HIGH The last monster is a doozy.

LOW Having to do a boss fight six times because of an AI glitch.

WTF Is that a wading pool full of dentures?

Despite what feelings they might have about a Little Nightmares they didn’t make, the developers at Tarsier should be proud that they created a franchise with vibes so iconic that it’s possible for another studio to make something that is so instantly recognizable as Little Nightmares.

For all of its flaws, no one can make the argument that Little Nightmares 3 doesn’t feel like Little Nightmares. It hits all of the important franchise beats – there are creepily adorable main characters, an oppressive, oversized world, and monstrous entities wholly focused on the heroes’ demise.

What it lacks, by comparison, is a sense that these elements meld together to form a whole — because right now, Little Nightmares 3 feels more like a series of levels than a coherent experience.

Set in a horrible dreamworld recognizable to anyone who’s played any of the others in the franchise, LN3 follows children on a journey through four distinct worlds — a necropolis, a dusty wasteland where birds are slaughtered, a disgusting candy factory and a Dark Carnival where the displays are as upsetting as the attendees. Finally things move to a final level that I won’t reveal, save to say that it is seemingly tied closely to the series’ oblique mythology.

Hopefully one of my major issues is clear based on the list of levels I just outlined – namely that LN3 has no coherent flow to its progression.

While individual levels might have a sense of rising action – players invariably meet that level’s threat about a quarter of the way through and then have to deal with three further encounters before vanquishing it or making good their escape – there’s never a sense that an overall tale is being told. Low, the lead character, has a map that he consults before using his powers to teleport to new areas, but what these areas have to do with one another, or the goal he’s attempting to eventually reach never become clear. At the end of the adventure, I was left with more questions than answers.

To its credit, on a moment-to-moment basis LN3 works well. The puzzles are cleverly designed and clearly laid out, and the AI is good enough so that if a player doesn’t have a live co-op partner, they should have no trouble completing the many two-person objectives. I played most of the campaign in single-player mode, and almost never found myself getting stuck because the computer partner was too slow or confused about what to do.

That said, LN3 really does play better when two live players are involved, and it’s delightful being able to speed things along by having two people working on puzzle elements simultaneously. As such, it makes the lack of single-screen co-op feel like an oversight. There are a few locations when two characters have to separate, but they’re few and far between, and the success of things like It Takes Two and Split Fiction have proven that split-screens work just fine. At least they aren’t forcing players to buy two copies – as long as the host has a copy of LN3, their co-op partner can simply download the demo and play with a Friend’s Pass.

In a large sense, I don’t have many complaints about Little Nightmares 3. Each new area is beautifully realized, the monsters are scary, and the skin-of-the-teeth escapes are as thrilling as one would hope. However, as I closed in on the end, I couldn’t help but feel that it all felt vaguely hollow. It’s definitely a Little Nightmares title, but it never feels like it has anything to say, or that it’s building to something profound. Even the ending was underwhelming, although given that it has to be compared to the sadistic gut punch in Little Nightmares 2, that was probably always going to be the case.

Little Nightmares 3 might be the least of the trilogy so far, but anyone who wants to have a new experience in its horribly bleak and oppressive world will still find this a great opportunity to do so — it just doesn’t come together as darkly perfect as it should.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco. It currently available on PC/PS5/XBS-X/SW. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. 2 hours were spent in Multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, and it features Violence and Blood & Gore. This is a disturbing world full of violent imagery, but it’s presented in such a cartoony and grotesque way that I suspect even younger teens won’t find it excessive. Be prepared to be haunted by some of these creatures, though. That will happen.

Colorblind Modes: The game does contain colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which can be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Little Nightmares 3 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

2003’s Manhunt is a brutal, gritty title that occupies a strange place in Rockstar’s catalog as something that should be considered the company’s best work, yet it remains overshadowed by their own mega-hit franchises. This bleak, uncompromising meditation on the nature of voyeurism questioned the player’s participation in horrific bloodshed, and has since become something of a cult title — and PIGFACE is certainly one of its descendants.

Set in a post-industrial wasteland, PIGFACE places players in the role of a woman with a bomb in her head. Faceless handlers have assigned her to murder members of a drug-dealing gang across a handful of locations, and what little characterization the game offers has those same handlers shocked by how little pushback they receive from their living weapon – almost as if she’s as much down for all the murder as the people playing the game. The gameplay is as basic as the graphics – this looks like a Quake-era experience and feels like gritty, vicious shooters of that time, back when most titles were developed by a handful of people and when it was easier to smuggle bizarre and extreme content into even major titles.

After choosing a mission, the player picks their loadout from a decent arsenal – but in a twist that feels strange for an FPS (and may have been inherited from Manhunt) the player can only bring a single ranged weapon. This creates a bit of awkwardness, as the player is asked to decide on a playstyle before they have a sense of what the level is like, and pre-mission the briefings are not particularly voluminous. So, there’s often nothing to do but guess whether a sniper rifle or a shotgun is better for any given area, and if that doesn’t pan out, they can hope to snag a more appropriate weapon off of a dead body somewhere along the way.

The strange part is that for a game seemingly built around experimentation and taking chances, the developers punish players harshly for mistakes. Any time they fail a mission, a steep financial penalty is incurred. While guns only have to be bought once and ammo is free, healing syringes cost money, ensuring that if a player fails a particularly difficult level more than a couple of times, they’ll be forced to try again with even fewer resources, and consequently, less chance of success.

Enemy AI is also a little on the spare side at this point. I’m sure it’s a difficult to balance and all of the enemies can be best described as drug-addled wastrels, but they were remarkably unobservant and unresponsive whenever violence kicked off — enemies will watch a guard’s head get blown off with a sniper rifle, shrug, and then get right back to their patrol seconds later. Setting off explosives or blasting away with a machine gun might attract reinforcements, or it might not – enemies were largely unpredictable in an ‘is the AI broken and not responding to triggers?‘ kind of way.

