Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW // 19th October – 25th October // The [Not Quite As] On Time Edition

I have an ineligible Gears of War 2 review which I mention here so I can mock Rob all the harder when he misses it next week.

THIRD - F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin [PC] Cpt Thought Process

This is a good short review, but it has a tendency to talk around the game rather than about it. It talks about what the previous game did well, and tries to point out when this game does them better or worse, but it’s very example light and often feels like a tell don;t show kind of review. It’s also, as we used to say back in the day, likely that you snacked on thesaurus for breakfast on day of writing, because there’s a lot of grand sounding words included, but they’re sometimes not the best word choices you could have had. Some sentences feel stuffy and would have benefited from simpler wording to get your point across.

SECOND - Knack [PS4] Overdrive

Rob’s struggle to talk about a very mediocre 3D platformer is real. Knack really is the kind of game where you’ll struggle for much to say because it isn;t exactly good, but it’s not awful or broken, either. I think you initially do well with tying that into the review for the first three paragraphs, but you then struggle after the first screenshot and list through stuff quickly in an attempt, I assume, to get to the end and push this nonsense from your plate. Sometimes, you can literally see the enthusiasm you begrudgingly summoned up at the start of the review leaving your writing as you progress. It’s not going to win you any awards this week, old chum, but I salute you for sticking with it and getting it done.

FIRST - Into The Gloom [PC] Joe

It’s a testament to Joe rather than a slight against the rest of this week’s review pool, when I say there were a couple of his reviews that could have taken the top spot this week. It helps his case that he’s decided to wait until it’s my RotW slot and then go all OctJOEber on me out of what I’ll assume is spite. Originally, I had Ethan Carter as the week’s winner, which I thought was probably the best written review submitted this week, but I;’ve swapped Gloom in right at the end, and I guess I’ll tell you why. I’ve spent years reading Joe reviews about awful horror games he’s picked up from Steam for $1 and then gently pulls apart for our reading pleasure, and that’s exactly where I thought Gloom was heading. Except it wasn’t; Joe likes Gloom and, by review’s end, he manages to make not only the game he’s talking about sound good, but further damn all the other ones because of the similarities between the countless bad and this one good. If Gloom can get it done on this engine, why can’t you, Spooky House Window Scare Simulator 6? Shame on you.

TAGLINE OF THE WEEK
Gary Hartley says: "A little elementary, my Gear Watson"
Joseph Shaffer says: "Wight at the Museum"

For us. For them. For you.

Thank you for the victory. I'm glad to take the crown with a first-person horror game, because even the good ones are getting hard to write about without feeling like I'm just copy and pasting material from previous ones. Congrats as well to OD and CTP.

The only thing my milkshake brings to the yard is a subpoena.