Cathartic

I rely on metacritic reviews before buying a game. This one helped me to decide. Buy this game for the ending scene. See how everything connects! Other players shape your ending and you shape theirs! Your level of exploration determines how much you shape their ending! Superb music, with some tracks needing to be a bit longer to avoid repetition. There's an oboe melody that is so reminiscent of Tomb Raider (PS1) it brought back that nostalgic feeling of exploration. I have no problem with the controls but could have used a controls reminder screen in a couple of places. The run/walk function could have been placed somewhere else but there is a problem with the movement of the fox: completely rigid, like it was stuffed. A few more frames of animation, perhaps turning its head when you move the camera...anything extra would have helped here. Jumping isn't well animated either. There's a waggle in walking mode, but I cannot (unless I'm forced to later on) walk for long in this game. Even the run is slower than I would like. The open world feel of Breath of the Wild is present in this game - but with loading screens between areas (so, more like Ocarina of Time?) I would happily keep exploring were it not for the invisible walls about 7/8 of the way up a rocky hill. This immediately suppresses the open world feel and the desire to explore! Where there is no indication where the next pick-up is or where to explore next or where you have explored on a HUD map, this is where the area becomes a chance to memorise landmarks. The fox starts with double jump ability - something I discovered half way through the game. The dig function happens for about 1 second, before hidden items are dug up. Plenty of these items could have used a better look - maybe to show detail in the photos or the blueprints? Each time I had to zoom in and even then, I wasn't sure what I was looking at. Weren't these clearer in the trailer?! There are three areas with so little illumination it's hard to see where to go and if you are actually moving or just stuck on a wall. These could all use a little brightening up. The frustration at a tree root in the evening sun will be with me long after I finish this review. The rocks and the house are the other two places. The music track with lyrics was a highlight of the game - it started to sound so much like Sigur Ros I thought it might actually be them! That is wasn't isn't a disappointment, because the effect was enough to heighten the entire scene.

It's a quirky combination: a cute and dark story from Tomorrow Corporation. In this world you play almost the entire game from the first person perspective - throwing items you order from an Argos-like catalogue into the fireplace to keep warm. The items are ridiculous and the captions often hilarious - even referring back to 8-bit gaming history and their previous game World of Goo! It is (this week) reduced to an insanely low £2.39. If it's been in your wishlist for ever, NOW IS THE TIME to grab it! Featuring a two-player co-op, you can even experience the wonderful music, effects, and short story with someone you love ;) So, open all the catalogues, work out the hidden 99 combinations and see what happens next!

WIth a long start-up time, poor background graphics, twisting puzzles without any indication of what you're attempting to find, and shaky, jumpy and sometimes simply disturbing narrative sections, this has to be an 80p game lumped in with the £5 software. After several minutes of twisting, turning, changing the water level and some sighing, DS2 asks me to solve the puzzle - of something **** with objects that weren't part of the picture at all. The puzzle pinged and snapped to the right shape on its own, and not before time. Several of the levels have a nasty blue screen representing being under water - they are not attractive levels. This game is best avoided, even if the trailer looked promising.

It took me over 45 marvellous hours to reach this game's final boss. I have rarely been so frustrated with my inability to play a game well. The mechanics are beautifully balanced, and there's little here that makes me think of other metroidvania games because the content is original and the characters interesting. I found Elderbug amusing, Myla the cute miner fun to visit, Quirrel dashing and informative, and the (hopefully soon to be a playable character) Hornet challenging and all-aware. Learning the map and discovering new areas without hand-holding was refreshing. I felt like I was building my own world through exploring and DS2 reached areas I hadn't within the first three hours. There are limited slots to use power-ups, and choosing what to take and what to deactivate proves difficult in the early game. The add-on content boosts the interesting finds and activities that occur in dirtmouth and in many other **** Dream Nail means there's additional text from characters and collection challenges. A very hard challenge awaits in the Grimm Troupe tent, The godmaster add-on has just come out! Finally, the price point was superb - SO MUCH GAME for under £10. Truly special - this game will continue to be played by me for hours and will probably remain in the top ten switch downloads for months to come!

A fantastic game that is engaging for all the family. Often described as minimal but with plenty to look at, this game has a two-player mode, many cities to create maps for, simple but very effective music that changes as you switch line colour, three challenge modes (normal - where station overcrowding ends the game, endless - which means you can keep extending the tube lines, and extreme - where tubelines are fixed once you build them!), and best scores to beat (200,300,500!) The surprise for us after 30' playing time was the inclusion of interchanges - making the sudden build up of passengers more avoidable. I have no idea what the trailer was trying to convey -- I nearly didn't buy it because of the high level of dancing on the underground -- but we loved it and highly recommend it!