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Tom Orry, Editorial Director – Disney Infinity, Xbox 360
I’m yet to play the Pirates or Incredibles Play Sets, but the Monsters Inc. scenario is only slightly above awful. Disney clearly wanted the game to ship with Monsters University as the film hit cinemas this summer, but it makes for an extremely dull game. What we’ve got is a simplified mix of Ratchet and Clank, Bully, and Assassin’s Creed. That might sound like a good combo, but stripped down to the most basic attributes this play set is no better than the average movie tie-in hashed together for an easy pay day.
Simon Miller, Editor in Chief – The Walking Dead, Xbox 360
Despite all the noise and yelling, I took a while to get to The Walking Dead. Even before I made the decision I was still unsure, mostly due to the nonsense and abomination to video games that was Jurassic Park. In complete contrast to that fiasco, however, Telltale’s take on the undead is one of the finest games I’ve played in a long time.
Putting narrative and player-choice ahead of everything else – including controls – it’s just incredibly engrossing from start to finish. Every character is well fleshed (no pun intended) out and voice-acted, even if when you start Episode I the complete opposite seems to be the case. It’s the only game I can think of where an episodic structure has worked wonderfully, and one of the few that completely suckered me in from an emotional point of view.
Everyone should play this.
David Scammell, Deputy News Editor – Saints Row 4, Xbox 360
And so begins the three month onslaught of back-to-back open world titans. Saints Row 4 was always going to be the underdog against games like GTA and Assassin’s Creed, but Volition should be immensely proud of what it’s managed to achieve under difficult circumstances.
I’ve sunk around 12 hours into SR4 so far, spending most of it satisfying my OCD addiction (gotta get those clusters!), and the rest . The super hero powers and new navigation mechanics are excellent, and make traversing the city fantastic fun. Though it detracts slightly from the personality of the city (it’s hard to admire what’s going on around you when you’re speeding through at 200mph), it makes navigating from A-B exciting rather than a chore.
August was the perfect time for Saints, then. Any later and it would have been crushed under the weight of the other genre heavyweights. But with one down and three still to go, my only fear now is whether Watch Dogs – possibly my most-anticipated release of the year besides GTA – will suffer the consequences of genre fatigue come November.
Steve Burns, Reviews and Features Editor – Deus Ex: Human Revolution, PC
Thanks to this being discounted to roughly six pence everywhere on the internet, I thought I’d snap it up. That was months ago, of course (thanks Steam), but I finally got around to playing it this week. Well, for about a minute, until I realised that the opening level is utterly boring second time around.
Fortunately, this being PC and all that noise, all it took was a quick Google search for ‘Deus Ex PC mods’ and soon I could fixed all those problems that irked first time around. Level skip? Yup. Lesser energy drain? Thank you very much. All Praxis skills? Wonderful. Granted, I went mad with power and ended up ruining the experience by giving myself all the weapons and hacking tools, but hey. It was fun while it lasted.
