Recent reviews by Thomas

Very nearly flawless. Cairn innovates in multiple ways, from its gameplay mechanics to its subject matter.
The climbing system is unique both in complexity and controls, with the option to use an automatic algorithmic limb selection system or a manual selection system. I will say that the automatic system can often pick the wrong limb on harder climbs, which can lead to falls and frustration, so a hybrid approach of using the auto selection and then using manual when necessary is a good option.

The game is beautiful and does an amazing job of immersing the player in the world. The game relies on both environmental and character driven storytelling and merges them quite well.

The environmental storytelling borrows a lot from Jusant, but goes enough of its own way to feel like it's not retreading ground. The character driven storytelling is excellent, although may put some players off initially because the game exposes you to aspects of the main character from the outset that in isolation make her seem very unlikeable. I found that I enjoyed the environmental storytelling and gameplay most initially, and then began to feel very invested in the main character about half way through.

Highly recommend, tremendous fun and has a lot of replay value.

Spoiler Section

The game's subject matter is complex and centers on themes also explored in the climbing documentary Free Solo; the ethics and motivations of those people who engage in activities that are popularly considered to be very dangerous, like free solo climbing or extreme alpinism.
The game's main character, Aava, is introduced as an immature, petulant and selfish person who cares for nothing more than climbing a massive 9000m mountain named Kami. She ignores her business partner who only desires to get her funding so she can continue her passion, and her romantic partner who cares deeply for her welbeing.
Shortly after starting the climb she meets a fellow alpinist named Marco, who professes that she is massive inspiration to him and while perhaps acting overfamiliar seems a pleasant enough man. Aava is clearly uninterested in speaking to him and quite rude about it, which makes her very easy to dislike.

However as the climb progresses this begins to shift. You go through the hardships and joys of the climb with Aava, and begin to understand why she's doing what she's doing. This becomes more and more inevitable as the game goes on, as the questions you can ask about Aava's motivations can then also be directed at the player.
Suddenly your meetings with Marco go from being frustrated at Aava for her rudeness to being frustrated at Marco. As the climb progresses it is increasingly revealed that Marco is far out of his depth on this mountain. You climb past pitches that he has spent days on without even breaking a sweat. And each time you meet he is more exhausted, more afraid, and more combative.
This happens with Aava's partner as well. During a particularly hard climb Aava recieves a voice message in which her partner describes in great detail how their pet cat has died, dragging out the description and almost relishing in inflicting pain on Aava. Then caps off the message by guilt tripping Aava into quitting climbing.

Your perspective shifts then to one of understanding. Aava is a uniquely talented, even superhuman, climber. It's something she has always done, and something she will always do. You don't need to ask why she's trying to climb this mountain because you're the one piloting her to the top. There's not a complicated reason for it really. Why does one need a reason to get to the top of a big mountain?

My main criticism of the game is where the story goes after this point. Near the peak to find a cave with an old climber living in it. He climbed up to that point many years ago and after giving up trying has resolved to the idea that summiting Kami is impossible. Marco is with you and laps this up, you get the impression that all he needed was for an authority figure to tell him that the climb wasn't possible, and now he feels as if he can go back down the mountain without feeling defeated. However for whatever reason he assumes Aava is having the same issue, and tries to get her to retreat from the mountain with him. The game then offers you a choice between giving up and continuing. I can't decide whether this was a good addition. My first instinct when playing is that the choice makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story. Looking back I can see some of the merit, choosing to go down the mountain feels very hollow and just feels plain wrong, so it reinforces the idea that the only choice to make is to continue. I'm not totally sure how I feel about it even now.

The game is then unable to stick the landing from this point onwards in my opinion. After saying good bye to Marco you return to the cave, where the old climber is shooting at corpses with a high powered rifle like a lunatic. He again warns you not to continue, and Aava rightly tells him that he needs to either continue the ascent or accept defeat. Then you begin the climb to the finish. You navigate ice waterfalls and some tricky routes, but the climb isn't really all that difficult. Then you hear a gunshot, and a massive avalanche triggers. Aava climbs up the rock face despite the avalanche, and then passes out at the top.

The game from this point cuts your health and stat bars by 2/3rds and Aava now climbs like she's broken every bone in her body. Despite all your prep up to this point, the food you've made, the drugs you've scavenged, Aava suddenly acts like she's on her last legs. The environmental storytelling stops here, nothing more on the troglodytes and no more character moments. Just a slog to the peak with Aava walking very very slowly but somehow still able to flash routes that would make Adam Ondra blush.

You get to the top, Aava sits down, screams, then dies. You then get a weird sequence where you climb the stars, become a shooting star and the credits roll.

Even now I can't put my finger on what exactly made this so unsatisfying. Is it that despite the efforts I went to as a player to keep Aava well stocked and healthy, she still died? Is it that despite the story leaning in the direction that Aava's motivations and background make her uniquely suited to summiting the mountain, the story still has her fail?

I understand that alpinism in real life is full of risk and danger, and that what usually kills people isn't lack of skill but things out of their control, but there are many aspects of this game that clearly depart from the real world, so why is it that we have realism in this sense but not others?

