Tom Ravencroft
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Writing For
MonsterVine
KeenGamerLatest Reviews
This is a fine game, the kind of thing that gets overlooked in major release season. It’s not a world-beating AAA release, but it’s got giant robots shooting guns, decent customization, a fun anime style, and giant robots shooting guns. I focus on the important parts.
The designers have described themselves as “the last living Soviet game designers,” and that may or may not be true, but it feels true. The aesthetic is distinctly Eastern European–your Pathologics, your Metros have a similar vibe–and the sense of humor is as bleak as a good Russian joke. Not...
John Wick Hex
It’s a minor thing, but the voice acting is all recorded at different volumes which means SOME GUYS YELL ALL THE TIME and some only speak in growly criminal lowercase and lends a “Mommy and Daddy are fighting!” feel to the cutscenes. Also, I am pretty sure that’s not Keanu...
Code Vein
While multiplayer is there, it’s a little on the ehhhh side. The floaty combat and weird camera angles and weird, finicky controls are much more of a hassle when lag hits or when actual people are involved. Flaws you’d write off when you’re poking around a dungeon alone are much...
Untitled Goose Game
A neat flourish is the music: There’s not a lot of it and when something shows up, it’s as a cue that something’s happening. You stole something, you got caught, someone’s chasing you, all these merit a little flourish of the soundtrack. Otherwise, it’s all ambient sounds and, of course,...
Night Call
The investigation is almost secondary to the Cabbie Simulator 2019 thing, but you put together a conspiracy wall as you unlock clues. You make connections from what you see in the paper and what you overhear and what you scrounge up on your own. In classic noir sense, you really...
Close to the Sun
Close to the Sun wants to be Big Important Art, but it tries so hard to be Big Important Art that it undercuts itself. As it is, it’s a decent adventure and exploration game with some eye-rolling action sequences and a few good jump scares that are telegraphed almost as...
Tropico 6 feels more like a Cities Skylines with a “Caribbean dictator” mod than a Tropico game, which isn’t a bad thing, but it does change the nature of the game. Traditionally Tropico has been about building a dysfunctional state and trying not to get overthrown, where this feels a...
Metro Exodus
I’m not going to spoil the story more than I have, but suffice it to say, in a Western narrative, finding a hint that other people had survived would be rapturous. In a Russian narrative, it gets extremely complicated very quickly. We do lose the dark tunnel fights, but we...
Some of that is due to the advancement in these genres we’ve seen since it started development in 2013. One of the hazards of the game’s design is the clock is almost always running (you can pause if you need a think, but it’s hard to get out of a...
Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics
Instead of a campaign along the lines of an XCOM or Jagged Alliance, there’s a main storyline and side missions. The story missions tell the main story and side missions give you a little more XP and gear. So you’d be an idiot not to do the side missions. So...
Shadows: Awakening
Shadows: Awakening follows the Diablo script: Journey to a hub, go through the hub and do all the quests and find out what’s going on, beat up monsters, kill them and take their loot. The environments are pleasantly destructible, with barrels and sarcophagi and all sorts of other things to...
