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Nickelodeon Kart Racers is a disappointing cash grab, a terrible celebration of Nickelodeon's contribution to cartoons and one of the worst games I've played in a long time.
A promising world undone by numerous crashes, broken quests, and laborious combat.
At £30 on Steam, the asking price is frankly absurd. You’re getting one repetitive mechanic, no real innovation, and a loop that runs out of steam (no pun intended) within an hour. Dreams of Another could have been an intriguing little experiment, but it’s a one-trick pony that never justifies its cost or concept.
Suicide Squad has zero redeeming features. It's a game that tries to be edgy and fails. It tries to be fun but fails. And above all else, it tries to appeal to a wide audience and appeals to nobody. This is a lazy, poorly written mess that deserves to be treated the same way Batman is in this game - like disposable trash that's thrown out after a monologue about how bad it is.
Marvel’s Avengers is just not a fun game. It’s a vapid, boring, buggy, uninspiring mess of a live service that tries to jump on the band-wagon and falls flat on its face doing so.
If this was just a collection of the mini-levels thrown together with a sort of hub area to hone your skills, Frontier may have been a solid Sonic game. As it stands though, there’s so much wrong with this that it’s hard to know where to start. Some will undoubtedly have fun with this one, pointing out other, worse, Sonic games on the market, but compared to platforming giants like Mario and Crash Bandicoot, this one barely stumbles out the gates before being left in the dust.
Topics of grooming and sexual abuse are here but distorted into a bizarre romanticized narrative that not only undermines the ideas, it actually damages the game’s credibility. I really wanted to like Suicide of Rachel Foster and I think games as an interactive medium are actually well-equipped to tell these hard-hitting and difficult stories – but not from this perspective. Whether on purpose or not, the tone-deaf narrative promises to tackle these subjects diligently but does nothing of the sort. Instead, Suicide Of Rachel Foster is a game in serious need of a rewrite and difficult to recommend in its current state.
When you compare this to titles like Minecraft of Stardew Valley, Summer In Mara fails to match up to its predecessors that stand tall in this harvested field. Sure, it looks pretty and for some of the younger kids this may even be a good stepping stone to get into this genre, but the gameplay loop and repetitive quest design wears thin long before the end of the main narrative.
I get that this is an indie game and expectations need to be tempered, but given two other recent indies I’ve been playing recently, Keeper’s Toll and While We Wait Here, have more polish than this (and both cost less combined than this one as well), it’s hard to recommend Moon Mystery in its current state. It’s not bad, and there are a few stand-out moments, but nowhere near enough to make this a a game I’d recommend picking up anytime soon.
Ubisoft have marketed Star Wars: Outlaws as a AAAA experience. And I whole heartedly agree. It absolutely is… if AAAA stands for Absolutely Atrocious And Abysmal.
Unless you’re a die-hard LOTR fan or a lover of bad games, this can’t be recommended. The sound design and motion capture work are both excellent but the game’s negatives far outweigh its positives. One day, we will get a game that rules over all LOTR games. But for now, we have a game, that, to misquote Gandalf, DOES NOT PASS!!
Atomic Heart could have been a great game. All the pieces are here to form a beautiful picture but it feels like these have been run through a blender, set on fire and then Sellotaped together to form a grotesque Frankenstein’s monster. Almost every facet of this game is underwhelming or broken in some way; if you’re expecting the next Bioshock you’re going to be very disappointed. This is closer to We Happy Few or Duke Nukem Forever. What a shame.
The few glimmers of brilliance in Forspoken are overshadowed by an abundance of problems that are hard to overlook. A horribly written story is accentuated by a morally disengaged protagonist; an empty open-world with the usual checkbox of meaningless busywork gives no incentive to explore; while the magic system sports lots of control and options but very little reason to deviate from spamming the same moves. This is a game in desperate need of another year in development rather than the bland-fest we're served up. Forspoken? More like For-shame.
Between some irritating bugs and a sorely lacking checkpoint system, Terrorarium is a real marmite game that you'll either love or hate. The map maker is just enough to save this from being a complete disappointment but beyond that there really isn't a lot here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.
Assassin’s Creed Unity is not a good game. It’s a buggy, poorly written adventure that received a lot of criticism from the fan-base when it released back in 2014. 6 years later, that criticism is still warranted as Unity remains a buggy, poorly written title that stands out as one of the worst games in the Creed franchise.
Acting as a soft-reboot for the Sakura Wars series of games, this PS4 title essentially plays out as an interactive novelization of an anime. It’s a game that feels like a half baked medley of ideas, swinging between a slice-of-life dating simulator, a simple hack’n’slash arena fighter and a visual novel. The result is something that’s disjointed and feels like three games awkwardly squeezed into one 20-hour title. With an archetypal anime story full of the usual tropes you’d expect holding everything together, a couple of stand-out moments in its narrative just aren’t enough to elevate this above disappointing mediocrity.
After the mediocre effort of Lego Incredibles and the familiar, but largely entertaining, offering of Lego DC Villains, The Lego Movie 2 attempts to merge two worlds but fails quite considerably. For the younger members of the family, Lego Movie 2 is a simplistic, entertaining and well-rehearsed Lego game with less bugs and a better aesthetic compared to Lego Worlds. Sadly, the lack of a compelling narrative, interesting missions and a repetitive gameplay loop makes The Lego Movie 2 a really poor offering in comparison to other Lego games. It’s not terrible but it is a far cry from what we’ve come to expect from this studio.
Kejora’s gorgeous art can’t mask a clunky, buggy core that feels undercooked and frustrating far more often than it is enjoyable.
Project Tower is ultimately a mish-mash of different ideas that never synergies into a compelling experience. The morphing mechanic is severely under-utilized, and while the boss fights are a definite highlight, there’s just not enough here to recommend as anything but a Returnal clone gone wrong.
Hyper Scape ultimately falls within that realm of forgettable mediocrity; a mid-level battle royale player that never quite hits the top 20 spot but isn’t the first one eliminated either.