Death Stranding: All this, for this?

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.

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Frostpunk vs. these survival simulators that don’t say anything

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.

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Love letter to Euro Truck Simulator 2 from confinement

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.

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Project Hospital: 20 years later, finally a worthy successor to Theme Hospital

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.

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The Master of Orion reboot has all the classic flaws of recent 4X games

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.

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Mad Max the Video Game is better than the movie

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.

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Fallout 4 a.k.a Hoarding Simulator 2017

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)

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SOMA, the perfect Let’s Play experience

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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.

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Grand Theft Auto V (Five), the sequel too much

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”