Still, there’s plenty to be optimistic about here. The violence is every bit as brutal and upsetting as one would hope given PIGFACE’s obvious inspiration. There are huge blood spatters with every shot, and enemies scramble around and scream as they’re injured, making the whole thing feel doubly unpleasant.

This unpleasantness also permeates every bit of the world. Every room is full of trash and dirty needles. The player is asked to shut down drug factories, and all they find are a few drums and jars crudely linked together with hoses and tape. This game is about the absolute lowest-tier of criminal being executed by an assassin who lives in a dingy one-room apartment next to a set of elevated train tracks. It’s a celebration of the grindhouse aesthetic and seemingly pointless violence – although as the story gets developed in later updates, that might well change.

PIGFACE is in a rough Early Access state at the moment, with inconsistent enemies and no real narrative to speak of. I don’t expect the graphics to get any better – the low-end look is the point — and it’s a clear throwback to a rougher, more brutal past. Anyone lamenting that we never got a Manhunt 3 will find a lot to love here.

Assuming gameplay is rebalanced and more levels are added – I beat all five in just under an hour – this is extremely promising. Hopefully the devs manage to turn it into a more complete experience, as games this heartlessly brutal are few and far between.

Or maybe this kind of game being rare is a good thing? I’ll let history be the judge.

The post PIGFACE Preview appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The payoff of the ‘rare scrap collector’ storyline.

LOW Locking quests by accidentally moving the plot forward.

WTF So we’re just not going to explain the zombie robots?

In an age of bloated development and enormous open-world maps, I can’t remember the last time I got to the end of a game and found myself thinking wait… is that all there is? So, if nothing else, at least Robots at Midnight found an exciting new way to disappoint.

I’m being glib, of course. As a 3D action-adventure with Souls-inspired combat, there’s plenty to like about Robots at Midnight. However, the further I got into the experience, the more I found myself thinking that this couldn’t possibly be the whole game that the developers set out to make.

Set in the distant future after all life on earth has been wiped out by some kind of an electrical event, the player controls a teenage girl who was thrown into twenty years of stasis to protect her from rogue bots. She’s now awake and has a chance to explore the rusted-out and overgrown remains of an extremely small section of the world’s surface. There are only four distinct areas in the adventure, with each one featuring the same basic threats as the one before it.

As with most titles that broadly fit into the soulslike format – explore a wrecked location, kill enemies with mostly melee combat, reset monsters at campfires – there’s not much content here other than combat, and it’s extremely simple combat at that. Robots at Midnight‘s fighting involves locking onto enemies and using basic combos, then blocking when enemies attack or parrying to stagger them and set them up for a vicious counterattack. There’s an arsenal of weapons, but they don’t have major differences — just variations in damage, attack speed, and stamina usage while performing the same set of attacks.

Over the course of the adventure, the player can unlock three special techniques that offer concrete combat advantages. The first is a super punch that interrupts any enemy attack, ragdolling even bosses. The second is a laser blast that’s perfect for wiping out groups of foes, and the last is a ‘super-parry’ with timing so fiddly that I rolled credits before getting the hang of it — although Robots at Midnight‘s extremely brief running time was a factor in that.

To the game’s credit, it has some genuinely interesting creature design. All of the killer robots have seen better days — decades without humans to run the factories that make their parts have left them struggling to cobble together whatever repairs they can. These robots don’t fight with high-tech energy blades, they stumble around with nailbats and clubs built from bundles of rebar they’ve crudely welded together. The fact that the enemies are barely holding it together reinforces that this is a world on the edge of collapse. This precarity is only heightened by the titular midnight. It’s not just what comes after 11:59 PM, it’s also when a horrible beam of red energy sweeps across the planet and gremlins reanimate all of the robot corpses, turning them into mindless killing machines – moreso than they already were, anyway.

Which brings me to the most frustrating part of the experience – just how underexplained the story is.

There are a lot of strange elements here – the aforementioned zombie robots, a robot cult that worships the light beam, a leather-clad robot who ultimately serves as the main villain… even for a Souls-inspired game, Robots at Midnight does a terrible job of explaining any of these pieces. The main character is very interested in figuring out what’s going on the in world – she just never has the chance to do so.

Robots at Midnight is promising, and if this were an Early Access title, I’d be excited to see where it’s going. The combat is solid (if basic) the art style offers a cartoony take on a world post-collapse, and the mechanics of exploration were satisfying from moment to moment. Still, the whole thing feels like an idea for a game, as what was in front of me for review felt miles away from being a full, complete experience.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Finish Line games and published by Snail Games USA. It currently available on PC/PS5/XBS-X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. The game contains no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, features Violence. There’s constant human-on-robot violence and the game is set in a post-apocalypse, but there’s noting particularly traumatic about it. After all, it’s not like the player is ever introduced to any of the billions of people who were presumably killed offscreen. It’s fine for even younger teens to play.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Robots At Midnight Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Wiping out a giant zombie with a shotgun in one hand and revolver in the other.

LOW Having suiciders spawn right on top of me over and over again.

WTF That buckethead zombie is getting up to some weird stuff.

The Zombie Army franchise has been chugging along for over a decade now, giving players a chance to blast apart hordes of the undead using weapons and mechanics from the the Sniper Elite games. Four titles in, ZA has developed its own cast and lore, and with Hitler finally destroyed at the end of Dead War, the developers at Rebellion are looking to expand the world beyond the Nazi demonology that had driven the plot until now.

This time around the threat is of a more eldritch nature. In a plot largely cribbed from the film The Keep, an allied bombing raid has released an incredibly powerful horror from its prison beneath a German castle, and it’s up to the player to end its reign of terror before the whole world is consumed. Despite the new premise and justification for the action, the game is built entirely out of assets from Zombie Army 4, ensuring that there will be plenty of familiar Nazi zombies to blast.

