Monthly Archives: October 2015

Thoughts: Tales From The Borderlands

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You might be wondering why, after the relatively superlative review of episodes 1 & 2 of The Walking Dead on here three years ago, you never saw a followup review of episodes 3 through 5. Or, indeed, any other Telltale adventure game. The answer is pretty simple: after doing a pretty stellar job of implementing a genuinely branching plotline and choices that felt like they really mattered, episode 3 of The Walking Dead revealed it all to be a sham as it hammered the reset button by killing off most of the characters who had been introduced in the previous two episodes.  After the various choices I’d made were revealed to be ultimately meaningless, and since TWD compromised pretty heavily on being an actual adventure game in order to try and maintain the illusion of those choices, this left a pretty bad taste in my mouth – I never played episodes 4 or 5 as I didn’t want to play it as a game, and once you took away the “choice” I didn’t think it was too hot narratively speaking either. There was nothing left to hook me in.

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Thoughts: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide

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Firaxis are a developer with a reputation for releasing expansion packs that dramatically improve their base game. Yes, you can say that this is partly because the base games tend to be broken, unbalanced or otherwise underwhelming in some way, but there’s no arguing that Civilization V was a much better game after Gods and Kings, and while Enemy Within added some flab in the form of Exalt it did wonders for the pacing and balancing of the XCOM campaign as a whole. They’re commendably committed to improving and expanding on their games post-launch; even so, the existence of the Rising Tide expansion pack for Civ-V-In-Space ‘em up Beyond Earth surprises me more than a little. There was so much wrong with Beyond Earth that I was convinced that this time around Firaxis would just tie a rock to it and let it sink rather than send good development money after bad.

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Thoughts: Destiny

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Destiny is one of the most stupefyingly average games I’ve ever played. But I cannot stop playing it.

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