The Sword of Shannara, a fantasy novel written by Terry Brooks, tells a classic, derivative story that is marred by repetition and an unwillingness to detach itself from its greatest inspiration: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. The protagonist is Shea, a half-elf who one day receives a visit from a mysterious Druid, called Allanon, who …

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker boasts a unique art style – a wondrous cel-shaded look that simulates a cartoon – and a great story – with the best antagonist in the series to date –, but it is sadly bogged down by some uninspired dungeon design and an overly repetitive structure that focus too much on combat. The …

City of Blades – the second book in The Divine Cities trilogy written by Robert Jackson Bennett – manages to easily surpass its already great predecessor. The novel offers a complicated discussion on the problem of soldiering, juxtaposing the idealized purpose of the military with its real one in a narrative tinged with blood and violence, but also deeply melancholic. …

Tails Noir (formerly known as Backbone) is a strange point-and-click adventure. Its story moves from one extreme to the other too fast, going from dabbling into complete cliché material to “holy hell, what’s going on” after a single twist. However, it never commits to both approaches, abandoning important elements for the twist while also not giving it time to breathe. The …

Pierre, the purist, doesn’t like change. Every day, he cooks two boiled eggs with three crispy strips of bacon for breakfast, with just a touch of honey, because this was the way his late mother did it when he was little. He takes comfort in the repetition, in the idea that things can persevere, remaining the same, unspoiled by the …

Here’s the thing about repetition: it’s an ambivalent element. On the one hand, it’s the ultimate learning tool, commonly used by tiny humans, called children, to mimic big humans, called adults, to discover how to act and behave in life. It’s how humans of all sizes learn how to speak a language, how to write, how to build objects and …

Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel written by Ernest Cline, uses the vastness of the geek universe to compose the base of its narrative without capturing a fraction of its wonder. The book is plagued by one-dimensional characters and fails to deliver anything more than glorified references. The story takes place in a decrepit society dominated by mega-corporations, where hunger, …

Super Mario Odyssey is a marvelous achievement, not only successfully moving the series back to its sandbox structure, but also expanding it in exciting new ways. It’s a game brimming with energy and creativity, one that fully develops its many ideas and lets the player free to explore its fascinating worlds packed with things to do and discover. The story …

The first book in The Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, is an epic fantasy novel that wears its inspirations on its sleeve – even to a fault: its story is clearly based on Arthurian legends and The Lord of the Rings, but it’s Tolkien who most shackles Robert Jordan’s novel. The Eye of the World shines …

The ambition of Assassin’s Creed III is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available for the player is certainly impressive, since in one moment we will be bombarding ships during a storm on the high seas and, in the next, we will be hunting foxes with hand-made traps in …