Unfortunately, the transition to VR has proven a little bumpy for the franchise. Rather than simply adding a VR perspective and manual weapon handling — a formula that has worked fantastically for Capcom in recent years — the decision was made to offer an original and significantly scaled-down experience.

Most of the series’ classic weapons appear, including the delightful triple-barreled shotgun, which is an absolute beast to use. This is a good thing.

The enemies, on the other hand, suffer from an extremely reduced roster. There are regular zombies, tank zombies, machine gun zombies, snipers, grenadiers, and dynamite-clad suiciders — but that’s it for standard enemies. No sneaky creepers, monstrous butchers, or vomiting water zombies. The iconic zombie shark — tragically — appears only as a taxidermied specimen on a wall.

From a mechanical standpoint, the gameplay is almost perfect. Weapons are intuitive, and movement options are varied enough to make sure everyone from newbies to the most experienced VR players are satisfied. Ironically it’s the sniping that keeps it from being fully functional.

Miming a two-handed weapon is never completely effective, which led me to having a shakier aim when looking down the scope than I would have liked. Other VR sniping titles have offered motion smoothing to make the aiming feel right — and considering that Zombie Army includes the main franchise’s ‘hold breath to slow time’ mechanic, and while the game claims to offer this feature, I could detect no difference in aim shakiness whether it was turned on or off.. It feels somehow wrong that I found myself relying mainly on handguns to deal with most of the threats in a Sniper Elite spinoff.

However, the biggest issue here has is the inability to offer the overwhelming threat that the franchise is known for.

Zombie Army has historically been about desperate battles against hordes of zombies, with the player leaning on the raw power of their sniper rifle to level half a dozen bunched-up corpses with a single bullet. ZAVR, by comparison, has a hard limit of six zombies in the world at a time. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but that’s only because it absolutely isn’t. Given the arsenal the player is armed with — at any point they’ll have a pistol, machinegun and sniper rifle, as well as up to three grenades or landmines — six zombies just aren’t very threatening.

The developers try to compensate for this limitation by forcing the player to spend most of their time in tight quarters. While it’s a workable solution and leads to plenty of intense, close-up skirmishes, the result is that the sniper rifle — the weapon that the entire franchise is built around — feels largely irrelevant to most of the action.

For me, the sniper rifle only came out when my other weapons ran dry, and even then I mostly fired it from the hip. There are only a handful of areas in the campaign that allow the player to fire from a good distance away, allowing players to enjoy the classic tactics of setting up mines to defend approaches and thinning the ranks as the horde draws close. Of course, there are no hordes in ZAVR, so these sniper sequences let me wipe out every zombie before they ever had a chance of getting near.

While the combat may not feel like franchise material fans expect, the developers have done a great job of building battlefields that justify the frantic fighting. There are cluttered graveyards where zombies can pop up at any moment, mazelike crypts with threats around every turn, and the standout — a mad science bunker full of strange machinery and piping that the zombies can use to corner the player.

These environments look great and are packed with collectibles and interesting details. The franchise has always done a great job of depicting a European theatre absolutely wrecked by the zombie apocalypse, and ZAVR doesn’t disappoint from an art design standpoint. The only drawback is that the graphics have clearly been dialed back to ensure that the game will work on all headsets, meaning that I never really felt as if I was getting the full experience out of my PSVR2.

Zombie Army VR isn’t a failure by any means — the zombie shooting is certainly thrilling in its brutality, even if it still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. The relative paucity of zombies, the fact that the sniper rifle feels like a secondary weapon, and the lack of any of the franchise’s crazier elements, like magical combat abilities or zombified vehicles, conspire to make it feel like half of the experience it should be. Maybe we’ll get extremely lucky and when Rebellion gets around to making Zombie Army 5 they’ll consider developing a VR version alongside it so that we’ll finally get a chance to truly inhabit this world.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Rebellion and Xtended Realities and published by Rebellion. It is currently available on PC/Quest 3/PSVR2. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PSVR2. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. Multiplayer modes were not sampled.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, and Language. The swearing isn’t too bad, although the violence absolutely is. Not to mention the presence of a bunch of Nazi iconography and the fact that the player has to work with ‘heroic’ Nazis to battle the villain. Keep children far away from it.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: While the dialogue is subtitled, there are no visual cues present to assist with offscreen threats. This is especially troubling because suiciders can one-shot the player if they get too close, and the only warning players get about their approach are their famous screams. Consider playing the game on easy difficulty only.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. There is no control diagram. Players use one thumbstick to control movement and the other to change facing — they can decide which controller does which in the settings.

The post Zombie Army VR Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH There’s got to be something, right?

LOW Having a boss chase me for fifteen minutes while I plinked away at his health.

WTF We’re still doing first-person platforming?

There’s a kit that people can buy to help them jumpstart their game development journey. It’s advertised as a complete framework on which to build a horror game and offers an inventory system, interactable objects, a way to include text files, and even light combat elements. It costs twenty-five dollars. I’ve played dozens of games built with this kit used as a starting point, but until now, I’d never seen one on the PS5.

Set in a decrepit hospital, Gore Doctor has the player wake up confused by their surroundings and expects them to find their way out by doing the standard first person horror things — pushing shelves aside, climbing on boxes, crawling through vents, fighting bosses — all of the expected elements are here, almost as if someone was ticking items off of a checklist.

That, in fact, is what I find most intriguing about Gore Doctor — the way each design element is used just a single time. As the player moves from one area of the hospital to the next, looking over rusted-out furniture familiar from a hundred other titles (likely purchased as part of the ‘Abandoned Asylum Mega Pack‘) they’ll encounter a few obstacles that they need to overcome.

First, they’ll have to move a box to be able to climb over a vent. Then they’ll have to sneak past some enemies while looking for a key. First person platforming follows a sequence where they have to seek out body parts to complete a set, and then a ride down an elevator while dodging buzzsaws that emerge from the ceiling of the car. Why is this followed by a series of image-spinning puzzles? Who can say, maybe the ‘puzzle wheel’ mechanic was on sale?

