Stylus

An alright game I guess. Obviously there are elements of hype and nostalgia in play here for many people but even taking account of those things this is still a very special game. Don't believe anyone who tells you it's perfect but it's still very deserving of praise. Five stars.

A pretty looking point-and-click adventure game without any great puzzles to solve (Space Invaders is not a great puzzle to solve). The bonus art pages being used as cheat sheets rather than as rewards for success annoyed me as well. Inoffensive. Two stars.

Mass Effect was never a clever game but in this sequel it takes a turn for the dumber. RPG mechanics are stripped out but not properly replaced with good TPS mechanics, there was no sense of urgency (which is unforgivable in such a linear game) and the main story was underdeveloped (to be specific it felt like the writers wanted it to be like a movie heist such as Ocean's Eleven but there was never any pay-off after assembling the team and nobody had a coherent plan). . As I mentioned before the shooting mechanics aren't particularly good; comparing this game to Gears of War would be an insult to the folks at Gearbox. There are little things like being forced to slap the spacebar all the time and bigger things like the lack of interesting enemies that force you to change your play style. The only redeeming aspects of the game were the little call backs to your saves in the original game and the side characters and squad mates who provided all the game's interest. Unfortunately the small joys provided by the characters aren't enough to offset the fact that most of the time you will be playing an uninspired shooter. Two stars.

This game is ugly (not because its graphics aren't cutting edge - it just looks bad), buggy, terribly balanced and in general gives off the impression of being rushed. Those rather large flaws aside it's an excellent RPG with a solid story, some interesting characters, a world with plenty of things to discover and one of the best character creation systems I've ever used in a CRPG. One of Troika's great unfinished masterpieces. Three stars, four with the unofficial patch.

This is one of the best "CRPGs" of this generation with interesting characters, a huge amount of choice in how you choose to complete quests and a world that feels alive and somewhat plausible. One problem the game does have is that with all four major DLC packs installed the level cap becomes so high that all your characters will become very similar and pretty much perfect at everything so I recommend that you download J.E Sawyer's mod for New Vegas from his website. Sawyer was a leading designer on this game and it really refines the combat and survival mechanics. For fans of the Fallout franchise this is the closest thing we're going to get to a sequel to Fallout 2.

This game is not good and certainly doesn't deserve the praise it's been getting from the gaming press. A lot of the poor user reviews on this site are in protest of how awfully Bioware has been treating their fanbase of late although that doesn't mean that they don't have valid criticisms, and Bioware would be foolish to claim otherwise. If you've already played the first two games you may as well get this over and done with, but I would strongly advise against picking up the series here.

This game has a good premise and literally nothing else. The game looks ugly (not "retro"), the combat is shallow, most items are either too easily obtained or just plain pointless (for example rare food types do nothing for you that common foods do not) and the randomly generated nature of the game means that while occasionally you'll stumble upon something kind of cool that might take you a fair while. As far as building stuff goes a lack of intelligent opposition and the general low difficulty level makes it pointless while building for its own sake is boring due to the simple nature of the game's engine. A novelty that became a short lived cultural phenomenon. Avoid.

Bethesda continues to re-release Daggerfall with fewer features and better graphics. I could talk at length about the boring combat, the poor levelling system, the stupid quest lines, the horrendous UI, the gruelling first two hours of play and other flaws but I could forgive all of that if Bethesda learned to write a single interesting character. Everything about the characters from their voice acting and dialogue trees to the way we see them interacting is just plain boring. It's really hard to give a damn about the world when it's populated by soulless robots and the combat/grinding experience just isn't good enough to redeem the terrible world building. Skyrim is nothing but a fad and whilst there aren't many things I can point to as being physically painful there really is no reason to play this game. Props to Bethesda's marketing department.