Fatal Frame continues to treat the split between shooting and running as a productive tension, with results that are equally exciting and scary.
Runbow is a party game for the hardcore.
The virtue of shooters is a simple set of parameters creating interesting decisions, and the game’s greatness is how it expands that matrix.
Game designers create two things: the thing on your screen, and the experience in the room. And the second half of that equation is the most important.
After the last few willfully easy Kirby games, it’s a nice change to see the poor little puffball repeatedly die as you struggle for mastery.
Treature Tracker is a powerful gesture of confidence by Nintendo: a spinoff game with more original ideas than most companies’ new IPs.
The campy hypersexuality feels joyful, rather than oppressive, because the character’s overdetermined gender presentation is an expression of her power rather than a contrast to it.
Missions have unclear objectives and way too much backtracking, made more frustrating by doors that go from sealed to open for no good reason and checkpoints triggered by obscure means.
Legends doesn’t skimp on content, with plenty of new worlds, old levels ported over from Origins, weekly challenges, and even a multiplayer soccer mini-game.
The combat levels are gleefully challenging, even on Normal difficulty; your team will be crushed if you don’t maintain total battlefield awareness no matter how many aliens are shooting at you.
Before Shadowrun was a cRPG, it was an RPG of the pen-and-paper variety, a medium that did more than a thousand junior-high workshops to encourage young people to tell each other thought-out stories.
On Easy, the game reduces the song to a few moves and repeats them in predictable patterns, so beginning players don’t just get self-esteem-boosting scores.
Shooting in the game is a staccato aim-and-fire affair that only emphasizes how difficult it is to make your movements correspond to the system’s invisible bounding box.
Forcing players to choose their custom worms one by one suggests that no one bothered to test play the game together with custom teams.
The game makes clear that it’s as enamored with Holmes the Victorian superhero as with Holmes the masterful logician.
Many of the levels, particularly the chase missions, are so precise in their demands that they become a sort of high-speed puzzle game.
Some gamers might be turned off by the funny-animal style that’s already earning the game creepy attention from the furry-fetish community, but it does little to impede the touching and sometimes quite mournful story.
The puzzles are consistently well-designed from an entertainment perspective—just hard enough to keep you busy, but clear enough that you’ll enjoy a rush of “I am so smart!” every few minutes.
The previous console title in the series, The House of the Dead Overkill, made an honorable effort to push all the game’s narrative elements to the same hysterical pitch as its gameplay, and I’m sorry this one doesn’t even try.
Even two years ago, when they started, he could imagine a game that would be a new standard in interactive entertainment.