Krotos

DO NOT BUY! GAME-BREAKING BUGS! While Observer has an intriguing plot and great atmosphere, it also has *serious* bugs that, if they come up, can make it impossible to progress in the story. Since the game has only a single, continually-updating autosave, whenever you encounter one of these bugs, you have to RESTART THE ENTIRE GAME FROM THE BEGINNING. I ran into one of these when I was maybe 80% completed. It is unforgivable for any software studio to release a title in this state. Maybe they'll patch it up eventually, but for now, save your $30 for a game that isn't going to suddenly stop working when you're most of the way through it.

If you enjoy first-person shooters with vague plots and flat characters in which you get attacked every ten seconds by enemies that spawn out of nowhere, even in totally implausible situations, and absolutely hate it when a game gives you time to think about strategy, immerse yourself in a story, or even just stand still and admire the scenery, then Far Cry 4 is for you. If, on the other hand, you enjoyed Far Cry 3 precisely because it wasn't that way, then you may wish to avoid this brainless, noisy, lazily-designed sequel, or at least wait until you can buy it for under ten dollars. FC4 is basically a Himalayan-themed retread of FC3 with the game mechanics modified to appeal to people with severe attention deficit disorder.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

For me, the most obnoxious thing about Dead Space 3 wasn't the game mechanics or overall story, both of which are adequate, but the very character you play. They really should have left Isaac Clarke mute like he was in Dead Space 1. In that game, you could project whatever personality you wanted onto him: I personally thought of him as someone who would under normal circumstances be thoughtful, self-controlled, and quiet, like many real-life engineers and scientists tend to be. I like people like that, so I liked Isaac. Unfortunately, in Dead Space 2 they gave him a voice, and did ever he use it. I no longer liked him. The trend is ramped up even more in Dead Space 3, making Isaac Clarke one of the most exquisitely annoying video game characters in recent memory. There's something wrong when you regularly have to suppress the urge to yell "Shut the f**k up and quit your whining!" at your own character in a single-player shooter. What is it, exactly, that makes Isaac so grating? First there's the voice itself: he sounds like he's about eighteen, even though he looks at least twice that. It's jarring. Then there's the melodramatic moaning and groaning during combat why does Isaac have to shriek like he's being tortured on the rack every time he falls down or takes a punch? And then there's the frequent and usually pointless chattering, both to himself (essentially to remind the player of the goals of a mission, in case they've been forgotten since the previous reminder two minutes ago) or with the other members of the team exploring Tau Volantis. All the talk-talk-talk makes you appreciate how the general lack of dialogue in games like Bioshock, Half Life, and the first Dead Space adds to the eeriness of their atmospheres. But worst of all is Isaac's personality, which emerges fully in a puerile love triangle side-story that has been unnecessarily grafted onto the plot. Isaac's endless sulking and complaining made me understand why Ellie left him for the far more dignified Norton. He comes off like a self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-pitying high school student mooning over an an unrequited crush, and not like the embittered and traumatized adult he's presumably supposed to be. I don't know why the developers chose to make Isaac such an immature putz maybe it's just lazy writing, maybe the marketing department wanted them to appeal to a younger demographic, whatever. But I'm seeing this trend more and more in games the strong, silent (and undoubtedly scared s**tless) type of computer game main character seems to be going extinct. Someone ought to make a mod that lets you replace Isaac with the Doomguy then you'd have a pretty good game.

I am a casual WoW player -- I play maybe a few hours per week when I get the chance. I almost always solo quests and I've never joined a guild. I play video games primarily to be entertained, not challenged. From my point of view, Mists of Pandaria is a fine expansion, perhaps the best to date. There are new zones and quests, and the Pandaren are a well-imagined new race with a culture obviously drawn from medieval China and Japan. The Monk class is powerful, and many of the more tedious aspects of advancement in the game have been simplified (for example, at least for Monks, you no longer have to visit a trainer to learn new abilities when you level up). More intangibly, MoP has somehow brought back the sense of wonder and fun that made the original WoW, as well as the earlier single-player games, so appealing -- if the three previous expansions had a sort of dark, epic Lord of the Rings feel to them, MoP is more like The Hobbit. By taking itself less seriously, WoW has become more enjoyable. The only significant drawback is the graphics engine, which is definitely showing its age -- WoW will likely need massive upgrades in this regard if it is to continue for more than another year or two, especially after the next-generation consoles are released.

AMY has an awful checkpoint system that makes the game truly frustrating and tedious to play, and I suspect that this defect, more than anything else, accounts for the extreme hostility of a lot of the reviews. If the saving issue were fixed, though, it would be solidly in the "okay" category -- not the second coming of Resident Evil, perhaps, but certainly not an unmitigated disaster either. The concept is interesting, and it's somewhat refreshing to have a protagonist who is not particularly strong or powerful, i.e., resembles an actual human being. What AMY ultimately comes off as is a somewhat promising game that needed a few more months of beta-testing.