Xbox One

Observer is a first-person cyberpunk game with a horror twist that quickly loses its appeal: the main horror scenes build an unbearable atmosphere but drag on for too long, repeating the same tricks over and over again. The game’s protagonist is a Polish police detective called Daniel Lazarski – played by Blade Runner’s Rutger Hauer – who, after receiving a mysterious …

After the series’ brief diversion in the high seas, Unity marks a return to what Assassin’s Creed has always excelled at: parkour inside famous churches. Building a new foundation for the series, based on more elaborate sidequests and freeform assassinations, the game mostly falters with its disappointing story that is too afraid to delve deep into the complicated politics of …

It’s great when things make sense. And it’s even greater when they also come together nicely, harmoniously. Charles, the snob, likes to call this a matter of “coherence” and “cohesion”, but you can call it whatever you want if you still pay your taxes and sometimes stop to take the time to see if all elements in a piece of …

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 …

Call of Duty WWII has the series returning to its roots but also once more playing too safe to be truly great. Offering a derivative campaign that fails at developing both its characters and themes, and a bunch of multiplayer modes that any series veteran will have already played hundreds of times, the game’s lack of ambition is the only …

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 …

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 …

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 …