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The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Review: Please Reclassify
I recall hearing a games critic say that playing bad games is much more fun than playing good games because there’s so much more to write or talk about when you play a bad game. I have to disagree. There’s nothing fun about playing a bad game. Playing through a bad game is a painful and frustrating experience. Once you move beyond the frustration, it gets funny but you have to get to that point. At least writing the review can be somewhat cathartic.
And that brings us to The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. This game started life back in 2006 as just XCOM, a first-person survival horror about an alien invasion. The idea of an XCOM shooter terrified fans of the classic 1990s PC strategy game and the shooter was seemingly put to the side to make way for the rebooting of X-COM as a strategy game franchise with 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
However, the XCOM shooter didn’t go away. The game from the seventh circle of XCOM fan hell was pulled from the seventh circle of development hell by 2K Games and 2K Marin. It was almost completely reimagined during a seven-year development cycle from being a first-person horror to a third-person squad-based tactical shooter. Unfortunately, it should have remained in development hell, never to see the light of day.
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Divekick (PC) Review: Kick It
Can a fighting game only have two buttons? It doesn’t seem to be a necessary question. Any game can use any control scheme the developer chooses so long as it works.
Don’t tell that to some vocal members of the fighting game community who consider Divekick to be a joke. How can a fighting game only have two buttons, no combos and only one-hit kills via jump kicks? It clearly doesn’t belong in the same category as multi-button, combo-laden games like the Street Fighters, Tekkens, Soul Calibers and Mortal Kombats of the world.
So does having only two buttons make Divekick a sick joke or is it so well put together that it actually pulls off the adrenaline rush of a fight game with a simple facade?
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Papers, Please Review: Glory to Arstotzka
When you think of unexplored genres that would make for interesting games, I don’t think that customs officer simulation would be one of them. Yet, Papers, Please is one of more interesting games that I’ve played in a while… Even if it does seem at time like a desk organization simulator too.
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Remember Me Review: The Memory Remains
A while back, I wrote a column lamenting the loss of new intellectual properties coming from the big publishers. One of the few new multi-platform IPs that is coming out this year is Capcom’s Remember Me. It had an interesting premise and the rare not hypersexualized female protagonist leading the game. For the first few hours, Remember Me was certainly worth my past consideration as a new IP to wake up the industry.
However, the experience doesn’t hold up over time. While there are parts of the game that are very memorable, it’s certainly not the unforgettable rookie developer Dontnod were hoping for.
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Rogue Legacy Review: Everybody Rogue
With the games release schedule decidedly quiet during the summer, it’s a good time for everyone, including would-be games critics, to catch up on games that you might have missed during the first months of the year. To be quite honest, I’m not sure how many of this year’s big releases I’ve finished.
I’m starting with the current indie darling du jour, Rogue Legacy. It’s received heaps of praise from critics but what do I, a gamer of average skill and free time, think of the latest big thing on the indie game scene?
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The Walking Dead: 400 Days (PC) Review: Long on Stories, Short on Storytelling
Last year’s The Walking Dead by Telltale Games was a real surprise. Not only was it a licensed game that turned out to be spectacular when the TV show based on the comics was struggling but it came from a developer who hadn’t put out a really good game in the previous couple of years. The Walking Dead was the surprise hit of 2012 and walked away with a number of Game of the Year awards.
With the promise of The Walking Dead: Season 2 upcoming, Telltale tided us over with a new series of five short stories from their The Walking Dead universe. Fortunately, all the success hasn’t gone to their head and tiny series of snippets into The Walking Dead play out almost as well as Season 1.
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Fist Puncher Impressions: A Punch to the Face
Normally I review games but sometimes a game just beats me down so badly that I can’t get any further and just can’t compel myself to fight with the game any longer. So rather than call this look at indie brawler Fist Puncher a review, I’ll just call it impressions.
Fist Puncher is a game that likens itself to old-school 2D side-scrolling brawlers like River City Ransom. The similarities are clear in terms of the brawling gameplay and integration of RPG elements. However, Fist Puncher can be downright painful to play.
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Gunpoint Review: Spying Excellence
It’s not everyday that one single indie game, an indie game that’s the first effort of a former gaming journalist, causes the whole of the gaming press to pause and take notice. But that’s what we have with Gunpoint, the rookie effort of now-former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis. I say that he’s now a former PC Gamer writer because the commercial success of Gunpoint has given Francis the financial freedom to pursue game development full-time.
So could the debut effort of a man who hasn’t made a game before and put it together in off-the-shelf game making software be worthy of all the praise it received? Yes. Yes, it can.
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Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe Review: Jump and Gun
Before I got around to playing The Last of Us, I found a fun little sink published by one of new best friends of indie developers everywhere. Adult Swim Games’ move from the flash game market to publishing games on Steam was unexpected but their propensity for getting simple but fun games straight onto Steam without going through the hit-and-miss Greenlight system benefits both the developers and gamers.
Their second release on Steam is another upgrade of an Adult Swim flash game. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe might be a bit of a misnomer but that doesn’t make Andrew Morrish’s creation any less delightful to play.
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Element4l Review: Slip Sliding Away
Sometimes, I need to play a game that’s on the calm side. As fun as driving cars at speeds approaching 200 MPH and shooting baddies with overpowered weapons is, I like to throw a quiet game into the rotation to mix things up. Lately, that’s been the oddly spelled but appropriately titled puzzle platformer Element4l.
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