Quarter to Three's Scores

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For 146 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 31% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Game review score: 64
Highest review score:
Assassin's Creed III
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Fighting Fantasy: Blood of the Zombies
Critic Score 20
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 72 out of 146
  2. Mixed: 27 out of 146
  3. Negative: 47 out of 146
146 game reviews
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    • Metascore: 62
    • Critic Score 40
    Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone
    Features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 40
    Orcs Must Die!
    The problem with Orcs Must Die isn't necessarily Orcs Must Die. The problem is Toy Solders: Cold War, Plants vs. Zombies, Defender Chronicles, and Dungeon Defenders. Because a good tower defense game is just the first step to a good full-featured tower defense game.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 40
    Hero Academy
    Hero Academy is simple, simplistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. You might as well find a friend and take turns punching each other in the arm to see who gives up first.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 40
    Oil Rush
    For the most part, this is a game about running around for five minutes and then a long grind of the winner winning until he wins while the loser loses. Press "F" to watch.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 40
    SoulCalibur V
    The new character customization is either much better or much worse, depending on what you're looking for in character customization. If you want to put stickers on your cape or make a short Asteroth, Soulcalibur V is the game for you. But if you want Soulcalibur IV's indepth unlockable stat-based equipment RPG, well, Soulcalibur IV is the game for you. Because Soulcalibur V has none of that. What a disappointing step backwards.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 40
    Final Fantasy XIII-2
    If there's no payoff - or, as is the case here, if the payoff is hidden behind such a clot of unavoidable tedium that it ultimately overwhelms how much I care about reaching that payoff - then hasn't the game failed? The balancing act for any game designer is to make me care in proportion to the challenge level you throw at me. And given how close I must be to the end, and how little I care to push on, Final Fantasy XIII-2 ultimately fails.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Critic Score 40
    Caylus
    What it all comes down to is this question: Is Caylus a good candidate for porting to the iPhone? Given the length of games, given the poor multiplayer support, given that the elegance of the boardgame is lost entirely, I suspect the answer might be "no". Which is a real shame after Big Daddy Creations so successfully ported Neuroshima Hex to the iPhone.
    • Metascore: 68
    • Critic Score 40
    Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
    Red Wasp Design seems to prefer detail to elegance, and that's exactly the wrong call to make on the iPhone. It's also a damn shame in a game with such an obvious affection for its own characters and the Lovecraft mythos.
    • Metascore: 92
    • Critic Score 40
    Journey
    It mostly reminded me of some of the dull and barely interactive bits of Uncharted 3. I think the lesson here is that deserts are often poorly suited to games without dune buggies...There's no challenge and no real gameplay, which isn't necessarily a criticism. It's sort of like Shadow of the Colossus without any colossi, or Ico without the little girl.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 40
    Ridge Racer Unbounded
    The scripted sterility of a Ridge Racer and the destructibility of a FlatOut go togther like peanut butter and fish oil. This arcade racer deserves credit for elevating the Ridge Racer name above the level of a punchline. But it doesn't manage to crucial task of giving you a reason to play it instead of the current standards of arcade racing likeSplit Second, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, or Driver.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 40
    Nightfall
    So as far as a tabletop game, Nightfall is just weird enough to be worthwhile. But as an iPhone port, Nightfall is a disappointing mess. That I'm no longer playing.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 40
    Max Payne 3
    The shootporn is satisfying enough, if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am. Which is why I have so little patience for how often the awful story and grim prattle get in the way.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 40
    Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings
    This is the same disappointing strategy game it was a year and a half ago, except that it now has two finicky and mostly unimpressive systems shoehorned in.
    • Metascore: 75
    • Critic Score 40
    DiRT Showdown
    Dirt Showdown is all the in-between stuff from other racing games. It's those filler events you had to play to get to the next actual race. Basically, driving game gametax, now given its own game. It's as if someone lifted up all the rally races from the previous Dirts, swept out the detritus that was left, collected it into a tidy little pile, and then slapped a name on it. Dirt Showdown.
