When any video-game franchise, mainstream or niche, breaks into the double digits, developers should recognize the unique milestone as an opportunity to revamp the series, especially if the latest entry is making its debut on the mother company's latest home console. Sadly, Mario Party 10 suggests the series has reached a downward-trending low.
It wouldn't be a Battlefield game without a host of multiplayer scenarios, and Hardline is definitely no slouch in that department.
Xenoverse isn't a particularly great fighting game, or even an above-average one, but it's clearly the best entry in this long-running franchise in quite a while.
Even though much of Hyperdevotion Noire is indeed unoriginal, with its countless caricatures of trendy gaming icons, there's enough novelty and variety in its strategic battles to keep players, especially fans of the mainline series, interested for quite a while.
Gone are the days of dashing in for a quick pummel, retreating, defending, counterattacking, and cycling said routine ad nauseam.
The game's progression, while unhurried in nature, stays true to the orthodox route of the conventional JRPG, keeping things engaging primarily by way of its kinetic, multi-faceted battle system.
The process of earning respect is a key aspect of the game; establishing your team with only the most loyal companions is a tricky task among many other demanding objectives.
In a year that the Wii U gifted us with Mario Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2, games that displayed what the system could do graphically, Rise of Lyric's graphics are simply unacceptable in 2014.
No matter what the type of scenery, the objectives are widely the same: lay waste to enemy officers, locate the boss character, defeat them in earnest.
The game's 30-character roster has its pros (all hail Metal Mario and Pink Gold Peach) and its cons (too many babies, and the Koopalings aren't all that special either), but there's enough dissimilarity in weight classes that there's always a suitable option in any versus situation.
There's not a shred of innovation or much of a concerted effort to evoke terror in players throughout the entirety of Daylight.
As flawed as Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is, its video-game counterpart is even more of a disappointment.
ASW takes a chance on comprehensively reformatting BlazBlue's story progression, and the result is a bit of a mixed bag.
It's a shame Arzest routinely steps out of line when it comes to the visual and aural artistry of Yoshi's New Island, because the gameplay ushers the little spin-off that could into the current century.
The monotonous clear-this-room-to-move-forward progression speaks volumes as to how much thought went into the structure of Yaiba's core mechanics.
The game is as across-the-board demanding as its predecessors, functioning on an ever more grandiose scale, dishing out excruciating beatdowns like Thin Mints at a Girl Scouts cookies sale.
If nothing else, Three Rings could have put in the extra man hours to salvage Romance Dawn from the germinating trash heap of poorly actualized One Piece games by at least paying tribute to Oda's spirited creation. Yet, since they abstain from doing so, apparently with almost every fiber of their being, they've put forth a product so systematically undercooked as to make even the most unflappable One Piece zealots question their faithfulness.
Although the Wii U GamePad doesn't receive its due of customary prods and blows akin to SM3DW, there's more than enough ingenuity, and thoughtful nods to gaming trailblazers of old, in Tropical Freeze to forgive its lack of novelties.
To dwell on the debacle that is Lightning Returns's ghastly storytelling is to deprive oneself of a rather fantastically constructed battle system, one that sporadically elevates the game from disastrous lows to dizzying heights.
The variation in objectives stretches past the typical bored-game rigmarole and into uncharted territory that frequently invites cruel, comeback-heavy sabotage.