Once players have completed a challenge, they won’t have to worry about seeing anything like it again, making Gore Doctor feel almost like an audition reel or work sample — as if the developer is showing off the kinds of things that can happen in a horror project, which they could then go on to employ in a larger, more robust version of the title given the proper funding. In Gore Doctor‘s running time of less than one hour, the only repeated element are boss fights…

…Singularly awful boss fights.

In perhaps the greatest sign that the whole affair is cobbled together from whatever premade assets the developer found creepy, two of the three bosses are clown-themed despite the fact that the campaign is set in an evil hospital.

Those bosses, ‘Freaky Lady’ and ‘Killer Clown‘ (available on two-for-one sale, perhaps?) offer the most annoying gameplay Gore Doctor has to offer — they charge straight at the player until they’re close enough to swing their weapon (which they’re kind enough to stand still while doing) making it a simple matter to back up and avoid all damage. The player will quickly run out of ammo while trying to wear down their absurdly large pools of health and be forced to rely on an axe with a criminally short range and miniscule attack power to finish them off. I can’t imagine anyone playtesting Gore Doctor and finding that spending ten minutes backing up and swinging an axe was a worthwhile experience, but somehow it ended up in the final version anyway.

To the game’s credit, at least the final boss ‘Crazy Doctor‘ (another premade asset) has a medical theme, and there’s enough ammo lying around his lab to make this last fight is a lot less painful than its predecessors.

Anyone with a few hundred dollars and a couple of months of free time could build Gore Doctor for themselves. The only thing that it has to offer which didn’t come from the Unity store is the plot, and that’s so threadbare as to be nearly incoherent. As a sample designed to demonstrate how a variety of different assets can be assembled into a playable experience, Gore Doctor is functional. As something that people are expected to pay for and enjoy, it doesn’t clear the very low bar set to call something a real game.

Rating: 2.5 out of 10

Buy Gore Doctor – PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Salient Games. It currently available on PC/PS5/XBS-X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 1 hour of play was devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. The game contains no Multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB and features Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Nudity and Strong Language. The game wallows in its horror vibes, offering buzzsaws, body parts, and blood splattered on every surface. There’s also a naked woman suspended in a liquid tank. Not for children in any way, shape, or form.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post Gore Doctor Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Finally unleashing the full-power Mech Mode.

LOW Spending 45 minutes trying to beat a single platforming sequence.

WTF Are those seriously Dig-Dug enemies?

Might as well rip the band-aid off right away — yes, this is the Pac-Man Metroidvania.

It’s about a gamer who gets pulled into a strange Namco-themed dimension and has their soul dropped into a swordfighting robot. It seems that Puck, the ravenous yellow sphere, needed someone to help her activate a giant machine for reasons that are way too convoluted to get into here, so the player got dragged into an insane sci-fi struggle because it seemed like they had… decent reflexes?

After that absurd opening, things get even stranger, as Puck and her player sidekick explore bizarre, shattered landscapes crammed full of biomechanical horrors. The player can fight back using fairly standard 2D side-scrolling combat. There are slash combos, dodges, parries, and an array of power moves that the player can obtain by killing bosses scattered around the world.

Well, killing and eating them, technically.

In Shadow Labyrinth‘s most potentially-upsetting detail, simply killing enemies isn’t sufficient to obtain new abilities and crafting resources. Once the player has slashed an enemy into submission, they have to remember to call Puck out so that she can lunge forward and chomp her way through the enemy corpse, gathering the items the player will need to craft upgrades. Luckily, boss devouring is an automatic process, although the form Puck takes in order to unlock new abilities is as horrifying as any of the twisted foes the player will encounter.

While Shadow Labyrinth can be appreciated for its tight, easy-to-learn combat, what it should be applauded for is the innovative take it has on classic Pac-Man gameplay.

Scattered throughout the map are special electrified floors. If the swordfighter steps onto them they’re instantly transformed into Pac-Man, complete with automatic movement and wakka-wakka sound effects. However, it’s more complex than Pac-Man ever was, because Puck has access to a jump move that allows her to vault from one electrified floor to the next. This one addition allows the developers to include maddeningly complex sequences that require pixel-perfect precision in order to vault through gauntlets of energy fencing and spinning buzzsaws.

There are even special dedicated Pac-Man levels that the player can defeat in order to unlock resources. Each one is a clever take on classic Pac-Man gameplay, with the player trying to collect enough pellets to switch over to ghost-eating mode while zipping through mazes that gradually fall apart as pieces of the world transform into weapons to be used against the ghosts. It’s to Shadow Labyrinth‘s credit that they included a minigame so creative in the ways it uses assumed familiarity with Pac-Man that it easily could have been sold as a stand-alone product.

While the gameplay is stellar and art design are truly exceptional, Shadow Labyrinth does have one major drawback, and it’s that it’s — and please excuse the wordplay — a little too labyrinthine.

The map is simply enormous. It takes forever to get from one place to the next, and fast-travel nodes are few and far between. It wouldn’t be so bad if the levels were absolutely packed with interesting features and monsters to fight, but that’s just not the case — every single one one of the areas has at least a few sections that force the player to simply wander for minutes on end to get to another checkpoint.

What’s worse is the sheer number of movement abilities the player needs to unlock in order to make their way around this enormous map. While it’s relatively common that metroidvanias ask the player to get a couple of movement upgrades to see everything, Shadow Labyrinth sets the number absurdly high. There are multiple jumps, air dashes, a grappling hook, a giant laser, and more. The map isn’t much help in keeping track of all the locations players will need to revisit, either — the player can unlock markers for it, but there are just four colors, and close to a dozen obstacle types.

It took me over sixty hours to do everything, and it’s not exaggerating to say that nearly half of that time was spent scouring the map for places to use a new ability I’d unlocked in the hopes of finding a path forward.

