Cosmin Vasile
We cannot recommend Neverwinter Edition Enhanced Edition for PlayStation 4 not even at a heavily discounted price.
The game does have a relatively clever connection between its mechanics and themes. Digging up the farm and digging up a life feel somehow similar, especially when it comes to seeing long-buried stuff in a new light. But the gameplay is too limited to offer anything more than a way to get story bits. And the narrative starts off interesting, delivers a good second and third day, and then collapses. Avoid The Magnificent Trufflepigs and just play Firewatch or Gone Home again.
Even though it would still be very short, if the technical aspects would have been fixed, the artistic part and atmosphere would have compensated for the length by offering an intense and memorable experience. Unfortunately in its actual form, even the most basic gameplay mechanics from Remothered: Broken Porcelain are broken, and as such, no one should waste time with it.
The remaster of Mafia II remains a great opportunity totally missed by the publisher to turn the bad memories, softened anyway by nostalgia, into a new worthwhile adventure. Instead, we received a console port put together haphazardly and without any care or consideration. The Definitive Edition of Mafia II dooms the game to go down in history as an experience that went from bad to worse.
Just like Ancestors, AWAY: The Survival Series is based on an interesting idea, but the end result is far from being entertaining or even educational. Instead of being a nature documentary it is a rudimentary combination of platformers with a bad combat system and even worse stealth mechanic.
Airplane Mode would have probably been a better game if it also included the check-in process and some extensive and tension-filled passport control moments. It should also have worked harder on the humor angle.
Even though developers have removed most of the freemium aspects of the mobile version, World of Warriors remains a shallow experience that you'll want to replace as quickly as possible. While there are some positive like the cute art style, there isn't much else that's couldn't be classified as mediocre at best.
Taken individually there are some aspects to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League that are enjoyable. The problem is that cloning the same few basic gameplay mechanics seen in most live service games creates a negative overall experience. As a result, even if playing alongside your friends as a full party, you will feel like participating in a chores marathon.
Forest Grove is not the stocking filler I have hoped for. It is a mediocre game at best, that does not offer any real challenge or satisfaction. The game mechanics are way too simple and repetitive, the hardest part being to decern what is relevant for the case and what is not.
The adventure game genre has been revived in the last couple of years, so it has become harder for such a game to stand out. Rendezvous is trying to offer its own take on the genre by adding action elements, but more often than not it’s these moments that make the game worse.
Bright Memory: Infinite has its moments, but in the end, it feels like a project that could have been great if it was developed by an entire team with all the necessary resources at their disposal.
I was really curious about Deliver Us the Moon on PS5, but after finishing it I am struggling to find anything good about it, beyond the obvious passion of the developers. It is not a bad game, but it is just flat, and it does not have anything memorable about it.
35mm tries hard to be more than just a walking simulator. It stumbles in this endeavor and forgets that a good walking simulator can still be a pretty entertaining experience. The game falls short of the experience offered by popular titles in the same genre like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or What Remains of Edith Finch.
Transient Extended Edition is a great concept, but the implementation is flawed on every level. The art style is stunning, but the graphical engine can’t keep the pace. The game world is truly different, but there is not too much to do in it. The puzzles are too simple and feel like a filler so you wouldn’t call the game just a walking simulator.
The gimmick of using a PlayStation 1 presentation might attract an audience. But the game needs more than style to keep players engaged, even if only for the around three hours the story needs to reveal itself. Chasing Static has some good elements but it never manages to get the right mix for a truly engaging experience.
It has its moments in co-op, but even those are ruined by the glitches and bugs. After the first few hours it becomes a repetitive grind and there is no real motivation for anyone to finish it. Aragami 2 is a completely unworthy and unmemorable sequel.
Blightbound does not need only bug fixes, but a complete overhaul, because it is not a fun experience by any means. It tried to walk in the footsteps of the great classics, but it fell on its face in the most embarrassing way.
The developer clearly is a fan of some classic experiences and knows how to take their spirit and bring it to the present. The challenge is to update the core mechanics interestingly and choose the right concepts for the world he is building. Guild of Darksteel is ultimately a shallow experience that does not offer much more than its demo but I am curious what Sandman can create in the future.
The patches are coming out steadily, the developers are trying to fix their mess, but in the end, Hired Gun leaves you with a bitter taste. This could have been a memorable game, yet Necromunda: Hired Gun feels like an ambitious project too big for such a small developer.
The dialogues are plain and the pace of the story is way too slow, with only a few moments you could actually call funny. The simple graphics do not bring justice to the fairy tale theme of the game, and overall Anna's Quest is far from the level we come to expect from Daedalic.