the best of the Juarez games. Aside from a hiccup here and there caused by some design decisions unwisely plucked from the Call of Duty style of shooter-- namely the tendency to be shot at by hitscanners you can't see. The game seems to recognize its problem with hitscanners since it has a sort of reverse-VATS mode where the game goes into slow motion and you can dodge any…
The first chapter of Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a partial reboot of the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D. The Old Blood is a reboot of the first chapter of Return to Castle Wolfenstein which was a reboot of the first episode of Wolf3D. The fat nazi lady who turns into a poop golem even returns, except this time she doesn't turn into a poop golem and she has a sad, humanizing back story as told in diary entries…
Wolfenstein: The New Order has the pretense of deep storytelling and rich characters, but it's a game where you go to a Nazi moon base. It's a game where a concentration camp is the setting for Summer thrill-ride action. It's a game where the hero has a jaw the width of his shoulders and the villain is a scientist who makes robots out of stolen brains. It's a game that has nothing to say about Nazis, oppression,…
This game took me a long time to beat, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I was avoiding it. I just didn't enjoy Ultima Underworld 2 all that much. That's not to say I hated it, either. I liked the first Underworld a lot, and they made some smart changes here. The trainer system for character progression is much better than having to memorize every ankh statue password, and this game has that…
Read the full review Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds
This game is incredibly okay. It does some very clever things with its time powers, specifically with how they can integrate with combat. The puzzles I could leave or leave. There's some cool stuff in Timeshift, even though I didn't enjoy playing it very much. The game's weapons aren't fun to shoot and the movement is clunky. In a lot of ways it's a lame Half Life 2 ripoff with a looser grasp of the fundamentals…
Singularity is a pretty basic " Half Life 2 With a Gimmick " game, but done better than most. The end result is a bunch of cheap setpieces haphazardly tied together by a throwaway the plot about evil scientist nonsense (but they have audio logs as if there are layers to peel back). The time manipulation gimmick is roughly comparable in depth-- or lack thereof-- to Bioshock Infinite's Elizabeth. Point at a thing,…
If you think about it, Gothic sort of invented the modern action RPG. One could argue that Ultima IX came first, but whatever. It doesn't matter. My point is that Gothic 1 was a big deal despite its lack of popularity outside of Germany and it's a very early example of a type of game that has come to define RPGs. Yet here we are some 10 years later and now Gothic 4: ArCanIa is the worst one. It's the worst one. It's…
In Crysis 3, there's grass and bushes everywhere, but you can't hide in them. It doesn't work; enemies see through the vegetation. That's how stupid Crysis 3 is. Your enjoyment of Crysis 3 will hinge on whether you care about the Crysis series's characters and transhumanist philosophizing. That's how stupid Crysis 3 is. The game spends a lot of its energy on the plot and on drama. Remember that part in Crysis…
First things first, this game is gorgeous. The overworld, which was frozen in the first game but is now symbolically thawing, looks more or less like STALKER taken to its aesthetic conclusion. At times the game, as it is being played, looks like the visual target concept art of other games. The underground areas manage to not be as monotonous as a game taking place wholly inside of metro tunnels should-- there are…
I played this for the first time about 10 years ago and absolutely hated it. Recently I decided to give it another shot. It's not as bad as I remembered it being, but considering I remembered it being worse than gout that's not saying much. Back then I mostly suffered because I refused to read the notes on the universal translator, which give hints on how to solve the "puzzles" roughly 3% of the time. The other 97%…
I'd always wanted to play this because of its reputation as a hidden gem of the 2.5D FPS era. It turns out it's pretty mediocre. It also only has 9 levels! Doom gave you that for FREE. There are side missions probably from an expansion pack, but there's only 5 of them and the game's not good enough to leave me 'hungry for more'. All of the enemies are hitscan and enemy types are almost indiscernible from one…
The idea of Bionic Commando is that you swing around and have fun, but this game realizes what you really wanna do is crappy combat that is wholly reliant on an auto-lockon system that seems great at locking onto the thing you don't want. This goes great with the fact that you die really easily. The game uses regen health, except you don't have a whole lot of it and it regens really slowly, and you run away really…
I saw the Quick Look for this game and got hype for it immediately, but that video sells the idealized version of the game, not the real thing. For the most part this is NOT a sandbox "make your own path" game. In parts it can become that, but it's certainly not representative of the majority of your time spent. In fact, it's quite easy to put the game into an "unwinnable" state, at which point you have to hit the…
