Here’s my Metro reviews for the week of Aug. 10th
We Don’t Need Roads: The Making Of The Back To The Future Trilogy
By Caseen Gaines
Kindle/iBooks/Kobo
With popcorn enthusiasm, Gaines interviews fifty people who worked on the time-travel series to tease out stories about its iconic DeLorean and hoverboard sequences while delving with surprising detail into the dramatic departures of actors Crispin Glover and Eric Stolz. It’s obsessive in detail and enjoyable for its honest accounts.
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris
Xbox One/PS4/PC
Rated: Teen
Tomb Raider-meets-Gauntlet in this beautiful, atmospheric four-player maze admirably filled with triggered traps, magical artifacts, protective mummies, and vengeful, Egyptian gods.
This is a vastly-improved sequel in a series that aims to give Tomb Raider an arcade-like feel and it manages a surprising depth with chase sequences and interactions between Egyptian Gods and Lara Croft (voiced by Keely Hawes) giving as good as she gets.
As you’d expect there are plenty of sequences where Lara and friends must shoot and use magic to fend off waves of mummies and scarab beetles, but the real joy is using her athletic abilities to climb and leap across structures, duck through traps, and move explosive spheres. She can even rappel up walls and swing from that position to claim hidden items.
A very clever touch is the way the game takes advantage of your top-down view, where you can see the tomb and pyramid complex from an angle that the player characters can’t, revealing to you the way Gods and protective creatures poke their heads out from amongst the architecture to threaten and watch Lara unaware.
Turning Tomb Raider into a familiar arcade game should be a quick gimmick to make money, but the designers here have found enough room to be creative and inventive that they’ve given it a surprising and enjoyable sense of adventure.
Moodnotes
iPhone/Apple Watch
$4.59
The creators of Monument Valley have teamed up with clinical psychologists for this anti-depression app that tracks your moods and identify patterns while helping to avoid the “thinking traps” that lead to negative habits.
Gather Journal
iPhone/iPad
Free
This archive of exotic recipes from the biannual Gather print journal includes gorgeous photography, interactive recipes, and streaming mixtapes of music to help you tackle such meals as rainbow bruschetta, Korean bibim guksu, and rabbit-in-a-hat pot pie.
Koi – Journey of Purity
iPhone/iPad
$2.29
As a Koi fish in this tricky, but relaxing game you must safely guide smaller fish past large predators and help unlock hidden flowers amongst a complex waterway threatened by pollution. There’s lots to discovery in this little adventure.
