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.
It's a rusty cutlass in the heart of a sequel that, otherwise, is progressive in small but welcome ways. The series still lacks a worthwhile identity of its own and is too quick to run away from its piratical setting in favour of more familiar fantasy archetypes, but for surprisingly hefty chunks of Risen 3 I was drawn in and entertained, at least until another clumsily staged battle soured me again. For those who have been able to cut through the clutter and clumsiness of the series so far, this may well be a small hurdle, and you'll discover a commendably deep and full RPG for your trouble. It's just a shame that such a fundamental feature as combat takes the shine off what could have been the sequel to make Risen popular beyond its small audience of devotees.
What's most frustrating is that with more enemies, more graceful control and a more compelling structure, there's no reason why a retro-styled Adventure Time roguelike couldn't have been an absolute treat and a game worthy of the show. Developer WayForward has certainly made better licensed games than this in the past. But then this is not even a particularly bad game, just a bland and unambitious one that feels like it escaped from a web browser and somehow found its way onto a disc. The wonderfully weird Land of Ooo and its eclectic inhabitants deserved so much more.
As a platform for future Disney games, Infinity could surprise us yet. It's certainly more promising than the flavourless Disney Universe, and the playset concept means that improvement is only ever one great expansion away. That greatness isn't here yet, however. While Infinity is adequate in basic gameplay terms, and will certainly amuse Disney-fixated youngsters for a while, it falls short of the games whose ideas it borrows.
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.