Review Archives (Staff Reviews)

You are currently looking through staff reviews for games that are available on every platform the site currently covers. Below, you will find reviews written by all eligible authors and sorted according to date of submission, with the newest content displaying first. As many as 20 results will display per page. If you would like to try a search with different parameters, specify them below and submit a new search.

Available Reviews
	MYST review (DS) Reviewed on August 15, 2008 Sensibilities and expectations have changed over the last 15 years, but not much else has. The game is still a collection of wondrous locales which we must navigate in the crudest of ways—through a poverty of frames such that turning around brings to mind a herky-jerky slide show. Impossibly, the game actually looks worse – far worse – than it did when it first reared its innovative head in 1993.
	Guitar Hero: Aerosmith review (X360) Reviewed on August 14, 2008 Aerosmith fans will be left disappointed by a sparse and omission-filled track list, and Guitar Hero devotees will find little of the difficulty they crave. If anything, I'm going to remember Guitar Hero: Aerosmith as the first video game to accurately simulate the embarrassment and humiliation of being an opening act.
	Okami review (PS2) Reviewed on August 14, 2008 Some dungeons also do memorable jobs of balancing on the line between epic and comedic, with the vast cavernous fortress Orochi calls home being perhaps the best example. The battle with the great serpent is an awesome clash that's topped off with cowardly warrior Susano finally accepting his heritage as the descendant of Nagi and realizing his heroic potential. Leading into this.....you're running around with a mask covering your head and fetching ingredients for an imp chef so it can concoct the perfect side course to Orochi's virtuous maiden supper.
	The Bourne Conspiracy review (X360) Reviewed on August 12, 2008 There's a certain appeal to the thought of jumping into the shoes of a rogue assassin like Bourne. Explosions are cool. Sniping is a hoot. Fast car chases through the streets of Paris are all sorts of exciting. Hand-to-hand combat with military professionals also has its merits. When it comes right down to it, there's actually almost nothing about the whole concept that doesn't scream “make me a video game.”
	Word Zapper review (A2600) Reviewed on August 09, 2008 A good number of these things will ram into you and bump your ship a smidgen off to the side, making it tougher to get a bead on the proper letter. Another type threatens to make the game fun by temporarily scrambling the letters, so you don't know when the one you're looking for will appear. And the final type just obliterates your ship — a tactic that's far more useful in preventing players from spelling words than those used by the other shapes. You can destroy these objects, but there's no real point, as they aren't hard to dodge and you get no reward for doing so.
	Swordquest: FireWorld review (A2600) Reviewed on August 07, 2008 Well, my nine-or-10-year-old mind had an absolutely FANTASTIC time wandering aimlessly through this maze and struggling through one action sequence after another, only to grab a couple of items, put them in another room and.....see nothing happen. I vaguely recall getting a clue once. That moment was so exciting, it shocked my body into puberty. And then I realized I'd lost my official Fireworld comic book, so that clue couldn't have been more worthless to me.
	Guitar Hero: On Tour review (DS) Reviewed on August 06, 2008 At its best moments, this mini edition will still fly you through hand-wrenching solos. For a franchise that pulls a lot of its thrills from shredding with a plastic axe, though, On Tour doesn't have the setup to be at its best enough.
	Chase the Chuckwagon review (A2600) Reviewed on August 06, 2008 To pick up your own copy of Chase the Chuckwagon, you had to buy a bunch of Ralston-Purina's products and send in the proofs of purchase. Not surprisingly, very few of these games wound up in gamers' hands and the majority of the cartridges were destroyed. This ingenious idea might go a long ways towards explaining why, a decade after this site's creation, I still had to add Spectravision to our list of developers in order to include it with this game's data.
	1942: Joint Strike review (X360) Reviewed on August 06, 2008 While most of the game is manageable enough if your twitch gaming skills haven't grown too rusty, boss encounters can be a different story entirely. Even the adversary you face at the conclusion of the first stage is beefy, unleashing a wicked spread shot and heat-seeking missiles when he's not pelting you with standard shots from one of several turrets. Emerging from the encounter in one piece requires you to unleash your most convincing assault as quickly as possible, since dodging and weaving will only get you so far and is ultimately destined to fail if you have to keep it up for too long (plus your rating for that encounter will drop and you don't want that).
	Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards review (N64) Reviewed on August 05, 2008 Kirby’s Dream Land may have been short and easy, but it was never boring, with levels often vertically oriented to take advantage of Kirby’s flight capabilities. Kirby can still fly here (though the ability is more limited), but most of these stages could be completed by any generic platformer star: Walk forward, defeat a few enemies, jump a few times, move on. And damn, is Kirby ever slow. You’ve got to double-tap a direction on the d-pad just to make him bolt at an adequate pace, and even then there’s the unwavering sense that he’s wading through invisible mashed potatoes.
