Recent reviews by Artfunkel

Playing Homeworld is a great way to switch off and indulge in an evening of forgettable relaxation. The colourful space vistas, twisting neon engine trails, and soft explosions all come together to create a dreamy feel – which is just as well given how soporific the gameplay is.

Like other space RTS games, Homeworld removes the genre staple of terrain but provides nothing to replace it. Your activities will be managing bog standard rock/paper/scissors unit counters while gathering a single resource type. 3D movement is one of the USPs but it adds very little: in the vacuum it's just a slightly more fiddly movement direction, albeit one which grants your ships an arbitrary damage bonus to targets above or below their own plane.

The most you'll need to think about 3D movement is when positioning capital ships, most of which can only fire in front of them and all of which turn slowly. Unfortunately you can't explicitly set ship facing, making planning ahead a challenge, and during combat capital ships can veer off-target if their pathfinding AI decides that it needs to steer around an obstacle. With capital ship battles often decided by the direction in which each ship is pointing, this easily becomes a pain point.

Otherwise ships can either fire in all directions or turn quickly enough that their current facing doesn't matter. There is no apparent bonus for hitting ships from the rear unless you are specifically trying to disable their engines, a niche activity given how slowly ships large enough to have targetable sub-systems move. There really is vanishingly little else to discuss at a high level.

The automatic difficulty scaling of the campaign, in which the number of enemy opponents changes depending on how many ships you carry over from the previous mission, was ahead of its time. Unfortunately the AI will simply clump all its ships of the same type together and order them about as one unit, which actually makes the campaign easier as it progresses due to the slower response times required by larger battles. You'll coast through the campaigns until their final missions, which both spike difficulty up to the same obscene level. They are disasters and I would suggest just watching the closing cut-scenes online instead of bothering with either.

I paid £9 for the game when it was on sale and am not unhappy with that. But I cannot recommend it for £27 nearly two years after release.

(I didn't play online, but I hear that it's dead.)

Virginia is well worth investing two hours and £7 in. Its jump-cut pacing and dialogue-free story eliminate the two biggest flaws suffered by its peers: dropping out of flow due to excessive amounts of walking or listening.

You won't make any meaningful choices or solve any puzzles while playing. The level of interactivity is instead pitched to keep you engaged with the world without becoming distracted from the considerable task of interpreting it. Characters, locations, and events all whizz by at a pace that would be astounding in a traditional game, yet Virginia makes the onslaught manageable and even exhilarating.

Each scene adds something new to the unfolding narrative, and most are completely unique. World design and animation are superb throughout, with the game's posterised look helping to break up low detail areas. Most scenes keep things flowing smoothly with very clear signposting, and on the few occasions when I did become lost there were only a few seconds of fumbling required. The plot itself is perhaps best described as "diffuse", but I was able to follow it and enjoy the unusual perspective offered by a female protagonist.

Technically there is less to praise. The posterisation shader is dependent on the location of the camera, resulting in distracting bands of colour sometimes crawling over surfaces as you move around. A 30fps cap is in place by default and you are warned when disabling it that the game is meant to be experienced at that speed; this is bizarre and I suspect a fig leaf to cover up performance problems. It isn't even enough, with more than a few scenes dipping below 20fps on my more than capable system.

Nevertheless, Virginia is the best walking simulator yet made. It escapes the criticisms implicit in the genre's name by successfully expanding the model first explored by 30 Flights of Loving from twenty minutes to two hours of densely packed entertainment. I'd far rather see more of this than the current torrent of 95%-filler survival games.

It turns out that a field of grass isn't a very interesting place to hide.

Although Sir, You Are Being Hunted bills itself as a stealth game, in reality you will spend most of your time avoiding your robotic foes altogether as you trudge over empty hills in search of the macguffins you need to escape the islands.

This is no accident: interaction has been designed out of the game in several ways.

Foremost is the lack of any player motivation to approach the robots (save for those which guard each macguffin – more on that later). The best the game musters is its hunger system, which encourages scavenging the abandoned settlements where robots are more likely to patrol. Alas, early on in my game I shot and cooked two rabbits. This simple task, plus occasional visits to unguarded buildings, led to me finishing the game with enough rabbit in my trousers to feed a poorhouse.

The wide open terrain also works against interaction by giving the player too much information and too many choices. There is always plenty of warning of approaching bots, and there is always more than enough space to hide in until they pass. When the player is spotted, running and hiding in the open are both farces.

The game compounds all of this with a thinly-spread checkpoint save system, punishing experimentation and killing curiosity. Developers: please stop doing this.

With the player relegated to an observer it’s just as well that the bots are fun to watch. Pathfinding AI is robust, with sensible group dynamics, and the designs are imaginative and distinctive riffs on various aristocratic stereotypes.

Procedural island generation is also reliable. Yet despite each biome having one special feature (Castle and Industrial, added later in development, shine in this regard) they otherwise all merge into one brown lump. The slightly different items sprinkled on top aren’t enough to create anything memorable and it doesn’t help that they offer no apparent variation in robot behaviour, type or numbers.

Which brings me to the subject of pacing. Here it is in one sentence: the more macguffins you collect, the more robots there are. You will otherwise finish the game in the same way you started: avoiding bands of robots until you find a macguffin, then killing or distracting the two (always two!) low-level robots guarding it, then scurrying back to the nearest checkpoint while again avoiding all contact with anything.

The letters scattered about try to hang a wider narrative on these bones, but they are so rare that multiple play-throughs are required to join any dots together – and that is not a prospect I relish.

After a fantastic two opening levels, Overlord 2 goes downhill rapidly. Expect long trudges when you get lost, a glitchy camera, rubbish "good/evil" choices, a tedious naval section, and repetetive combat. Overlord 1 was much better.

I absolutely love CK2. It's a huge, enthralling and intelligent game where nearly everything is an internally-consistent simulation. Its focus on characters and families makes it infinitely more engaging and human than any other grand strategy game; it isn't even fair to describe it as one. Think of it instead as a soap opera for men.

Just be warned. Once you've embraced Crusader Kings II there is no going back to pretenders like Civ or Total War!

A platformer for human beings. Capsized is all about joy, not pressing buttons accurately. It looks and sounds jawdropping too, with a warm soundtrack and a lush, hand-drawn world.

One word of advice: the flamethrower's alt fire blocks projectiles!