Shadow Labyrinth is also punishingly difficult at times — not just the devious and brutal bosses, either. Ithas some of the trickiest platforming I’ve seen in ages.

At a certain point it became clear that I could progress no further until I obtained the ability to double-jump. The only place I’d failed to search was a winding tunnel made of instant-death spikes that could only be navigated by zipping from one grapple-point to the next, with the slightest mis-angled shot or split-second hesitation erasing all progress. I’d hesitated in exploring based on the assumption that it was the kind of late-game location I was supposed to conquer after getting all of the movement abilities, but no, this ridiculously complex and demanding exercise in free-fall platforming was the barrier keeping me from the double-jump. This truly is a situation where only the most dedicated players need apply.

Shadow Labyrinth is equal parts magnificent and frustrating.

The action is stellar, the setting — largely made up of deep-cut references to Namco’s arcade history — is uniquely fascinating, and the retro Pac-Man gameplay is perhaps the best the franchise has ever offered. At the same time, it makes exploration such a chore that I swore off finishing it and stepped away from it more than a few times. I always came back, though, which goes to show just what an incredible job the developers have done here.

Even when I hated what I was doing, it was always a pleasure to engage with, and there aren’t a lot of games I can say the same about.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on PC/SW/PS5/XBS. Copies of the game were purchased on Steam obtained and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 60 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Fantasy Violence. It’s fantastical and stylized action, and it’s safe for just about anyone to play. I’m serious about how scary Puck eating enemies is, though. It’s absolutely brutal, and deserves a warning if younger teens are interested in checking the game out.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All information is delivered via text on screen. I played most of the game without audio, and encountered no issues. This experience is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Shadow Labyrinth Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Death Game Hotel, White Owls’ VR title that forces players to ante up their body parts before playing games of chance and skill, recently relaunched as a free-to-play title which allows anyone with a Meta Quest helmet to get in on the bloody multiplayer action.

Recently, Gamecritics had the chance to interview creator Swery65 about what changes have been made to the game, and what he has planned for the future, for both DGH and other projects, such as the upcoming horror-themed beat-’em-up Hotel Barcelona (co-designed with Suda51) and a possible new version of Deadly Premonition!

The interview was conducted through a translator, and has been edited for clarity.

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GameCritics (GC) — How did you come to the decision to move Death Game Hotel to being Free to Play?

SWERY — When I originally created the concept for Death Game Hotel it was mainly for a social, multiplayer type of game. Ever since launch, we’ve had such an amazing community around the game — especially on Discord — and a lot of the members let us know that they want to spread the game around to their friends and people they know online, however it’s sometimes difficult to do that with a premium, or ‘not free’ game. So I thought by making the game more accessible to players around the world, and allowing them to experience the game and lore firsthand, it would be able to transform into a sustainable business model, allowing us to make the tweaks to keep the game healthy. The main goal is to make sure as many people as possible can access that game that we made, and that the community wants to share.

GC — Speaking of the community, what do you find most interesting about the fanbase that has built up around the game?

SWERY — Rather than just using social channels to promote the game, for the first time in White Owls’ history we created a dedicated Discord server so that players would have a place to gather. We have various channels where players can freely talk to each other and find games, ‘Ask SWERY’ and ‘suggestions’ channels where the devs can get immediate feedback from players. We also have ‘dev parties’, where players can challenge the developers in the various death games, which we also livestream. We’ve used Discord to keep up with the community and make sure that they’re being heard — which has allowed us to see what changes are most important to the fans — even if those tweaks are sometimes far more difficult than the players might realize to implement. Being able to create a feedback loop makes sure that players feel like they’re being heard, which is a big part of why we took the game free to play.

GC — While making the move to Free to Play, you also included a new single player mode, the Slot Machine — why add this, and was it difficult to balance?

SWERY — It was extremely difficult to maintain the balance between the single and multiplayer modes. The main reason we wanted to include a single player mode was because we understood how difficult it can be for people to organize multiplayer sessions, so we wanted to make sure that players could have something enjoyable and thrilling to do inside the game while waiting for their party to arrive. One of the most complicated aspects was figuring out how we were going to use the chips you can win playing death game. We didn’t want players to wind up with huge stacks of chips that they couldn’t spend on anything, so we thought the slot machine would be a great way to give players another way to use those chips in an entertaining way. Of course, you can also lose body parts while playing the slot machine, and even win them back. The important part was making single players feel like they were getting the same experience as in the multiplayer gambling games.

GC — Speaking of losing body parts, in the table games players can use them to cheat in a variety of ways. Can you also cheat at the slot machine?

SWERY — The slot machine is entirely RNG-based, so we thought it would be a little risky to add in cheating mechanics.

GC — Is there just one slot machine room, or will players be able to use the slot machine in a variety of the game’s environments?

SWERY — Right now there is only one dedicated slot room per lobby, but it’s possible in future DLC updates we could add additional characters and locations for the death slot machines.

GC — Is the ‘story mode DLC’ that players can buy for the free to play game the same content as the game’s original single player mode?

SWERY — Yes, the story mode is the same as the single player mode from the Premium version of the game. The only change we’ve made is to tweak the amount of nuggets you can win playing the single player mode so that it doesn’t affect the free-to-play experience too much.

GC — What additional items are you adding to the shop in this new release? I was particularly happy to see a ‘Killer Tomato’ in there.

SWERY — We are currently working on a variety of item designs, although we can’t reveal any specifics just yet. Stay tuned for for news about other SWERY-ish items we’ll be adding. As for the new items available in the free-to-play version, we’ve added new items like bladed weapons you can use to cut off your own limbs, and darts you can throw into other players’ faces to try and gouge out their eyes. There’s plenty of interesting things to do with pointy and bladed items in the game.

GC — You’ve announced that there are going to be seasonal events in Death Game Hotel. How many are you thinking about, and what will these events feature?

