Dennis Scimeca's Reviews
The Division 2 is surely the game that fans of The Division wanted to play and that Massive Entertainment wanted to deliver the first time around. Good things come to Division agents who wait.
Destiny 2 is everything you could ask for in a sequel. The systems of the original Destiny have been tweaked and tuned. The graphics quality is superlative. Destiny 2 feels less like a grind, is easier to get into, and is a superior project to the original Destiny in almost every way.
You always play as part of a cover band in a Rock Band game, but in the main games you're part of a really good cover band that knows how to mimic the songs they're playing. In Rock Band VR, you sound like a cover band that sounds like a cover band, which isn't nearly as satisfying unless you're enamored enough with the VR technology and experience to not care what the song sounds like as long as you're having fun.
Paper Mario Color Splash isn’t frustration-free, but compared to the Mario platforming games Color Splash is light and refreshing, an opportunity to have an adventure with Mario and his friends that doesn’t require lightning-quick reflexes and high frustration tolerance. You’d better be ready for some cringe worthy puns, however.
Victories in ReCore, whether they were rooted in platforming or combat skill always felt satisfyingly earned, and that for me was enough to balance all the frustration along the way. But if I hadn't enjoyed the Disney-like tone of ReCore's story and had not genuinely liked the game's characters, my patience for ReCore's shortcomings would probably have strained to the breaking point.
In Minecraft, I can invite other people to share my discoveries. In No Man’s Sky, I am utterly alone.
I have a lot of patience for VR control schemes with wonky elements. Developers are still figuring out how best to create games for VR. But there has to be a valuable experience to balance out the frustration those control schemes can create, and other than a single moment of empathy for a suffering animal that I don’t think would have been possible without VR, The Assembly failed to deliver that experience.
If you are a first-person shooter fan generally, and if you enjoy team-based FPS play specifically, not at least trying Overwatch feels criminal. Blizzard always imparts a deep sense of holistic quality into its games, and Overwatch is no exception.
Doom's triumphant return to hell makes old school the new hotness
The game doesn't shine unless you have real communication among teams, which is tough to find with random players. I can't see myself sticking around to learn all the different Battleborn and embrace what this game is ultimately about without a group of friends to play it with.
Star Fox Zero fails to capture the magic of its predecessors
New Ratchet & Clank game captures all of the fun of the original
I enjoyed Quantum Break in the same way I enjoy Marvel superhero movies. They're fun to watch while I kick back and eat some popcorn. But when I go to see The Avengers I don't have a control pad in my hands, and there's where Quantum Break gets confusing for me. Sussing out the relative importance of the two halves of Quantum Break messed with my head as much as trying to sort through all the story's causality loops.
The Division sets a new standard of excellence for shared-world shooters
Every so often a game jam produces something special that is both interesting and commercially viable. A game like Superhot.
Far Cry Primal takes the series in a strange and satisfying direction
Firewatch delivers a forest adventure that never really ignites
XCOM 2 has everything you could want in a sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown
I also can't be upset about how hostile The Witness often felt, because the game taught me a lesson that was worth the pain—about how intimate puzzle games are. I think they represent a more direct relationship between creator and participant than most genres, and that's an aspect of puzzle games that I've never really appreciated before.
In traditional adventure games, even if the experience amounts primarily to dialogue choices and walking through the story, the action is also punctuated with cutscenes. Oxenfree lacks this element, so a second playthrough to experiment with different choices will require a lot of slogging through the same wide-angle shots and simple interactions with the environment that I doubt would change the second time around.