Kirk McKeand's Reviews
Mafia 3 is a game with some brilliant ideas, but the execution falls flat. It's a huge shame, because the opening hours are full of promise, but it loses its way as soon as it embraces its open-world design. [OpenCritic note: This review scores Mafia 3 at 2/5 stars. Because Kirk McKeand has already published other scored reviews for Mafia 3, the score has not been recorded]
Those golden-era JRPGs are beloved because they were packed with memorable locations, characters, and combat. I Am Setsuna unfortunately falls short on all three counts, and instead delivers an average and forgettable adventure, albeit one with wonderful music.
It's a likeable game, and it feels fantastic to play when you nail an extended combat encounter with a chain of flawless shots, deflections, rolls, slides and aerial skull punches. It can be a touch imprecise, especially when trying to time a shot while rolling or throwing an explosive, but sometimes your failures can be just as entertaining as an unbroken display of acrobatic death.
Most of its good points are inherited from the last game, and while the excellent level design improvements are welcome, there’s not enough variety to get the most out of them.
While there’s an inherent fumbliness to Blood & Truth – I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve dropped a grenade under my own ass, my friend – it’s a game that wants you to feel and look cool. When you’re in the zone, it’s the closest to playable John Wick as we’re likely going to get – that is if John Wick liked flipping people off and collecting vape bottles.
It’s not going to win any Game of the Year awards, but if you’re looking for a fun co-op game that scratches a similar itch to something like PayDay, Rico is well worth picking up.
If you sleep on it, you’re sleeping on one of the best – if not the best – single-player FPS games of this generation.
For now, I have to at least commend The Division 2 for getting the basics right. There’s a compelling endgame, there’s loot that actually matters, and missions don’t feel like they’re copy and pasted to bulk out the runtime. If some of the frustrations can be ironed out, it could be the best of its genre.
Where most publishers are trying to squeeze as much as possible out of people, juicing those nostalgia glands for every penny, here we have a sensible price point for a decent older game that’s been blown up to look passable on a modern screen.
While it’s still slightly better than most recent Xbox One exclusives, Days Gone just isn’t anywhere near the quality of the majority of PS4 first-party releases.
Overall, Battlefield 5 is a brilliant shooter that’s hamstrung by its setting.
For all the savvy tweaks to combat and exploration, Shadow of the Tomb Raider unfortunately feels like an extremely long expansion pack, now with killer fish and face mud.
Unfortunately, The Crew 2 is just too inconsistent to fully recommend.
The sense of speed is akin to watching Bruce Lee flail his nunchucks about while high on amphetamines.
There's a scene in God of War where Kratos decapitates someone to free them from a magical cage within the mangled roots of a tree.
I am sitting cross-legged in a watchtower, praying the crew searching for me doesn't realise I'm here.
Ever since Far Cry 3, Ubisoft's open-world series has been about the bad guys.
Devil's Third will probably gain a cult following because it's a game from Itagaki, but it's nowhere near the quality of some of his earlier work.
And that's what it feels like to play Godzilla - you're a man in a giant suit, blindly bumbling around a fake cardboard city, swinging your arms and trying not to pass out - not because you're exhausted, but because you're bored out of your mind.
Ubisoft has failed in two areas where it usually excels here – sequels and open worlds – but there’s still a small glimmer of hope in another area: reinvention. Perhaps this concept will get scrapped entirely for the next one and we’ll go back to the good old days where Ghost Recon was an excellent shooter with its own identity. Right now it’s out of focus, confused, and frustrating. A ghost of its former self.