The Games Machine's Scores

  • Games
For 2,656 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 71% higher than the average critic
  • 7% same as the average critic
  • 22% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Game review score: 79
Highest review score: 99 Baldur's Gate 3
Lowest review score: 30 Dino Dini's Kick Off Revival
Score distribution:
2658 game reviews
    • 71 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Astroneer is a survival space simulator that offers a rich and colourful experience based on some interesting game mechanics.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Transference is an extremely interesting experiment and it succeeds in mixing the movie and videogame components. The use of audio will keep you on the edge, and a few jump scare work very well. However, the constant feeling of tension ends up holding the narrative back, as a greater variety of emotions would have benefitted the overall experience. Transference is remarkably short for a videogame, which might disappoint many players.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    After nearly 14 years Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz is still an entertaining piece of software despite some minor flaws.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Elderand is a successful metroidvania take which adds nothing to the genre, but enhances what we are used to see in these games. The only drawback is a lack of action in the first minutes, but then the game starts to get interesting.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    9th Dawn Remake is an action RPG with very simple gameplay, in which all you have to do is move and click, that manages to offer great complexity thanks to the huge choice of weapons, builds, and companions ready to help us out in battle. Dungeon crawlers lowers will find everything they want, from secret passages to hidden treasure chests, scattered along a vast and pleasant world to visit with various side quests. The Vampire Survivors-style fishing is a nice little touch, and the whole production drips love from every pixel. Too bad most of the monsters are quite anonymous, bosses included.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    From the incception to the core mechanics, Hypergun is a colorful and fast roguelite FPS, with a neon aesthetic and a great sense of humour.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Catherine: Full Body is a quite perfect match on the Nintendo Switch and it's still an entertaining and original adventure-puzzle experience.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    An intriguing adventure with noir overtones and 100% Japanese madness, featuring an intriguing story involving a team of super-detectives, an unscrupulous multinational corporation remotely reminiscent of Resident Evil's Umbrella Corporation, and a protagonist whose past and future are shrouded in a thick blanket of mystery.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Smallands: Survive the Wilds is an open world survival that puts us in the shoes of an insect-sized creature struggling with a wild world teeming with dangers, managing to instill a certain sense of unease when battling ants, cockroaches and various beetles. Basic resources are fairly common, but to get the more valuable ones you have to grind a little bit and fight, with an overall above-average difficulty. The tiny character is charismatic, and the same can be said for the NPCs, and the story reserves some surprises, to be discovered little by little as you progress through the game, alone or in company.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Touken Ranbu Warriors features a combat system which virtually would allow to complete all missions just using, in addition to the directional stick, a single button. Acting this way, however, you would miss the soul of the entire musou and its myriad of lethal and spectacular attacks performed by charismatic characters. Although the official plan is restoring the normal course of history, the real one is to unlock all the combos to try them out on the field and slaughter the poor, unfortunate enemies. Thanks to its breathtaking onslaughts at the price of a simple gameplay, fans of this kind of products will love it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Daring missions with all odds stacked against us, that’s the exciting essence of Sumerian Six. The deveolper Artificer is not quite yet at the level of quality Mimimi Games got us used to, but I can already see a lot of good in this game.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Easy to learn, difficult to master: OkunoKA is a good platform game with a nice art direction.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    An awesome, compelling but repetitive rogue-lite shoot ‘em up with a lot of enemies to kill, and a comic-style story to discover, game after game.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Curse of the Dead Gods is a roguelike hack'n'slash with fast-paced action, and an immediate but also very deep combat system.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    The Switch version of Gekido Advance is a pretty good title, especially considering the price. The Italian NAPS team added a bunch of stuff and new content that will be appreciated by everyone, even by fans that played the original release.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Branded by many as an announced disaster, Sonic Frontiers proves instead to be a chapter full of content and a lot of fun. It is not free from technical problems, however less heavy than one could imagine, but it represents the ideal bridge between the past and the future of the famous SEGA mascot.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Generally, the fun curve of managerial games starts to go downhill when we have learned to gather resources, build facilities, and research technologies in the right sequence. At that point everything becomes routine and we are no longer surprised by anything. Undead Inc. manages to keep the interest a little longer thanks to various unlockable content but mostly because it touches on a hot topic in recent times, and earning billions on the lives of patients proves sadistically fascinating. Those who enjoyed Fallout Shelter will love this variation set in the cruel world of speculative medicine.