Josh Wise
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EurogamerLatest Reviews
If only Naka, staying true to form, had given the whole thing a dose of high speed; his work holds together only when it hurtles past our eyes, growing vivid with velocity.
The Italian tourist board may consider litigation.
The designs of Elizabeth’s family aren’t so much foreshadowed as foreshouted, and the plot soon wavers off-key and winds up shipwrecked. But something about it hangs around, like the hum of an unsettling tune.
The more I played the less the goings-on of the narrative bothered me, and the more I relished the wavelike rhythm of the action: the roll and crash of sailing and breaking to alight for supplies.
If you’re hoping for a sombre tale of lives brought low by the touch of darkness, my advice would be to go for a ride and take in the sights instead.
Faced with a declaration as longing and impatient as “It’s About Time,” I can’t help but think, Is it?
Where the action comes alive is in the leaving behind of bodies altogether. Most missions involve breaking and entering, and the thrill lies in the absence of any breaking.
Dreams
Dreams is devoted to the realisation of exciting wishes, and with it Media Molecule has its defining, if not quite definable, game.
When the credits rolled, I felt better, gunning for action, as if life were a thing to rage through with a smile on your face. How often does that happen?
It rarely swells beyond the sum of its parts; with parts as precision-tooled as this, it doesn’t need to.
You could argue that Squadrons breaks no fresh ground, that it is merely the latest in a prized patch of genre; but the ground, fresh or otherwise, was left behind long ago, and being the latest is no bad thing.
Where it succeeds isn’t in how close it scrapes to the level of prestige TV, or to films. Its coup is not, “Look how closely we can make games resemble highbrow art.” It’s more, “Look what previously fenced-off realms we can get interactivity into.”
