Graham Smith
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Writing For
Rock Paper Shotgun
PC GamerLatest Reviews
Maybe I'm so enamoured by Despolete because football has been a constant companion in my own life. My childhood memories are inextricable from hundreds of hours spent playing Sensible Soccer, or from kickabouts at the park in which my friends and I provided our own colour commentary and adopted the roles of regens from our Championship Mananger campaigns. When I dreamed, I too dreamed of football. I think if you've never had that kind of relationship with the sport, Despelote might help expla...
A 1920s golden age mystery in which you plot your own path through the scheming world of an all-girls boarding school, told with energy and some bugs.
Look, I can talk all day about the parts of Lost Records that didn't work for me. If I hadn't been playing it for review, I probably would have stopped after a couple of hours and never gone back. As it is, I reached its climax and it finally introduced the drama and the stakes that were missing from the rest of the story. Lost Records is bland, derivative, lacks momentum, does not reward player agency, and it twice made me cringe so hard I had to look away from the screen. I wish it was half as long as it is. I wish it had learned to let go of the ideas that have lost their power, like Sarah does in Labyrinth. I wish it had learned you can tell your coming-of-age story about a teenage girl with energy and originality... like Labyrinth. I am, despite all of that, looking forward to finding out whether any of it pays off when the second and final part releases on April 15th.
Thank Goodness You're Here! is a funny, cheeky, innuendo-stuffed 2-3 hour adventure game about sausages, pies and slapped bottoms.
A multiplayer first-person shooter in which teams of three fight to capture cash boxes in fully destructible levels, with plentiful parkour and movement abilities.
As I flicked switch after switch and roly-polyed through each generic challenge, the game's early levels and that glorious GIF felt like a distant memory. My Friend Pedro does let you realise the fantasy of conducting a bullet symphony while hanging upside down from a zipline, but like most fantasies, it doesn't survive past the initial rush of blood to the head.
Disclosure: Cara Ellison, a former writer for RPS, was the writer for Void Bastards. I'm also pretty sure she voices one of the pirates, so if you ever wanted Cara to call you 'a dobber', then playing this is the best way to do it other than being in the RPS IRC room circa 2012.
Catalyst occasionally infuriated me, and at other times simply passed me by in a blur, but on the whole I enjoyed my time with it. The movement is still wonderful. The world is still beautiful. There's still nothing else quite like it. It's better than the first game in most ways and there are still umpteen ideas in here crying out for a better implementation. So I'll end in the spirit of the game, with a refined version of what I said last time: Mirror's Edge Catalyst is good and you should probably play it, but damn, it could have been superb.