SWERY — For right now you can expect the same kind of seasonal events we had in the Premium version, including summer, winter and Halloween festivals. But I’m not satisfied with just continuing as-is, and right now I’m looking at ways to include more original events and focus on the lore of the game. That could include crazy items and decorations around the lobby, because we’re working to make sure that it feels different from last year’s events. We haven’t locked down any specific dates yet, but given the game’s theme, we might do a Day of the Dead celebration, and there’s also a Japanese celebration of ancestors every summer that we would like to focus on. If only there was a national torture day, that would be perfect. We’d like to find weird celebrations that fit the game’s themes.

GC — Are you planning on adding any more multiplayer games to the current lineup of Goblets of the Reaper and Death Poker?

SWERY — We have plans for additional games, but nothing to announce just yet. Right now we want people to focus on Death Poker, since it’s a game that a lot of people already understand the rules of. Stay tuned for news about more games to come.

GC — Do you have any news to share about expanding the world of the game, be that through manga or light novel adaptations?

SWERY — I do have an idea for a light novel in the world of Death Game Hotel, and right now I’m looking for a good partner to work alongside. The writers I worked with on The Good Life have had their careers take off, and are very busy with their own projects, so the biggest obstacle right now is finding a partner who I work well with. So yes, I do have plans in this area.

GC — Now, to move on to other subjects — do you have any news you can share about Hotel Barcelona?

SWERY — We are currently working the the publisher, Cult Games, to find the best release date for the game. We’re currently taking the game to various events and looking for ways to get their hands on it.

GC — So Hotel Barcelona is complete?

SWERY — Yes, the game is finished, we’re just going through the console submission proccess.

GC — Where would you rank Hotel Barcelona among your games?

SWERY — Well, that’s hard to answer, it’s like asking me which is my favorite child. I can say that I’m always most excited about the game I’m currently working on, and Hotel Barcelona is the focus of all of my attention.

GC — It was recently reported that you worked on a VR test for Deadly Premonition, can you tell us a little more about that?

SWERY — It was actually Deadly Premonition 2. The developers and I did a test to see how the game’s environment worked in VR, but sadly I don’t have the rights to keep working on it or share what we made with the public. So if fans want to see Deadly Premonition in VR, they’ll have to let the publisher know and draw attention to it.

GC — Now, a question for you — is there any media you’ve been enjoying recently?

SWERY – I watch a lot of movies, as you know, but something I’ve really been enjoying lately is On Call, a show about the LA Police and what they go through. It’s from Dick Wolf, who’s done a lot of shows about law enforcement, and whose work I really like.

GC — Is there anything else that you’re working on you’d like to give people a hint about?

SWERY — Actually, there are a few games that we’re working on, focusing right now on how to build the new mechanics we’ve envisioned. One example is a multiplayer horror game, where we’re trying to find a way to make people feel like they’re having an out-of-body experience.

GC — Thank you so much for your time — do you have any final thoughts about Death Game Hotel you’d like to share?

SWERY — The most important thing I want people to know about Death Game Hotel is that when you buy a piece of pizza in the game and ‘eat’ it, when you pull your hand away the cheese will stretch realistically.

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Thanks again to SWERY for providing a look into Death Game Hotel and what else White Owls is working on Death Game Hotel is currently free to play on Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro.

The post INTERVIEW: SWERY65 – Revisiting Death Game Hotel appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Taking a boss out in five seconds with two perfectly aimed headshots.

LOW Having my driver decide to steer the truck off a cliff for no reason.

WTF That… is a really big worm.

The developers at Runner Duck have a pretty amazing gameplay formula on their hands.

Starting with Bomber Crew, they built a title about a group of cartoon cuties flying a WW2 bomber in missions over occupied Europe. Each flyer has skills that improved their ability to shoot down enemy planes, drop bombs accurately, or repair broken parts of the bomber. It worked like a charm, so they did it again with Space Crew, which was almost the exact same game except with in space, and it was every bit the amazing experience its predecessor had been.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that those same developers were about to apply that winning formula to the most criminally underserved setting in gaming — adorable cuties driving a war rig around the wasteland, turning ornate death wagons into scrap… it’s a match made in heaven.

Badlands Crew puts players in the role of a commander in charge of reclaiming the wasteland from insane warlords. This is accomplished by taking on a series of missions — clear enemies out of areas, seize bases, escort trucks to their destination, and raid enemy convoys for their goods. Yes, all of these, to one degree or another, involve using the gun emplacements of a truck to blow up enemies, but there’s enough variety in the missions to keep things from ever getting boring, even after sinking dozens of hours into the experience.

Unlike their previous titles which put the plane or ship at the center of the screen and asked the player to maintain it via navigation and combat minigames on subscreens, Badlands Crew is a realtime experience through and through. Players actively navigate the wasteland, directing their tractor-trailer through the ruins of the old world. One can find the shattered remnants of a ski lift in one area, the bones of long-dead leviathans in another, and in one particularly memorable location, they can get air off of ramps made from of the roofs of houses that were buried by the ash of an exploding volcano centuries earlier.

Micromanaging the truck is the key to success in Badlands Crew. In addition to keeping the gun turrets manned, players need to have a solid driver to keep the thing running, a navigator to use the map and spot resources in the world, and yes, a drummer who constantly jams on their skins to keep everyone’s spirits up. As objectives are completed and the crew levels up, they can specialize in each role, unlocking useful perks. Drivers can sideswipe enemies off the road, Drummers can heal the crew and put out fires by summoning rainstorms, and Gunners can unlock a VATS-style targeting mode that slows time to a crawl so they can pinpoint exactly what part of an enemy vehicle they want to blast. The best-armed rig in the world won’t be much of a threat with its driver blasted out of his seat, after all.

Progressing through missions and destroying enemies rewards the player with the resources they’ll need to build blueprints they find out in the wild. At the start of the campaign, players will literally be using junk cannons lobbing scrap at their opponents. As they take down each enemy faction they’ll unlock different weapon types — flame from Pyros to wreck vehicle parts, toxic from Klowns to attack crews, blades from Vultures shred wheels, and projectiles from Gun Nutz to tear armor to pieces. Badlands Crew offers almost unlimited freedom in allowing the player to build any kind of rolling beast they want, mixing and matching until they find what works best in each situation.

