Game reviews Archives - Quarter to Three: Recent Episodes
Tom Chick
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is an absolute delight and one of my favorite games in a long time, has four main things going for it. The first and most immediately obvious is Metropolis, the glittering comic book city where Superman makes his home, an emblem of Silver Age comics if ever there […]
The post Rocksteady throws down the Batgauntlet in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League appeared first on Quarter to Three.
One of my fondest early videogame memories is playing the 1988 adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was just a point-and-click adventure game, but it had a cyberspace to hack into. Once you got in, you could subvert and solve stuff in the point-and-click parts of the game. This interplay between cyberspace and meatspace was […]
The post Midnight Protocol hacks into the sweet spot between storytelling and strategy appeared first on Quarter to Three.
What a great time to be a fan of ray tracing! Whatever that is. I couldn’t tell you what ray tracing is if my life depended on it. Something to do with reflections and light? I figure it’s like lens flare: if I notice it, it’s not doing its job. But I’d have to know […]
The post Rift Apart brings ray tracing — and not much else — to Ratchet & Clank appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Necromunda: Hired Gun is the best Spider-Man game since Spider-Man. My magic web-shooter/grappling hook can get me anywhere I can see. A quick thwip and I’m standing on a ledge high overhead! The double-jump assist is just gravy. But unlike Sony’s 2018 love letter to Silver Age superheroics, Hired Gun lives in a grim Warhammer […]
The post With big guns & a bionic dog, Necromunda web-slings through the world of Warhammer appeared first on Quarter to Three.
A colorful post-apocalyptic open world populated by intelligent mutated animals. Tthe usual Ubisoft style open-world with a touch of Gamma World and a Secret of NIMH vibe. Over-the-top brawler gameplay, intricate stat-based character development, and a hearty crafting system. Mounts, vehicles, loot, exploration, puzzles, choice-and-consequence. A robot cricket sidekick! If games were bullet points, Biomutant […]
The post Biomutant tells a cautionary tale about cleaning up your own mess appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Remember that time when Resident Evil tried something new and different? Resident Evil 5 cast horror in a new light. Africa’s equatorial sun blew the usual cobwebs out of the series in favor of something different and even controversial. It finally played like the shooter it had been trying to be for so long. It […]
The post Lady Dimitrescu and kin deserve a better game than Resident Evil: Village appeared first on Quarter to Three.
When it comes to gaming the spread of infectious disease, everyone loves Matt Leacock’s Pandemic. Not me. I think it does a terrible job of modeling the outbreak, spread, and containment of an epidemic. It’s all gamey abstraction loosely held together by a strained disease motif that makes no sense. It’s not even a very […]
The post Do you know there are known unknowns in epidemic management game Raxxon? appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Racing isn’t just about speed. Speed is the goal, sure. But the important part is knowing when to relinquish speed. The important part is figuring out when and how much to slow down. It’s hardly surprising most racing videogames downplay this part. In most videogames, you mash down the accelerator, feel the exhilaration, and have […]
The post What does Project Cars 3 have that other racing games don’t? appeared first on Quarter to Three.
One of my favorite boardgame designs is Troyes. Although it relies on dice, it’s not about chasing sixes. Normally, dice games are all about seeing how many high numbers you can roll. Over the course of the game, you have to work through the peaks and valleys of sixes and ones, which feels more like […]
The post Under Falling Skies unfortunately lives up to its name appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I kept waiting. At some point, it was going to do something to disappoint me. There was going to be some misstep or oversight or shortcut, something that wasn’t fully developed or that should have been cut. Something that didn’t seem to fit. Something weak or wrong. But Immortals Fenyx Rising is one of those […]
The post Immortals Fenyx Rising is what happens when everything comes together perfectly appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Speed is a cheap vulgar thrill. It has none of the tension or innate drama of torque. You cannot savor speed the way you can savor the interaction of traction and mass. Speed wants nothing to do with the earth. It wants to leave it. But torque wants to defeat it, to prevail over it, […]
The post If Werner Herzog made a driving game, it would be Snowrunner appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I was done. I was finished with head-to-head card battling. So little has changed since Richard Garfield invented it with Magic: The Gathering back in 1973 or thereabouts. Build up mana, spend it to bring out cards with an attack and defense value, tap the cards to attack, win when you’ve done 20 points of […]
The post Just when you though it was safe to ignore collectible card games, Mythgard shows up appeared first on Quarter to Three.
