John Walker
This author account hasn't been claimed yet. To claim this account, please contact the outlet owner to request access.
Writing For
Rock Paper ShotgunLatest Reviews
I'm not going to pretend to have finished it. I'm hoping this is a game I'll keep playing for a long time, picking away at puzzles, and then desperately hoping for extra levels to be added later. But this is wonderful. Completely wonderful. Original, inspired, challenging, and most importantly of all, that constant sense of "Oh no, how will I ever do this one!" so quickly followed by, "I AM A GENIUS!" It's a very, very smart game, that has the humility to let you, the player, feel like the clever one.
It's definitely a shame that painting isn't more of a thing. But this really comes together. A slow, gentle, personal RPG, with neat little stories, characters I remember, and a real sense of having spent time in a special place. Oh, and last of all, in Eastshade if you want to get around a bit faster, you buy a bicycle. Yeah, it's exactly that sort of place.
This is a joyful, happy-faced good time. There are "boss fights", but they're deliberately not an impediment to progress. (One especially in a way that I shan't spoil, but gosh it made me laugh.) The chatter is plentiful, but always fun to read (or enact). And it's extremely funny.
I've adored this. It's so damned smart, the level layouts as good as anything from the '90s heyday of the genre (perhaps with the exception of Dark Forces? I'm not sure if I'm willing to let that game's meticulous architecture slip from the top spot), the secrets rewarding to hunt down. The more you progress, the more elaborate its ambitions, and the more it starts to play with the nature of the limitations of the early version of the genre. Oh, and there are some lovely nods to other games. At least I hope they are, anyway, or someone from Looking Glass should be perturbed by this corridor:
I'm just at a loss as to how this has happened. Just Causes have been buggy, sure. But they've never felt at least six months from finished. I cannot fathom how this wasn't lengthily delayed, because it's in such a dismal state. Although that said, even if the bugs and AI were fixed, it would still leave behind a version of Just Cause that barely changes anything you actually do since the third edition, yet has made every aspect of doing it so astronomically more annoying. What went wrong? How did such an established and entertaining series end up in such a quagmire? Gosh I'd love to know.
While I've not completed the game due to some technical issues before release, I've spent a good 20 hours with Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and they really have been good. This works out as a great balance between the icon-ticking compulsion of a top tier Ubisoft game, with the puzzling chops from a team that have suddenly remembered they were the best in the business. It's huge and detailed and stupid and probably most of all, fun. Problematic fun, without question, in a way that the game loudly invites upon itself, and the gets completely arse about tit. And even without that aspect, the story is absolute balls from top to bottom. But I came for the running and jumping and grabbing and sliding, and I got that in spades. Combined with the quite astonishing detail in the game's towns, there's an awful lot here that's awfully good. In a dumb way.
Still, The Forest remains a huge achievement, and a survival horror game that somehow manages to keep those two elements surprisingly separate and yet let each impose upon the other in very interesting ways. I do wish it had been tidied and bug-fixed by now, but I can't stop wanting to play despite it.
The result of a successful Kickstarter, and released the traditional year later than planned, Pixwerk's debut seems like a proper treat. And looking at the game's screenshots on Steam, my early exploration shows I've seen barely any of the environments and weapons/vehicles on offer here. At less than a tenner, I'm rather taken.
I cannot fathom what Ghost are doing with the Need For Speed series. The introduction of smashable billboards (although not of course those with real-world advertising on them) seems like a hark back to the glory days of Criterion, but the repeated punch in the face that is the storyline and quest structure seems like something unwanted in either the Burnout or Need For Speed worlds. It's such a ghastly game, not because of its weakly driving, but because of every single other thing it does to get in the way of it.
I feel pretty certain that I'm going to be bemused by other people's enjoyment of the game's fuck-you death traps, just as I was after Inside. And frankly, when so many endorsed Inside's ending, which I found utterly moronic, I feel like I may as well be clucking in the wind. So I don't doubt that Black The Fall will find its fans. I actively hated Inside, but I didn't hate this at all. For me it felt far too derivative of Inside (it was of course in development before Inside's release, but looked awfully different), which was itself derivative of Limbo, and without the precision of either. Utterly beautiful when it remembers to be, but more irritating than fun in execution.