july |
The upside of the summer games drought is that it often allows space for smaller titles to shine through without being steamrolled by titles with bigger advertising budgets . This year it was the turn of Furi , a fascinating boss-rush title that lies somewhere on the Venn diagram between Metroid , Killer7 , and Kingdom Hearts in its scarily difficult battles with inventive and entertaining
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enemies .
But it was Pokémon Go , launched on mobile devices early in the month , that really stole the show .
Combining a genuinely quite unique style of gameplay with a slow news cycle , it stormed to the top of the download charts amid a whirlwind of publicity from traditional and gaming media alike .
Though the Pokémon
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Go storm disappeared almost as quickly as it came , with player numbers soon rapidly declining as the game ' s simplicity became clear , it was great publicity for Nintendo and a sign that in the mobile arena at least , their old blue water strategy of appealing to non-traditional players can still hold water .
Those still pursuing the " like Minecraft
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but " dream w o u l d have found something to enjoy with Starbound , while The Banner Saga 2 went largely ignored , to prove there ' s no justice in the universe . |
august |
August offered us a Grimm ' s fairy tale about the folly of hype , as No Man ' s Sky took off from its launchpad before rapidly running out of fuel .
The procedurally generated galactic exploration simulator had been trailed as a vast expanse of space for players to explore .
But everyone soon realised that algorithms as designers means a lack of variety , and gameplay kindly described as " sticking with what it knows ".
The vicious response from fans towards the game ' s creator Sean Murray was overblown , but taught a valuable lesson about the wisdom of underpromising
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and overdelivering .
The game launched without a number of features , and with visuals seriously scaled back from the previews once shown at E3 .
The PC version was also plagued with bugs , and sales soon dropped off .
The new Foundation update adds a large number of new modes , including a creative mode with all upgrades unlocked , but it seems to have come too late .
Meanwhile , the excellent Deus Ex : Mankind Divided brought us sci-fi a little closer to home , and told a gripping story based in the Deus Ex universe .
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september |
September was a good month for compilations . If you hadn ' t previously played Bioshock or Dead Rising , you could now get all their games on one convenient disc . It ' s just a shame both series had installments you wouldn ' t really want . |
The release of Persona 5 would have been massive to RPG fans , were it not for the unfortunate fact of only launching in Japan .
It ' s due out here in April , but it doesn ' t say great things about the industry that the translation is taking so long ( after two years of delays
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already ), given the size of the Western fan base .
Braid ' s Jonathan Blow finally released his new game The Witness , to applause from some and confused expressions from others .
Taking many cues from the likes of Myst , The Witness places the
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player on a mysterious island and has them run around solving abstract puzzles in order to complete the game .
It ' s a genre which hasn ' t been on the gaming radar for some time , and was probably due a reboot .
Clustertruck rounded off the month with an
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insane concept executed brilliantly . It sees the player trying to reach a distant goal via a game of " the floor is lava " played on top of a fleet of speeding trucks .
It ' s the kind of madness that has to be seen to be believed .
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