Andre M.'s reviews

Completed · PC

The most interesting thing about this game is how openly it fights its own genre. It's an open world power fantasy that spends sixty hours telling you the power fantasy is a lie and the man having it is dying. That tension is where all the value is. It's also why the gameplay frustrates people — you are given a magnificent toybox and then repeatedly told, by the mission design, that you are not allowed to play with it. Some of that is deliberate. A lot of it is just old-fashioned scripting that Rockstar hasn't moved past since the PS2. An A because I think the friction between what it wants to say and what it lets you do is unresolved rather than intentional. When it works it's the best thing in the medium. When it doesn't you are riding a horse at a fixed speed behind a man who is talking.

Completed · PC

I have no particular interest in superheroes and I liked this a great deal, which I think says something about the writing rather than the licence. The smart move is making Peter about 26 and broke. He's behind on rent, his relationships are strained by a job he can't explain, and the science subplot is a real job he is bad at keeping. That's a much more interesting frame than the usual origin story, and the game trusts you to find the domestic stuff as engaging as the punching. Mostly it's right. Where it loses a tier is the open world scaffolding. Towers, crimes on a timer, collectible backpacks. It's competent Ubisoft furniture in a game that didn't need any, and every hour spent on it is an hour of the actual writing you're not getting. An A. The character work is better than the genre deserves and the map design is worse than the character work deserves.

Dropped · PlayStation

It is the most beautiful open world ever made and underneath the beauty it is the most conventional one I've played in years. Strip the colour grading and the wind and the leaves, and what's left is a 2014 checklist map. Camps, side quests that are three fetches with a sword fight, a skill tree of percentages, collectibles by category. The samurai cinema framing is a very expensive coat of paint over a structure that was already tired when Far Cry 4 shipped it. I dropped it around 18 hours, in Act 2, when I realised I was clearing the map on autopilot while a genuinely interesting story about collaboration and honour happened somewhere off to the side. A C because I think 'stunning' has been allowed to substitute for 'interesting' in the conversation about this game, and the parts that are actually interesting are the parts it spends the least time on.

Dropped · PlayStation

The best writing in any game I've played is in here, surrounded by about fifty hours of things I did not want to do. Skellige is where I stopped. Not because it's bad — because opening the map and seeing a hundred and twenty question marks, most of which are a chest guarded by drowners, made something go out in me. I understood at that moment that the game did not distinguish between the Bloody Baron and a crate in the sea. Both are content. Both go on the map the same way. That's a presentation failure more than a design one and it's why I'd argue this game is worse than the sum of its quests. The thing it's celebrated for is buried inside the thing it copied from its competitors. A B, and I'd rate the best twenty hours of it an S without hesitation. I never found a way to play only those twenty hours.

Completed · PC

The combat is a rhythm game wearing a samurai costume and I mean that as the highest praise I can give it. Nothing else has made timing feel that physical. My reservation is everything around it. The level design is the weakest From have done since Dark Souls 2 — Ashina is a set of corridors between arenas, and the interconnection that made Lordran and Yharnam worth exploring isn't really attempted. The stealth exists but evaporates the moment anything interesting appears. And the prosthetic tools, which the marketing sold as the variety, are mostly situational keys rather than genuine options. So you have one perfect system in a game that doesn't have much else going on. An A. When it's the combat it's the best thing FromSoft has ever built, and it isn't always the combat.

Completed · PC

The thing I keep coming back to is how little this game contains. Two portals, a handful of gels, some cubes and buttons. From that it builds eight hours that never repeat an idea, and I cannot name another game that gets a better ratio of output to ingredients. The teaching is the real achievement. There is no tutorial text anywhere in Portal 2. Every mechanic is taught by a room that makes the wrong answer impossible and the right one obvious, and then the next room assumes you learned it. Designers have been trying to copy this for fifteen years and mostly produce tutorials with the text removed, which is not the same thing. And it's genuinely funny, which is much rarer and harder than the internet's relationship with this game's quotes suggests. A perfectly shaped thing. It ends before it runs out, which almost nothing does.

Dropped · PlayStation

Night City looks alive and isn't, and once you notice that you can't stop noticing it. NPCs have no schedules. Crowds spawn and despawn within your view distance. Shops are doors that don't open. There is no simulation under any of it — it's a very expensive diorama, and for a game whose entire pitch is a living city, that's not a small gap. Compare it to what a much smaller studio did with the Pathologic towns or even what Rockstar was doing with NPC routines three console generations ago. The main story is good. Several of the side characters are excellent. But I don't want to play a good story in a fake city, I want to be somewhere, and this never became somewhere for me. A C. It's the most beautiful backdrop ever built and I don't think beauty is the thing I'm rating.

Completed · PlayStation

This is a beautifully made game that I found slightly hollow, and I've never managed to explain why to anyone's satisfaction, so let me try here. Everything in it is excellent and nothing in it is surprising. The father-son arc goes exactly where you expect from the first hour. The combat is deep but never asks a question you haven't been trained to answer. The set pieces are staggering and they happen on schedule. It is a triumph of execution over invention, and after a while that started to feel like watching someone do something difficult very well rather than watching someone do something interesting. I'm aware this is an unpopular position on a game most people call a masterpiece, and I want to be clear it's not a criticism of the craft, which is close to flawless. A B from me is a compliment to the polish and an honest note about how little of it stayed with me.