Eurogamer Latest 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.
But this isn't 1999, and even where third rate franchise filler is concerned, standards are now higher than a game of Escape Dead Island's shoddy construction could ever reach. With a dash more ambition, and a lot more technical coherence, at best it would only have been a middling distraction before next year's Dead Island 2. In its current form, the kindest thing would be a short, sharp stab with a screwdriver behind the ear.
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.
Much like the recent MouseCraft, which at least had a Tetris twist, Flockers struggles to move out of the shadow cast by Lemmings' brilliantly pure concept. While that adherence to a classic template yields considerable amusement, over time the features that should have lifted it higher start to become frustrating. Not only does it not move beyond the 1991 formula in any meaningful way, in the long term it struggles to match it. Flockers is not without its appeal for the patient and nostalgic, but Team 17 is ultimately just grazing on DMA's old patch when it could be striking out for pastures new.
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.
It would have been nice to report that the underdog turns out to be a unstoppable champion, but that was never realistically on the cards. So instead we get this: a cheesy, silly, mindless romp in which hordes of identical bad guys get turned to sticky red paste under the furious gaze of your twitching gun barrel. It's certainly not a good game, but it is a game with zero irony. It's not being corny and schlocky on purpose, which means that for all its faults Rambo honestly taps into the spirit of 1980s action cinema more deeply than you might expect - not in spite of its rough edges, but because of them.
Oceanhorn is good enough to suggest that Cornfox & Bros is a developer to watch, and one with an acute eye. A little more spit and polish on the mechanics, and the confidence to build a game around original ideas rather than sitting in the shadows of giants, and it could create a classic of its own. For now, this is a fine calling card.
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.