    • Metascore: 73
    • Critic Score 40
    The Secret World
    Less ambitious MMOs break less dramatically. But The Secret World breaks differently, crushingly, almost tragically. There are various explanations and workarounds and excuses, and it mostly comes down to the simple fact that making games is hard and making MMOs is even harder. Funcom is simply unable to make the game they designed.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 40
    10000000
    All the cool stuff 1000000 gets right - the strategy, the long-term persistence, the loot, the leveling up - falls apart when I have to back up and align two tiles just so in order to convince the game that I want to move in the direction I want to move. It doesn't happen often. But it happens regularly enough to kill what would otherwise be a pretty cool game.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 40
    Darius Burst SP
    With its forgettable competence, Dariusburst very nearly turned me off of the entire genre of iPad shmups.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 40
    Sleeping Dogs
    A middling open-world game can get by if it's well paced. The Saboteur and Prototype 2, for instance, weren't necessarily good, but they moved. Really moved. They pulled you forward, thanks in large part to great progression systems. There is no such sense of progression in Sleeping Dogs. You have a few tracks that gradually unlock moves you may never use.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 40
    Puzzle Craft
    Dungeon Raid was based on building up your RPG character and earning high scores. But with its crass Farmville skin, Puzzle Craft is ultimately a variation on one of those godawful free-to-play play-now-m'lord microtranscation boondoogles. It's like a time waster wrapped around a time waster. Time wasters all the way down.
    • Metascore: 51
    • Critic Score 40
    Dominant Species for iPad
    You can't take up the slack for the miserable AI by playing multiplayer, because there is no online multiplayer support, asynchronous or otherwise.
    • Metascore: 86
    • Critic Score 40
    Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm
    The campaign is poorly written, poorly acted, erratically paced, full of pointless upgrades and meaningless choices, crammed full of overproduced cutscenes that fail to relate to the gameplay, and without a shred of creative insight into how to use a real time strategy game to tell a story, much less how to get me to click "next mission" without heaving a tired sigh. For all their incomparable game design smarts, Blizzard remains one of the worst storytellers in the business, partly for how hard they try and mostly for how spectacularly they fail.
    • Metascore: 65
    • Critic Score 40
    Defiance
    Defiance is mostly lacking meaningful connective tissue. It fails at the fundamental task of feeling like a thoughtfully designed and polished game. It fails at feeling like a world. It fails at giving you much to look forward to once you’ve realized you’ve seen most of what it’s ever going to do. You can only get so far with “it’s fun to shoot stuff”. About Defiance far.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 40
    Talisman Prologue HD
    These canned side quests are a pretty poor substitute for whatever entertainment you and your friends might normally wring from a real-world copy of Talisman.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 40
    The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
    Van Helsing starts out slow and takes a while to get not terrible.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 40
    Warhammer Quest
    If only the game mechanics were as clearly laid out as the business model.
    • Metascore: 49
    • Critic Score 20
    Saints Row: The Third - Genki Bowl VII
    Saints Row 3 is a tough act to follow, particularly given how much awesome over-the-top stuff is already in there. But dribbling out forgettable and pointless content like Genki Bowl is exactly the wrong way to follow it.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 20
    Midway Arcade
    As I played - or tried to play - these games, I found myself wondering if Tiffany Melson is on Facebook. Which would never happen if I had playable versions of Gauntlet, APB, Rampage, and Defender.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 20
    Syndicate
    It's every generic shooter you've forgotten you played, come back to be forgotten again...Oh, did I mention there's bullet time? Because there's bullet time.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Critic Score 20
    Operation: Eradicate
    A colossal disappointment for how it takes something I really want - an iPhone version of Pandemic - and manages to screw it up completely, reducing me to frustrated stabbing at impossibly tiny icons.
