This was a fun experiment that I think we’re going to continue, especially since the summer is pretty light on major releases. That said, I’m continuing it despite these two games, because it’s obvious you people take pleasure in my suffering.
First, “Game of Thrones”, requested by rj moffa.
I’m not a huge fan of “Game of Thrones”, as a series of novels. I’ve read them, and the game is fairly faithful to the style and tone of the stories…but it’s also a rush job.
I can’t really blame the developers on this one because it was blatantly hurried out the door to cash in on the series. The interface was obviously a work in progress. The textures and graphics are pretty clearly beta: I seriously doubt they were deliberately made this rough. Similarly, the combat is so basic and simplistic it’s difficult to believe this was a finished product.
Especially from Atlus, this is disappointing. Cyanide admittedly has not had a breakout moment as a studio, but “Loki” wasn’t a terrible game and it showed some genuine taste for RPGs as a genre. They’re capable of better than this. They should be allowed to deliver it.
“Inversion”, requested by Dub_C, is more polished, which makes the lack of creativity that much more painful.
This isn’t a bad game so much as just…bland, really. The gravity mechanics are ultimately nothing more than throwing stuff at enemies, yanking them out of cover, and occasionally having some fun with it. The game never goes nearly as wacky with it as you want it to. You want to be floating in the air behind some cover, which is also floating, running up the side of a building while getting in gun battles with gross aliens, and changing the gravity of the area you’re in at will.
Instead you basically get “Bulletstorm”, only with the gravity gun from Half-Life instead of the leash, and with far less of a sense of humor.
It’s not a bad third-person shooter, but honestly, the conceit doesn’t carry the game. There are moments of brilliance, like creating floating gasoline bombs with your gravity weapon, but the game is too linear and too unwilling to let you play with the concept to really be any fun. Too bad: if they’d rolled with it, it might have been a classic.