DrFriendless

You cannot trust the developers of this game. Sometimes it's a fun game, although buggy, and then they make random sweeping changes to it. It *could* be a great game, but it won't be until they dump the current management and decide what they want the game to be.

I have to admit I am in two minds about this game. On the one hand, there wasn't much to do, but on the other hand it was awesome. It's basically a walking game - at every point, you have very few options. On the other hand, when you do need to do something, it's not just a stupid quicktime event to keep the story moving, nor click X nor hammer square, it's actually something interesting. I very much appreciate the design that went into the minigames. So I am torn because I was simply told a story. On the other hand, it was a great story. I guess what I need to tell you is, play this game.

I hate this game so much. The jolly voices which try to teach me how to play just annoy me beyond belief. The complete drivel introduction alienated me before the game even started. Wow, I have never hated a game so much so fast.

I did enjoy this game. As I knew what happened next, in that I've played Life Is Strange and so the future is predetermined, I felt free to make any choice I liked without feeling responsible for other people's fate. I did feel for Chloe, with all of those people trying to guilt her into doing what they wanted... they just made me wish there were more options for telling them where to go...

Goodness me, what a long game! It just keeps going and going and going. By the end, I was quite sick of it. I turned the music off after about a hundred hours because it was annoying me and everyone else in the house. I would like to say that the story was gripping, but it became less so as the weeks wore on. In the end I was just glad it was over. I almost liked the turn-based combat - it was a change from button-mashing - but Child of Light did a far superior job. The graphics in DQXI were magnificent, but so much of the animation was just cut scenes, and cut scenes can look as pretty as the designer chooses. I finished the game due to sheer stubbornness, but I may avoid coming back for more. The music wore me down, so many features of the game were underdone (e.g. the Forge), and so much of the play felt like downtime. Pretty good, but not great.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Why is this a game? If I want a manga I'll read a manga. There's no interactivity in this game. The sounds are horrendously bad - just random squawking. There's nothing to do.

I tried Danganropa Reload before this, and was completely appalled by the lack of interactivity. It just seemed like I was hitting X to no good end. I was assured that the Nonary Games were better, and indeed they were. However there was still an awful lot of hitting X to be done. So I played the game for a while and solved some of the puzzles. Every now and then there seemed to be a choice to be made, but it wasn't clear to me what I was trying to achieve by those choices. And then all of a sudden the game ended, badly. Whut? So it seems that the choices were meaningful, and had I understood the consequences of them, I might have done better. However every other thing I had to do had been explained in such excruciating detail that I figured that these choices were of no great consequence. Now, I could go back and make different choices and achieve a different ending. But that would involve a whole lot more tapping X to get through the really boring stuff I've already seen. Sure, I could do some different puzzles, but the puzzles really weren't very good. So I have no motivation to return to this game. In fact I think I'll avoid anime games altogether, I am not seeing the value in them at all.

It's very beautiful, but the game is determined to not tell me what's going on or what I'm trying to achieve. It seems there are mini games, but it's so hard to control the pointer that I apparently always fail them and die. That wears thin very quickly.

I got my first computer in 1985. I may have played this game then. Or I may have dumped it for a good game.

I gave the game a 3 because it seems to be technically well-made. So it should be though, as there have been hundreds of games like this on all platforms for about the last 30 years, and frankly we don't need another one. I received this game free from the PSPlus program, and would never have paid money for it.

This is a cute game. I played it co-op with my son who's a much better gamer than I am. I played the fox and he played the girl. It's a pretty standard platformer with a few puzzles and challenges, so nothing really outstanding. It mostly works well, though there were a couple of odd glitches that weren't fatal. The cultural background of the game is very strong, although we did not pay too much attention to it yet. The art style is wonderful. I had a lot of fun carrying on like a fox, but the second half of the game is less interesting for the fox. In co-op play, the better player should definitely be the girl.

Fun chaotic couch coop. There are always new things happening, and puzzles to solve.

