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The Plucky Squire can’t compete on either count. It’s a fantastic concept but a lackluster design that neither surprises players nor meaningfully empowers them. It’s a classic example of a game that must have made for a thrilling half-hour demo at the pitching stage, but that never quite found itself in production. For all its borderline-smug jollity and borderline-twee sense of wonder, and for all the careful craft and evident effort that went into its making, it lacks inspiration in itself, and engenders none in the player. The light bulb is there, but it never pops on.
Thematically, Team Asobi revels in the freedom of the traditional platform game: not having to stick to a theme at all. Astro Bot’s levels are a restless parade of “what if [blank], but robots?” where the blanks are filled in by turtle temples, funky trees, construction sites, or the inside of a giant worm. In the Spooky Time level, Astro pauses time to navigate a haunted house. In Free Big Brother, Astro unshackles an Iron Giant-sized bot and clambers up his limbs. Everything is made out of the same smooth, machined plastic and metal as a PlayStation device, even the rabbits, trees, and penguins; just like in the Mushroom Kingdom, everything has eyes, but in this world, they’re blinking blue LEDs. The robot theme lends a sweet logic to the rampant anthropomorphization, bloodless violence, and surreal non sequiturs of platform games. It’s like an automaton universe, a scrambled simulacrum of random concepts (and PlayStation games) assembled by some loopy machine civilization.Sony has been reaching for something like Astro Bot since the PlayStation launched 30 years ago in the age of Mario and Sonic. It has cycled through mascots like Crash, Jak, and Sackboy in its quest for a breezy family...
Minter’s intense, techno-driven remix of the classic vector-graphic Atari arcade cab — in which enemies crawl up a 3D tube toward your craft, clinging to its outer lip — is simply one of the greatest shmups of all time. There’s something about staring down the playing field into the void that is the perfect match for his psychedelic, flow-state sensibilities.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong was directly inspired by Donkey Kong ’94 and features many of its mechanics, including the lock-and-key system and the Super Mario Bros. 2-style treatment of enemies. It’s a very solid puzzler, but it’s just not as inspired in its design as the older game. Until Nintendo decides to give its actual puzzle-platforming masterpiece an equally considered remake, though — or at least deigns to add it to the Game Boy collection on Switch Online — Mario vs. Donkey Kong will have to do.
If it’s ever tempting to think that Polyphony has been left behind by the times, we should remember that the Sport mode is its greatest achievement of the past decade, and that it remains without peer in its field. And if it seems striking that GT and its closest current mass-market competitor, Forza Horizon, now seem to be operating in different worlds — stylistically, philosophically, structurally — we should consider ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy two such distinctive approaches, both executed at the highest level. With GT7, Gran Turismo continues to be a glorious anomaly: a game made with different goals and to different standards than any other; a game made in service to a singular, individual vision; a game that’s all science and engineering on the outside, and all history and heart within.
A far-out new expansion and major levelling revamp see Blizzard's veteran online world riding a new wave of popularity.
As pretty and playable as it is, in no sense is inFamous: Second Son a post-Grand Theft Auto 5 open-world game. It's just a tidier, shorter and shinier one. It's easy to enjoy and has a winning personality, but it's reluctant to deviate from a stale streetmap of game city. It's no rebel, then. In fact, it's a conformist.
It's an unglamorous kind of success story, admittedly. And perhaps it's worrying for 38 Studios that the bland fantasy world it's hanging its future on is the least enticing aspect of its debut game. But it's not all elbow grease - Kingdoms of Amalur adds a splash of colour and a lick of polish to the open-world RPG, and they couldn't be more welcome.