Dan Stapleton's Reviews
The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos isn't a grand finale for Obsidian's RPG, but it gives us an intriguing whodunnit in a new location and a reason to return for another adventure with the crew of the Unreliable.
Do you like Slay The Spire? If so, you should absolutely try Monster Train's more tactical spin on the deck-building roguelike, which literally layers on new ideas and has every bit as much depth and variety.
Watch Dogs: Legion's bold use of roguelike mechanics in an open-world action game pay off in interesting ways, making this visit to near-future London feel more varied than the previous two games.
Serious Sam 4 still has the spectacle of hundreds of enemies bearing down on you, but its long stretches of run-and-gun shooting quickly become monotonous.
The Outer Worlds’ Peril on Gorgon DLC is mechanically unambitious in that it doesn’t introduce any new ideas to change up gameplay, but it does take the crew of the Unreliable to several new locations around the Hyperion system as it unveils a fairly lengthy and entertaining detective story.
The Destroy All Humans! remake recaptures the simple, campy joy of of rampaging through 1950s America as an angry gray alien.
Orcs Must Die! 3 is very familiar to players of the second game but still a fun and goofy action/tower-defense challenge.
Phantom: Covert Ops takes itself way too seriously and it stealth is basic and reliant on virtually blind enemies, but infiltrating an enemy base with a murder canoe in VR does have its bright spots.
Disintegration's single-player campaign has some novel ideas and its robot enemies die well, but it never achieves any tactical depth.
Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.
Gears Tactics does an excellent job of grafting Gears' signature look and feel onto XCOM's turn-based battle format and looks great doing it.
Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.
Black Mesa is the best way to play the classic original 1998 Half-Life today, but it's a remake that already feels old enough that it would benefit from a remake itself.
Phoenix Point's more complex take on the classic X-COM formula has some great ideas, but most of them feel experimental and in need of fine-tuning and balance.
Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order makes up for a lot of lost time with a fantastic single-player action-adventure that marks the return of the playable Jedi.
With The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has found its own path in the space between Bethesda and BioWare's RPGs, and it's a great one.
John Wick Hex is a simple, smart tactics game but its distracting lack of polish often thwarts its attempt to distill the fast action of the movies into deliberate gameplay.
In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, survival is easy once you decipher the basic mechanics of evolution and sit through the cutscenes, but the journey is full of moments of discovery.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw does a great job of modernizing the spacefighter gameplay of classics like Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer.