God of War: Ascension is a game that I had a hard time getting excited for. For me, God of War 3, capped off the saga of Kratos on the right note. It was bittersweet to see the story end, but it did so on an epic (and violent) note. Instead of the series continuing with a new protagonist or mythology, we have a prequel to a story that I felt pretty comfortable with already. Ascension ends up being a sadly mediocre game, and I expected more.
I’ve made it no secret on this website that I’m waiting for some forward-thinking developer to reinvent the classic beat ‘em up genre and bring it into the 21st century. While some games have come frustratingly close, I’m still waiting for that one shining example of the modern side-scrolling brawler. It’s become clear to me that it’s going to be a long wait, but games like Sacred Citadel at least tiptoe in the right direction.
More stunning confessions from me to you! I didn’t get into the Metroid series until Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion, and didn’t even play Super Metroid until maybe two years after I played Metroid Prime. While the first Prime title took many design inspirations from Super Metroid, I didn’t enjoy Super Metroid at first, mostly because I played it through less than reputable means. Once I got to play it on the Wii Virtual Console, I finally understood why this game is considered an SNES classic. Super Metroid sports great game design, with a wonderful atmosphere unparalleled on any 16-bit system. At only 30 cents on the Wii U eShop until June 16, there’s little reason to not give this excellent title a shot.
Does the world need another match-three puzzle game? Most definitely not! But, hey, Dungeon Hearts got made anyway, and it’s actually pretty cool. Conjoining a fast-paced action RPG with the heretofore played out match-three puzzle concept is a pretty slick way to innovate on two formulas we’ve had our fill of. Mixing the two together adds extra tension to the color matching bits and a real need for skill and practice in the combat. This well balanced combo makes for an addictive puzzler that I keep coming back to even though I am terrible at it.
Last June, EA Labels President Frank Gibeau said the publisher's objective for Dead Space 3 was to increase accessibility without upsetting established fans. To give credit where it's due, EA was half successful—the first half. But with its compromised and uninspired design, Dead Space 3 is streamlined almost beyond recognition. And I'm upset.
I’m not sure who the target demographic is for Dead Island: Riptide. It’s more than an expansion but far less than a sequel, so it provides more of what the first game had with few enhancements. With that said, I’m probably Deep Silver’s dream audience. I didn’t play the first game, but even less than glowing reviews didn’t stop me from being interested in it. Now that I’ve played Riptide, I can’t help but scratch my head and wonder what went on behind the scenes that resulted in this, another full-priced Dead Island game that seems to offer very little to set it apart from the 2011 original.
In this age of long preview cycles and aggressive PR and marketing campaigns, it can be easy for the video game hype train to go so fast that it flies off the rails. The bigger the game, the bigger the hype, and few titles can ever hope to live up to it. Too Human was a game built on over ten years of increasing hyperbole, and when the game was finally released in 2008 the backlash from gamers and games writers far outpaced the merits of the actual finished product. I’d much rather evaluate games based on their actual strengths and weaknesses as opposed to what they were expected to do, and getting far enough removed from the initial hype allows for that. No, Too Human couldn’t live up to its lofty promises, but it’s also not the atrocity that some people painted it to be.
Basing an entire game around a gag is risky. What if the joke isn’t funny? What if it peters out after the first twenty minutes? So much could go wrong centering a game entirely on a goof. Thankfully, Ubisoft Montreal went all in with their giant farce, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, and scored a big win. By weaving well-crafted jokes into a quality shooter, they’ve created the perfect game for fans of satire and game-bullets that should inspire other devs to cool it on the artsy-fartsy stuff every once in a while.