While I couldn’t stop playing Badlands Crew — I put off finishing it for maybe a dozen hours, just doing random missions so I could have more chances to watch my crew tear opponents to pieces — it’s not without flaws. The biggest is the inability to directly steer the truck. I understand what the developers are going for — the player is giving commands, and it’s up to the crew to carry them out to the best of their ability — but the driving AI has enough quirks that offering a direct control option is close to a necessity. I can’t count the number of times I almost lost a mission because, for no clear reason, my driver decided to make a hard turn straight into a wall, damaging the rig and stunning my crew at a pivotal moment.

The other main issue is with the truck-building mechanic. While I certainly enjoyed building my murderwagons, I won’t claim to understand exactly how it works. The tutorial doesn’t do a fantastic job of explaining things — I’ll be given the notification that some piece of equipment is blocking people from being able to move around the truck, but the interface won’t highlight the offender. Likewise, Badlands Crew never clearly explains exactly how players are supposed to put a second story on their trucks, forcing me to muddle through tough skirmishes with a preposterously overloaded flatbed.

A not-insignificant part of this is certainly a me issue — the user-created trucks that show up as random enemy vehicles from time to time were invariably better designed than my jalopies, but I still feel the devs could have done more to make the construction process accessible.

Not since the Yakuza developers decided to make a Fist of the North Star game have I seen a better melding of developer and subject matter. Runner Duck’s penchant for making hectic management sims about intense action-adventure settings have reached a new high with Badlands Crew. This is the best Mad Max game we’ve had in ages, and given the increasing quality of their work, I can’t wait to see what the developers have in store for us next.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Runner Duck and published by Curve Games It is currently available on PC. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 50 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. The game contains no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not rated by the ESRB, but it’s basically a T and features an absolute ton of Fantasy Violence. There’s no shocking or offensive content in the game, no alcohol or drug use, just a countless examples of cars exploding or getting eaten by sandworms. While I can’t say it’s safe for everyone, it’s the next best thing.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post Badlands Crew Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Solving the serial killer case.

LOW The gunfights.

WTF I feel like cops shouldn’t be driving off so many ramps?

On paper, The Precinct seems like a great idea. Take the formula of a police simulator and throw in an actual narrative. Instead of patrolling the streets as a generic player-created avatar, the main character will have a name, backstory, and goals they want to achieve. It’s a great idea that’s quickly sabotaged by the way the content thoroughly underdelivers on the very aspect that’s supposed to differentiate it from others in the genre.

In The Precinct the player controls Nick Cordell Jr., a rookie cop determined to rise through the ranks of the police department where his father served as Chief — until he was murdered by persons unknown, a crime that Nick will go to any lengths to solve, if by ‘go to any lengths‘ one means ‘write a LOT of parking tickets‘.

In spite of the intense plot hook at the core of the experience, Nick will not spend much of The Precinct‘s playtime investigating his father’s murder, interacting with other characters, or really doing much to make him feel different from the generic cops that populate other police sims. Nick will be able to have a few conversations that involve a choice of responses, but those responses don’t serve any purpose or affect the plot. No, there’s no significant time spent with him as a character, exploring his feelings about the job he does, the people he works with, or the city his father died protecting. Nick is more of an idea of a character than an actual character, and it’s The Precinct‘s greatest failing that it doesn’t explore the narrative in any real way.

With such a weak script and story elements, it’s good that the police action is competently made, for the most part.

Each new day at the precinct, Nick is allowed to choose from a variety of shifts. Does the player want to write parking tickets, catch speeders, or just amble around, keeping an eye on things? Once they’re out on the streets, the player is free to wander around town, looking for trouble – which never takes long to pop up, of course — if the player goes more than a minute without a crime occurring directly in front of them, they’ll receive a ‘callout’ requesting them to respond to a nearby crime within a certain amount of time. Things are never boring on the streets of Averno City.

Responding to crimes has a solid rhythm to it. A crime occurs and the player runs or drives towards the perpetrator, tapping the ‘yell’ button. Either the crook stops and it’s a quick arrest, or they don’t and the player has to chase them down.

These on-foot chases make good use of The Precinct‘s top-down perspective, letting the player keep track of their quarry as they duck down allies or race through busy intersections. It’s genuinely thrilling stuff, and these pursuits are a pleasure to take part in.

Unfortunately, whenever The Precinct tries to get more complex in gameplay, things take a dive. See, Nick has a partner named Kelly, and he’s… not great. Not only does he insist Nick do all of the driving, he’s pretty dire at chasing suspects, which is a fairly major problem, since more than half of the random crimes that are generated involve multiple perps.

When both crooks run, there’s a pretty good chance that one of them will get away, due to Kelly’s ineptitude. What’s even more frustrating is that one of the criminals frequently surrenders while their partner flees — but there’s no way to tell Kelly to arrest the passive criminal so that I would be freed up to chase the fleeing one. I’d say roughly 60% of the time I’d have to accept that half of a criminal duo was going to get away. The other 40% were times I’d search dumpsters until I found the guy hiding in one — which is another thing Kelly is incapable of doing.

While The Precinct‘s on-foot chases are great, car chases are fairly frustrating, as the backup AI is truly terrible at supporting the player.

It’s a good concept — tail a car to charge up a support bar, then spend that bar on things like spike strips, roadblocks, or cruisers to help run the target vehicle down. In practice, none of these abilities are particularly useful. Even when the spike strips and roadblocks are dropped in a good location — which is not guaranteed — the enemy AI never has any trouble avoiding them, either by driving on a sidewalk to go around the obstacle, or simply by pulling a U-turn. I took part in countless car chases during my time with The Precinct, and the one and only time I saw a spike strip work it was because I rammed the fleeing car into it.

