I’ve had Monument Valley on my phone since November, and I probably should have done a review of it right after I finished it the first time. But I got busy with other stuff for a little while, and by the time I thought of it again, I felt it would be better to play the whole game again, and then write up a review. It’s not a very long game at all, not even with the additional purchase of Forgotten Shores, a collection of eight new puzzles. It is also not very expensive, so the time to cost ratio is pretty good. Upon finishing all the levels for the first time, I likened the game to one of those fun-sized candy bars. It’s good, really good, but it leaves you wanting more. This isn’t a bad thing, either, and I think it’s one of the nicer kinds of complaints one can have about any form of entertainment, wanting more of the same.

Monument Valley follows a princess, Ida, through a strange world with beautiful puzzles that look harder to solve than they actually are once you’ve got a good grasp of the game’s mechanics. I might compare them to Escher’s Relativity, except they’re not quite that complex even if they are just as visually appealing. It helps that the game uses a colorful palette to render these monument castles and their surroundings. The designs are simple, but every bit as pretty as games with much fancier graphics. The music is very soft and relaxing, which fits with the relaxed pace of the levels.

As I said, none of the puzzles are hard to solve, although they do get progressively more elaborate with higher levels. You start out only needing to rotate a walkway to help Ida move from one checkpoint to the next, but soon the game expands so that you’re rotating the entire level to make walkways rise and fall to meet each other in ways that are both clever and charming. This is not a game you play to challenge your speed or smarts. It’s instead a nice casual stroll that’s perfect for passing a few minutes on a train or in the bathroom. Continue reading

“Zoe,” you say, “I thought you were broke, so how did you get a new game?” Well, faithful reader who always asks the right questions, I discovered I had 4.99 still stashed in my Sony wallet, and being desperate for a new game, I went looking for something on sale cheap. LA Cops was only 3.49, so I got it, and here we are, another review for you loverly peoples.

My first impression of LA Cops is that it’s very similar in design to Hotline Miami, with some minor improvements in a few areas. It unfortunately also replicates a lot of the problems and design flaws I saw in Hotline Miami, but I’ll hold off on listing those just yet.

First, let’s talk about what it does have going for it. One, it’s got a diverse cast of cops to choose from, with no need to mess around with unlocking. It’s got a neat visual style to its cut scenes, something I can’t say I’ve seen in any game in recent or even distant memory. The voice acting in the cut scenes is pretty good, and the story is…it’s okay, for what little there is to it. The music is very good, something my husband noticed after only a few minutes into the game and commented on. A couple of the songs don’t sound like the era they’re aiming for, and they’re more like an extended Pearl Jam solo. But eh, I like Pearl Jam, so this worked for me. Continue reading

I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about Assault Android Cactus in that I want to like it based on most levels and its graphical and aural charms. My problem is mainly due to the control scheme, although I do have several other complaints as well. Assault Android Cactus is categorized as a twin stick shooter, and it’s about androids (surprise!) on a freight ship whose AI has gone nuts and started killing everyone. I’d worry about spoiling the plot, except the plot is unbearably stupid and goes like this: an evil emo android showed up and told the AI that the universe is a lie and everything sucks, and the AI agreed and set about killing everyone to “save everything.” Stupid? Oh absolutely. But for video game writing, one can almost pretend this is some deeply philosophical shit.

The game’s title is also the “main character,” but right from the start, the player can choose from several other androids, each with their own unique payload of weapons. Further, by beating bosses at the end of sections, the player can unlock even more androids, including making the evil emo Licorice playable. All of these choices give players a lot of options depending on what kind of rate of fire on their primary weapons they want, and on what kind of secondary weapon they can deploy. Those include options like a flamethrower, land mines, missiles, a force field, and a singularity. (Because an indoor black hole is always a good idea, amiright?)

For the most part, the non-boss levels are fun if a bit frantic due to these androids having extremely poor battery life. This is for me another problem, as I’ve got no love for games that put me on a timer and demand perfect speed. It’s particularly frustrating to pop the icon for a battery, only to die while trying to reach it. (Or worse, while circling around it because the damn thing has decided to go in an orbit around your character without connecting.) And there’s one level called Repeater that I honestly was ready to murder someone over because it rearranges the floor underneath my character whenever I moved. I could turn a perfect circle and rather than return to my starting point I’d end up in a confusingly dense range of hallways, which conveniently only melted for enemies to take pot shots at me before rematerializing again to block my shots. Confusing doesn’t even begin to cover it. Continue reading

Bethesda…Bethesda never changes. I truly believe they are the only company who could get away with the things they do and still receive so much love from the community. The games can crash or glitch and still have people clamoring “game of the year!” with so many more qualified candidates out there. This year’s most qualified, Witcher 3, comes from a smaller team that went out of their way to make a world feel truly alive. By comparison, Fallout 4 feels like a lot of lazy half assing in so many ways. The vast majority of the sound effects in this game have been used in every single other Bethesda game in recent memory. Even the music playlist for the radio station has been heard before in previous Fallout games. The recycled engine is given some new next gen spit and polish, but aside from the prettier outdoor environments and new more colorful locations, the character models are often but ugly and badly animated.

The problem here for me is that I’ve seen other companies raise the bar higher and higher for what to expect in terms of character design and animation with each release, but Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.

However, this is actually the first Bethesda game I’ve played all the way to the end, (Unless you count Fallout Shelter, which I don’t.) liking and loathing it in equal measure. There is nothing I can praise in the game that does not instantly lead to a big BUT, and for every time I was enjoying my game, there’s at least twice as many times where I was left groaning, “This is utter bullshit.” Or yelling it, or even growling it. And I want to note that it was rarely the challenge level of the game that was the reason for my anger. Sometimes it might be a glitch or a crash, but more often, it was just lazy writing or coding.

But let me start off at the beginning. Bethesda never changes. That’s why yet again, Fallout 4 starts with the same introductory sentence. However, this time the world is fleshed out in more detail before the character creation process begins, and I think it hurts the premise even more than the previous entries. In this version, the war did not take place in an alternate fifties era. Instead, the world went on with the same culture and technology until 2077. Try to think about that. If a person from 1950 were frozen and taken to our time, they would not recognize quite a lot of the progress we take for granted. But not only did technology freeze, but so did all culture and art. So for this period of supposed nuclear peacetime, no one ever did anything in any field. Ever. The game actually contradicts this idea many, many times, and yet…Bethesda never changes. Continue reading