Fraser Brown
It’s strange to be slightly disappointed with Leviathans despite spending entire days completely immersed in Stellaris, yet again. It’s not bad DLC, it’s just mostly invisible for large portions of the game.
The Walking Dead: Michonne is supplementary at best. It's a sidestory that fills in a brief gap in a much bigger narrative. There are hints of more interesting things to come, but as of the first episode, this is far from essential for either fans of The Walking Dead comics or Telltale's other episodic games. It's a diversion, and not a great one.
Wargaming’s flagship remains a great game that frequently gets in the way of itself.
Lethal League Blaze doesn’t flip over the table, but it’s an extremely confident sequel that improves on just about every part of its predecessor.
I don't want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.
Every part of Stellaris is still here; the pieces have just been rearranged, neatly.
Railway Empire should be so much better.
The Tomb Kings are ultimately a great addition to Warhammer's perpetually pissed-off factions, but their poor integration into the Vortex campaign suggests that Creative Assembly haven't quite figured out how to add factions who don't share the core participants' objectives.
Easily confused with Life is Feudal: Your Own, Life is Feudal: MMO takes the multiplayer medieval crafting and survival game and makes it larger and, through developer-run servers, more permanent.
SpellForce 3 is a game that, when pulled apart, doesn't always come out looking great, but that I've still really enjoyed.
If you're in desperate need of a historical strategy romp, you could do a lot worse than Empire Divided, and it's the best piece of Rome DLC by quite a large margin, but barely a turn went by without me wishing I was bullying Elves or fighting the hordes of Chaos instead.
Overgrowth feels like a mod created for a wacky physics sandbox where all the openness and experimentation has been pushed to the side, and everything else has been twisted around a forgettable, barely present story and a series of brief and ugly levels. I'm just glad that, at around two to three hours long, it's incredibly short.
Norsca is a brilliant last hurrah for Total War: Warhammer. It's full of spectacle, monsters and thrilling wars, but where it really succeeds is in its campaign twists.
I don't think Aven Colony is terrible, despite these 1,500+ scathing words. The combination of survival and constructing a frontier colony is still an intriguing concept, and Mothership Entertainment have used the alien world conceit to create some novel, if ultimately irritating, obstacles. But the balance is all off, and its slog of a campaign and the attempts at streamlining make this a disappointing extraterrestrial outing.
Despite the concessions made in the name of ambition, it's an impressive dungeon romp.
It's an exceedingly strong beginning to this chapter of the Warhammer trilogy and is a strong contender for the best game in the series.
I'm conflicted. Conceptually, The Crimson Court is very much my cup of blood, but the execution, particularly when it comes to the first mission and the curse, sometimes feels off. That said, Red Hook has clearly been taking feedback seriously, and changes have already been made to make things a little less punishing.
Housemarque and Eugene Jarvis have created something very special, and I suspect, enduring.
Thanks to the myriad possible move and combo loadouts, along with the various weapons and classes, PvP is both challenging and full of unexpected comebacks and knife-edge duels, but it just doesn't feel like a complete experience. Bugs, server issues, a small, dull open-world and the lack of modes is definitely holding it back.
From the interface to economics, it sports some of the best systems I've seen in a 4X game, and like Endless Legend, it's simultaneously confident and experimental, finding new ways to spice up a genre that can too often be bland.