Reviews
“I’m gonna live happily ever after, right here. Forever.”
As I finish absorbing the Residuum from a temporally-dislocated shovel, I’m told Julianna is on the hunt. What’s she on the hunt for?
Me. Why? Because I want to break the loop – the interminable hell of living the same day over, and over, and over again, on a demented island called Blackreef.
And likely for something more. Something that’s woven into every tick of every clock.
“We’re just too hot for this old rickety thing to handle.”
Verona Beach – a chill place to spend the summer. Especially in a rent-free apartment previously occupied by your cousin. Kind of him to offer you the space, even if he’s one of the most obnoxious and interfering people you’ll ever meet. But hey, families – can’t pick ‘em.
But you can pick lovers, and that’s part of the reason you’re here. See, you’ve never had a date. Not even once. Your cousin, under some duress from your mother, has been assigned your wingman, but it won’t be long before you’re able to make connections at your own pace. Connections that have some very interesting quirks…
“Yet again being a cog in the machine…”
The dimension of Quake’s evil has the power to possess. We see its dark influence in the corrupted soldiers of fallen portal stations and the Eldritch structures that blot a netherworld beyond space and time. That dark influence has now taken possession of Machine Games, and they have channelled it into the game’s fourth official expansion, Dimension of the Machine.
Mini Motorways made its debut on Steam at the end of July, and will be coming to the Nintendo Switch next year, but it still feels absolutely like a mobile game at heart. Perhaps, though, I should correct myself there. It feels like a touch game at heart. This isn’t some in-app purchase driven knock-off, but a very smartly thought-out city builder that begs to be picked up and played, one which will undoubtedly find a very welcome home on the Switch.
Coming to Mini Motorways on the PC without having played it, or its predecessor Mini Metro, I was immediately struck by how clean and fresh it looked. I’m a sucker for good-looking art, and with Mini Motorways, where everything is fairly minimalistic, there is more than enough character to draw me in. I love the way the cities expand as the days and weeks tick by, but in such a subtle fashion that you don’t realise that you’ve progressed from managing the road network of a village at the start, to now trying to tame the sprawl of a megalopolis. A sprawl that is all your own doing.
Once a few in-game weeks have passed and your starting route between two houses and one work place has grown exponentially, it’s wonderful to take a moment to pause, delete your original road networks and create things afresh to best take account of how your city has evolved. A city that has evolved to grow around your roads, with houses sprouting in the most awkward of spots but able to be ignored. Meanwhile the new business that sets up on the other side of a river when you have run out of bridges to plop down will be what finally brings a game to an end.
It might not be your traditional city builder, and yes it might work best on a touch device, but Mini Motorways is a gem, and comes highly recommended.
“So much misguided effort pursuing only the shadow of the big picture – why?”
I’d been anticipating Backbone for some time, but I didn’t go into it with an excited smile. Not quite. That isn’t because it was released to polarising reviews, but rather because of the developer’s response to that reception. It goes without saying these developers put everything into their game, and goddamn, they have every right to stand by it with confidence and pride.
I am so very behind that…
Attempting to get away with homicide in the presence of a detective is pure folly, but that’s never stopped Agatha Christie’s villains, has it? Still, they all stumble in the end – Poirot and his fellow sleuths are just that good, ain’t they?
Overboard! has no such detective figure (well, not quite), so the plan to push my broke, fascist-sympathising husband into the ocean and claim his life insurance ought to be a doddle. But it turns out – can you believe it? – murder just isn’t that simple.
Resident Evil has taken many shapes since its inception. Survival horror, light gun shooter, third person adventure, online cooperative game, and, with 2017’s Resident Evil 7, first-person horror. This latest shape was fitting, in a way: the very first Resident Evil was conceived as a first-person game, before the limitations of the PlayStation forced Capcom to abandon it. At the time of Resident Evil 7’s release, though, it was a return to the survival horror that once defined Capcom’s multifaceted franchise.
And it was quite good.
Now, after two years of remakes, we at last have the eighth instalment – Village. It, too, is good. Very good, actually.
The introduction of Detective Francis McQueen and his sidekick, Officer Patrick Dooley, in 2017’s comedy horror point-and-click, The Darkside Detective, was an unexpected delight. The strange and kooky world of Twin Lakes didn’t take the ‘horror’ bit all that seriously; it was much happier indulging obscure film references and finding innuendo everywhere.
And we were all the better for it.
The sequel, A Fumble in the Dark, is much the same, only bigger and carried off with a confidence born of its developers knowing they’ve crafted a winning duo, milking it for all it’s worth – albeit a little too much at times.
The Ancient Gods – Part Two wants you to know that the stakes are high.
The highest, in fact. The Dark Lord is free and all of existence is in peril. All of it. You would agree that it doesn’t get much higher than that. Unless of course you count my waning interest in the franchise, brought to the brink in the fun but clunky first instalment of the DLC duology.
In the face of that the so-called ‘Dark Lord’ doesn’t amount to a whole lot, no matter how much he narrows his eyes and declares that I will burn, burn, burn.
I’ve been looking at ‘Fights in Tight Spaces’, a tactical deck-building combat rogue-alike from GroundShatter and Mode 7 that has just hit Early Access.
The acronym FITS is maddeningly close to FIST’s which would be infinitely more suitable given the game, though swapping the S and T around does ruin the name- so I understand their reasoning. You see the name does exactly what it says on the tin, albeit a bloody, violent tin. The FITS acronym does open up some glorious options for alternative names such as the ones already mentioned in Week 129 of Our Week In Games here.
A more professional games journalist would leave that joke there and concentrate on doing the review. I am not a professional games journalist (but what makes a game journalist a professional? – Ed)……