All I know is that despite loving this game, and having just started a free solo run, I really dislike the ending.

This is a co-op puzzle game based around the concept of obscuring information from each player. Every puzzle in the game has to be solved as a duo, with players feeding each other information and interacting with things individually to progress.

The game is mostly fun and engaging, but some parts are a bit frustrating. It looks very nice, the graphical style is simple and executed well. The movement also feels quite bouncy and just generally nice. All in all my friend and I got about 6 hours playtime out of it.

What's disappointing about this game is the lack of originality and depth of some of the puzzles, the game length and the story.

There are some puzzles that are solely based around one player not being able to see what the other is seeing, meaning one player does nothing except describe what they see, and the other solves the puzzle using only the information they've been given. This leads to scenarios where one player is in a room for an hour with nothing to interact with, whilst the other player figures out how to solve the puzzle by asking questions.
This becomes more apparent as you get to the later puzzles, and implies to me that the devs ran out of ideas after the first few puzzles and just put run-of-the-mill unoriginal puzzles in the game and split them up so they were technically co-op.

The game makes itself feel like it's going to be a lot bigger than it is, as you start the game in what appears to be an arctic outpost, and you have to input the co-ordinates from a distress call into a map to go rescue people. To me, this implies that you'll be responding to multiple distress calls throughout the game, and that the puzzles will be about trying to help each one. But there's only one distress call, and you never find out who sent it.

The story is nonsensical and feels very forced. Once you get to the place you received the distress call from, you enter a castle and start hearing random voices talking about a magic dagger. As you progress, the dagger forms, and there's a jester doing magic. Once you complete the final puzzle, a player has the choice of killing themselves or their buddy in order to make sure the castle stays cursed. There isn't any emotion for this decision, and you don't really know why you're making it. The distress call just felt like an excuse to get the players to the castle somehow, which broke immersion for me as I realised it was just a tool for the story rather than a part of it. And then the game just ends and shows you cutscenes about characters you don't even care about.

Having said that, I do still recommend this game, as I haven't played a co-op game like it before and despite its problems I still enjoyed myself for the most part.

I stumbled upon this game by reading a YouTube comment about Obsidian's The Outer Worlds. I think a big reason I hadn't heard of this game before was because of The Outer Worlds overshadowing it due to their similar titles. I can't think of any other reason why this game wouldn't have been the talk of the gaming world when it was released.

It's an exploration/mystery plat-former with space flight. It is totally open world, every part of the map can be explored the moment you blast off in your rocket, but it somehow manages to never feel directionless.
The music in the game is expertly composed and does wonders in bolstering the already incredibly immersive atmosphere.

Unlike Metroid-Vania style exploration games, exploration in Outer Wilds is facilitated by your increasing knowledge and skill rather than your character's access to items and abilities. The only thing stopping you from completing the game from the get-go is that you simply aren't aware of the final objective.

Outer Wilds feels like a game where the developers had an ambition, and stopped at no lengths to achieve it.
I clocked 22 hours on this game in 2 days.

It's incredible.

Good concept, lack-lustre execution.

I really liked the graveyard keeping part of the game, but it only accounts for about 5-10% of the game itself. Parts of the game were remarkably shallow such as the autopsies and the grave-keeping, other parts were needlessly deep such as the massive knowledge/technology trees.

Games such as these need to have a satisfying game-play loop or a really good story-line to make them worth playing. The game-play loop involves waiting for ages for a corpse drop-off, removing parts of the corpse, burying the corpse, and then putting a tombstone on the grave. This, by itself, isn't a bad game-play loop. What ruins it is that you have to wait a REALLY long time for a corpse to be dropped off (one every 7.5 minutes if one is dropped off per in-game day, which is rarely the case, the donkey also goes on strike early on in the game) so you spend barely any of the game managing the graveyard. Instead you have to spend most of your time grinding materials to complete meaningless tasks.
The story line is gated behind so much of this monotonous grinding, NPCs just won't talk to you unless you give them things that take hours to get. A good example of this is the talking skull: you dig him up, he shows you the graveyard and the morgue, then tells you to go to town and get him some beer before he helps you further. From here on, he will flat out just not interact with you until he gets his beer. Once you get him his beer, he gives you a sentence of helpful dialogue and then demands wine. So for the next 6 hours of the game you cannot talk to the only companion you have. This kind of content gating is universal throughout the game.

Feel like this game wasted my time.

Hotline Miami but as a side scroller with Samurai.
Gameplay is very replayable and retains its enjoyment even after completion. If you want a challenge try beating the game without using slow motion.

My only criticism of this game is that it's quite short and the story ends in the middle of an arc, which makes finishing the game quite unsatisfying.

Is pretty good game

Overwatch but free and better

I dislike the changes to the character design and modelling that gave the original games their personality, however the coat of fresh paint does not go unappreciated and the control schemes have been updated to suit modern standards. I got this game in a humble bundle for £12 with the crash remaster and the new COD game, so i paid about £4 for it, which I feel is well worth the price. The most I'd pay for this trilogy is about £10. Anything more and you might as well just install a PlayStation 1 emulator and play the original.

