Vdeo Game Reviews
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Mirror’s Edge Catalyst’s open world city of Glass is abounding in creativity, its environments oftentimes singular in their beauty, perpetually engaging and arresting. The game’s greatest displays of creativity stem largely from the bold, liberal usage of color – tranquil blues and violets have a prominent presence, as do striking yellows; everywhere is vibrancy; everywhere
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Battlefield 1 is terribly bleak tonally, its themes characterized by a certain unflinching maturity; difficult subjects are not skirted but are instead embraced – narratively, the title is a masterwork. In terms of construction, it is comprised of five distinct “war stories,” each one being totally unique, featuring different protagonists and secondary characters, showing a
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Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons expertly manages to court player engagement and investment from its very opening, beginning with a well-animated cutscene, seeing the death of a still unidentified woman, the precise nature of her death being drowning. The cutscene, also, shows the futile attempts of a young boy to prevent that drowning; tossed
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Splinter Cell: Conviction’s narrative shows no innovation, characterized by a dearth of ambition, embracing to the last the tropes of generic, uninspired spy fiction. Some intrigue is admittedly present, but it is fleeting – a few moments of narrative greatness, emotional heft, cannot salvage what is otherwise disastrous, unengaging. The intrigue which is present stems
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Narratively, Mafia III is engaging from the first. The game initially opens with a hint of optimism, an optimism which is promptly and totally displaced by overwhelming bleakness, greatly characterizing the narrative, the characters, and the world-building. This temporary optimism principally arises when considering the protagonist, Lincoln Clay, a soldier returning from a violent tour
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Call of Juarez: Gunslinger’s greatest achievement is its evocation of place, expertly capturing the atmosphere and stylings of the American West, and even more exotic locations, like Mexican deserts and sandscapes. In a stroke of mastery, these diverse environments coalesce, resulting in one cohesive whole, contributing also to the game’s abundance of charm. Beyond these
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Narratively, Crysis 2 is abounding in potential, though that potential is compromised by an excess of narrative ambition. Rather than embracing precision and conveying one focused, succinct narrative the game overreaches in attempting to tell a multitude of stories, touching on the hostile alien Cephs, developing also a debilitating sickness, the Spore, also elaborating upon
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Technically and creatively, Battlefield 4 remains a marvel, though the game’s strengths here are tempered by an uninspired narrative, which sees the player character, Recker, cooperating with his varied squadmates; their mission involves the leaping from creative environment to creative environment, each decidedly unique. From an Azerbaijanian village, characterized by brown deserts and dilapidated structures,
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Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s greatest narrative intention is apparent from the first: tell a quirky, eccentric tale, eliciting laughs and creating a more playful environment; here are no aspirations towards the grimy and gritty. A perfect balance is struck; despite the overbearing humor present within all facets of the narrative, the game never ventures
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Sniper Elite 3 falters narratively, an inconsistent, dull plot dampening potential successes. Part of this narrative failing is attributable to a lack of any ambition; the entire story can be condensed into one succinct statement – weaken Axis presence in Northern Africa during the heart of World War II. No intrigue ever really emerges, and
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The world-building of Metro 2033 marks its greatest strength, even as the precise history of that world is left rather vague. There is a brief cutscene on the title screen, which details a violent atomic bombing, devastating Russia and forcing its inhabitants to retreat underground, living in the tunnels of once-derelict train tunnels, now improved
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Faery: Legends of Avalon opens in a fairly routine fashion. The customizable player character is awakened from a period of protracted slumber and instructed by his king to traverse the varied lands, and right the varied ills that were then plaguing them. In efforts to this end, various worlds are visited, each distinctively different from
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Rage opens with a brief explanatory cutscene, detailing a world fallen and collapsed, the Earth turning into a desolate wasteland. The player character, an unnamed male, awakes from a state of stasis, seemingly frozen in time for hundreds of years. What was the point of his slumber? What precisely happened to Earth? These things aren’t
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Titanfall 2 starts off fairly strong. We are swiftly introduced to our protagonist, Cooper, a plucky, ambitious sort desperate to break through, rise beyond his rank and achieve the much-coveted position of pilot, thus having at his command his own titan and companion; it seems to be his one dream. In these opening sequences, the
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Borderlands 3 gets off to a fairly rough start. The starting environment, Pandora, has been featured heavily in prior games of the series, and thusly feels overused, stale; originality is lacking. The opening hours are slow and unremarkable, the deserts and landscapes mimicry of what has come before. True from a technical perspective the graphics
Games With Grey 