I admit, when I played this I was a bit of a PS3 newb, and I couldn't work the controls. So while I tried to figure stuff out, the game just wandered off without me and a whole lot of nothing happened. And then when I went back to it, I realised that the story was completely depressing and I really didn't care what was going to happen anyway. Postscript: when this game came free on PSPlus I downloaded it and tried it again. It was worse than I remembered. A whole lotta nope from me.

This is a wonderful game. Split screen coops or any couch coops at all are a bit rare these days, and I'm judging this game against its competition in those genres. There are a good variety of different coop and friendly competitive things to do, and it looks great. The cut scenes did drag on a bit long as in all story-telling games, but at least you've got a mate there to wake you up when it's your turn. I found the story kinda schmaltzy, so some people will love it and some people will hate it. There's not a whole lot of replay value in the game, but it is a great once-off experience.

This is a very beautiful game. It's a puzzle game maybe in the genre of The Witness, where you sort of know what you have to do but not how or why. There are a few moments of discovery where you figure out something that was complex but logical. However it is a very short game, and that will turn a lot of people off. It doesn't woory me so much, except that I would have liked more of the same.

I got this free on PSPlus. I played for maybe 10 minutes, during which there were a couple of decently scary things, but no hint at all as to what the game was about or what I was supposed to be doing. And it's very very slow. I don't demand a lot of action from games, but I do demand at least some action or some story. I decided the best move was to press the PS button.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The atmosphere was pretty decent, but the game just isn't very interesting. The cases have interesting things in them, but are oddly ambiguous, so that you can never be sure that you've found the correct answer, as you can't explain all of the details. Until you get the hang of investigating things you spend a lot of time with the game insisting that you need to do X, when you've already done X except for that one teensy thing... that wears a bit thin.

The start of "The Unfinished Swan" is a truly wonderful example of game design. However I felt the game gradually went downhill from there, and I pretty much hated the last third and was glad when it was over. I was hoping that the game's simplicity would be exploited in cunning ways, but I wasn't impressed. Oh well. I'll try whatever else Giant Sparrow makes, as maybe next time they have a great idea they'll deliver a great game to go with it.

This is such a beautiful game! The artwork and animation are completely perfect, and the sounds the characters make are wonderful. The way that the characters speak in symbols is perfect. I cannot express the joy that looking at this game gives me. The gameplay though is a bit lacking. Many times I found myself in the situation where I knew there must be something I could do, but for the life of me I couldn't see what it might be. Is it because I'm not smart? Is mucking around until you figure out how you can interact with a game supposed to be the fun bit? Anyway, philosophical thoughts on game design aside, this was a superb experience. The story was wonderful, and this was a prime example of the way that games are exceeding movies in their ability to tell stories.

Wow, what an experience. "Detention" is a 2D walking game which initially appears to be a horror game. There are indeed some horror aspects, and some scary bits at the beginning. As the game progresses though, the blatant horror subsides and the more subtle horror of the story takes over. And although I thought there were some inadequacies in the gameplay, the story it told was wonderful. As to the gameplay, as with many games of this genre, you walk around, have limited ability to interact with the world, and don't have many options. Where that genre becomes weak though, is when there aren't many options and the player can't figure any of them out. So the player spends some amount of time achieving absolutely nothing. That might be atmospheric at first, but then it becomes boring. So great care must be taken in the design so that there is an appropriate level of game, but players don't drop off because they can't proceed. Unthinking boofheads who just like to kill things in games are not the target market for this game, and should avoid it. People who want infinite gameplay for few dollars should stay away. However people who would like to play through an absorbing story and have some appreciation for other cultures will like this very much, and should give it a try.

I played a few hours of the demo and wasn't really thrilled by the story. The controls for looking at the character and choosing weapons were nice, but the gameplay felt a bit like Uncharted and I was hoping for more than that.

