Dan Stapleton's Reviews
What a disappointment. Even with a reputable developer behind it, The Legend of Korra game left us bent out of shape.
Besides the fact that there's absolutely no evolution involved in it, Jurassic World: Evolution is a bad game because it's just a bore of a park sim. Sure, the dinosaurs look nice enough, but the process of unlocking new species is beyond tedious and actually running the business is shallow and quickly gets stale. It beats getting mauled by raptors, but after careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse this park.
Serious Sam 4 still has the spectacle of hundreds of enemies bearing down on you, but its long stretches of run-and-gun shooting quickly become monotonous.
Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.
At the end of the day, we’re mostly just stacking blocks in Tumble VR, and that’s rarely going to be exciting. Even when it challenged me with head-scratching feats of structural engineering it bored me with the mundanity of its theme. Adding onto that some of the PlayStation VR’s inherent limitations with tracking, and it was as often frustrating as rewarding.
Crypto's material has worn a bit thin. While Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed does a respectable job of making his second rampage look good, its small assortment of new weapons and enemies makes it feel like an unambitious expansion rather than a sequel.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker makes disassembling giant spacecraft piece by piece fun for a bit, but due to a lack of variety in its puzzle-like objectives it soon devolves into hard labor.
Phantom: Covert Ops takes itself way too seriously and it stealth is basic and reliant on virtually blind enemies, but infiltrating an enemy base with a murder canoe in VR does have its bright spots.
Disintegration's single-player campaign has some novel ideas and its robot enemies die well, but it never achieves any tactical depth.
It’s a shame these four games and one sightseeing trip aren’t sold separately, because as a mismatched hodgepodge it’s a lot harder to recommend as a whole than the good parts would have been on their own. The entertaining shooting gallery and drama of The London Heist carries the other three short and less interesting games and the passive Ocean Descent, and is likely the only one I'll remember.
No Man’s Sky has sci-fi spectacle of strange new worlds on its side, but not much else. Its gameplay is underdeveloped and repetitive, and in my dozens of hours played it’s introduced very few new ideas to mix up its crafting, upgrades, combat, or universe. The promise of limitless exploration ended up working against it when I lost faith that it had any more meaningful things to show me no matter how far I traveled. This ambitious game reached for the stars, but its reach exceeded its grasp by light years.
Getting by on strong atmosphere (no pun intended), scenic views, and an intuitive means of controlling full three-dimensional movement, Adr1ft's repetitive fix-it missions make its second half a chore to get through. Some strong pieces of voice acting would've been put to better use if the story weren't so vague.
Don't blink, or you'll miss the Batgirl: A Matter of Family DLC. There's just not enough here to get excited about.
Youngblood is aggressively okay, but doesn't come close to recapturing the joy of its predecessor.
It may seem ungrateful to be unenthusiastic about a content pack of miscellaneous upgrades, but the strongest reason to recommend this DLC is to say thank you to Colossal Order and Paradox for the great stuff we got for free in patches. There's plenty here, and some of it can give your city a little more regional flavor, but none of it stands out as a must-have feature that refreshes how Cities: Skylines plays. Instead, it serves as a reminder to return to this great city builder and see how it's improved since you played it last.
Game of Thrones Episode 5 takes a turn south with some out-of-character portrayals and lack of forward momentum.
Sid Meier's Starships produces a few good tactical battles before its AI loses steam and its strategy gets frustrating.
You don't have to think outside the box to solve Magnetic: Cage Closed's puzzles, but there are a few head-scratchers.
Edge of Nowhere stands out in the current library of VR games only because it’s one of the longer and more polished games out there, but compared to the conventional third-person action-stealth games it closely emulates it’s competent but unremarkable. If you’ve played a game in this genre before, Victor’s platforming and sneaking will do very little to surprise you, other than the way the sense of isolation you get from putting on the Oculus Rift enhances the setting.
We knew this wasn't going to end in happiness for the Forresters - if it had, I'd be crying foul that it didn't feel like Game of Thrones at all. The problem is that sense of inevitability mixes with the lack of resolution for major parts of the plot in an unappealing way. Most of what this uneven season finale has to offer is found in a few strong moments and continued hope for answers to questions in a hypothetical season 2.