Brendan Caldwell
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Writing For
Rock Paper Shotgun 
Eurogamer Latest Reviews
But later, particularly in some of those bosses, the time requirements for practice spike, and you're forced to run the rigamarole of repetition expected of an arcade machine. This I have less desire to indulge, even if it does result in a game that feels like a perfect challenge for anyone who has finally drained all 50 games in UFO 50 of their sport. I can only speak for myself, someone who is effectively remembering a game I never actually played. Unsurprisingly, that anti-memory is not en...
It's a far cry from Messhof's previous works - the incomparable Nidhogg remains one of the best fighting games of all time. And I'll admit it feels a bit weird to set Wheel World's sweet and ultimately harmless roamaround racing next to the snarling energy and electro fury of the fencing worm and its serpentine sequel. But that redefining of studio style feels inevitable when it expands beyond its origins - Messhof used to be a moniker for solo developer Mark Essen, but is now the name of his...
In some sense judging Mecha Break for these free-to-play foibles is a pity. Because buried beneath the weedlike mass of microtransactions, the noise of lootboxes opening, the lecherous lingering over chests and butts, and the legion of screens popping up to flummox you with unintelligible currencies, there is a slight but glowing core: a decent multiplayer action game with a lot of admittedly cool robots. It is a shame this core is housed in the greebly shell of a desperate salesbot, hawking ...
It's telling that the missing feature I desire most is not an emote or a graphics setting or a - pffft - "mandatory pass". But just some way to auto-rematch, so I don't have to tap Y at the end of every game within a 10-second countdown to re-enter the queue for another game. This is how moreish (and perfectly named) Rematch is. My biggest complaint is that I'm sick of the game asking "Do you want to play again?" Of course I do.
I've been thinking about this idea a lot as I finished To A T (it clocks in at about 4-5 hours). It is full of moments when the controls change, and you must move them in some new way to brush your teeth, eat food, or whirl like a ballerina. The immediacy of game controls is something that necessarily gets lost the further this game travels into it's almost entirely non-playable final episode. But it otherwise resists the trappings of modern games that remove us from that body-to-button fee...
As survival games go, however, I cannot call it "bad". Fair warning: there are weird glitches and choppiness (one bug saw me backdashing every time I exited the inventory screen). And I had to abandon playing on a controller because of the obnoxious virtual cursor in menus. But this wasn't enough to interrupt my bloodsucking. Awakening is dense with lore, and loyal to the childlike "sand is lava" flavours of Dune. I've enjoyed it for the strength of its world, and I admire how straightforward...
There are some potholes, sure. That story is borderline insufferable, tutorials don't do a great job of explaining things, and there's some bugginess. I only got a fraction of the cash I was supposed to earn from some missions, for example, which made it difficult to progress up that ladder of nice vehicles. But even so, I'm left with the impression of a racing game punching far above its weight and landing an impressive number of blows. If I knew more about drifting as a motorhobby, I might ...
If I had lots of free time, I would probably enjoy it a lot more. But I don't, so tipping over with a cargo bay full of steel beams makes me frown, where it might have otherwise made me laugh. This, I think, is another issue. RoadCraft is a podcast game, in the same vein as Truck Simulator or Elite: Dangerous. There's a big place for games like this in the world, sims that excel in delivering a specific kind of wonderful and comforting boredom. Slow tasks that act as a reassuring sedative in ...
So as far as cop 'em ups go, it fits somewhere between the grey dispatch tales of This Is The Police and the boots-on-the-ground patrolling of Police Simulator: Patrol Officers. As much as the comparison isn't fair, I also find myself thinking of it alongside Shadows Of Doubt, the recent open world detective sim. One of these games leans into reality, and tries to disguise its inherent silliness with gritty crime writing and big messages that say "don't do that!" while the other approaches cr...
Except in this case, too much is gained. Tetris is a game of removal, of emptying a space - not filling it. The explicit goal is to have as empty a field as possible. Some deckbuilders do mimic this philosophy. Think of the way Slay The Spire encourages removing cards from your deck, paring things back, streamlining your loadout until you are flicking out the same five cards on hypereffective repeat. Drop Duchy doesn't go for this at all. It is an additive game, not a subtractive one. Here, c...