Polygon's Reviews
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the best video game adventure I’ve experienced since Elden Ring, a far more approachable open-world game that has no doubt colored how players perceive this year’s big fantasy RPG. (It certainly did for me.) But like another FromSoftware game, the original Demon’s Souls, I found that once I had accepted Dragon’s Dogma 2’s peculiarities and deciphered what it was asking of me, I fell deeply in love. Dragon’s Dogma 2 awakens those old feelings of learning to overcome my expectations of what a game should be, then discovering new types of experiences along the way. That’s the best kind of journey.
You'll have a lot of stuff to pick up at each of these locations, but the most important items will often provide a "Hey mom!" option, which lets Tess call Opal over. Opal's role in these situations is to provide context about her childhood, how she experienced the past, and what these items (and the secrets that come with them) do to color those memories. They're all essential conversations related to the big, overarching mystery, but they sometimes feel stilted; the "Hey mom!" button gets repetitive, making all the potential sincerity feel cheapened.
It’s unclear whether there’ll be a massive 1.7 update in the future. Barone has been developing a different game, Haunted Chocolatier, since 2020, and while that’s currently on pause to get 1.6 bug-free and available across platforms, surely at some point Stardew Valley will be left to its own devices. But even if it doesn’t get any more major updates, its unshakeable core, long tail, and rooted community mean that it’s bound to stay at the center of the ecosystem that grew up around it for a long while to come.
To an extent it’s understandable: Many of Minter’s best games from the last 30 years, including the likes of Space Giraffe and Polybius, remain commercially available on Steam and elsewhere, and presumably neither Minter nor Digital Eclipse wants to cannibalize Llamasoft’s meager sales. But it means this otherwise illuminating, funny, and exhaustively detailed portrait of a unique video game artist cuts him off in his prime.
That said, The Thaumaturge manages to do a deft job weaving between its supernatural story and the context of its historical setting. Wiktor is an outsider, and his detachment from society means that he can pick a side. I chose to have him back the unions and be a real comrade, but the game has tons of branches — including some where he falls to pride or commits sins that he cannot erase. These are the choices that make The Thaumaturge worth it, even when I’m annoyed by its technical shortcomings. Wiktor’s powers, detective skills, pride, and values are all things that can change the decisions at hand, and when I make a choice, it feels weighty. Since this is an RPG that lasts about 25 hours, I’m already getting amped up to see how a second run changes things. I have the feeling, though, that no matter how hard I try, something is going to go terribly wrong for someone.
Rebirth is worth your time, but I’m not sure if it’s worth as much of your time as it asks for. It’s a game that does many things right and does right by its weighty legacy — but it also makes it clear that for the future final installment, Square Enix should reconsider how necessary it is for these games to be so big.
Bandle Tale is one of the biggest departures in the League of Legends franchise yet, but it’s a hugely welcome respite from the more serious games in my backlog. It does take a bit of a time investment — somewhere between 40 and 60 hours — but it’s enjoyable to amble from objective to objective, taking breaks to host epic parties. It’s a shame that with the end of Riot Forge, we won’t be seeing these experimental titles anymore. While League can be an intimidating prospect, I found myself wholly welcomed by the comfy, silly nature of Bandle Tale.
Mario vs. Donkey Kong was directly inspired by Donkey Kong ’94 and features many of its mechanics, including the lock-and-key system and the Super Mario Bros. 2-style treatment of enemies. It’s a very solid puzzler, but it’s just not as inspired in its design as the older game. Until Nintendo decides to give its actual puzzle-platforming masterpiece an equally considered remake, though — or at least deigns to add it to the Game Boy collection on Switch Online — Mario vs. Donkey Kong will have to do.
Banishers is a spooky, loving tale about two incredible people. I cried a few times, both for these two characters I grew to adore, and for the very sad stories of others just trying to make it in a difficult world. While the combat is not spectacular, and the graphics are middling, everything else makes this a very special game. With superb writing, excellent performances, a clever central mechanic, and thoughtful, engaging stories, Banishers is Don’t Nod’s best game yet.