I went into this game with no expectations, I'd never played a Monster Hunter title prior to this one, and had heard nothing about it aside from a fleeting recommendation from a friend.

Cons:
-Limited Narrative
The game is not made with story in mind, the games value lies mainly with it's mechanics, levels, enemy variety and character progression

-Co-op is tedious
You can't just group up go from hunt to hunt, mission to mission. The game forces each player to start their own seperate missions to watch all of the cutscenes, and then all players quit their missions and start a co-op one. This ruins the flow of multiplayer.

-Hubworld system
Despite its name, Monster Hunter: World is not an open world game, and features a hubworld system

-Poorly executed multiplayer
You can't interact with other players in the hubworld, except for a tiny drinking bar at the top of the base. Joining in on other players requires you to join their session (which seems pointless) and then join in on them through the quest board.

-Boring Characters
While this might seem petty, as many great games don't possess characters at all, Monster Hunter World actually attempts to make likeable characters and just kind of falls flat. You see two other hunters at the start of the story, they introduce themselves to you, and seemed like they were going to have their own story arc, but you never see them again. The other characters just seem to be there to give exposition about the world. There's only one character that actually seems to have a personality, and it's a cat chef.

-Voice acting
I don't know if this is the same for the original voice over (Japanese) but in the english dub, very little of the dialogue is actually spoken, you have to read it all, which kind of disrupts the flow of the game. For £50 I'd expect extensive voice over work.

-Japanese Controls
This game suffers from the same control mapping problems as many other Japanese titles, and lacks a jump button which somewhat contradicts the verticality of the maps.

-The Handler
The handler is the single most annoying character I have ever encountered in any game literally ever. She does basically nothing. Throughout the game she's meant to be your partner, but all she does is act as the quest board and scream at you about how she's made the next story quest available. She constantly runs up to dangerous creatures and gets attacked, meaning you have to go and save her all the time. All the other characters treat her as if she is the one slaying all the monsters. G-man from half life 2 had better facial animations than her, and that's a 15 year old game. If she had been a plank of wood with a face drawn on I'd be infinitely happier.

Pros:
-Visually stunning
The game is beautiful. When you aren't hunting monsters, just wondering around the map exploring is exciting enough. The world design is great, each environment has its own unique aesthetic.

-Great level design
Despite not being open world, each map is designed in such a way that you could easily spend 4-5 hours killing monsters on each one and still not fully explore it. This game has a level of verticality that I've never before experienced, adding to the depth and replayability of each map.

-Plentiful Content
With 14 types of weapons, countless food buffs, a wide array of craftable items, exploration rewards, armour sets and pet armour sets, this game is chunky. I've spent 25 hours on it so far, and it feels like I'm still in the early-mid game.

-Best cat meowscular
There's a cat that cooks you feasts and he's probably the best thing about this game.


All things considered, this game is really good, it could be spectacular, but a few things hold it back.

The way you tackle monsters (tracking them, finding out their weaknesses, learning their attack patterns, crafting gear to counter them) is very rewarding and really makes you feel as if you've accomplished something once you've beaten them. And the sharp difficulty curve of later dragons makes the earlier ones a breath of fresh air to go back and beat.

However the multiplayer is quite clunky, and could be streamlined and made more interactive. The story could be more engaging with more plotlines and characters to interact with. The environments would be more satisfying to explore if they were all linked and part of a more open world.

At 25 hours I didn't recommend this game, but now I'm at 50 I have to reconsider, the gripes I have with this game don't ruin it, and with the lack of co-op games on the market I have to recommend this. Get it on sale if you can.

The game is fun with friends, building a fortified town with an army of dinos is quite enjoyable.
ARK can be incredibly frustrating at times though; the PVP in general is very buggy, none of the firearms are fun to shoot, dinosaurs have no physical indicators to show how injured they are, the movement feels ice-skatey, I could go on.

ARK is very poorly optimized, even on the highest settings the game doesn't look particularly impressive and yet runs with less FPS than GTA 5 being played on a playstation 2. If you want 60 FPS with anything less than a GTX 970 you're barking up the wrong tree, and I'm talking lowest settings here.
Another gripe I have is the levelling system, it's utterly pointless and serves only to slow progression in an effort to increase the time spent playing. Player levelling aside, dinosaur levelling is even more redundant. You could have a level 200 dodo and a level 1 dodo and they'd be equally easy to kill, what's more the bigger dinos with incredibly high levels are plopped in the same areas of the island where the lower levelled dinos so there's absolutely no sense of progression.

And let's get to the entire reason I'm writing this review: 'ARK: Survival Evolved', a pre-release early access game, has a DLC with a £15 price tag. To those of you who don't find this incredibly strange, Vanilla ARK is an incomplete game rife with bugs and feels generally just unfinished. Releasing paid DLC for an incomplete game is equivilant to making a car with no wheels and then selling people custom made spoilers.
And the saddest part of all of this is I have 105 hours logged on this game, will probably buy the DLC and plan on playing it a lot more throughout the winter holiday.
-9/11 would recommend again