Rory Wood
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COGConnectedLatest Reviews
Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom (called Shiness from here on out) makes a good first impression with many positive traits, showing less rough edges than many of its equally ambitious indie peers, that you’d be forgiven for believing it comes from a bigger studio at an early glance. Mixing the RPG genre with deep fighting game mechanics and environmental puzzles, Shiness is an impressive outing for developer Enigami. While the action started to feel a little repetitive as the adventure continued and some questionable design elements popped up, Shiness left me with a positive impression in the end.
The Legend of Zelda series is one I’ve always been fond of, less so for the stories (though some of them are great, too) but more so for the gameplay, puzzles, and sense of wonder. These aspects are especially prevalent in the original Legend of Zelda on NES as well as A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. After what I found to be a disappointing entry in Skyward Sword, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is an exciting and bold new step for the franchise and will forever change what gamers expect from a Zelda game moving forward.
If you’ve been following COGconnected’s coverage of Steep you’ll know that I enjoyed my time with the short beta that was released. I was eager to see how the game stood up after having more time to delve deeper into the full experience. I’ve always enjoyed a good winter extreme sports game with 1080 Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64, SSX 3 on PS2 and Amped 2 on the original Xbox being among my favorites. Believe it or not, it may be time for them to move over as Steep might just be the best winter extreme sports game yet. It lacks a few things I’d love to see patched in but overall, like the Christmas season it’s launching in, Steep brings me a kind of video game joy I long for.
Why beat around the bush? Battlefield 1 is the best Battlefield game in a long time. It’s got a surprisingly emotional and poignant single player campaign and the large scale multiplayer is fantastic – retaining it’s identity while making some smart changes to gameplay. By taking the genre back in time to World War 1, EA DICE has delivered one heck of an intense shooter and proves that sometimes the best way to move a franchise forward is to revisit the past.