I have a love/hate relationship with the Call of Duty franchise. On one hand, I enjoy the mental release that comes with playing a first-person shooter. I don’t typically find the violence gratuitous or distracting. In a FPS, you aren’t typically very engaged with the stories or the characters, so […]
Power Hour Reviews
92 posts
Today’s Power Hour review is really a review of a game within a game. I love LEGO Dimensions, but as I’ve written before, it’s pretty expensive. I’ve been mostly skeptical about the Level Packs, which come with both LEGO builds and a new level, but also come at a pretty […]
The Dwarf Run is a very interesting game because its very existence represents a desire in the gaming community for a return to early point and click adventure games. When I was growing up, Realmz was my absolute favorite game. Realmz is a fantasy adventure RPG only developed for the […]
I am going to have to start with full disclosure and admit that I played the first two versions of Animal Crossing on the DS and 3DS with something that bordered on addiction. With the first iteration I played the game every night until the battery in my DS died […]
It’s starting to feel like fall, which always makes me want to watch scary movies and play creepy games. So, this morning I went looking for a spooky game on Steam, and I found Port of Call, a free to play indie adventure game. I like to play these quick […]
It seems strange that Shadowrun is only just over twenty-five years old; for me, Shadowrun, that dour, gritty marriage of cyberpunk and fantasy that so made William Gibson roll his eyes, feels eternal. I feel like the landscape has been littered with books and games in the Shadowrun universe for […]
You find yourself licking the salt from your lips, an automatic action, as you guide your small boat through a flooded metropolis, the motor sputtering like an old man struggling to catch a breath. The encompassing silence in the seemingly desolate city would be crushing had it not been for […]
Last year, as I was getting ready to move out to Indiana to begin my Ph.D. program, I watched the first season of the French television series The Returned. As I watched each episode (while I piled books into boxes and wrapped plates up in paper), I was struck by […]
I’ve played about an hour and a half of The Magic Circle, and, to be completely honest, I haven’t yet figured out whether or not I like it. I think I do. But I’m not sure. I’m mainly confused, but not really in a way that makes me annoyed or irritated […]
I’m not sure how much time I’ve actually spent playing Her Story. The game was open for a long time while I was trying to stream (unsuccessfully), and more time passed as I searched for paper and took notes. And then there was the time spent considering and studying and adding […]
As a LEGO fan and a gamer, I have enjoyed many of the LEGO video games, but LEGO Jurassic World has been my most anticipated LEGO video game by far. I like the superhero film franchises, like Batman well enough, and LEGO Batman 2 is thus far my all time […]
I am a sucker for a good spy story. And when those spies are also cyberpunk hackers, then all the better. So when I discovered that Invisible, Inc. is a game that features such hacker-spies, suffice it to say I was pretty excited to play it. Invisible, Inc., developed by […]
The Music Machine delivers an experience that’s uncharacteristic of most horror games. There are no monsters chasing after you, despite the fact that they’d be right at home on the abandoned island where the game is set. There are no jump scares waiting for you around the corner (at least […]
I have been anxious to see Splatoon up close and personal since it was first announced in a Nintendo Direct conference. First off the game was going to release with amiibo. Little Inkling amiibo with funky little hairdos and super soaker type paint sprayers. And if the collectible gods smiled down on […]
I have spent a lot of my last 40 years playing adventure games. Text based adventure games, monochromatic adventure games with crazy little pixelated figures that “moved” from screen to screen along with the story, 8-bit, 16-bit, cel shaded, PC, console, mobile…you name it. Lots of them. More of them […]
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is the third in a series of games based on several books and short stories by Andrzej Sapkowski. Throughout the first two games, you play a “witcher” named Geralt. A witcher is someone with supernatural powers, who is not entirely human, and who is a […]