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Telling the story of a frustrated writer who suddenly sees himself as one of his creations, Alan Wake is a great horror game that successfully operates under the logic of a nightmare, blurring fantasy and reality through the veil of horror.
Author of a couple of best-sellers, Alan Wake has been unable to write anything for almost two years, and because he’s getting increasingly frustrated with his writer’s block, his wife Alice decides to go with him on a vacation to a small, isolated town in Washington, called Bright Falls. They are to stay at a cabin on a lake, but as soon as they arrive, they start to quarrel and when Wake storms out of the cabin, furious at her, the lights [...]
“But can it run Crysis” was a humorous question back in 2007, as the game was infamous for testing the power of any PC when it was originally released. The 2021 remaster of Crysis aims to make it a demanding game for current hardware as well, but the more important question should have always been “should it run Crysis” instead: is this game just a piece of demanding software, a glorified tech demo, or is there something more to it that makes it worth our time?
The game opens with a distress message from a female scientist, who claims to have found something strange on an island right before the North Koreans took over her operation. We hear this message while looking at what [...]
Tales of Vesperia is a competent JRPG that suffers from a lack of focus: it presents a complicated protagonist with a narrative arc full of potential but builds the story around other unrelated subjects. It still offers some great moments and scenes, but could have been a much better experience with a tighter script.
The protagonist is Yuri, a young man that left knighthood after realizing that a police force works not for the people, but for those few in power. Yuri’s hometown, Zaphias, is marked by stark social inequality: “To lack nobility is to lack humanity,” a nobleman scoffs. This explains why no one seems to care that the local fountain in the Lower Quarter has [...]
On paper, Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is a perfectly competent entry in the series, getting a lot of the basics of a survival horror right, successfully building a tense atmosphere while giving limited ammo to the player. The problem is that, just like its many monsters, the game lacks a soul: its design choices and storyline are so bland and uninspired that, even though Revelations 2 is far from being the worst entry in the series, it’s certainly one of the most forgettable Resident Evil games.
The game opens with an ad about the dangers of bioterrorism, advertising how politicians and big companies should not be trusted. It’s selling a private organization called TerraSave [...]
The road to Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was a short, but still bumpy one. The first game was an uneven adventure that set up the plot of its sequel with a post-credits twist that made absolutely no sense, while Mirror of Fate made poor use of its classic Metroidvania format and told its story with a disastrous structure. And here we are, with the last game of the trilogy, Lords of Shadow 2, which manages to be worse than its predecessors: although it still shares most of their problems, it also displays an alarming lack of creativity and direction.
The premise was already set. Dracula is alive in the twenty-first century and Zobek warns him that Lucifer is about to free [...]
When it was released back in 2010, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow shook the franchise to its core, switching genres and rebooting the entire storyline. Instead of being a Metroidvania, putting the focus on the exploration of a labyrinthine environment, the game follows the God of War approach of creating awe-inspiring set-pieces punctuated by brutal action. The game mostly succeeds at what it tries to do, building a melancholic atmosphere while telling a tragic and exciting tale, but it is also dragged down by strange narrative decisions, a baffling post-credits scene, and problematic controls.
The protagonist is Gabriel Belmont, a knight of the Brotherhood of Light chosen to [...]