Recent reviews by Entriech

Pretty and stylish. Simple, but brutal. Eventually infuriating. Gaps between checkpoints got too long for my taste, and no checkpointing on the final boss meant that I gave up before seeing the end.

I really loved my time with this game. It really resonated with me emotionally. It's a testament to the writing and voice work that you can be brought so far in in such a short period of time. I'd really like to see more games with this form in the future.

A lovely, polished, challenging experience. Gameplay leans back and forth between puzzly pathfinding and a score-chasing mentality reminiscent of the early Tony Hawk games. Fans of Uniracers, take note.

A short, relaxing puzzle game revolving around manipulating water flow to make flowers bloom. Has a few occasionally tricky bits, but nothing that'll result in you tearing your hair out. Presentation is pleasant and simple. About 1.5 hours to see my way through, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is a great game!

Mad Max doesn't do anything new with the open-world, character-action formula, but it's got a ton of style, taking cues from the recent Mad Max : Fury Road. There's a satisfying checklist of side activites, most of which aren't too grating, and the core loop of ticking objectives and upgrading your character and car feels good for quite a while. The story's a bit lopsided, and mostly centers around searching for a McGuffin, but the ending hews well to the theme of the series. The driving feels fine, the car combat is actually pretty fun once you open up some options, and the hand to hand combat is serviceable, if simple.

There's nothing here groundbreaking, but sometimes you want something comfortable and familiar.

If you're a fan of tactical strategy games, this is more than worth your time. The grid-based fights are different from anything else I've played in the genre, tying your remaining health to your ability to do damage, incentivizing keeping your party in good health. There's a real emphasis on fighting against a team, as a team, and once you start to hang back and create opportunities the strategic depth really shines through.

The heroes/caravan/item system strung on top of the combat is well put together and systemized in a fun way, harkening back a bit to things like the Oregon trail. There seems to be a number of decision points strung through the story that can create some interesting divergences, resulting in losing/gaining new heroes, as well as the permanent death of major characters.

The animation style of the game is fantastic, 2d artwork in the style of say, old Ralph Bakshi movies from the 70s and 80s. It's a fairly unique look for a game in this genre. Music is fantastic, by the always on point Austin Wintory.

Definitely worth your time.

I finished off Enslaved:Odyssey to the West yesterday. Overall I found it marginally enjoyable! After thoroughly enjoying Ninja Theory's work on the DmC reboot, I was excited to come into this, but it's a very different game, and doesn't sport anything close to the highly technical, challenging combat system of DmC. In fact, to be quite critical for a moment, most of it's gameplay systems felt pretty shallow. The combat is fairly simple, and the platforming is context-sensitive. It also does this annoying thing where it litters collectable items in nooks and crannies, items that you want because they'll provide currency to upgrade your character. This is usually fine, but devolves into the stupid when they're still present during moments of high drama or time pressure in the storyline. Your NPC companion yelling for help, and you're rooting around in a trash bin in an alley for upgrade currency.

I'm also torn two ways on the context-sensitive jumping. On the one hand, I'm not sure the gameplay would have been enhanced at all with the ability to fall to your death and then having to restart sections of the game. On the other hand, as you go through yet another sequence of holding directions and tapping 'A', you sort of find yourself wondering what the payoff is. Certainly it allows you to have more confidence in trying things, because you flat out aren't allowed to if it would mean your death, but it kind of neutralizes any sense of satisfaction about the successfully traversing the level.

However its atypical plot, colourful, post-apocalyptic U.S. setting, and service-ably written/acted characters bring it up a bit. Also it clocks in at a perfect six hours. Surprisingly, the game was co-directed by Andy Serkis who provides both the voice and mo-cap for the main character, with excellent results.

If you want a character action game that's a bit different from the rest, I recommend checking it out.

Initially, this may seem like a fun cross between Dungeon Keeper and Diablo. However with most of the content being player-generated, what you eventually run into is level after level tuned to be as annoying as possible. To their credit, they don't abuse the free to play model (purchased currency is limited to buying cosmetic improvements and boosters). Even so, the game gets dry rapidly, and dropping swarms of monsters on players becomes the norm.