Joe Skrebels
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PC Gamer Latest Reviews
Little Nightmares 3 features little innovation, few scares, and limited appeal if you’ve already played the previous two games, unless you’re dead keen to experience the series’ signature brand of stop-start stealth with a friend in tow.
Success in Concrete Genie comes easily – probably too easily for some – but that ease lets its best moments breathe. It’s less about challenging you to get through traditional video game obstacles than it is about letting you challenge yourself to keep coming up with new and creative ideas, new designs, and new places to put them around this dilapidated city. At heart, it’s an exercise in the pleasure of the artistic process – just like Concrete Genie’s core idea, you never really have to paint, but I absolutely wanted to.
Like a mech without a pilot, Daemon X Machina is a beautiful shell with not enough to fill it. It’s a frustrating thing - simultaneously proving that there’s life in this old genre, but failing to inject much of interest beyond the base level. I was thrilled enough by the opportunity to truly micro-manage a mech for the first time in a while, but there just wasn’t enough to do with my creation once I was done tinkering.
At first blush, I worried that Iron Rain was a little like EDF lobotomised – a little ‘saner’, more approachable, but lacking a certain something for the process. But as I played more, began diving into meaty, 15-20 minute battles, kept changing my loadout, and saw how different it could feel with friends, it became clear that this was far more than an experiment in sanitisation. Iron Rain is a true spin-off, a new take on an existing and much-loved (okay, somewhat-loved) idea. It won’t have done enough to draw in an audience that wants legibility and good looks. Paradoxically, it might have done too much for some more dyed-in-the-wool fans. But for me, Iron Rain is a more-than-pleasant experiment, a game that feels like it was made by fans of the series with their own ideas. Some work, some don’t, but it’s never short of them – and if you can’t enjoy new ideas at the same time as shooting a 30-foot spider in its awful face, what are you even playing games for in the first place?
Whether or not it's the best, this is certainly the most audacious Monster Hunter game. World takes a dramatic leap into a look, feel, and size that feels truly new, simultaneously staying true to the series’ ideals by maintaining the addictive loop of combat, intimidating monsters and meaningful upgrades that fans love. The sheer depth and commitment required is still intense, but it clearly isn’t Capcom’s aim to court a casual crowd. This is as all-consuming and incredible a ride as ever.
Cuphead made me feel more good and more bad than any other game I’ve played in the last several years. I swore, laughed, and hollered with delight. I hated it (and my own fingers) for long stretches but, having finished, I realise that’s more or less the point – I emerged from all that pain smiling. Rather than simply offering the player what they want, Cuphead makes them earn that right – the rewards, if you can hack the tests, are absolutely worth it. Cuphead is incredible for more than just its looks. But before you dive in, make sure you actually want a game that plays like this, and not just a game that looks like this.
Perception is as much a disappointment for the clever and inherently frightening idea it wastes as it is for the mistakes it makes. At its heart, there’s the promise of playing something genuinely new, from a perspective that could help teach and thrill simultaneously. It’s unfortunate that, like its echolocation mechanic, the more I saw of Perception, the more there was to worry about.
Rain World is a maddening thing, because of quite how special it could have been. Beautiful environments, incredible animations and enticingly hazy mechanics are fantastic, but the sheer cruelty of how it’s pieced out to the player transcends challenge and becomes an unwanted trial.