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Winter's family nightmare comes to an end in this first and last DLC for Resident Evil Village, that delivers a new, short but intriguing story for Rose, the third person view option and a bunch of Mercenaries mode contents. Unmissable if you want to bite another chunk of meat from Capcom's latest horror.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    The Stone of Madness is a stealth adventure set in an 18th-century monastery-psychiatric hospital. Players lead a group of troubled characters, each with unique abilities and phobias that affect gameplay. The Commandos-like approach requires cunning to overcome guards and obstacles by capitalizing on cooperation among team members. The beautifully reconstructed monastery oozes Gothic eeriness, while the plot explores the cruelty of religious institutions of the time. Despite a few technical flaws, the game offers a compelling experience for fans of the genre, who have been on a diet lately; almost starving I would say.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Last Epoch is an isometric hack and slash RPG that is graphically well crafted but most importantly accessible to a non-hardcore audience. You can progress without much difficulty and dying does not bring particular penalty as seen in soulslike. The few trivial starting classes can generate thousands of different builds through specializations, crafting, perks, and talents to be assigned in the skill tree. Story as always plays a marginal role, but the introduction of time travel will make wandering through the same regions in various eras interesting. Endgame management will determine long-term success, but at the moment it is an RPG worth trying.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    The Ballad Singer is an interactive book made video game. The game developed by Curtel Games is not for everyone, but it sure is incredibly rich and deep.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Project Warlock is a fast-paced, fun and challenging old-school FPS, with a hint of RPG mechanics.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    FORM takes us to another world, halfway between dream and metaphysics. The developers nail the feeling of interacting with every object in the game and present us with interesting puzzles. It is too short, though, more akin to a demo or a concept than a full game.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Samba de Amigo: Party Central is the classic game that you would hardly start to play solo, but which cannot be missed at a New Year's Eve, a birthday, or any house party. We challenge each other to see who is the best dancer, we make fun of who gets all the steps wrong, we laugh, have fun and sweat. Then, after the fiesta, you probably put it away until the next opportunity. The virtual maracas work very well and do not suffer from any input lag, and the only perplexity at the moment concerns the playlist which does not include many Latin hits or many famous songs.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    A "more of the same" that will surely not disappoint fans of the series. Even if some small novelties can be glimpsed, Trine 5 does not change the cards on the table that much and offers the classic mix of platforming and physics-based environmental puzzles. Very pleasant to play in single player but even more fun in co-op, but the series is starting to feel the need for real evolution.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    A very particular compilation, which collects the remakes of the two main stories of Layers of Fear, together with the two DLCs of the first chapter (one of which is unpublished) and a totally new adventure that binds everything together. The Unreal Engine 5 gives us genuinely terrifying settings and atmospheres and the "package" guarantees many hours of thrills but also manages to arouse emotions other than simple fear.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    When you want to get rid quickly of level bosses just so you can get back to running down ramps and trampolines, there is something amiss with the balance of the game. And this is exactly the issue with Solar Ash: common enemies aren’t a big threat and boss battles break the flow, and not a in a great way. Exploring the game's bizarre worlds, on the other hand, is extremely fun, and requires above average amounts of skill and timing. If you are looking for a fast-paced 3D action platformer that also offers a good story, Solar Ash is a solid choice.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms is an action RPG that takes the graphical style of Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity and enriches it with a much more challenging than average combat system, making any button mashing-centric approach futile and forcing us to use, for once, all the skills the game makes available. Although all the typical RPG elements have been included, a certain sparingness has been used in the variety of options so as not to scare off those who do not like to get lost in hundreds of statistics, making sword skill more important than the skill point placed on a given feature.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    With its unique system of buying perks with hit points, Revita can reward the ones who dare or punish the reckless ones. A twin shooter roguelike in which to experiment in search of the best powerup combos, fast paced and suitable both for those who want to try and try once more for the perfect speed run, and for those looking for a game to play in short sessions, almost in a casual way. Unfortunately, bad luck can be a decisive factor when it comes to success or defeat, since only a handful of the more than two hundred available upgrades are real gamechangers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    An engaging story and a disturbing atmosphere are the best features in this game that recalls the gameplay style of classics 90s survival horror. A repetitive combat and bland stealth elements drop its overall value.

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