While Man of Medan isn’t the greatest game you’ll play this year, it does a good enough job of setting the Dark Pictures Anthology series out to sea.
All in all, Fire Emblem: Three Houses does a great job of bringing the series to the Nintendo Switch.
Still, though, I had a really good time traveling through the world that has been brought to life within Dragon Quest Builders 2. If you're looking for a good game that has plenty of content to keep you logging in every day, then this is one title you'll want to check out.
If you’ve ever been a fan of Lovecraftian horror or just mystery stories in general, The Sinking City is one stop you’ll want to make a little time for on your trip down the rabbit hole.
Overall, Cadence of Hyrule is a brilliant but short adventure that expertly blends the Legend of Zelda series with the intensity of a rhythm-based game.
Overall, Gato Roboto is one of my favorite indie games I’ve had a chance to play this year.
For now, Rage 2 feels like the final shrill beep on the ECG before the flatline hits. The last flutter of life the series had to offer, squandered away.
Sure, The Division 2 isn’t perfect. Those hoping for an in-depth and engaging story will find themselves extremely disappointed in the meager offering on hand here. But, if you can overlook that, you’ll find an amazing experience beneath that is just teeming with engaging content.
For now, I’d steer clear of it—unless you don’t mind a shallower RTS experience. But, if you’re going into Bannermen expecting the next Starcraft, Age of Empires, or Warcraft 3… well, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.
God Eater 3 rewards you for diving deeper into its mechanics. There’s a lot to like here when it comes to customization and combat, but the story and level design leave a lot to be desired.
Metro Exodus is best when it follows the classic Metro formula, painting the world with tension as you dive deeper into the darkness of the world. While the game does suffer with a bit of an identity crisis at times, at the end of it all, the tension and fear that is peppered throughout more than makes the journey worth the trouble as players get their first look at a much bigger world and the dangers that lie within it.
There’s a lot on offer here, and while it does lose itself in the grind sometimes, the sheer amount of content here more than makes up for the negatives that you’ll encounter, especially if you’re a fan of the games that inspired it.
On the surface, Mega Crit's weird blend of rogue-like and card game might seem like a simple dungeon-crawler with some deck-building mechanics thrown in. But, as you dive deeper beneath the surface, and really start to flesh out the complexities tied into each deck, you’ll find an entirely new world of mechanics to learn and master as you try your best to survive each encounter and eventually slay the Spire.
Halo Wars 2 is a dull RTS with a beautiful spirit
Perhaps one of the most interesting features to make its way into Tyranny is the new reputation system. Unlike other RPGs, where morality plays a key part in the story, Tyranny takes a different path, basing its reputation system on Fear and Loyalty. Throughout the story the things you do either instill Fear or Loyalty into your party members and companions. It is an interesting way of going about the famed RPG repuation system, and it gives you a little more leeway with how you play the game. But when it is all said and done it almost feels like a wasted system. No matter what your reputation with your companions, their story never changes. They will always be there, unless you let them die, and you never get a chance – no matter how scared or loyal they area – to see more into their lives. Unlike Pillars of Eternity, which featured different quests to showcase your companion’s lives, Tyranny allows the companion system to fall flat, ignoring it in favor of stifled choices and tiresome combat.
Battlefield 1 might not be the best Battlefield game, or the best FPS game I've ever played, but it succeeds at doing what it needs to do. It feels like Battlefield, it works like Battlefield, and it has plenty of opportunities for amazing things to happen that have only ever happened in a Battlefield game. It’s nice to see DICE returning to the roots of what makes this series so amazing, and I’m happy that, for the first time in years, a new Battlefield game doesn’t feel like it is in the middle of an identity crisis.
The biggest disappointment of the expansion comes in the form of the new social arena, the Archon’s Forge. Billed as a mix between the Prison of Elders and the Court of Oryx, Bungie made some unfortunate design decisions when putting the forge together. They’ve since fixed one of those, making it easier to get SIVA Offerings (which you need to activate the forge), but the instanced event still suffers from a lack of connected players. This is one event that feels like it would have been better used as its own instance in the game (like the Prison of Elders), but instead the Court of Oryx approach leaves a lot of players to tackle their Offerings on their own, which defeats the entire purpose of the encounter. This makes it tougher to take on the more difficult events in the Forge, which has been a huge turn-off for a lot of players so far.
When you step back and look at No Man’s Sky you can actually see how well it shines, and just how much love and devotion was put into each piece of the universe. It’s a procedurally generated world, but that doesn’t change the fact that Hello Games breathed life into this world. While some mechanics can be grating, it succeeds fairly well at its vision of delivering an eerie galaxy and the sense of discovery in exploring it.
DICE may have failed to address all of the problems of its predecessor, but it completely re-captured what Mirror's Edge was all about. Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a great way to bring new fans–and old fans alike–back into the world of Faith Connors.
One of my favorite things about Blood and Wine is the main storyline’s ending. After you’ve completed the story, CD Project Red brings everything to a close. This means your decisions throughout the base game’s main storyline is important, and it plays into one of the moments you come across as you finish up the final bit of the expansion’s main quest. It’s a nice touch to really help things feel connected, and to further hit home the impact that your choices have on the game world as a whole.