Tomb Raider
–-{ Graphics }—
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
—{ Gameplay }—
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It’s just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don’t
—{ Audio }—
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I’m now deaf
—{ Audience }—
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
—{ PC Requirements }—
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
—{ Difficulty }—
– Real player with 100.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action-Adventure Singleplayer Games.
Tomb Raider is very much similar to Uncharted, though in some ways better and in some ways worse. Depending on what you want this could be good or bad. Uncharted has better story telling and production values, whereas Tomb Raider has much better variety of gameplay and level design.
In TR there are 4 weapons you can carry on you: bow, pistol, machine gun, shotgun as well as a pickaxe for a melee weapon. Actually, the pickaxe, bow, and technically shotgun are all used in many of the platforming/puzzle elements as well. Very good design. There are also alternate firing modes for every weapon (the pistol is DLC though), skills to be unlocked, and upgrades for weapons. This game is like if somebody took the Uncharted idea, but wanted to add more gameplay elements to make it more fun.
– Real player with 51.5 hrs in game
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Ultimate Edition
First off, I’m a huge fan of the Castlevania series. So that foundation may color my opinion of this game and it’s ensuing interquel and sequel (which I’m currently in the midst of). Something about medieval through Enlightment era Europe with a heavy gothic/baroque aesthetic, corrupted through dark forces that threaten the world? Awesome. Tons of monsters pulling on a multitude of inspiration from the myth cycles of antiquity through the modern Universal monsters? Yes, please.
Konami struck gold initially by creating these dark adventures that took a quite serious tone for the early Nintendo systems, offering a beefy challenge of vintage Nintendo difficulty through several increasingly impressive platformer games. They then evolved into the famed Metroidvanias with the release of Symphony of the Night on the Playstation - trading a bit of the reflex-intensive difficulty for massive sprawling environments that took forever to explore and fully unlock - and followed this formula with several excellent installments on Nintendo’s handhelds where they found their most sustainable home and success through the late 2000’s. Then Konami, sensing the increasingly stagnant nature of the series as it became mired in repeated iterations of SotN’s sprawling platformer/RPG hybrid, started searching for a way to revitalize the series again, just as SotN ignited a sort of Golden Age for the series.
– Real player with 98.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action-Adventure Singleplayer Games.
(Important note: This game, for whatever reason, doesn’t like being set to fullscreen + max res on a display other than that which Windows / your video card identifies as Display 1, regardless if it’s your primary display or not. Weird bug but easy to fix.)
Lords of Shadow is a flawed but polished masterpiece and a triumph of artistic direction. It’s shortcomings are forgivable. That said, since you can expect to sink upwards of 40hrs into this, I’ll go into some more detail.
Presentation wise, this game is stunning. Masterful visuals paired with smooth and optimized 4K performance make for an eye-popping experience. The art team went all out on this and it shows. I’ve never taken so many screenshots of a game before. Two major detractors though: 1. Some of the cutscenes were pre-rendered for console are unimproved by modern hardware (they still look passable but they’re jaggy af); 2. Godrays are a weak point. The score is powerful but not iconic; you’ll love it in the moment but try to recall the music later and you’ll likely struggle, for the most part. This isn’t objectively a bad thing, as it simply means it’s enhancing the experience without overpowering it but I was disappointed by the lack of iconic singles and the abscence of a Bloody Tears revamp.
– Real player with 47.4 hrs in game
Smart Gecko
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Action-Adventure Sokoban Games.
(This game was received for curation with no promise of a review, positive or otherwise.)
Smart Gecko is essentially a simple variant of the “don’t cross your own path” puzzle sub-genre. It could have been a passable way to spend a little time, but for the fact that zero effort has been made to fix some pretty glaring issues.
It should have been simple: Move your gecko one space at a time in order to eat all the fireflies and finish the board. Yet there are multiple problems, least of all the lack of a tutorial. It seems like that would be unnecessary, but at least two of your losses will be figuring out that turning into a wall makes your gecko explode violently, as does walking into a pillar (in the game’s overhead view, the pillar looks like something you can walk over). There is no way to undo a bad move, which will happen more than you’d like due to the inexplicable lag after pressing a movement key. There is a timer that doesn’t seem to do anything, and no option to play without it. Finishing a level means you have to actually maneuver your gecko to the edge of the screen, and then press another key to move it off the screen. The problem with this (besides the obvious redundancy) is that you cannot tell where the actual correct path is. And since, as I’ve mentioned, there is no undo key, you’ll just have to start over.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game