Velvet Crowe
Game Junkie
Member Since: 03 Jun 2010
Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Age: 33
Bio: Former journalist, invested in humanities, fitness, and consuming garbage. Probably one of the few Criticker users who actually read comics and plays competitive video games. Subtlety is overrated. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/176986912-drew https://twitter.com/DrewStr56396515
Recent Ratings
Check out Velvet Crowe's...
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996) - Rated 21 Aug 2025
"The novelty of this game is in its scale but I do think it sacrifices a lot to do this resulting in cookie cutter quests and the towns being ubiquitous in their design and layout. The gameplay is largely a bunch of obnoxious stat checks and exploits and I don't think there's much in the way of making its utility interesting in spite of how complex its character building is. The RNG dungeons can often be goddamn TEDIOUS too. But in spite all that, it's a cool enough novelty I can't totally hate."
Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness (2022) - Rated 21 Aug 2025
"I'd define this game as CRPG's brought to their bare minimum and designed in the most stock way possible. But it's fixated on the worst aspects of CRPG's, meaning lots of painfully boring fetch quests with bland outcomes and combat that's one note and plodding. The main twist it wants to play with is the greed mechanic but that's so inconsistent in terms of how it's measured and the game never challenges you narratively in ways to make this the least bit engaging. Everything is so paper thin."
I Wanna Maker (2023) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"Imagine I Wanna Be the Guy but the level design isn't a shitpost? The main campaign that comes with this package is on its own some of the best 2D platforming I've experienced but the game becomes infinitely replayable with how much it offers in the user created content. The physics and implementation of the double jump allows for so much level design to work with the simplest of options, yet this game offers so many variety of tools that possibilities are near endless!"
Spy Fiction (2003) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"I like the game's style and personality but it's basically "what if we put Hitman into MGS?" Without the merits of either. You don't interact with NPCs beyond the garb system and virtually all of your tools are extremely contextualized gimmicks that only function in certain setpieces. And fuck me if its setpieces can't be atrociously bad at times, especially the Mission Impossible zipline sequences with awful visual cues. I think it's a charming novelty but... playing it is actually painful."
UFO 50 (2024) - Rated 16 Aug 2025
"UFO 50 is fascinating in that the quality of its titles is inconsistent but that inconsistency contributes to the overall meta narrative. It's interesting to look at each title as a representation of the phases this fictional company goes through, the experimentation and changes to how its titles are designed. But it's also impressive that it has a good number of titles that are enjoyable to play regardless, some I'd even say would be peak NES design had they been made in the 80's."
Ecsaform (1999) - Rated 11 Aug 2025
"Conceptually and vibes wise this is fantastic. I actually think it implements some cool gameplay systems too, the fact it moves so quickly is a huge plus in contrast to other PS1 SRPGs. But the big downfall of this is how unfinished everything comes off. There's literally town scenes where you can run around into a lot of areas with literally no NPCs around. The scope of battles while structured well is also so limited given how small they make everything. Really sucks, this could have been cool"
Evil Genius 2: World Domination (2021) - Rated 11 Aug 2025
"Part of me wants to say this is better because of how much more flexible it is with base building but it being so lenient just makes difficulty a joke and it doesn't aim to change much with the formula as much it just wants to add bloat. The bloat makes the gameplay loop so tedious and after a certain point you come to realize how every mission and task is literally the same thing every time. It doesn't help that the writing is low effort which could have salvaged all of this."
Marvel Rivals (2024) - Rated 11 Aug 2025
"It has glaring issues with how overtuned support ults are wherein they stall the game in a lame way and have no consistent counterplay. It also has a lot of weird jank to it such as how headshots work and the kits are inconsistent in terms of how interesting they are to engage with or capture that character's fantasy. But compared to other hero shooters I dig how much more versatile this is in terms of the type of characters it allows and some like Spider-Man are really cool in execution."
Weird West (2022) - Rated 11 Aug 2025
"This game is a perfect example of how bloat and overstaying your welcome ruins the experience. Leaves a strong first impression stylistically and its concept is novel but then the more you play the more obviously imbalanced it is. There's never not a reason to abuse stealth and more direct, confrontational options are so much weaker due to how health balancing works. Eventually it repeats maps constantly so going through the same encounters constantly gets really goddamn boring."
Dishonored 2 (2016) - Rated 24 Jun 2025
"Really cool setpieces, love the level with time travel, and honestly, I think most of my enjoyment from the game comes from that. But on the other hand I hate how much gating the game puts on your abilities which severely limit how much interaction you can have with levels and enemies. The level themselves also feel needlessly big at times and while a good many have cool setpieces a lot also have gimmicks I find annoying, not to mention transparency on enemy detection is poorly conveyed."
