Category Archives: Game Reviews
Tales from the Borderlands – Episode Five Review: End of the Road
It took them a while but Telltale has finally completed the Tales from the Borderlands series just as they got Minecraft: Story Mode off the ground. It’s fitting that one of Telltale’s game spin-offs ends as another begins. From what I understand of Minecraft: Story Mode (review coming soon), it’s apparently designed to appeal mostly to kids which is how I would peg the stereotypical audience of Minecraft proper.
I look at Tales from the Borderlands in a similar way. No, it’s not a kids’ game but it is a game designed to appeal to the audience of the proper game that it’s based on. In its final episode, though, Tales from the Borderlands finally clicks in the way we’ve gotten used to from Telltale Games.
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WRC 5 Review: Dirty Rally
One of our unanticipated annual traditions on et geekera is the review of some annual sports franchises in the fall. In the next little bit, we’ll review Football Manager 2016 (the third entry we’ve reviewed in our under three years of existence) and Franchise Hockey Manager 2 will be the latest addition to the lineup of sport reviews. But the one I’ve been doing the longest between etg and The Lowdown is WRC. After a year’s hiatus, the World Rally Championship game is back. While much has changed, a lot still stays the same.
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Life is Strange – Episode Five Review: Time of Your Life
It’s so seldom that I play a game that really moves me. Sure, there are plenty of games that I play that I think are really good or have their poignant moments but I can’t remember the last time I played a game that stuck with me quite the way that Life is Strange has. I came into it expecting to be underwhelmed but Dontnod exceeded all of my expectations and made the best episodic point-and-click adventure game on the market.
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Tales from the Borderlands – Episode Four Review: The Bravo-Team
If you were to ask the critics, Tales from the Borderlands is the hidden gem of Telltale’s slate of episodic adventure games. I’d hazard that those critics are also going to be fans of or at least have played the Borderlands games at some point in time. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve never put much more than five hours into Borderlands.
When you take that into consideration, it’s probably not that much of a surprise that I haven’t rated Tales from the Borderlands as well as most critics. And while a number of critics saw the penultimate episode of TFTB as the best episode in the series and called the series the best thing out of Telltale since the first season of The Walking Dead. I saw it as just an episode.
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Star Wars: Battlefront Beta Impressions: Pray I Alter It Further
So we have a new Star Wars trailer and many, many people have tickets to an early showing of The Force Awakens. Exactly a month before the earliest showings of Episode VII, the next chapter in the Star Wars video game franchise will hit shelves.
Both the announcement of J.J. Abrams as director of Episode VII and the appointment of Electronic Arts as the publisher of Star Wars games were met with excitement. While EA did cause a bit of trepidation, the appointment of DICE, BioWare and Visceral, three of EA’s top guns, to develop the games got gamers excited. First up for EA and LucasFilm is DICE with their take on Battlefront. The early results aren’t exactly awe-inspiring.
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Life is Strange – Episode Four Review: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
Next week marks the release of the final episodes of both Tales from the Borderlands and Life is Strange. As someone who is reviewing both games, that leaves me a choice of which game I should play first when both finales come out on October 20th. After playing Episode 4: Dark Room, Life is Strange proved that it is the best in class in the episodic adventure game genre.
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Life is Strange – Episode Three Review: Truth and Consequences
Newton’s third law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Put simply, for every action take, there is an opposing force pushing the opposite way with equal strength. While that’s a law of physics, Newton may as well have been a philosopher with that one. I’m not sure that there’s a law of physics more appropriately applied to life.
The whole point of Life is Strange is actions and their equal and opposite reactions. You could make the argument that all games that are designed to change themselves to fit your decisions should act like that. If there’s one thing that Dontnod has gotten right through three episodes of Life is Strange, it’s that your decisions cause real and obvious reactions in Arcadia Bay. It certainly extends beyond just little changes in dialogue too.
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Life is Strange – Episode Two Review: Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro is an art term for the use of strong contrasts between light and dark in a composition. It’s the concept that forms the basis of most strong black-and-white photographs. No, Life is Strange – Episode Two: Out of Time isn’t presented in black and white in a literal sense. It contrasts light and dark themes to pull off emotionally impactful moments in just two episodes what it takes Telltale five episodes or BioWare dozens of hours to achieve.
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Life is Strange – Episode One Review: If I Could Turn Back Time
With the final episode of Life is Strange, Square Enix and Dontnod’s surprise hit episodic adventure game, coming out on October 20th, I think that’s as good an excuse as any to play through it and get it all reviewed between now and the release of that last episode. Critics adore this game and review scores are getting better with every episode. My interest comes in that I find that my reviews often contradict the critics in that where critics see improvement, I see it differently. Will I see a game floated as a game of the year contender differently that the rest?
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Absolute Drift Review: Get a Little Bit Sideways
Racing games tend to be very complex. It’s not just the Assetto Corsas, Forzas, and Gran Turismos of the world that are complex. Even the likes of Mario Kart and even all the way back to the old NES racing games that seem fairly simple and arcadey have a lot of different moving parts (pun intended).
But what happens when you strip away most of those moving parts? What happens when you build a game around a car, a track and your right foot? Absolute Drift attempts to answer that by taking the drifting game and distilling it down to just drifting.
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