Like the partner AI and car chases, The Precinct‘s combat is also a mess.

From time to time on foot, a crook will take a swing at Nick, and he’ll have to subdue them. Theoretically this should involve the nightstick he carries around, but the attack and block commands are messy to the point of being unusable, especially when every physical altercation can be won by button mashing in a ‘subdue’ minigame.

Gunfighting is equally poor in its implementation. When the shooting starts, the player has to find cover and then hit the aim button. Then, a pointer appears onscreen that they have to awkwardly move around with the right thumbstick. Maybe this works better with a mouse and keyboard, but it’s an absolute disaster with a controller, and should have been swapped out for a standard lock-on system. Also, hitting enemies offers no visible feedback, which ends up making these life-or-death shootouts feel more like tapping a button to make a crook’s health bar shrink.

If it sounds like I hated The Precinct, I can say that simply isn’t the case. The foot chases are a delight, the town of Averno is an interesting location to explore, and there’s a couple of side-cases which actually ask the player to participate in finding evidence and solving a crime. These diversions are wonderful and offer a glimpse of the kind of experience that The Precinct seems to want to be — unfortunately, that potential is let down by too many poor mechanics and a plot that doesn’t do it job.

Rating: 4.5 out of 10

Buy The Precinct – PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is developed by Fallen Tree Games and published by Kwalee It is currently available on PC, XBS/X, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 30 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. The game contains no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, and it contains Blood, Drug Reference, Mild Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence. It’s a police action game, so there’s car chases and shootings a-plenty, but shooting anyone that isn’t actively trying to kill Nick causes an instant checkpoint reload, so what the game lacks in realism it makes up for with kid-friendliness. The drinking and drug use aren’t shown in a particularly positive light, as one would expect. Still, it’s a cop game, so make sure you restrict it to older teens at the youngest.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post The Precinct Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

It’s not that Zombie Survival is a particularly underserved genre — checking Steam will net you twenty games with ‘zombie’ and ‘survival’ both appearing in the title, with the category of the same name offering options in the hundreds. So, Into the Dead has some competition for the title of ‘most impressive zombie survival game ever’. I would argue, though, that it doesn’t have a lot of competition for that title.

Contrary to most entries in the genre, Into the Dead isn’t a sandbox exploration game with a focus on base building. No, the developers have a much more focused goal in mind.

Set in the mid-sized Texas town of Walton in the year 1980, Into the Dead takes place a few weeks after a zombie outbreak turned the city into a slaughterhouse. Some people fled before the government closed the town off to keep the zombies from spreading, and now the few surviving souls have to find a way to escape the city.

Equal parts base management and scavenging action, Into the Dead starts players off by allowing the player to choose which pair of characters to use from a handful of options. Every character has a positive and negative characteristic that affect how they play, so a character might have a bonus to repairing their hideout’s defenses but also is a vegetarian who takes a major morale hit if they’re forced to eat meat in order to survive.

Characters have three main stats — hunger, tiredness, and morale — and if any of them get too low they’ll acquire negative traits that affect their ability to both scavenge and work around the base. Successfully surviving the zombie outbreak means constantly finding new sources of food and water, along with the construction parts they’ll need to build weapons and improve the base so that the survivors can keep their conditions high. It’s important to recruit as many survivors as can be found out in the city, but every one means another mouth to feed, and the town has already been pretty much picked clean in the weeks since the outbreak started. Scavenging the most dangerous areas of the city is where the game starts, and the threat only builds from there.

Into the Dead’s greatest strength is how compelling these scavenging sequences are. Each day has a day phase and a night phase, during which survivors can be assigned to maintenance tasks around the base or head out to scavenge locations. This scavenging takes place from a side-view perspective, with the player creeping through crumbling buildings, trying to avoid making any noise that might alert the hordes of zombies that fill almost every location.

Zombies are unusually threatening in Into the Dead, not because they have any special abilities, but because the survivors are realistically frail. Any given room will likely have at least one zombie in it, but so long as the survivor is quiet, they’ll stay idle. Run, jump, or use a loud weapon to stealth kill a zombie, and the player can suddenly discover that what they thought were a pile of corpses is actually a bunch of very hungry zombies ready to pounce. It’s not too difficult to take out a single foe, but once a second and third undead enter the fray, the player has to decide whether to flee or risk the permadeath of one of their characters. No matter how placid a location may seem, any situation can turn deadly in seconds, making every scavenging excursion and exercise in masterfully sustained tension.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how incredible the game looks. I was impressed not just with the overall graphical fidelity (which is stunning) but by how effectively the developers have used the look of their locations to tell the story of the zombie outbreak. Each new building features the aftermath of desperate attempts to survive the inevitable. Pools of blood, smashed furniture, blocked stairwells, all of it lets the player see just how fast everything went wrong, and how hard people fought before being added to the hordes of the dead. Also impressive is the use of background elements — while the gameplay is strictly occurring on a 2D plane, every location stretches back into the distance, giving the player a great overview of the environment, letting them see that no part of the city was spared.

While far from finished, Into the Dead is already a complete experience. There are currently two ways to beat the game and escape the city, and I’ve managed to finish one of them. More escape plans and locations to search are promised, as are additional game modes, although exactly what those will entail isn’t exactly clear just yet.

Even in its current early state, Into the Dead‘s gameplay is so well-designed that I can wholeheartedly recommend it, but I am interested to see what complications and rewards are added as they build out towards the full release. The only thing missing right now is a character element — each pair of survivors comes with a backstory, but no one has any meaningful dialogue and there are no story elements beyond the need to find a way out of the town, so enhancing that aspect would be quite welcome. However, Even with threadbare story elements, this is still a masterpiece of zombie survival gaming, and hopefully it will only get better from here.

Buy Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days, EARLY ACCESS – PC

The post PREVIEW Into The Dead: Our Darkest Days appeared first on Gamecritics.com.