Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW: September 5-11, 2016 -- Reviews and more reviews

Another RotW by me, where I judge eight reviews and ignore one, as it is mine. As always, I read them, judge them and post results which may or may not reflect anything I actually read, leaving you to determine just what was going through my mind when I did all this. Fun for me, fun for you!

THIRD PLACE

holdthephone's Stranger of Sword City (Vita)

Another week where it was hard to determine who'd place and where they'd place, leading me to simply pick which reviews grabbed my interest the most and then try to explain why they did. For you, the key was that you took a game I'd heard of and gave a comprehensive explanation of what it is and how it works. You described some interesting aspects, such as how your party essentially lurks in ambush and can be considered a random encounter to the monsters. You also mentioned how it's really difficult and how things can veer too much towards THE GRIND as you try to improve equipment to the degree you can be competitive with the tough boss encounters, as well as how the game essentially revolves around those bosses. Good stuff that taught me a lot about this one.

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SECOND PLACE

Lucas Goulding's The Final Station (PC)

The strength of this review is how you did a good job balancing between praise and criticism of a game that probably can be best described as "intriguing, but mediocre". You were quite clear on the many annoyances of this game ranging from how death is essentially meaningless to how you can take cheap hits to the "filler" mini-games. However, there just seems to be enough to this one to make it worth experiencing, if only once. The potentially doomed futuristic world, with many secrets hidden off the beaten path that enrich the game's world seems to be a neat theme, even if (as you said), it could have been implemented a bit better. You really do a good job of giving the impression this game could have been pretty good with a bit more work and imagination on the part of the creators.

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REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

sam1193's No Man's Sky (PlayStation 4)

This one simply resonated most with me. Stuff like your second paragraph reminds me a lot of my youth, where I could look at a road map and spend hours imagining what all the places I'd never visited must be like. That's the sort of thing that makes a game like this seem wonderful -- giving you a massive galaxy (or is it galaxies?) to explore with a near-infinite number of planets to explore. And after all the introductory stuff, you do a wonderful job of simply describing how the reality of things doesn't come close to meeting that lofty expectation, as after getting over the initial thrill of things, you're stuck having to do mundane, repetitive tasks on a collection of worlds that generally all are only superficially different and wind up seeming sterile with collections of similar lifeforms that all apparently exist only to be recorded, since you mention how things don't actually interact with each other. It's possibly the best description of this game I've seen — something that appeals to youthful imagination, but winds up letting it down because the longer you play, the more everything seems the same.

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And that's all for this week. Oh yeah, EmP, you best not forget I had a review this week to carry over in order to win next week's contest. Hopefully, I'll finish my other review today, so that will give me two entries, making it totally unfair to EVERYONE else!

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Gawrsh.
I was actually concerned when I sent that review draft off since after rereading it for the third time it sounded like I was a fence sitter, but there wasn't really a way to escape that mentality once I was done with the game.

This is where the witty thing should be. I seem to have lost the witty thing. I'll get back to you on it.

Congrats to all that were mentioned, holdthephone and Dinoracha, and to sam1193 for the RotW! It was another loaded week of reviews, and it's always nice to see some variation.

I head spaceshit noises.