It’s been an, uh, interesting year for rally games. Dirt 5, which was already kind of superfluous given the amount of content in Dirt 4, took a new direction…and then drove right into a ditch. WRC9 continued that series’ remarkable campaign mode, which shifts the traditional caRPG structure from RP’ing as your favorite car to […]
The post Art of Rally runs on an idyll engine appeared first on Quarter to Three.
It would be easy to fire up Code Vein, run around some of the early game areas, and conclude that it’s a Dark Souls soul in an anime body (amply bosomed ladies and androgynous boys with spiky coifs and freakishly large eyes). You wouldn’t be wrong. But to appreciate Code Vein, you have to wrap […]
The post Why I’ll be playing Code Vein long after I’ve given up on Dark Souls appeared first on Quarter to Three.
To appreciate Desperados III, you have to understand that videogame time is not linear. Videogame time allows you to rewind and try again. Over and over, if necessary, until you get it right. In most games, I’ve seen this as a failure, on my part and on the part of the design. I already played […]
The post Desperados III, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Savescum appeared first on Quarter to Three.
One of the greatest feats of engineering is holding back oceans. Also the oldest feat of engineering. Check out the first page of the Bible if you don’t believe me. It was the earliest bit of business God had to do before getting around to the stuff in the rest of the pages. This is […]
The post You can dive into Creeper World 4 in a way you couldn’t dive into Creeper World 3 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
The two pillars of cyberpunk in popular culture (i.e. you don’t have to read a book or watch anime) are Blade Runner and The Matrix. These hold up and inform everything else. For instance, cyberpunk in recent popular media like Westworld and Altered Carbon. Aside from being set in dystopian futures, what do these all […]
The post Looking for the cyberpunk in Cyberpunk 2077 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Dirt 5 is the kind of game where your award after a race is paid in Dirt Dollars. Not US dollars, not Euros, not krugerrands, not bearer bonds, but Dirt Dollars. It’s the sort of game where you unlock stickers you can buy with your Dirt Dollars and then stick them on your car. Do […]
The post What kind of game is Dirt 5? Glad you asked! appeared first on Quarter to Three.
One of my favorite solitaire boardgames is Dan Verssen’s Hornet Leader, which is the original game in the Leader series when it was published by GMT in 1991, and also the pinnacle of the Leader series when it was revised and reprinted by Dan Verssen Games in 2010. The Leader series has gone in various […]
The post Sherman Leader kicks back and lets the dice drive appeared first on Quarter to Three.
In Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, you have to play as a Viking named Eivor, which is pronounced “AY-vore”. Eivor is a flaccidly drawn Mary Sue of badassery whose flimsy characterization consists of machismo and shit poetry. The male voice sounds uninterested. The female voice is hoarse and forced. Take your pick. You can even swap freely […]
The post Despite Odyssey’s long shadow, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla holds its own appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Watch Dogs Legion is exactly what I want in my open-world games, and I know this because State of Decay was exactly what I wanted in my open-world games. I don’t need someone writing a story about a character doing character things, because good writing in open-world games is rare and meaningful writing is almost […]
The post This one easy trick could have saved Watch Dogs: Legion! appeared first on Quarter to Three.