This game is pretty awful. The controls are the worst I've ever encountered, making conceptually simple tasks long and painful. Most of all, the one that caused me to ragequit, was that when you're doing a puzzle it's possible to use items but there is no indication of that whatsoever. There are icons for the items there, but they defiantly do nothing. It turns out that you have to use the D-pad to enable the really awful interaction with the items. Another awful feature was that whenever Poirot is speaking you can press X to shut him up (not O, like it should be). So whenever he's mentioning to himself that he hasn't solved the puzzle yet, you have to press X, wait a couple of seconds, then press O to undo whatever was wrong. Oh yeah, and L2 to interact, instead of X. It's frustrating every single time. One thing the game does do well is the deduction system - you've found some clues, and you put them together to make deductions. There were a couple where I just tried all combinations, but generally that was good and kinda fun. The art work is decent, and role-playing Poirot is a little fun. The rest of the game is quite painful though. Poirot is a gentleman built for comfort rather than speed, so it's understandable that he doesn't gallop around the game, but that's no reason for every other interaction to happen at a stately speed as well. If the game allowed interactions at the same speed as any other game, it would be twice as much fun and take a third of the time. I hope if more games are built in this franchise that they completely redesign the user interaction. This game gets many things wrong, and that should not be a sustainable practice.

I don't normally play platformers, as the skills they require are of little interest to me. Luckily, this isn't a very standard platformer and there were only a couple of occasions where I had exhibit any skills at all. The game turned out to be more of a 2D side-scroller RPG. I liked the combat system a lot. Each character had individual powers, and for any battle situation there were a variety of characters and powers which could be used, so I was always considering whether I could win just by bashing on, or whether Id have to try something else. The character development let me aim to gain particular powers that I thought might be useful, and it was wonderful when a new power worked well. The RPG element was also good. The characters were cute without being painful, and each had enough charisma that I could remember their names and motivations, which often in games I do not care about in the least. The art work and music were fine, though I'm not as thrilled about them as some people seem to be. One thing that did bother me were the various pointers to Ubisoft's external Uplay thing - I just don't care and I will never use that, please don't be pushy about it. Overall, a very nicely made game that I liked a whole lot more than I expected.

I want to give this game a high rating because I can appreciate that it's quality art, but on the other hand I just spent an hour or so pushing myself around an island and did not receive illumination or even have to tap any buttons. So I am unable to assess the quality of the experience. This game is worthy of playing for the experience, as long as it's cheap. I think my time might have been better spent rereading "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull".

The point of this game is to be scared. And it succeeded in that, it gave me a few good jumps. However as for story telling, it kinda lost me. I know there was a story there, I found clues to it. By the end it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Apparently I also "died" several times during my playthrough? Really? It is indeed a scary game when dying is indistinguishable from the rest of play. And that was the problem with the game - there wasn't enough information given for me to know what I was supposed to be doing, and whether I was succeeding at it. In the end I had to concede that I had been scared, and that was really all that the game was capable of achieving.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Well, it's very pretty, but it's oh so dull. Too many times I felt like I was pressing a button so I could watch the next few seconds of a movie. The inability to pan the camera where I needed it was beyond frustrating. The fight sequences were boring, the climbing sequences were boring. And I didn't like that old guy.

Umm yeah... it's OK. The story is intriguing but not satisfying. The world is OK but not beautiful. The game works, without demanding much of the player. There wasn't much to see or do, so it can only be OK.

I bought the Switch solely to play this game, having never played any Zelda game previously, and I don't regret it a bit. This is a beautifully made game - beautiful world, interesting puzzles - and it works very very well in all respects. My only complaint is that it ended, and unlike Skyrim, once it has ended there's not so much to do any more.

I know Skyrim has its flaws, but I've been addicted to it twice - once for the original, where I played well over 100 hours, and once for the special edition where I did about the same again. It looks dated in 2018, but the variety of quests and the detail in the world remain the best out there.

HZD is very nice to look at, and robots are cool, but there are some massive weaknesses in the game. The open world is gorgeous to look at, but essentially empty. The landscape is beautiful 3D, but you can only climb structures in a few defined places. It's so sad to see a beautiful world going to waste. The story is a complete snoozefest. During one endless exposition I just went and made lunch, but when I got back it was still going on. I did enjoy the variety of weapons, but I did not enjoy continually being attacked from behind by enemies that seemed to come out of nowhere.