After Dirt Rally and Dirt Rally 2, this entry in the modern Codemasters/EA rally game series seems a bit less revolutionary and falls a bit flat for me.

At this point in my life, I've played a lot of racing games and a significant number of the rally games there are. Dirt Rally was a hard cut towards sim-style rally gaming that Dirt Rally 2 faithfully stuck to. I played through both of those on the standard Playstation controller, which was particularly difficult since they leaned towards a wheel input due to their sim-like nature. Booting up EA WRC, I expected to crash on the first stage and blame the controller immediately. However, I found myself just racing down the stage unimpeded by the unwieldiness of the input system! Has EA found the correct balance between sim and arcade style racing or did I just set the options to baby me through the world?

Whatever the case, if you liked the Dirt Rally series, this WRC game adds some branding and more car choice to the racing experience. I spent most of my time in the career mode, however, and found it a bit of a mess. While most racing career modes are pretty linear and straightforward, EA dumps you in as the team manager, choosing rallies to compete in, hiring staff, managing teammates, negotiating with sponsors, and even building cars. You are left to wonder what that British guy who keeps talking to you in the menu is for... The whole process becomes a bit tedious, but luckily it is easy enough to just focus on the main series and get to the WRC in two years. The difficulty is adjustable to your skill level and I always tend to pick a level that lets me win by 30 seconds, so I guess I'm awesome at video game rally driving.

It is a racing game based on the best genre of racing and it does the racing part very well. If you're looking for a solid rally game, you can't go wrong with this one.

Review from thedonproject.com

Accessible, stylistic RPG with enough variation and excitement to entice most players, for a while.

Nobody Saves The World would have made an excellent Adult Swim or Nicktoons animated series. The graphic style and writing is wacky, humorous, and slightly off-key without being too ridiculous. Characters are well developed and even NPC's have distinct styles of speaking or acting. Everything looks and sounds good as you endure waves of enemies and some very mild exploring of a pretty strange world.

All of this style doesn't get in the way of some solid substance, as well. The gameplay choices are interesting, as you can use your magic to change form at basically anytime to best suit what the world is throwing at you. I found myself preferring a certain form for a while and then reconsidering my build as we entered a dungeon that required a certain skill to defeat the enemies within. Mixing up skills from some forms into the other forms added a level that kept my interest, as well. My partner and I did a co-op playthrough and having a second player made the game a bit less challenging but made the hordes of enemies an summoned demons, zombies, or familiars a bit more hectic. Pairing up builds was pretty fun and working together to unlock other forms was our main goal.

The game did a lack a really compelling story (we guessed the twist kind of early on) and was a bit of a slog if you focused just on completing quests, but overall, it was a decent time in a fun and fantastical world.

Review from thedonproject.com

A love letter to the 8-bit era action-adventure games of our youth.

Okay, everyone's comparing this game to the NES Zeldas, which makes total sense after you find the cover of the in-game manual or notice that our main character has a Zelda costume on. However, I think it is more a tribute to the whole experience of NES action-adventure games rather than a close comparison to the early Zelda offerings. Modern techniques and style are used to capture the same spirit of exploration and growth as you hack and slash and magic your way through a slew of enemies. With the addition of the cryptic language and the pieces of the manual that "tell" you about the secrets of the world, the whole game becomes a nostalgic dream of those bygone days of sitting in a basement room decorated in too many shades of brown but living in pixelated 8-bit lands of pure imagination. Probably even more so if you imported a Japanese-language game and tried to read the manual even though you did not read Japanese.

It truly is a wonderful experience for those of us of the golden (well, maybe greying) 8-bit generation. Mostly. I found myself either too impatient or too uncoordinated to bump this up to legendary status. For example, I would constantly underestimate the reach of my sword or stick. I also spent a number of minutes just wandering, looking for what I was supposed to be doing. My -- potentially self-inflicted -- frustrations led me to get to that place in game where you "just want to finish" which takes the experience down a bit.

To avoid frustration, I started turning to the internet's collective resources instead of flipping through the in-game booklet after I had retrieved a crystal (or maybe two). Perhaps this wasn't the intended way to play this puzzler but it does kind of fit into the experience, right? Some of the ways to find treasures or unlock secrets were so obscure or complex that it would take the collective work of a number of folks to discover the solutions to them all. Maybe this is the game's multiplayer mode? Whatever the intent, if you 100% this game without looking anything up... kudos to you.

In the end, Tunic is a stellar game that's just a bit too frustrating for me to cherish forever like some of those old NES games.

Review from thedonproject.com