Recent reviews by Angel of Mercy

If you know ThatGameCompany, you can guess at the sort of MMO they would make. It's cosy, it's relaxing even when the rest of the world is not, and it's pretty fun.

I think the best word for Nightingale is 'promising' - it's not a great survival game, it's a survival game with a lot of promise. I do enjoy it, for the most part, between server issues - I think I see connection errors more often than I see the next realm I was trying to reach - but I am hoping the offline mode will help with that.

Nightingale is early access in every sense of the phrase; it's unfinished, it's buggy (99% of that is server issues) at times, but what is there is a lot of fun when you actually get to play it.

With a few exceptions, this is a fairly gentle game of solving a mystery. There are a few ways to die (letting your autopilot fly through the sun, for example) and one type of hostile enemy (I didn't cope well with the many hungry angler fish) but the game is based on a 22-minute loop anyway and even dying can help teach you about the world you are playing in. With a persistent database of knowledge and rumours, you will always be nudged forward once you have started to explore.

If I had one gripe, it would be this; there's not much replay value. Despite the skill-based puzzles, the true goal of the game is collecting knowledge. Once I finished it, there was no more mystery to explore. There is one path to the end, one route, and each loop you play just brings you closer to it. All I can do now is chase the achievements and find the exotic deaths.

This is a silly game.

If you want gritty moral choices and challenging gameplay, look elsewhere. Just Cause 4 is like Just Cause 3, a game of blowing things up, driving cars off bridges and overblown villains. The main differences here seem to be better graphics and dialling the 80s action-hero tropes up to 11, but that's hardly a criticism.
I get that some people are not looking for a game where you can attach weather balloons to cows, where the protagonist does not hum Ride of the Valkyries as he flies a helicopter, where you can't walk into the music video for Take On Me.

If you can embrace the silliness though, it is great fun.

This game has potential, but I'm not sure it's there quite yet. Early access is always going to be a risk, but I think this is one I'll have to come back after a hardware upgrade and a little more development time. The parkour is a little clunky compared to a bigger budget game like Mirror's Edge, the storytelling is indie, but it's not a bad game.

Play the demo, make up your own mind.

This is the kind of game you pick up because it's cheap, giving it a shot because 'why not?' at that price. It's not a gritty dystopian tale from award winning writers, nor a ground-breaking experience with unique mechanics. It's just cute and engaging, something you suddenly notice you can't say of half the games you have been playing recently.

What more do you need?

I loved this game. Some people said it was too short, but I think it was just concise. It told a good story, it told it well and it never tried to be just another FPS.

If you are looking for a shooting game, look elsewhere. This is free-running done in a way I never really thought a PC game could do. It might have been a disappointment to people whose expectations were a little off, but this is really an under-appreciated classic of the AAA world.