![]() ![]() Set in a dark and dingy world, Shadwen (the titular assassin of the game) is on her way to despatch the ruler of the land as part of a contract. ![]() That said, does what is effectively a long escort mission manage to keep your interest from beginning to end? Throwing a definite spanner in the cart wheels is that fact there’s a little girl you need to take with you after rescuing her from a grim fate. I hate looking weird.Coming from Frozenbyte, the Finnish creators of the Trine games, Shadwen is a physics based stealth puzzle game set in a medieval 3D world where you are an assassin heading to kill the head of an oppressive regime. I must have looked really weird to my allies, attacking thin air like that. The game looks poor, even by Wii U’s budget end standards, and the game was only remotely playable if I was the host of a party – if I joined someone else’s party, the lag from the netcode would be so bad that I would not be able to hit enemies with ranged attacks, and had to button mash melee strikes instead, hoping something landed. There is visual variety in enemies and locations, but they all play similarly to one another, further deepening the sense of endless grinding. By the tenth crawl through the same monsters and crypts, however, you’ll be ready to start shoving crystals through the gamepad screen, just to make the pain go away. Playing a level three times is pushing its luck, as the designs are simply not interesting enough to validate repeated plays. The problem is that the game all-but mandates that you buy into the microtransactions, because otherwise progress is so incredibly slow that you’ll get bored well before you get anywhere. Napoleon really drew you to the Napoleonic Wars, Shogun was uniquely Japanese in tone, and now Warhammer convincingly teleports you into a fantasy universe where those miniatures that you used to spend weeks and months painting in anticipating of grand tabletop wargaming are able to come to life. ![]() You could argue that Total War has hit a groove now where one game is merely iterating on what has come before, but I think that would be disingenuous, when each game is so distinctive. Importantly, it’s also gorgeous to look at, and really helps to draw players in to a badly underrepresented fantasy universe in the video game realm. There’s plenty of different units to recruit, and the battlefield control of them is comprehensive and engaging. You’ve got a number of different classical Warhammer armies to take control of (and the promise of more to be added in later via DLC), and, in classical Total War style, you need to manage both the growth and maintenance of your empire – which plays out in a turn-based fashion – with the real-time battles as units clash with one another. On the higher difficulty levels, there’s a real need to start guessing where icons are going to flow to. Complicating matters is that the “bars” that the icons travel down are not static – they move around, and as they do, you need to tap a different part of the base as you were initially expecting. In this game, icons cascade down the screen in rhythm with the music, and your goal is to tap them at the right time, just as they hit the base of the play field. But because I love you all so much I review ’em anyway.Įnjoy! And be sure to let us know what games you are playing at the moment in the comments.Ĭoming to us from Rayark, the same developer behind mobile rhythm game darlings, Cytus and Deemo, VOEZ is perhaps the most beautiful and expressive work the team has achieved to date. These aren’t necessarily bad games – not at all! But rather they are smaller or shorter games, or they might be free-to-play and therefore don’t really need a review at all. Welcome to this week’s short ‘n sweet reviews, where I look at a number of games that I’ve been playing that I just haven’t got the time to do give full reviews to.
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