[Editor’s note: Among the many things that I found deeply confusing in the 70s was the commercial for Life cereal. Two boys are given a bowl of Life cereal and told it’s healthy. Of course, they want no part of it. They’d rather have Sugar Pops or Froot Loops. But then one of the boys gets the bright idea […]
The post I don’t want to tell you why Hades is so good appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Dear sir or madam, I am writing to you concerning the legal pad you found somewhere in the vicinity of Pasadena, California, on or about the date of September 12th, 2020. The pad contains several pages of notes in cramped and somewhat messy writing. Surely you can appreciate the time that was spent writing them. […]
The post An open letter to whoever found my Godhood notes appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I remember Donald Pleasence screaming. He’s trapped. A white blood cell is bearing down on him. He’s been shrunk to microscopic size and injected into a human body. It’s the movie Fantastic Voyage, from 1966, and the white blood cell is descending slowly and inexorably toward Donald Pleasence. It oozes over his head and he’s […]
The post What’s a nice shoggoth like you doing in a game like Carrion? appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Allow me to introduce you to Ramiro Vazquez. Reader, this is Ramiro. Ramiro, reader. Ramiro is a member of a small nameless organization hidden deep underneath the machinery of government, yet profoundly involved in the affairs of state. A “deep state”, if you will. Our secret brotherhood pulls the strings that run the world. Yes, […]
The post Let’s meet Secret Government member Ramiro Vazquez appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Heavy Metal was a 1981 anthology of very R-rated short animated films based on the sci-fi/fantasy magazine. It was infused with enough nudity, gore, and profanity — albeit animated — to keep a 15-year-old boy riveted. But after the titillation wore off, the part of Heavy Metal that stuck with me the most was a […]
The post I wish Dan O’Bannon were here today to see Zombie Army 4 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Valorant, the new free-to-play team shooter from Riot makes me feel all of my years. I’m 49 now, so I’m not so old that I feel like a senior otherwise. I exercise. I binge stream. I’m hip with the kids. Sure, I played the Atari 2600 and I remember when arcades had pinball machines that […]
The post Let’s count the ways Valorant makes me feel old appeared first on Quarter to Three.
There are a lot of reasons to stop playing Shadow Empire. I’ve hit many of them several times over. The most common is that I don’t understand how something works, but I didn’t realize I didn’t understand until it was too late. Maybe I built some expensive structure that took several turns of saving up […]
The post Seven Reasons I Keep Trying to Play Shadow Empire appeared first on Quarter to Three.
You can tell a diver whose mask doesn’t fit by the ring pressed into his face after a dive. The angry red crease along the shallow skin of the forehead, then down around the outer edges of his eyes, into a furrow through the soft flesh of the cheek, and finally cupping the nose to […]
The post The torturous tragedy of Solium Infernum appeared first on Quarter to Three.
There are lots of issues with Doom Eternal, but only one has been a deal-breaker. It’s probably not even the one you think. It’s not the silly Prince of Persia wall climbing or the sillier Gymkata horizontal bar swinging (at least my space marine doesn’t do a full twirl around the bar). Sometimes Doom Eternal […]
The post Oh, the friends you’ll make in Doom Eternal! appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about Tapestry. I guess I could say the artwork is cute in some places. Okay, that’s that. Let’s get on with the rest. Although Tapestry is powered by iconography, it’s also brimming with words. I will ignore these words because they have almost no bearing […]
The post The arbitrary tangle of Tapestry, a game that couldn’t care less about civilization appeared first on Quarter to Three.
For all the points of the compass, there is only one direction. And time is its only measure. –Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead The eye has a powerful thirst. It will drink greedily and without reservation whatever pictures you put in front of it. But words sneak past the greedy eye with their […]
The post Entropy and empires collide in Sunless Skies, the best game of 2019 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Wargame design has developed so profoundly over the past four decades that a collection spanning this era almost feels like a series of geological strata. From the perfunctory Nixonian arithmetic of military integers dressed up as history in early SPI games, to the multilateral multi-impulse area movement Avalon Hill games of the first Bush Administration, […]
The post Volko Ruhnke’s Nevsky is a fiddly that has its own quality appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Fighting games are a form of puppetry. You pull the strings, an insensate doll animates, videogame violence ensues. Most of the puppetry has gotten really complex because most of the puppeteers have gotten really good, and therefore more demanding. They expect long deep learning curves and literal split second timing. Those learning curves get deeper […]
The post The 3rd best game of 2019: One Finger Death Punch 2 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Sometimes when you’re playing The Swindle, a steampunk heist game with cool steampunky progression to pull you through procedurally generated heists, you get a gimme. A lightly defended computer stuffed with cash, right next to the entrance, with only a couple of robot guards strolling by on their preset patrol paths. Knock out the robots, […]
The post The 4th best game of 2019: Void Bastards appeared first on Quarter to Three.