	Packaging Man review (PC) Reviewed on August 05, 2008 While Pac-Man is an endearing classic because of the constant challenge and addictive gameplay it provides, though, Dogwood Alliance's effort lacks the substance it needed to exist as more than a fleeting memory. It's over almost before it begins, it's ugly and there's not much value in the long term. Sort of like deforestation, I can almost imagine someone from the company quipping, and maybe he'd be right.
	The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind review (PC) Reviewed on August 05, 2008 Morrowind's atmosphere is so all encompassing despite the derivative high-fantasy setting that it's an enormous challenge not to be blown away at regular intervals. This atmosphere stretches beyond the realms of the delicious visual design, or the eerily fantastic soundscapes, right up to those little moments of the game where you simply can't believe what's happening.
	Hail to the Chimp review (X360) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 The humor is practically non-existent with even the puns falling flat (and I usually love those). This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the game were an improvement, but it's really not. The uninspired mockumentaries are actually the highlight of the whole affair (and double as bonus content that you can unlock). When you're a developer and the best bits in your game are rather poorly animated segments that wouldn't cut it on network television or even Cartoon Network in the early morning hours, you know that your project is seriously flawed.
	BioShock review (X360) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 The setting of Rapture is unique, which in horror-themed FPS terms means the developers were free to pull off new environmental tricks – like having water leaking in through the windows, or making the walls creak from the pressure – in addition to the usual flickering lights and distant screams. Irrational also knew how to handle irony and awkward juxtaposition, too. Watching a little girl in a pink dress who’s stabbing corpses with a giant syringe get attacked by a bunch of lunatics wielding rusty pipes is unsettling. It’s even more unsettling when it all unfolds as “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” plays on an old turntable in the background.
	Portal review (PC) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 For a game that toys with such an inventive idea, it gets it miraculously spot-on in one attempt. The whole thing is strikingly intuitive, meaning that within ten minutes you've grasped the fundamental concepts of the whole thing, and your progression is simply down to your thinking power. Solutions are often abstract or lateral, but never illogical, meaning there's a sense of reward for every one completed. The difficulty and complexity curves are handled brilliantly, with the introduction of the portals themselves coming a while before you get your hands on the fantastic portal device, and the puzzles themselves always a logical progression from the previous one. It's always fast-paced, always interesting, and always stupendously entertaining.
	Women’s Volleyball Championship review (PS2) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 It's so frustratingly unpredictable that you begin to feel like you're not even playing. Why do the players respond so poorly to your commands? Why do you have so little control over where the ball goes? How is it that your teammates are more likely to excel if you just press the button once or twice per round and then leave them to their own devices the rest of the time? I just don't know, and nothing in the tutorials answered such queries.
	SNK Arcade Classics: Vol. 1 review (WII) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 ... A compilation burdened by games that don’t showcase why players loved SNK so much in the days of the arcade. While there’s definitely some good content here, Vol. 1 feels like a missed opportunity...
	Pro Cycling Manager/Tour de France 2008 review (PC) Reviewed on August 04, 2008 The premise of being a cycling manager preparing for the Tour de France is a simple one: Find a team; Train them until they threaten to quit; Find a sponsor; Win.
	Jet Force Gemini review (N64) Reviewed on August 03, 2008 I’m generally okay with fetch quests – hell, half of my N64 career was positively made of fetch quests – but Rare bumps it up a notch. They obscure some of the Tribals from regular view. The others are thrown out into the open, where they’re more likely to get killed by stray gunfire. What’s worse is that worlds are divided into districts, and you’ve got to collect all of an area’s Tribals before you leave. If an area has ten Tribals and you save nine, you can’t come back later and rescue the one that you missed. You’ve got to get them all in one fell swoop. It’s not simply tiring – it’s exhausting.
	Racing Team Manager review (PC) Reviewed on August 02, 2008 Racing Team Manager is probably the most counter-intuitive and frustratingly illogical game I've ever played. There are no tutorials or help buttons, which is a bad idea anyway, but when all of the option screens seem to rely on bizarre icons or abbreviations for everything, it's simply absurd. It took me about fifteen minutes to work out why it wouldn't enter my car for the first race. It turned out it didn't have an engine in it. I only worked this out by clicking, then double-clicking, then clicking and pressing 'automatic' (which seems to sometimes set up a bit of your car by itself) in a desperate attempt for something to happen. Management games should involve careful, strategic planning and fine-tuning. This felt like playing Myst.

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