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Death Stranding boasts a “genre-defying experience”, but it isn’t accurate, it’s defying several genres at once, and it isn’t succeeding on several fronts. In the end, this extremely well-engineered game doesn’t manage to cover the extremely large ego of his main creator, Hideo Kojima.
Survival city-building simulators add some tension to an otherwise chill video game genre. But with this tension comes expectations of message that aren’t always fulfilled like Frostpunk masterfully did.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 hides a real game under a deceivingly austere look. I fell for it for contextual reasons, but I stayed with it for its qualities.
Project Hospital, released in 2018, finally tackles the herculean task to succeed to Theme Hospital in the niche genre of video game hospital management simulation. The secret? Going their own way instead of copying the original.
I bought Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars (2016) in a recent deal that included the 3 original games in the franchise started in 1993. After pulling an all-nighter on it, it feels like an old game: unreadable fights, tedious planet management with a stupid autobuild feature.
Continue reading “The Master of Orion reboot has all the classic flaws of recent 4X games”
Mad Max: Fury Road is arguably one of the most memorable movies of 2015, for a number of reasons. And after having extensively played the eponymous video game released the same year, I feel like it is going further and deeper into human madness than the movie ever went.
Continue reading “Mad Max the Video Game is better than the movie”
Fallout 4 is the latest and in my opinion the best episode of the franchise since Bethesda took it from the cold dead hands of Activision. However this game excels at flattering my natural impulse to pick up and hold everything that’s lying around, and this is what I sheepishly did for nearly 180 hours.
(Spoiler warning)
Let’s Play videos are popular on YouTube but controversial for a few reasons. I think overall those videos are doing more good than harm, especially for the horror genre whose game SOMA is a very good example of.
The fifth installment of the Grand Theft Auto series was published a month ago on September 17th 2013 and is already a huge commercial success, grossing $800 million in the first 24h after release. Video game reviews are unanimous, it’s a visual masterpiece, but is it really a video game masterpiece? Continue reading “Grand Theft Auto V (Five), the sequel too much”
I’m a huge fan of late productions of Bullfrog Productions game studio. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Populous, Syndicate… You name it, I love it (or I never played it). I was pretty sad when I found out that the studio closed his doors to merge with Electronic Arts.
Since then, I have been longing to play spiritual sequels of those great game. Alas, each and every games inspired from these classics disappointed me (you can read a comparison I wrote in french about Theme Hospital and Hospital Tycoon here). Even when Peter Molyneux was in charge, like for Black and White, I’m never been as thrilled as I was with Bullfrog’s productions.
Then I dived in Facebook “social” games. I found out that most of them don’t meet my quality criterias except for a few like TrainStation, but it didn’t bother me much until I tried three specific games: Simply Hospital, Rollercoaster Mania and Dungeon Overlord. All three share cruel resemblances with old Bullfrog titles and that caught my eye.
Continue reading “How the Bullfrog heritage is being robbed by Facebook Games”
