Welcome to the list of GamerSushi’s Reviews! Kick back, relax and check out what we have to say about these video games. If you have any questions about our review system, be sure to check out the grade chart!
Review: Sleeping Dogs
When a game originally starts its life as part of the True Crime series and gets dropped by its publisher in advance of its release, it doesn’t bode that well. Such was the case for Sleeping Dogs, until Square Enix swopped in and scooped up the rights to bring the game to the public, saving United Front’s Hong Kong-based open world game from development hell.
Starring the enigmatic Wei Shen as an undercover police officer infiltrating a local Triad gang, Sleeping Dogs takes the melee combat style popularized by the Batman: Arkham titles and mixes it with some familiar open-world tropes and in a brazen move, refuses to give the player a gun for the first few hours. Sleeping Dogs takes a lot of risks for what should be a safe bet in the video game world. Does the game succeed or is its cover blown?
Review: Wreck-It Ralph
We primarily review games here on GamerSushi, but every now and then, a movie comes out that appeals to the gamer zeitgeist enough that it deserves a review of its own. While Wreck-It Ralph, the new animated feature from Disney isn’t based on a video game, it has more than enough video game references that it practically screams for attention from the gamer community. Which we are granting with this review.
Wreck-It Ralph is the story of Ralph, voiced by John C. Reilly who is the villain in a Donkey Kong-like arcade game called Fix-It Felix. Ralph’s job in his game is to smash the windows of a tall building and then climb to the top, throwing bricks at Felix as he tries to fix the windows and reach the top, saving the residents of the building from Ralph’s destructive rage. Once Felix has done so, Ralph is summarily tossed off the building into the muddy ground below while Felix is awarded a medal. After 30 years of this, Ralph is fed up with his lot in life. He is ostracized by Felix and the residents, resigned to living in a nearby dump (literally) with nothing but bricks as his bed. He longs to be a hero, but as his support group of video game villains tells him, that’s just not possible. Continue reading Review: Wreck-It Ralph
Review: Assassin’s Creed 3
The most appealing aspect of the Assassin’s Creed series is the ability to experience different periods of human history through a sci-fi wrapper. Thanks to the prolonged presence of Renaissance Italy’s Ezio Auditore, the need to travel to a different era was reaching a high. Thankfully for Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft moved the clock up a few hundred years, dropping you in Revolutionary America in the moccasins of Connor Kenway (real name Ratonhnhaké:ton) a half-Mohawk, half-British assassin.
With a new setting, a new engine and the possibility of wrapping up the modern day storyline of Desmond Miles, Assassin’s Creed 3 seemed poised to make the same sort of leap that the series did with Assassin’s Creed 2 back in 2009. Did Ubisoft manage to pull it off, and can Connor replace the venerable Ezio? Continue reading Review: Assassin’s Creed 3
Review: Spec Ops: The Line
War games are a dime a dozen in the video game industry, but rarely do they make you think about the decisions you’re making as a virtual soldier. Go here, do that; it’s all very clean-cut and morally upright. But as anyone who’s read a post-war memoir or has watched a good film, or talked to a real solider might know, war isn’t so neat. It’s messy, brutal and even if you somehow managed not to get physically injured, there’s a whole host of psychological scars.
The other trope of video game wars is that you’re usually a low-ranked grunt, a Private or at most a Sergeant, someone who’s important on the field of battle but isn’t calling the shots. Spec Ops: The Line puts you in the boots of Captain Martin Walker, a Delta Force operator leading a small three-man fire team into the ruins of a sandstorm ravaged Dubai. You’re hot on the heels of one Colonel Konrad, the commander of the Damned 33rd and the person who was supposed to be evacuating the citizens of Dubai. Can Spec Ops: The Line make it through this hot washup? Continue reading Review: Spec Ops: The Line
Review: Borderlands 2
2009’s Borderlands was an interesting animal back when it released. A mishmash of RPG and FPS with a lot of loot thrown in, it stayed aloft mostly on a wing and a prayer. It was a little bland in its environmental design, the story lacked any real payoff, and it was too easy to break the various classes available to you. That said, it was fresh and unique and had an excellent crop of post-release DLC to keep it in people’s minds.
Three years later, Gearbox is taking another crack at it. With more polish, more PC options and even more guns, does Borderlands 2 hold even more for gamers or does it deserve to be sold as vendor trash? Continue reading Review: Borderlands 2
Review: Mark of the Ninja
Klei Entertainment is known for making 2D games with a really refined art style that are sadly a little lacking in the gameplay. While Shank and Shank 2 were by no means bad games, they were beset by a bit of monotony and a lack of polish in some of the fighting.
Mark of the Ninja is trying a completely different track, though, eschewing the over-the-top action of the Shank games and putting you in the tabi cloth of a ninja, one who has been gifted (cursed?) with an ever-growing collection of mystical tattoos which grant him great powers at the cost of his sanity. Can Klei make the transition from brutal violence to the beauty of a well-timed stealth kill? Continue reading Review: Mark of the Ninja
Review: Max Payne 3
After Remedy moved on to Alan Wake, Rockstar was left holding the bag for the Max Payne franchise, having published the first two games in the series for consoles. Instead of bringing on a developer with experience in the third-person shooter genre, Rockstar decided to tackle Max Payne 3 themselves. If I’m being kind, the shooting in the Grand Theft Auto games and Red Dead Redemption were passable, mainly because there were so many other things to do in those games that you could kind of work around it. Max Payne, however, is all about the shooting. The normal shooting, the slow-motion shooting, and the slow-motion-diving-backwards-down-a-flight-of-stairs-it’s-so-bad-ass shooting.
Developed by Rockstar Vancouver and written by Dan Houser with a serious case of Man on Fire envy, does Max Payne 3 deliver the same pill-popping thrills the series is known for? Continue reading Review: Max Payne 3
Review: Journey
Thatgamecompany has a history of making games that bend the rules of what we traditionally associate with games, and their last PlayStation exclusive, Journey is no exception.
For the uninitiated, Journey is a two-ish hour adventure that features a unique twist on co-op: you can see you partner, and he can see you, but you can’t talk to each other, or even send PSN messages. All you can do is do little chirps at one another. Sounds strange right? It might sound even stranger that this foundation makes for one of the most emotionally resonant experiences in modern gaming. Let’s get to it. Continue reading Review: Journey
Review: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
A yearly release schedule is a tough notion for any game, let alone one as deep and time-consuming as Assassin’s Creed. We were all pleasantly surprised to get Brotherhood so shortly after Assassin’s Creed 2, but the prospect of Revelations seemed to burn a lot of people out.
Focusing on the later years of Ezio Auditore’s life, the game moves out of Renaissance Italy to Constantinople where Ezio tries to find the keys he needs to get into a secret vault built by Altair, the assassin from the original game. Throwing in new gameplay concepts and an upgraded multiplayer mode, does Revelations deliver or does it fall flat like so many missed Leaps of Faith? Continue reading Review: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
Review: Xenoblade Chronicles
Hardcore games on the Wii have been few and far between lately. Despite Nintendo’s proclamations that their next system will focus on hardcore games before casual, it still took a massive online campaign to get the Big N to release Monolith’s epic JRPG, Xenoblade Chronicles, in the United States. Now that they have, was it worth the wait? Continue reading Review: Xenoblade Chronicles