If there’s anyone in the world who loves Dishonored more than they should, it’s me. Many were let down by the game after it received a skittering swarm of pre-launch hype that it couldn’t quite live up to – for certain people anyway. I was completely sucked into Dishonored’s city of Dunwall, which led to several days of me heading to work fueled by only three or four hours of sleep. Somehow I (and my career) survived this unhealthy escapism and I came out the other side infatuated with almost every piece of the game. Imagine my excitement when the first true DLC (in my opinion) for the game was announced where you would be revisiting Dunwall as the assassin who set the main game’s events in motion. Sadly, even though many of the things I love about Dishonored remain in The Knife of Dunwall DLC, it doesn’t live up to my lofty opinion of the original.
Having just recently completed Etrian Odyssey III, I wasn’t sure if I had it in me to dive right back into another massive adventure. I mean, heck, I was a little worn out from all of the grinding I had been doing and wasn’t so sure I wanted to get into that again. Well, somehow I got sucked back into this mess and am I ever grateful. Atlus has taken the fourth Etrian Odyssey game through a monstrous evolutionary process to create the best balanced, most addictive, strategically engaging dungeon crawler around.
It’s safe to say that the Gears of War franchise has safely secured its place in people’s minds as one of this generation’s most important franchises. Since the beginning, they’ve been innovating and refining the 3rd person shooter genre, introducing things like the modern cover mechanic, and the extremely popular horde mode. 2011’s Gears of War 3 was the ending to the trilogy, and I felt like it ended the series properly. I finished the game satisfied with the story as well as the multiplayer, and I didn’t feel the need for another game. It’s not that I didn’t want the series to continue, but I expected a decent wait before the next iteration. It was hard for me to get excited for Gears of War: Judgment, a prequel starring the wise-cracking Baird. What could be done to improve upon Gears of War 3 less than two years later? Unfortunately, aside from a few changes in the overall formula, it’s apparent right away that developers People Can Fly couldn’t even answer that question.
Get ready to ride a time machine back to the ‘90s. A time when we thought the Internet was something completely different than the cesspool we know today; a time when JNCOs and flannel were acceptable clothing choices; a time when we raised the roof and exclaimed everything was “the bomb, yo!”; a time when Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was intended to be released in America. For whatever reason, Sony rejected the title from release on the PlayStation and in Japan it remained. Until now, that is, when Atlus finally dusted it off and brought it into the future on the 3DS. The fact of the matter is that if Soul Hackers would’ve been released when intended, it would’ve been better than tight, it would’ve been straight phat, dawg.
Dead or Alive 5 earned my respect with its accessible and fluid combat, healthy challenge, and wealth of single-player content. Following the Plus ports of the first two Ninja Gaidens, DOA5 is Tecmo Koei’s latest re-release to hit the Vita and joins Mortal Kombat and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as another fighting game port done right for Sony’s handheld.
While WiiWare never made quite the splash that competing services XBLA and PSN did, it still managed to offer a few gems. Fluidity was one such title, providing Metroid-inspired exploration along with physics-based puzzles starring an amorphous blob of water that could phase change between ice and steam. Spin Cycle follows that experience with a more linear adventure that’s broken out into a set of 60 levels. The shift away from the original design proves less successful, with a number of the levels falling flat in their implementation.
Friends, let me talk to you for a bit about addiction of a gaming nature. I’m sure you’ve experienced it before: that sense of falling into a game so completely that it takes over your brain and keeps you up until the wee hours of the morning. I’m here to talk about a recent addiction of mine, a game so devilishly devious in its seduction that you would be wise to stay away, even as I tell you that you should by all means play it. That game would be Disgaea 2, a PlayStation 2 game recently added to the PSN marketplace as a PS2 classic.
Mystery Dungeon. Seeing those two words in succession are enough to make me cringe. For years now, Chunsoft has been developing this series of roguelikes across different licenses, with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity marking the third in the respective subseries. No matter how they seem to spin this core concept, I simply can’t build an appreciation for it. While it tries to cater to a wider audience by removing the “hunger” facet and dialing down the difficulty, it’s still possible given its random nature to have the odds stacked so highly against you that there’s no chance for success.
