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This is a game with plenty of meat that never gets precise or powerful enough to cut to the bone.
The surreality of Control Resonant serves to amplify its pathos.
Between Ordell’s amnesia, the time-jumping (and looping) narrative, and the multiple endings, Townfall’s design similarly spirals ever inward, revisiting again and again the same themes and locations, but each time cutting ever closer to the heart of what they truly represent.
It’s a brilliantly designed, if questionably balanced, system that unifies the game’s tactical battles, the grounded emotional reality of its characters, and the theme of different worlds colliding to both catastrophic and mutually beneficial effect. Which is to say, it’s classic Kato.
Mortal Shell II posed a bracing challenge at the time of review, toeing the line between a character-action game and Elden Ring.
Marvel couldn’t beat ‘em, and wound up being part of an absolute triumph by joining ‘em.
Beast of Reincarnation is like a cheap soda, as the first fizzy sip may excite you, but it only ever gets flatter from there.
Splatoon Raiders is a bit like one of those paint-spinning machines. When the game is only pitting you against hordes of foes, the whole thing bleeds into one indistinct blur. It’s only when the game slows down, either by focusing on a single boss (like the train-shaped Paincourse) or on the preset gadgets you must master to clear “sampler” dungeons, that you can really appreciate all the intelligent, playful gameplay decisions beneath the chaos.
Denshattack! is about commuter trains doing skateboard tricks, and it takes many of its stylistic and narrative cues from the likes of Jet Set Radio.
At one point, Kenway says, “It ain’t work if you love it,” but it’s hard to love the work that goes into a lot of the sailing you do. But push through the tedium and you may just be gobsmacked by the game’s beauty, as in the way you weave between lightning blasts and massive waterspouts during a storm, until the Caribbean returns to its natural state.
Rhythm Heaven Groove introduces great new competitive and cooperative multiplayer minigames, and their lunacy is inspired.
Velan Studios has turned Star Fox 64 into a graphical stunner, bringing it up to code with a more photoreal art design, and top-to-bottom script rewrite for cutscenes and mid-mission banter. For the most part, these are all improvements, making Fox’s mission more meaningful, and his crew feel more, well, human.
There’s a gripping experience nestled in the final few hours of The Adventures of Elliot, when its world, in its sweeping history, becomes your oyster.
But being a highly trained super-spy should feel more intricate than being Nathan Drake does, and every time that First Light tries to be that, it feels half-hearted.
The Dark Knight’s legacy goes extremely deep here, and it’s certainly not a bad thing that the developers want to make sure every player gets the most out of it before leaving them to their own devices.
Where Yoshi and the Mysterious Book really shines, though, is in the way it makes the player shift gears from simply playing the game to thinking about how the game functions.
In this lineage, Mina the Hollower, in all its textured detail and ambitious expansiveness, counts as a new high-water mark.
A few cheap jump scares aside, nothing about Directive 8020 is surprising: In fact, if you glimpse at the game’s Turning Points menu, a shiny flowchart of events, you can see everything that’s going to happen in a given chapter.
The game takes its time to reveal itself to be an intelligent and nuanced narrative RPG.
Mixtape frequently makes that flight not just fully interactive but literal—youthful freedom lighting up the world with a euphoric player-controlled fireworks display while sailing through the air in a caravan of convertibles.