EurogamerLatest Reviews
Weird, gory and surprisingly moving - Sony's long-delayed slasher tribute is a flawed but memorable step forwards for “interactive movies”.
A faithful and beautifully crafted Metroidvania homage that never quite stamps its own identity on the genre.
I just wish it wasn't so happy to sit in another game's shadow, and made more of the few fresh mechanisms that might distinguish it and move the genre forwards. Instead, it hews so closely to a proven template that it's basically a pretty good action-adventure by default. Yet as the game clock ticked towards 20 hours and beyond, I could never quite shake the feeling that I'd still rather be failing in Dark Souls than succeeding in Lords of the Fallen.
Dead Space 3 is a contradiction. Gorgeous but scruffy; tightly packed yet stretched too thin; often frustrating, frequently thrilling and bursting at the seams with stuff, not all of which fits comfortably inside the boundaries the series has set for itself. It's certainly not a great game, except perhaps as a poster child for the kitchen-sink development mentality of a console generation in its twilight months. But it does manage to balance out every misstep with something worthwhile. Sadly, newcomers with no preconceptions will likely enjoy this rollercoaster more than the series' fans.
4X strategy thrives in the long term, so it's a real shame that it's deep into the game that the minor flaws in Endless Space's mechanisms make themselves most keenly felt. Strategy fans shouldn't be too discouraged though. The foundations laid here certainly don't lack for depth or entertainment, and it's perfectly possible that a few tweaks and balances in the right places - either from the developer or the mod community - will elevate Endless Space into the genre great it deserves to be.
It's in the opening sections where the immediate desire to mash zombies to bits grinds most awkwardly against the restrictions of the RPG framework. Playing as a cop-trained firearms expert, only to be told you can't actually shoot a pistol because you're not level 10, is about as immersion-breaking as you can get. It also gets tiresome, constantly foraging around for pipes, planks and kitchen knives with which to defend yourself as you jog from poolside bar to lifeguard tower to gas station.
This sort of mechanical strangeness can be acceptable in a game that is fun or ambitious - Red Dead Redemption has more than its fair share of outrageous physics catastrophes, after all - but too many of the problems here impact directly and negatively on the gameplay.
Battles start with an overhead map view. From here you position and deploy your troops, drawn from a constantly topped up pool of new recruits. Select a soldier and the view swoops down to ground level, giving you full control of the character in question. You're free to move them around in real-time, though each step uses up some of their finite Action Points.
The level design is actually impeccable and utterly fair - you soon come to realise that every flat surface, every slope, every hazard, has been placed precisely to make your life harder, or easier, depending on whether you've figured it out. There are puzzles here that will find you leaving tiny crescent-shaped teeth marks in your controller, swearing that you hate this game and will never play it again ever. Then you suddenly see the problem from a different angle, realise that you can jump up to there, wall-jump across to there, and hit the switch from up here, dropping down into the exit avoiding a cluster of mines that previously seemed impassable. And then you try it, and it works, and you swear that you love this game and it's the most addictive thing ever and you feel the warm rush of hard won vindication and then...the cycle starts again.