Rob Zacny
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Writing For
Rock Paper Shotgun 
IGN 
Eurogamer 
PC Gamer Latest Reviews
When I started playing Thea: The Awakening, I was excited for its possibilities. I'd love to play the game that I thought, in those early hours, that I was playing. If the card battle system were better and less predictable, if there was more stuff to do with your village and a greater tension between exploration and protecting your home, if failure weren't quite so punishing or random at times… Thea breaks the mold by doing a lot of different things at once. It just needs to do all of them better.
The use of different classes and the evocation of the Warhammer setting is enough to make Vermintide a competent twist on the Left 4 Dead formula, but it doesn't execute them well enough to live up to its inspiration. Even at its best, Vermintide’s co-op horde mode lacks a sense of suspense, and its addictive loot chase can’t fully replace that. As I'm sure any Skaven would tell you, there are better things than being a rat in a maze.
When it all comes together around two competent teams working together, World of Warships is a glorious pre-World War 2 admiralty fantasy come to life. This is Wargaming's richest and most rewarding team game to date, with the most diverse set of classes and skills of any of its games. The irony is that this also means World of Warships is also the least consistent of its games, with higher peaks at the cost of lower valleys while you wait out games that have already been decided. But the view from those peaks more than makes up for those dives beneath the waves.
But Act of Aggression is also a game that obscures information rather than reveals it, and attempts to bewilder you with a million minor choices rather than a few clear-cut strategic decisions. In sharp contrast to Eugen's previous work, my first enemy is always the game itself.
StarDrive 2 isn't anything but honest about what it is: it says, right at the start of the manual, that the goal is to conquer the galaxy. But the focus on extermination saps excitement and possibilities from the strategic level, and the tactical minigames don’t have the AI needed to make the ship-building system’s depth pay off. When betrayal and war are always inevitable, one game starts to feel much the same as another.
Sunless Sea gives you a wonderful world to explore and packs it with memorable written vignettes. Its permadeath flirts with repetitiveness, and combat is disappointing, but it’s far from running out of ways to inspire one more trip back across the Unterzee.
Elite: Dangerous is a beautiful game and an amazing space sim let down by a universe devoid of character and low on excitement. It's great to fly the various ships and experiment with different loadouts, and there are a lot of different roles to play in Elite that helps keep the experience fresh. But without any special missions or narrative threads to pick up, and a universe that seems more mechanical than alive, Elite also seems far smaller than its 400 billion star systems.
If you set This War of Mine’s theme aside, you'd have a tough and demanding survival and resource-management game – but it never lets you forget that it's about a serious and sad subject. It's full of thorny problems, and that just makes your small gains all the sweeter. As things begin to go wrong, the choices get harder. Do you intervene when you see a soldier assaulting a woman in a ruined supermarket, or do you keep your head down? Do you shoot a medicine you can’t afford? These questions don't have right answers. But posing them, and putting the moral issues in sharp relief alongside the physical ones, is what makes This War of Mine one of the year's most thoughtful games.
Lacking some basic features and low on playability thanks to the central gimmick, Planetary Annihilation is a poor pretender to Supreme Commander's crown. A cool idea about robot armies battling across an entire solar system breaks apart when the realities of controlling multiple worlds at the same time set in.