The wait for BioShock Infinite has been extremely long for some. I however, failed to realize the hype until I finally finished the original BioShock just a mere six months ago. Though I experienced the game late, its effects still resonated with me, and I found myself extremely excited for more. Ken Levine’s promises sounded fascinating: A living breathing world, a constant and helpful partner, and a refinement to the core BioShock action. The only question for me was “can Irrational Games pull it off?” After finishing BioShock Infinite, I can easily say… yes.
Pretending to be a rock star with mini-guitars was pretty cool for a few years, but we’ve thankfully moved past that fad and can start getting music-based games that aren’t just for fulfilling your leather pants wearing fantasies. We’ve had a few highlights in the rhythm genre here and there as those plastic instruments made their way from Best Buy to Big Lots, but now that they’re completely gone it looks like we should get more innovative and quirky music games like we used to. If HarmoKnight is an indicator of the upcoming rhythm game onslaught, then I say “bring it on.” Mixing platforming with call-and-answer beat matching, HarmoKnight is a wonderfully cute and addictively fun journey that will keep you on your (tapping) toes.
As a game critic, it can be extremely difficult to set your expectations aside when playing a game for review. At this point in my “career,” I’ve become quite adept at seeing a game for what it’s worth and reviewing it without allowing my expectations to impact my assessment. I found this extremely tough to do with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate. I, like many others, expected something similar to a post-Symphony of the Night 2D Castlevania, but Mirror of Fate only resembles these titles on the surface. Digging deeper, it’s clear that Mercurysteam has merely converted the Lords of Shadow experience into 2D, placing the larger focus on combat, with only a minor emphasis on puzzles and exploration.
Like a photocopy of a photocopy, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus reproduces the content of its original source but degrades the quality. The source is Ninja Gaiden II: Team Ninja's hack-and-slash action adventure game released for Xbox 360 in 2008. A port would be released for PlayStation 3 in 2009 (hence the Sigma) and again for PlayStation Vita in 2013 (hence the Plus). What we’re left with is that third clone from Multiplicity.
In film, “popcorn flick” often holds a negative connotation, but like any genre it comprises both good and bad works judged by their own set of standards. Resident Evil 6 is a popcorn game and despite a few misguided design choices, it’s a damn good one.
Games evolve quickly. Despite a trilogy of quality releases ending only five years ago, Tomb Raider was already starting to get left behind by the genre it helped to create in 1996. Now the industry’s best-known heroine is back and reinventing action-adventure once again.
Unlike most reviewers, I feel like I had a unique perspective going into Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines. My fandom of the series only reaches back a few months, when friends recommended that I check out Alien and Aliens. While both movies were great, I didn’t really have the grasp on the series like most that grew up with the franchise. Also unlike most that went into this game, I didn’t have the chance to play it until after the backlash. Reports of the game being horrendous can be found everywhere, and while I agree to an extent, I feel that the majority of this game’s lackluster reception is due to the lofty expectations of diehard Aliens fans. However, nothing can stop Alien’s Colonial Marines from being a generic shooting experience that fell way below the standards of a great game.
Can we talk about women? They’re a wonderful part of our society; in fact they make up just about half of it. With that many of them around, they’re able to have a huge impact by being mothers, scientists, lawyers, caretakers, nurses, teachers, doctors, police officers, and will even be fighting on the front lines of the U.S. military. Yet, the makers of Picdun 2 think it’s just fine to stick ridiculously sexualized females into their stupid game to rake in a few bucks and set the entire gender back a few steps in the process.
Sometimes, it seemed a bit odd how quickly Nintendo used new characters to star in spin-off games. A bit less than two short years after his debut game, Donkey Kong's nephew Diddy Kong switched his pursuit of tasty bananas to silver coins in this kart racer from the once-proud Rareware. Even stranger, Donkey Kong himself is nowhere to be found. Weirder still, most of the other characters are original creations just for this game. Regardless, this ragtag racing team appeared in a game that offered just enough variation from Mario Kart 64 to have made it worth a look.
