Max Payne 3

In complete contrast to Arkham City, Max Payne 3 is a game that does almost everything wrong, but it somehow works. The developers obviously had a very strong and clear vision of the game they wanted to build.
So we have a game that has:

• Ridiculously excessive cut-scenes; felt like I spent more time watching than playing!
• Massive over-use of visual distortion to demonstrate Max's drinking and drug-use
• Completely linear game-play; absolutely no deviation from the pre-ordained path
• An unpleasant and unlikeable lead character
• A plot worthy of a low-budget Steven Seagal movie

And yet, I really enjoyed it. I didn't feel the need to go exploring a huge open world - it made a nice change to just shoot the baddies as the game lined them up. 

I think I'd probably get bored of it quite quickly - I wouldn't want to play too many games like this - but it was definitely fun while it lasted. Which is more than I can say for Arkham City.

Oh, and Max spent half the game looking like Walter White, so that was cool.

Arkham City

Well that was disappointing.
I loved Arkham Asylum and City is more of the same, but bigger and better - so what went wrong?

It's difficult to pin it down; where Asylum was gripping and addictive, I found City in equal parts tedious and frustrating.

I think my main issue stems from the more open nature of the game world and the inevitable side-quests that came with.
In some games, side-quests make sense. For as single-minded a character as Batman to be constantly distracted from his urgent and vital mission by (in some cases) trivial side-quests seemed out-of-character and just served to break the tension of the narrative.
This came to a slightly ridiculous head towards the end of the game. The story has Batman being forced (with strong encouragement by Alfred) to delay rescuing <spoiler> in order to <spoiler>
With missiles flying and time of the essence, I found time to complete two major side-quests and at least 3 unnecessary small battles.

I appreciate there's market pressure to provide variety, optional extras, mini-games and multi-player. There are always complaints on forums about games being "too linear" and then there's the need to fill up the "achievements" roster. I have my own thoughts on that, which probably deserve a post of their own, but I definitely felt it wasn't done in an appropriate way here.
How much agency do you expect when you're playing the Batman anyway?

As for the frustration, there were just too many battles with large numbers of heavily armed and armoured opponents. When enemies need a special combo to defeat and you're surrounded by regular minions it was very easy to get swamped. Again, in a game there has to be an element of risk - it can't be TOO easy, but it should take something special to beat the Batman - the approach here turned Arkham City and far too much of a stealth game.

And since when could Batman fly? OK - he couldn't quite, but the dive/glad mechanic was pretty damn close...

At the end of the day, Arkham City is a very good game. Excellent graphics, outstanding voice-acting and all the right ingredients for a 9.0+ AAA game.
But for me it just didn't quite work and didn't feel like Batman.

Antichamber

Finished Antichamber last night (well, actually it was this morning...) so can comment properly - just in case you're undecided. Did you notice I was up past midnight playing it?!

As all the other, proper, reviews say, Antichamber kind of defies description. Portal really is the closest match - it's a 3D puzzle game where you don't know what's going on half the time. But the puzzles are (mostly) completely different in approach - it's usually about figuring out what to do (or chancing on it by accident) rather than using fine mouse/keyboard skills to actually do it.

It's the puzzles where you DO need to carefully build complex constructs from coloured blocks that Antichamber does occasionally cross the line from challenging to frustrating. The controls aren't quite precise or predictable enough to match the design of the puzzles, having to restart a lengthy process right at the end through no real fault of your own is never nice.

On the whole, though, the game is outstanding. It takes an hour or two to get into - it really does challenge all of your assumptions about reality and causality as well as those about how 3D games work. Look up, look down, turn around, walk backwards, you can never assume that nothing has changed in a bizarre way.
That makes it fun, makes it challenging and ultimately worth your time and money.

I should also note it took me a LOT longer to finish than you might expect from the reviews, Reddit or HowLongToBeat.com
General consensus seems to be about 6-8 hours; it's difficult to be accurate (my Steam play-times are inaccurate due to playing offline and my tendency to leave games on pause for hours) but I reckon it took memore like 12-14 hours to find every exit of every room. Maybe I was just rubbish at it (no "maybe" about it!)...

Antichamber - First Impressions...

Weird. Very weird. After an hour I don't really know what's going on yet.
It's certainly interesting, challenging and graphically original - but so far I'm struggling.
I think the issue I have with it is that it doesn't give you any feedback at all on how well you're doing.
That's obviously a deliberate design choice and part of the artistic style of the game.

It's laudable that the game is trying to do something different, much like Dear Esther I'm prepared to be more forgiving of a game that tries to do something new - but I have to admit it's not doing much to pull me in  and encourage me to play. I'm not even entirely certain I've found any of the "puzzles" yet, much less solved them.

I'm far too stubborn to give up (especially since it was relatively expensive for an indie game), so hopefully I'll get more of a grip on things. In the meantime, I'll probably be playing Max Payne 3...

Update: After a bit more play over lunch, I found a couple of things I'd missed (much like the other reviews say, it's a game that benefits from the occasional break). So I've now {SPOILER} and {SPOILER} and have gone from amused bewilderment to definite recommendation!

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is one of those games that feels like more than the sum of its parts.
Really, it's just a fairly basic FPS - the engine is competent but not outstanding, the graphics are decent but nothing particularly special and the script / voice-acting is fairly average (the NPC barks are extremely repetitive and annoying)
But... somehow it all works and is really enjoyable. Perhaps it's the fairly unique setting, the unfamiliar weapons and the creepy atmosphere, but somehow Metro sucked me in in a way that not many FPS style games do. It's not BioShock or Half-Life 2, but it's WAY ahead of CoD and all the various clones/competitors.
Particularly the first half of the game, which involves a lot of creeping around in the dark, was extremely tense and enjoyable - it went down hill a bit for me in the latter part of the game where the weapons power up a bit and all of the ammunition you've been saving starts to blaze, but it was still fun.
I also liked the ending, and bonus points for letting me reload and see the alternative ending without resorting to YouTube!

I got this as part of the Humble THQ Bundle (and another copy free from a Facebook give-away); in terms of marketing these deals served their purpose brilliantly (not that it helped THQ) as I'll certainly be looking out for the sequel if/when it's released...