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Dennis Scimeca


Favorite Games:
  • Star Wars Galaxies
  • Wing Commander
  • Fallout 3

55 games reviewed
81.3 average score
80 median score
69.2% of games recommended

Dennis Scimeca's Reviews

Dennis Scimeca is a Boston-based reporter and critic for the Daily Dot. He has covered the video game industry for five years, for a wide range of outlets including NPR, Salon, Ars Technica, and Kotaku. He has also hosted panels on the video game journalism industry at the Penny Arcade Expo in Boston and Seattle.
Apr 5, 2019

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.

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95 / 100 - Destiny 2
Sep 7, 2017

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.

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80 / 100 - Rock Band VR
May 16, 2017

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.

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Oct 5, 2016

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.

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Sep 12, 2016

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.

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Aug 15, 2016

In Minecraft, I can invite other people to share my discoveries. In No Man’s Sky, I am utterly alone.

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Aug 9, 2016

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.

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May 27, 2016

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.

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- Doom
May 19, 2016

Doom's triumphant return to hell makes old school the new hotness

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May 12, 2016

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.

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Apr 20, 2016

Star Fox Zero fails to capture the magic of its predecessors

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Apr 11, 2016

New Ratchet & Clank game captures all of the fun of the original

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Apr 1, 2016

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.

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The Division sets a new standard of excellence for shared-world shooters

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Feb 25, 2016

Every so often a game jam produces something special that is both interesting and commercially viable. A game like Superhot.

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Feb 22, 2016

Far Cry Primal takes the series in a strange and satisfying direction

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Feb 8, 2016

Firewatch delivers a forest adventure that never really ignites

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Feb 1, 2016

XCOM 2 has everything you could want in a sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown

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Jan 25, 2016

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.

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Jan 15, 2016

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.

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