Recent reviews by Renjabert

As intriguing and frequently pleasant as any three vignettes from Fantasia, with a running time of just a bit more. I will need to revisit this sometime down the road when I need to recenter.

Conditional recommendation: best aimed at people who want a passable, budget experience. Water physics that can still be exciting to see in motion even a decade on (apart from the last stretch of the third act), but paired with a cinematic action-adventure game that needed at least another couple of months to cook. There's little that's technically bad, just an air of imprecision over most of the game. Every story beat points to a crisis in motion, but to get the highest score possible, you'll have to be very deliberate, often slow in exploring every nook and cranny, and those nooks aren't particularly exciting, nor are the collectibles they hide. There are still moments where everything gels and you can see the game this was probably intended to be, but those are just as quickly followed by reminders of why it never grabbed an audience in 2011.

What might have been a vacuous 2 hour VR platformer is instead a narratively-tight half hour movie that makes a very good argument for third-person storytelling in virtual reality. The $6 price tag feels a bit much for the content though, and it's going to come off far better to people looking for a proof-of-concept in VR cinema rather than an interactive experience standing next to what makes up most of Steam. But VR is still discovering its audience, as much as its audience is discovering it, and on a discount this is a compelling reminder of the promise of the medium.

Far Cry 2 is a bit of an oddity, but one that went on to help inspire major movements in game design in many pockets of the industry. Along with Assassin's Creed, it showed Ubisoft beginning to invest more into experiential storytelling, hoping the mechanics told a story that was exciting on their own.

There's a heavy, brutal story being told in every facet of the experience, and reinforcing that through its unscripted events is what the game does best. Your favorite gun will jam and later become unusable. The car you got as a reward for a quest will get jacked in town when you're not looking. Your malaria will flare just when you think you've got a handle on the what you want to tackle next. The best laid plans to avoid a shootout will turn into a scramble behind an outcropping while an accidental brushfire blooms.

Even so, it can be hard to get into initially: it has a rhythm not that far off from more exploration-heavy roguelites, but almost all the crunchiness has been swapped out for tactical shooter mechanics. No story beats are exciting enough to entice you to sprint from one to the next, and you're likely to be interrupted multiple times trying to get where you want to go. The feedback from the gameplay itself can be muted to the point of feeling inconsequential in its own right, but if you take the effort to invest mentally and emotionally with the immediate events around you and the theme of the game, it will pay you back with every measure given.

A lot of mainstream game design is made to reward your time without much effort (and I don't count that as an objectively bad thing), but Far Cry 2 stands a chance of paying even greater, just with a much higher investment required.

Plenty worth it on a sale. Though there are individual levels that have all the failings of the games they emulate -from poorly-indicated objectives to frantically searching a newly-empty level to find the one collectible you still need to exit- the variety of levels on offer and middling story line and performances can carry a weekend well enough.

A well-executed stab at a -nearly- surrealist settings with an obnoxious, faceless antagonist (given a homophobic slur by our plucky hero) who manages nonetheless to spoil the mood in every single one... and a protagonist only capable of confused or angry swearing.

If you think dull smack-talk and adventure games needed to come together, look no further.

I can think of several reasons I should have passed Rogue Legacy over: I have a hard time recommending difficult games because I hate the feeling of losing; having to explore this game's castle anew each time is something I would have called repetitive in many other titles; some treks into the fray yield nothing but spare change that'll be gone without ever having contributed to bettering your character... And yet, I burned up twenty hours making my way through Rogue Legacy, and turned around to (an admittedly less enthusiastic) jump into a New Game+, and really enjoyed the majority of my playtime.

Tight, fair game mechanics, and an interesting (if sometimes gimmick-y) take on the rogue-like genre are what you'll get here, and if you're a fan of platformers, you're going to love it.

An uncomplicated, arcade-y mech shooter with a lot of flight thrown in, too. It's not the best implementation of either, and it might only have been worth a rental on its console release, but there's a solid 3-6 hours of fun here.

LIMBO doesn't aspire to be much, but it sports ever-smooth gameplay and sticks to its design and aesthetic to great effect. Simple though it may be, the imagery can be provocative when it's not downright frightening. Granted, the punch is lost once you've had to replay the same segment several times (there are thankfully auto-saves after nearly every puzzle), but my first journey through still had me sitting respectfully silent, taking in each new environment.

Ten minutes in, I promised myself I'd play through twice and get every achievement. Two hours in, shortly before the game's end, I'd had enough of some of the puzzles to want to walk away once I had reached the game's conclusion. I may very well come back, though. Once the sting of the more annoying puzzles wears, the search for the game's secrets could easily seem a new take on something I did ultimately enjoy quite a lot.

Regardless of what it may have been for the time, this is a decent, albeit graphically muddy shooter. If the idea of a first-person shooter set in the Star Wars universe seems like a neat idea, pick it up. The difficulty can be a bit steep, and there are no mid-mission saves, but the experience is a solid one. Strangely enough, it's at its strongest when the game recycles the kind of architecture seen in the first movie. The levels that go for a more "organic" feel aren't bad by any means, but because of the limits of the engine, don't feel very lived-in.