Xbox 360

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 …

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 …

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag builds on the foundations of its predecessor to set its story in the Caribbean and put the focus on pirates and naval warfare. Black Flag’s many mistakes are old ones in the franchise, with the game being dragged down by clunky stealth, weak combat, a repetitive mission structure, and an underdeveloped story. The main character …

The Last Remnant is pure, crystalline perfection. Every facet of the game, every element, every design decision, they all work in unison to create the most excruciating experience possible. If you are looking for something that can annoy and infuriate you in equal measure, there’s no other option around that is so flawlessly, impeccably constructed to fulfill and even surpass …

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 …

Titanfall is an excellent example of the problem of restricting all modes of a game to online matches. After all, despite injecting into its worn-out genre new mechanics that finally renew and expand the possibilities of an FPS, Titanfall fails to develop them fully, limiting the player experience. The game’s story, which is told in an online campaign mode, is …

Developed by Platinum Games, Bayonetta is an action game that has an unusual heroine and a very engaging combat system. The action, however, is constantly interrupted by long cutscenes that tell a boring, barebones story. The main character, Bayonetta, suffers from amnesia, only knowing that she is an Umbra Witch – a European sect in collusion with demons that is …

After the Assassin’s Creed franchise became very successful, its producer Ubisoft adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year: they must make money while the iron is hot. It was inevitable, then, that the games would eventually show clear signs of a rushed development cycle, being devoid of any creative reason to exist. Assassin’s Creed Revelations is the first …