Star Wars: Battlefront II tries to straddle the hardcore and casual audiences. It succeeds some of the time, and it also fails some of the time. So far, the cut scenes in the single-player campaign are excellent, but I'm waiting to get into some really fun gameplay.
It took me around 36 hours and 13 runs to beat the game. And when I finally beat it, I felt so good. Now I'll have to get started all over again.
You may feel split between the lack of complete agency and the recognition that you are being told a story.
Detroit: Become Human is best when it foresees the consequences of our decisions and sets up a clear choice — or a muddy choice. It creates the illusion of the Butterfly Effect, where small actions can lead to big consequences.
The story was kind of wacky, it made me laugh, and it had a kind of moral to it in the end. It's not heavy moralizing, but it makes you think about whether you really should be tossing out so much trash for a donut hole to collect. I wished the story was longer and the game had more things to do besides capturing things in a hole. But the story was lighthearted and the gameplay was fun. If you don't have high expectations, I think you'll find Donut County is a nice diversion.
This Lara Croft memoir ends in a good way, and I'll miss this version of Lara more than any of them.
I found there was plenty of emotion, story, and action to keep me interested in what happens next. I'm not a fan of the episodic nature of the game, as I would rather play it all at once. But I look forward to the rest of it.
Call of Duty works best when it throws a diversity of experiences at you. The multiplayer game accomplishes this with the constant duels between the Specialists. The Zombies experience will keep you trying to survive for just one more round. And Blackout could provide an endless set of crazy and fun experiences.
But make no mistake: Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece. I see these flaws as small distractions, but they don't kill my enthusiasm for the game. Those bugs seem like nitpicking against scenes like the one in the video above, as Arthur rides to the sound of a beautiful song.
It had the potential to be as good as The Last of Us, but it lost its way. It’s worth playing, especially as Bend Studio stamps out the bugs.
And while I can appreciate this new art form, this story wasn't quite as dramatic as I had hoped for, or at least the sequence in which I saw the events wasn't as satisfying. It's not as long as I thought it might be. With the pluses and minuses here, I see this as an evolving new medium but not one that has yet reached its highest form.
I think this is much more fun and takes advantage of the fundamentally social nature of the choose-your-adventure style gameplay in Man of Medan.
Gears 5 has a lot to offer, with multiplayer, co-op modes, and a single-player campaign with wide range of emotions, from humor and laughter to despair and tragedy. It leaves the fans with a bit of a cliffhanger ending, but that just means that fans will want Gears 6 to come soon.
I liked the intentions of the game. But while it did have a big twist, I felt like it was more of a short story than a long narrative.
To say that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is provocative is an understatement. It makes you think about a lot of things, including how much violence a video game should have.
Just when you thought power fantasies couldn’t get any better, Doom Eternal comes along with its universe of blood and gore to put you in a state of flow.
The improvements that Naughty Dog made in gameplay and graphics showed that they were able to completely overhaul a system that wasn't all that bad to begin with, and the result was gameplay that kept me entertained even though it was the longest game that Naughty Dog had ever made. As I said, the action in this game is intense, grueling, and raw.
It doesn’t rely on stereotypes or tropes to find easy answers, and it could be a source of comfort to those who can empathize with these problems. That’s why I liked the tale. It treats all of its characters with a kindness and empathy that unsheathes their complexities.
But it’s not the best Call of Duty game I have played, and the specter of returning to Warzone battle royale games looms large over this game. That’s why I rate this game as 4-out-of-5 stars (and yes, I might rate it much closer to 4.5 stars out of 5, as it is a shade better than the Watch Dogs: Legion game I played recently). I don’t think it’s as good as last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which was so disturbing and thoughtful and had an excellent and long single-player campaign.
Empire of Sin has its bugs and some rough cinematic moments. But Romero Games pulled this project off with a team of just 30 people. For a game of its ambition, that seems like a small team. It’s pretty much an indie project, or perhaps “double-A,” compared to other games that are more polished but have hundreds of developers — or even more — working on them.