You have to spend hours crawling around, looking for lone enemies that you can gang up on and take out without raising the alarm – because there’s no way you’ll be able to fight everyone at the same time. To put it bluntly – it’s not fun, and Mutant doesn’t have anything else to offer. [Issue#235, p.46]

This should go down in textbooks on marketing as an example of how you can monetize the death of your own kid. [Issue#206, p.72]

JJ has to impale herself, burn herself alive and suffer all other kinds of mutilation in order to progress. Even when you get accustomed to that, The Missing keeps getting under your skin in many other ways. [Issue#234, p.62]

Kudos to Ubisoft for being brave enough to release a full-scale game focused on extreme sports – we definitely need more of these. Now for the bad news: like most Ubisoft games, at least half of the content is either superfluous, or underdeveloped. Only skiing and snowboarding are actually good, bikes are tolerable at best, and skydiving is just meh. [Issue#257, p.68]

Level design is overly convoluted. No matter where you’re going, the road will take so long you’re likely to forget why you were going there in the first place. Not to mention that the path is so rugged, no ordinary person would ever get there. So how do normal people live here (and they do, ostensibly)?[Issue#263, p.46]

Normally, the fact that you can’t play the campaign without another player would be a downside, but A Way Out is an experience that simply won’t work without a friend by your side. [Issue#229, p.66]

The levels are badly designed and uninspired, they don’t spark curiosity or desire to explore them – but you still have to, because new weapons and armor aren’t dropped by the enemies, they must be found in obscure spots scattered across the maps. [Issue#241, p.44]

Rogue Trader has some serious bad luck coming out so soon after Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a good story-driven game with meaningful choices, memorable characters, brutal battles and rich character-building system. But it’s hard to get into it after experiencing the colorful and user-friendly world of BG3. [Issue#263, p.72]

Defiant Development tried to kill three birds with one stone, but managed only to wound one – namely, deck-building concept of Hand of Fate is a quite interesting experiment. But instead of polishing it, developers spent their time chasing after the other two avians – combat and trap-filled mazes. [April 2015, p.71]

There’s a lot of little details that reflect your past choices. You won’t notice them the first time around, of course, but you may very well miss them on subsequent playthroughs – they’re worked into narrative that well. On the flipside, we have same old shortcomings: worn-out engine and QTEs that serve no purpose but to check if the player is still there. [Issue#220, p.67]

DiRT is making a comeback after getting rid of both Ken Blok and dubious car acrobatics. Instead, we get more of classic rally, rallycross, as well as some questionable disciplines like Landrush. [Issue#221, p.74]

Limbic Entertainment just took the reins of the series, so they didn’t change much, but when they did – they made the gameplay better and more diverse. [Issue#237, p.32]

Beneath simplistic puzzles there is a story so heart-touching it’s hard not to get misty-eyed. [Issue#221, p.77]

It’s not as memorable or unique as some of its predecessors, but incredibly detailed open world makes Hope County a destination worth visiting. [Issue#229, p.46]

Apart from laggy menu and modest graphics, UFC 4 is a good finale to the series’ run on current generation of consoles. [Issue#248, p.48]

Simple yet nuanced mechanic, short multiplayer games – it’s all tuned to let you become top dog of financial world once or twice after coming home from work. But OTC’s simplicity is also its shortcoming: there are too few goods to trade. Black market adds a touch of chaos, so no game goes like the previous one – but it would be great if OTC got a sequel that’s similar but at the same time more complex. [Issue#209, p.84]

Pixel games are not everyone's cup of tea, but Olija looks quite good. It’ll be a good fit for people who miss games where you can help those in need, or simply want to challenge their reflexes. [Issue#252, p.53]

A playthrough of Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments leaves little negative emotions. There could be much more positive ones of course, but perhaps that’s a goal that’ll be reached in the next episode. After all, we really are talking about the most rapidly progressing modern quest series. [Dec 2014, p.70]

Outlaw is a throwback to the roots of spacesim genre, a visual aid that shows where it all began and helps to understand just how far the genre has evolved since then. And the lesson to take is this: let the past stay in the past. [Issue#241, p.40]

More dull character for interactive drama is difficult to imagine. The LiS world is documentarily trivial, and the college, where Miss Caulfield will be studying managed to gather all the clichés from American movies for young adults: guys from sport team, kids with rich parents, nerds of all kinds... There is only one thing that is going to crush local routine: Max, for some unknown reason, is able to control time. [Issue #195, p.76]

Great parkour, gory combat, improved story and beautifully detailed open world make Dying Light 2 the best game of the last few months and a very strong contender in game of the year race. [Issue#258, p.38]

Humankind offers a fresh take on historical 4X strategy genre, with a lot of creativity thrown in, but the team sorely lacks a lead designer who could tie everything together. So even though each innovation is really cool on its own, the whole turned out to be less than the sum of its parts. [Issue#255, p.40]

Since you can’t have more than a dozen units at any time and defensive buildings can only be placed in pre-determined spots, your tactical options are extremely limited – and no matter what you choose, you’ll end up playing whack-a-mole with enemy troops. [Issue#231, p.72]

If you extensively use time powers, battles will be quick and colorful – but Quantum Break doesn’t actually encourage that playstyle. Even on the highest difficulty, only one enemy type requires you to teleport around; everyone else can be killed with standard cover shooter routines. What’s even worse is that there’s a considerable lag between the button press and actual use of the ability, which further discourages playing fast and loose. [Issue#208, p.68]

To be honest The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II rather looks like a decent add-on than a sequel. But is this so important given that the game is still interesting just enough to keep us entertained till final credits? [September 2014, p. 60]

One step forward, two steps back, couple steps to the side with some awkward shuffling thrown in-between – that’s how Back 4 Blood feels compared to Left 4 Dead. Card-based power-up system is the only interesting thing about it. [Issue#256, p.40]

If you think that Expeditions is just Snowrunner without emphasis on trucks – you are correct, more or less. It also has pretty much the same problems, including collision physics. But considering the perpetual drought in the genre, we’re going to play it nevertheless. [Issue#263, p.58]

It would be wrong to consider World of Tanks Xbox 360 Edition as repetition or a simplified copy of the PC-version. Wargaming West made a little miracle and slipped between Scylla and Charybdis: depth of gameplay is not inferior to the original game, it looks fresh and dynamic to appeal to the habits of console players. [September 2014, p. 76]