There is a lot to love here. Satisfying mechanics, gorgeous combat animation, flashy presentation, and a killer soundtrack. That said, I don’t know if my own excitement will be enough to win over friends who are on the fence about the unremarkable story, incomplete tutorialization, and aesthetically dubious roster.
I already consider it a modern horror classic, one that opens up a veritable ocean of possibilities for Remedy’s future. If it takes another 13 years for a game of Alan Wake 2’s caliber to come along again, it will have been well worth the wait.
The game did manage to answer one of my questions, though: Hercule Poirot does not charge his phone at night, and this, mon ami, might be the greatest modern crime of all.
Skylines 2 appears to be the distinct result of a dev team looking out at other places to find beauty and, more importantly, designing with an aim toward getting players interested in thinking of themselves as people making aesthetic choices. It’s thrilling.
Like the Switch itself, Wonder is a collision between the traditional and the new. A game that’s the same as it ever was and nothing like Mario has ever been.
Canons were made to be broken, and Spider-Man 2 swings in that direction. With a sequel teed up by the game’s final act, I’m eager to see where Insomniac goes with that momentum.
After 30 hours and counting, the world of Lords of the Fallen is one I have enjoyed visiting, but ultimately dread inhabiting. Quality-of-life elements, like the option to create your own checkpoints in designated areas, are often jeopardized by an actual checkpoint found two houses later, after you just used up a rare resource. Magic classes, which are introduced as "advanced" in the character creator, actually seem integral, with item descriptions, weapons, and rather powerful spells demanding a stat commitment that knights or archers simply can't afford. Seamlessly switching between realities, as impressive as it looks in action, isn't new. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and The Medium boasted their SSD-powered tech years prior, while Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver showcased similar ideas to Umbral with its Spectral Realm decades ago.
Players face a variety of crises, anomalies, and dilemmas throughout the campaign, presented in the form of two- to three-paragraph story cards and an array of options for pushing the story forward. Some of these stories are directly based on episodes of The Next Generation, while others are original to the game. They're all written in a prose style that's more flippant than you might expect from Trek, though in line with the flavor text of Stellaris or a tabletop strategy game. What's impressive about the setup of these story scenarios is how, despite their costs and rewards being the same across campaigns, I found that the material needs of whatever empire I was playing nearly always guided me towards making the kinds of choices that my faction would likely make on the show. Choosing the most humane or diplomatic option was always practical as the Federation, but often not affordable as the Klingons or Cardassians. It feels appropriate to Trek's ethos that the galaxy's more brutal powers make some dubious or cruel choices, not because they're "evil," but because that's where their circumstances lead them. Disrupting that is possible, but it takes a lot more work.
At certain points, I couldn’t help but feel like this game was trying to do a little too much. Dealing with themes of climate change, generational trauma, community, and loss is a lot to pack into one game. It also presented an ambitious number of character perspectives for players to navigate. Still, life today with all its woes also feels like a little too much, and I respect a team that unflinchingly sails into the headwinds of the weighty issues that have come with life in 2023.
Ultimately, Total War: Pharaoh is an attempt to provide an accessible experience that delivers what feels like an abridged version of a world history course. Most of the systems in Pharaoh offer glimpses of greatness, but aren’t deep or refined enough to deliver a memorable grand strategy experience. Creative Assembly’s take on the Bronze Age is not thematic enough to engage a novice, but not accurate or expansive enough to appeal to Total War veterans, leaving us with a Total War title that’s unlikely to stand the test of time.
With such a wide array of tweaks, updates, and iterations, Counter-Strike 2 is a significant move forward for the franchise. The community is alight again, and I’m as excited as I’ve been for Valve’s shooter in more than 10 years. Counter-Strike is back, and if the current trend of improvements continues, it’s only going to get better from here out.