    • Metascore: 53
    • Critic Score 20
    Inversion
    Inversion drinks deeply from the Gears of War well, including the same basic combat model, the same generic space marines, and the same overwrought investment in its own bad story. But there's none of Gears' heft or kick. Instead, Inversion has that lightweight feel usually reserved for the first level of a game before you get the useful weapons.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Critic Score 20
    Lollipop Chainsaw
    If you want to play a shallow fighting game that combines bad humor, cheesecake, and gore, Splatterhouse would be delighted to get a little of your attention. It knows what it is and it delivers. But the gravest insult in Lollipop Chainsaw is that it's such an obvious and vapid attempt at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bayonetta. You, ma'am, are no Bayonetta.
    • Metascore: 52
    • Critic Score 20
    Krater
    The best action RPGs are carefully calculated to go directly from the lizard brain to the index finger. Krater, an action RPG from a small Swedish studio, instead meanders, gets lost, and ends up in a quiet cul de sac somewhere around the cerebellum.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Critic Score 20
    The Amazing Spider-Man
    It's all such an uninspired riff on Rocksteady's Batman masterpiece, with the stink of a mandate from a boardroom to make it like that Batman game that did so well. But Arkaham City was built from the ground up because it suited the character. The Amazing Spider-Man is entirely borrowed.
    • Metascore: 69
    • Critic Score 20
    Zombie HQ
    The bottom line is that Zombie HQ is not a game. It's a shameless business model.
    • Metascore: 67
    • Critic Score 20
    Resident Evil 6
    Yes, this is just like Raccoon City all over again: stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, tedious. Except for the parts where it's like Call of Duty, which are equally stilted, awkward, ridiculous, embarrassing, and tedious, but with more NPC soldiers milling about. Resident Evil 6 is thoroughly oblivious to so many of the things that make a good game these days.
    • Metascore: 66
    • Critic Score 20
    Fighting Fantasy: Blood of the Zombies
    In the 80s, these choose-your-own-adventure books were novel and exciting, particularly on your way to discovering some of the well written Infocom adventures. But today, on an iPad, Blood of the Zombies is a tedious relic, not unlike playing Adventure on an Atari 2600 emulator. It might sound like a cool idea until you're actually doing it. Some things are better off remembered instead of experienced.
    • Metascore: 87
    • Critic Score 20
    Halo 4
    A shiny old dog without any new tricks. I got more out of the Halo 1 remake, which at least had the appeal of nostalgia. Playing through an updated version of the original Halo was at times tired or tedious. But it was also a reminder of the raw genius that launched the series. There is none of that in Halo 4, which is a drawn-out retread without any fresh perspective or energy, and furthermore missing a lot of what I need to pull me through a Halo game. Halo 4 demonstrates that if there's one thing worse than more of the same, it's less of the same.
    • Metascore: 74
    • Critic Score 20
    PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale
    The constant parallels to Super Smash Bros. eventually undermine Playstation All-Stars, which has nowhere near the generosity, enthusiasm, or longevity of a Super Smash Bros.
    • Metascore: 71
    • Critic Score 20
    Guardians of Middle-Earth
    Speaking of shameless, Guardians of Middle Earth is unabashedly grind-based. As you play, you earn ingame currency you spend on new characters, on slottable character improvements, and on potions that you can use once. Potions that drain your resources so you have to keep playing to stay competitive. Weak potions are cheap. Powerful potions aren't. Spend to win.
    • Metascore: 45
    • Critic Score 20
    Aliens: Colonial Marines
    Utterly flubs the fine art of shooting cool guns at freaky things in space dungeons. And it has a terrible weapon progression system and cut-rate production values, to boot. Plus, there are no predators, which is apparently what it takes to make an aliens game that isn’t awful.
    • Metascore: 64
    • Critic Score 20
    SimCity
    If Electronic Arts is going to make a game with the basic premise being that no city is an island, if they're going to stress the interaction among cities, if they're going to make playing alongside other people a cornerstone of the design, if they're going to force my creations into tiny boxes that cannot exist past a certain point without the help of other tiny boxes, they're going to have to do the hard work of making it actually work. And ideally, that hard work should be done before they sell people the game, not after they've been caught flat-footed for botching it so completely.

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