Recent reviews by Interference

As a huge fan of the original and System Shock 2, I generally really enjoyed this remake: the new art is wonderfully atmospheric and the quality of life improvements are great. There were a few bugs around release that I ran into that slightly marred the experience (like the maintenance level cyberspace crash) but every single issue I encountered has been fixed as of posting.

About the only thing I wasn't much of a fan of was the music. While it does its job, I was hoping for renditions of the original tracks, taking advantage of the fact they're no longer constrained by MIDI. Instead we just get a very broad interpretation of them.

Has the germ of a good idea but the execution is just too dull to recommend. After just 3 hours I didn't want to play anymore. Nothing in this game is remotely enjoyable: managing your ship is a series of tedious tasks that eventually grind away your will to play. Samey planets, standing around for progress bars to complete, near constant streams of insects to shoot, maze-like ships to loot for very little benefit, and all topped off by an art style that is so plain that it's genuinely remarkable.

A cautious recommendation.

The initial release of No Man's Sky was genuinely terrible: missing features that were clearly promised before release and very little to actually do. As it currently exists, those features are now present and there's considerably more to fill your time with. You'll get a good few hours of fun out of it, particularly with one or more friends, although the late game is not well paced: the point where you essentially run out of meaningful or fun things to do is sudden and you'll just find yourself floating around in space hoping for something interesting to turn up. It doesn't: you're done.

Takes about an hour before you properly settle in but once you're comfortable with the balance of combat it's absolutely superb.

The Witcher 1 was decent, The Witcher 2 was pretty good, but The Witcher 3 absolutely blows it out of the park, letting you run wild in an open world RPG filled with so much life and stuff to do that the fast travel system rarely gets used as it's generally much more entertaining to just ride from point to point, taking on quests and challenging everyone within an 80 mile radius to a round of Gwent, the card battler minigame within TW3 that is far better than it has any right to be.

The game as a whole is consistently gorgeous, well written, and engaging. Go play it, even if you haven't played the first two. It's that good.

A fantastic tale of time travel, photography, obsession, sacrifice, and the nature of fate. You may potentially dislike the ending (I personally liked it) but the journey is worth the ticket for entry alone regardless.

Long ago I played the demo for Jedi Academy and wrote it off as a cheap cash-in in the wake of Jedi Knight 2, a game I enjoyed but didn't really want more of the same from. Boy was I wrong.

Years later I finally get round to playing Jedi Academy and it's surprisingly good fun. A steady supply of varied missions, fun lightsaber combat, and a force powers system that got a satisfying rebalance from JK2: they now recharge faster, upgrade in interesting ways, and are a complete joy to use. Force Lighning in particular is hugely satisfying to use at it's max level: it blasts everything in a forward arc with such intensity it sends people flying off platforms, crashing against walls, and slamming against ceilings. A bit overpowered, but christ is it hilarious.

Another interesting quirk of note: this game was made just before the advent of ragdoll physics. Keen to provide some sort of feedback as you slam people around, though, the developers developed a sort of pseudo-ragdoll system that blends animations programmatically to make characters bend (as best they could) with the environment. This makes various storm trooper corpses bend over ledges and objects in an entirely comical way. It's great.

An hour long 640x480 pixel art game with no dialogue, about a kid befriending a bird. You'd think that wouldn't amount to much, but blimey: it's got such character, humour and warmth you'd have a heart of stone not to be utterly charmed.

Kan Gao does it again. I got sniffly at the end. OVER PIXEL ART BIRDS.

Gorgeous, atmospheric, has a few interesting puzzles and a great story with an ending that lingers long after you're done playing. The only caveat: it's around 3 hours in length. If you can't justify spending out on this, you might want to wait for a sale.

A lot of folk swear by this game, and I can understand it's appeal, but it's just not for me.

The art and music are amazing, but what utterly ruins it for me is the gameplay: insta-deaths, checkpoints you can accidentally shatter and render useless, floaty and imprecise jumps despite the precision platforming, A BLOODY ICE LEVEL... It all just adds up into an intensely infuriating mess that despite trying to be nostalgic manages to fall foul of issues even the period it's trying to emulate had stopped doing.

To top all that off, for some reason there are some serious performance issues on my rig, too. Baffling, weird performance issues. For example: the entire game runs in slow motion if you have v-sync turned on. The logical step would be to turn it off, right? That DOES make the game run at the right speed, but for some reason makes certain jumps impossible and makes navigating the map screen bizzarely juddery.