PS3

This review contains spoilers. The Last of Us is a competent post-apocalyptic zombie game about a troubled, violent man making troubled, violent decisions. It may never quite manage to successfully integrate its gameplay systems into the story, which leans too heavily on the clichés of the genre, but still offers a carefully built nihilist narrative and a couple of memorable …

Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s most famous work, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game that fails to harness its own potential. While its main story is hopeless, being shallow, repetitive, and contrived, when it comes to gameplay, it actually presents a great new idea even if it keeps sabotaging it at every turn. Shadow of Mordor’s story takes …

“When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor” – Paulo Freire. Dragon Age II is a rare type of RPG: instead of offering an epic, episodic adventure, filled with exotic people and wondrous locales to explore, it has a single, almost barren location and a thematically focused story. Its reused assets and simple …

Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, the 3D remake of the GBA title Chain of Memories, is a strange, disjointed, complex beast. It continues the story of Sora directly from where the first game left off, but with even more bizarre characters and plotlines, while introducing a new combat system that is as cumbersome and it’s unbalanced. The story starts with …

Narrative-wise, God of War: Ascension is as redundant a prequel as the PSP games, bringing a story that adds absolutely no new layer to its protagonist’s struggles. It follows the series’ formula closely, maintaining a sense of scope and epicness by providing exciting and grandiose set pieces, but ultimately falls short on purpose: Kratos will do incredible things once again, …

The first attempt at bringing the God of War series into a portable system was not very successful. Chains of Olympus suffered with a shallow story that only became interesting near the finish line and an equally shallow combat system that further reduced the complexity of mechanics that were never originally complicated to begin with. Ghost of Sparta, then, represents …

The God of War franchise’s success is largely based on the spectacle it provides. The first three main titles boasted huge environments that contained titans, monsters, and gods fighting epic battles while the protagonist, Kratos, was dismembering his enemies and shouting in fury. But they also tried to add to the combat system with each installment, either with new weapons …

One of the most important elements of a game – or any other piece of art – is its consistency. It’s important to observe how its various elements connect with each other: whether they work together to expand the core ideas being discussed or end up contradicting one another, diminishing the overall impact of the experience. There is even a …

Assassin’s Creed Rogue is Black Flag with a new coat of paint. Offering the same systems and overall structure, it shares similar problems to its predecessor: it’s shallow, bloated, and repetitive. Its story follows suit, showing some promise at the beginning, but quickly falling into similar pitfalls, packed with one-dimensional characters that have little to say about anything. The story …

God of War III is all about spectacle. During the visually impressive intro, Kratos is tearing his enemies apart on the back of a titan who, in turn, is climbing Mount Olympus and battling a gigantic aquatic creature controlled by Poseidon. The camera is constantly moving in and out of the action to display how the scope is now even …