PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale isn’t going to win any awards for originality, though I don’t think that’s the point here. Sony at this point in its life seemingly has the cast of characters and the cache to pull this off, so why not? While this provides a decent Smash Bros.-like experience, the devil is in the details, which it misses in a number of key areas.
Up until this point, I had never played a Sly Cooper game before. During its heyday, I was a big PlayStation hater and wanted nothing to do with Sony’s gaming endeavours. Since I bought a PlayStation 3 a few years back, I’ve been slowly making my way through the platform’s signature franchises. I can now cross Sony’s sneaky raccoon off the list, as I’ve played through Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time. Admittedly, I didn’t think I’d get much out of this stealth platformer, but it managed to impress nonetheless.
Saboteur is a game of deception and greed. Everyone plays the role of an elf that’s mining for gold. However, some of your party is looking to get the goods through nefarious means. You know that one or more members of your party aren’t on the up-and-up, but you don’t know who. Or maybe you’re the saboteur that’s looking to thwart everyone’s quest for gold. How far will you go to come out on top?
Jumping into the world of Pokemon for the first time this late into the franchise’s life like I did is daunting. It immediately throws you into a world where you’re mom is totally cool with letting you travel across a giant city on your own by foot. It’s a world where everyone from toddlers to grandmothers are constantly picking battles with you for no apparent reason. Beyond trying to grasp the ridiculousness of its fiction, I found that Pokemon X/Y is a dense game that assumes you’ve already played every entry in the series before. While I’m sure that master Pokemon trainers would enjoy how this cuts to the chase, as a newbie I floundered through its first 8 hours and almost gave up on it.
Then, after crossing what I thought was the most frustrating stretch of the game, it suddenly clicked for me. I finally got a grasp on many of the RPG elements that the game doesn’t really teach. The path forward became clear…most of the time. Most importantly, I began having fun with it.
I felt like Gears of War 3 was the perfect end for the series on Xbox 360. It further fine-tuned an already great formula while finally providing a narrative that was worth a damn. Had the series taken a hiatus until the next generation of consoles were ready, I would have been perfectly happy with that. Instead, we got Gears of War: Judgment, an unnecessary prequel that let me down in a big way.
Over the past few months, Ticket to Ride has almost become a mainstay at Steff and I’s tabletop nights. I think it’s masterfully done, though if I were to knock it for anything, it’s for the fact that the 30 destination tickets wears a bit thin after playing the game a number of times. They also leave certain swaths of the map largely untouched because they don’t directly map to destination tickets.
With 39 new destination cards, The Ticket to Ride USA 1910 Expansion is a direct answer to this dilemma. However, the expansion comes with a total of 181 cards. What the heck are the rest used for?
In Pandemic, the world is at risk of extinction due to four rapidly spreading diseases. With the fate of the world in your hands, you and your team of specialists must work together to contain – and hopefully find cures for – all of the diseases before it’s too late. You won’t always be successful in saving the world, but you’ll almost always have an amazing time trying.
Dishonored‘s premise is as simple as it gets. Corvo, the empress’ bodyguard, gets framed as her murderer as part of a plot to take over the throne. In the process, the empress’ daughter gets kidnapped. Now he’s out to save the girl, avenge the empress and clear his name.
The game at first blush was far from that for me. Struggling to grasp the game’s systems early on, I fumbled my way through the first mission; killing everyone in my path. Despite eventually completing the mission, the game’s heavy hand on leading you towards the stealthy route sure made me feel like a failure. Having killed 14 bodies in cold blood and the chaos level on high due to those actions, I feared that this wasn’t going to get any better.
It’s always a good idea to have quality party games handy. In the past, classics like Scattegories and Pictionary have dominated the space for ages, but as board games continue to grow in popularity and mature with interesting gameplay mechanics, the party game genre is also growing with it. Anomia is one such title that is very different from anything else I’ve played. But is it good enough to break out when your parents are over?
There was a time in my life when Animal Crossing seemed like the best thing ever. During its Gamecube days, I played that game religiously for about a year. I was fully invested in growing my house into a home I wanted to live in, building relationships with the townspeople and collecting all of cool items that world had to offer. But since then, Animal Crossing has been ported to the DS and Wii with barely anything changed or updated.
To its credit, New Leaf represents the biggest shift forward for the franchise yet. It’s also a game that managed to stay in my rotation for a long time. But did I like it? I don’t know.
In Third Person 