It’s been 25 years since I was captivated by Simtex’s Master of Orion and Master of Magic games. Since then, no one has understood Simtex’s appeal to my imagination as well as Triumph Studios with their Age of Wonders series. After wallowing luxuriantly in rich (if somewhat generic) fantasy, hammering away at their design like […]
The post 5th best game of 2019: Age of Wonders: Planetfall appeared first on Quarter to Three.
As soon as you boot up Field of Glory: Empires, you can tell what you’re getting. Just look at that patchwork map with those little armies standing around. Look at all those numbers and tooltips and region labels. Looking at the adoringly historical spreadsheet propping it all up. This is a clone of a Paradox […]
The post 6th best game of 2019: Field of Glory: Empires appeared first on Quarter to Three.
You can play X-com for the first time exactly once. And what a precious time that once. All the mystery and uncertainty, the danger, the discovery, the horror of what those weird little aliens were doing to our cows. Our innocent cows! What else were they up to? What would you reveal when you finished […]
The post 7th best game of 2019: Phoenix Point appeared first on Quarter to Three.
In modern aerial combat, aircraft fight against blips on screens. Maybe — just maybe — they might fight against a speck far off in the sky. Conflict and technology has advanced in such a way that combatants stand farther and farther apart. From the bow to the gun to artillery to aircraft to ballistic missiles […]
The post 8th best game of 2019: Rebel Galaxy Outlaw appeared first on Quarter to Three.
To some people logistics is a chore. A necessary part of getting to the fun stuff. The vegetables. To others — me, for instance — logistics is a foundation for the fun stuff. Without logistics in a game, you’re sort of cheating. How did those bullets get into that gun? How did that fuel get […]
The post 9th best game of 2019: Transport Fever 2 appeared first on Quarter to Three.
And who by avalanche, who by powderWho for his greed, who for his hungerAnd who shall I say is calling? -Leonard Cohen, “Who By Fire” It’s the summer of 2114. South America just collapsed into anarchy due to, I’m told, “cataclysmic heat stress”. It joins North America, Africa, Asia, and the […]
The post Pretend the darkly cynical Spinnortality has a name that doesn’t make it sound wacky appeared first on Quarter to Three.
Red Faction: Guerilla not only introduced the idea of a fully destructible world, but it remains the only example of it 10 years later. It could have been a revolution. But fully destructible worlds are hard to do. Level designers also have to be architects, because understanding how a building collapses also requires understanding how […]
The post Din’s Legacy is also Depth of Peril’s lonely legacy appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I just got a new car and, let me tell you, it is something else. It feels remarkable. The steering wheel under my fingertips, the responsive grip of the tires on the road, the graceful suspension, the throaty purr of the engine. And the interior! Plush seats that feel like they were made to fit […]
The post Borderlands 3 makes the exact wrong choices appeared first on Quarter to Three.
There is a long stretch of six-lane blacktop going from Kuwait City to Basra, officially known as Highway 80. To most of the world, it’s the Highway of Death, and it’s the home of the most enduring images of Operation Desert Storm. You’ve probably seen them. Hundreds of burnt vehicles littering a desolate road. Mangled […]
The post Is it a war crime to dislike Call of Duty Modern Warfare? appeared first on Quarter to Three.
I couldn’t tell you much about the national character of Finland. Unlike their Scandanavian neighbors, Finns don’t often express themselves in my preferred media of movies and videogames. Some of the world’s best and boldest filmmakers are from Denmark. Swedes have made some of my favorite videogames, and a couple of my favorite movies. Even […]
The post Finnish developer Remedy is finally at home with Control’s nightmare power fantasy appeared first on Quarter to Three.