Stacking

It was only writing my last review that I realised I hadn't posted anything on the other Double Fine game I played recently. If Costume Quest is the equivalent of a Rugrats episode, Stacking seems aimed at the Frasier enthusiast - it's all tasteful piano soundtracks and silent-movie inspired cutscenes. The gameplay seems to have come from Shaefer's point & click adventure history - you play a tiny Russian doll who can stack in a larger Russian doll and so forth. Each larger doll you stack into has an ability that might help you rescue members of your family. It's easy to imagine a speedrun of Stacking being very feasible- if you did the bare minimum you could get through the game in a couple of hours, but each problem has around four solutions, and it encourages you to replay each puzzle to find every solution. It may not surprise you that I probably did 100% of the first level, around 50% of the second and the bare minimum of what was required of me on the final level. Having said that, the end boss fight is inspired and I won't spoil it here. As slick as it is, Stacking is a game that would have benefitted from being a retail title, so it could have been a bigger, less repetitive title. But, it's hard to imagine the game getting the needed funding as a boxed title. It's an enjoyable, stylish curio, and generally worthy of the short amount of time it would ask of you. 6.5/10

Costume Quest

My wife has a tendency not to realise which games are for children and which are for adults. She'll often mistake Fez for a child's game and Call Of Duty as an adult game. Costume Quest is one of those rare games (although Tim Shaefer is good at being involved in them) that can appeal to all ages. CQ is an adorable turn-based RPG, centred around candy-fuelled monsters taking over Halloween - or according to the adults, older kids, and a missing sibling. It's also one of the few games that I actively seeked out to complete every achievement, and will probably play again this time next year. It's only around five hours, although everything is the game is perfectly judged and feels the right length...in fact this could be Double Fine's best game to date. 8.0/10

Infamous: Festival Of Blood

My only previous dealing with Infamous was getting it as a free game from the PSN hack.I liked it up until a difficulty spike and haven't returned back to it. However, I'd heard good things about Festival Of Blood and thought it was worth a go. It's pretty meh; a decent add-on pack, which can't really stand the weight of a stand-alone release. As I stated, I'm not too hot with the franchise or the genre, but this took me one four-hour sitting to finish. It's pretty repetitive, but it can be quite fun and Sony's Play Create Share ethos is evident in the user created levels. It's just that this feels like it should be a bonus on the disc - like if the Ada Wong level from Resident Evil 4 had been released as a full game. 5.5/10

Sleeping Dogs

I gamed periodically from the early eighties till the late nineties and then fell off the radar until about 2006. Gaming changed a lot in that period, and it can be best exemplified by GTA London being a new release when I went on my break, and San Andreas having come out around the time when I started again. As such, sandbox games seemed like something I'd missed seeing develop and I found it hard to get a foothold in the genre. I still haven't completed a GTA game. But I did finish Sleeping Dogs. For all it's technological advances,GTA seems quite an archaic game to me; badly chosen checkpoints and lengthy drives are really offputting to me. But somehow they're less painful in Sleeping Dogs, I'm not sure how they did it, as a lot of the things I didn't like in GTA are still present, just easier to cope with. The worst thing with Sleeping Dogs has to be it's writing. When you're best gangster friend tells you he's planning to go legit...well you should know what will happen soon if you've ever seen a crime film. The unexpectedly great thing about Sleeping Dogs, is the lovely neon splashes reflected on the wet Hong Kong streets. Whenever Epic shows off the latest generation of Unreal Engine they like to show details off like that, and Sleeping Dogs has those details in spades. On the whole, it's solid and enjoyable. Yes, it's totally unoriginal and GTA has done everything in this game before. But oddly, not always better. 8.0/10

Alan Wake: American Nightmare

The original Alan Wake was a very slick game, but flawed in many ways. In hindsight those flaws were more glaring due to the games prolonged development. As Alan Wake's American Nightmare didn't have the same expectations, it's initially more enjoyable, but the flaws still emerge.

So the first thing: there's probably never been a XBLA title with cutscenes of this calibre- very few games period actually. Second, when you start, the game feels really open- there's real opportunity to explore, which is great for a horror game. You feel you can get genuinely lost; it's really nail biting to have fought your way to a dead end & worrying you'll have the ammo to get back.

There are three levels, which you end up playing three times & this is probably the main criticism- it can feel a bit of a slog by the end. But on the whole, AW:AN succeeds in making the franchise feel vital and leaves you eager to see where it'll go next.

It's not a complete success but its a better building block for the future than the original title.

7.0/10

Max Payne 3

I really felt as if I hadn't played a real AAA game for a while, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, I was very soon reminded of this tweet:

Max Payne 3: Like being forced to watch your friend's shitty film, with breaks to play their shitty game.

— Peter Serafinowicz (@serafinowicz) June 11, 2012

I really didn't enjoy this. Games like Halo are basically all shooting, and yet somehow you don't notice too much. Max Payne you do. And the whole "shoot someone else when you're dying to revive" thing is tempremental (a nice way of saying often cheap and buggy). And the writing is often terrible ("I'm not following" "YOU'RE NOT MEANT TO BE FOLLOWING!"). There are some great setpieces, but this feels like a monotonous slog and shows how badly Rockstar can misjudge something when they're out of their comfort zone. 5/10

Dead Or Alive 5

Dead Or Alive is famed for its boobs and rightly so! Soul Calibur probably has larger boobs in skimpier outfits, but Dead Or Alive has characters falling to the floor, with a glimpse of a large, but feasible cleavage and most importantly, with a realistic jiggle.

So yeah, I'm so desperate to write about something Dead Or Alive does exceptionally, I'm writing about tits. And let's be clear, it doesn't do anything bad- there's a meaty story mode, an arcade mode, plenty of multiplayer options...but it doesn't have that spark a Street Fighter, Tekken or even BlazBlue has. It's enjoyable, solid but lacking greatness.

6/10.

Silent Hill: Downpour

Silent Hill 2 is one of my favourite games ever and no matter how good the subsequent games have been, they've never really tapped into the psychological murk of that game. And Downpour isn't any different to be fair. In fact with development being handed over to a Czech team and Daniel Lucht (of Dexter fame) taking over composing duties from Akira Yamaoka, it's samey-ness is impressive and oddly commendable.

It really feels like the game that should have been released as Silent Hill 4 (just typing that gives me flashbacks to that revolving prison level) and there's nothing wrong in giving fans what they want. It's just that nothing truly impressive has been made by being conservative and Silent Hill could really use some radical changes to capture the imagination of a wider audience.

6.5/10

Catherine

Another game I didn't finish! I read a review of Catherine that said something like "I liked everything about this apart from the game" and it's a sentiment I understand.

The cutscenes are truly anime standard, the parts where you hang around the bar chatting are really well done, but the Q*Bert meets Portal parts of the main game just frustrated me.

You know those puzzles where you slide the tiles to make a picture? I could never do those and Catherine feels like it uses the same skills. It's more frustrating as I could imagine a different fun game fitted around the cutscenes.

Not really fair to give a mark, but it was a 6 for me, but I could easily see the people with the right skills adding at least another 2 to that score.