Dennis Scimeca's Reviews
You may find the title music serene if not melancholic when you first load up Valiant Hearts. When you return weeks later to replay favorite sequences and find collectibles you missed, you may find the same music moving for the way it tugs at the heart strings. You will know, as you're returning to the game, the music is a reminder of the tragedy and the beauty that lies underneath the cartoonish art and puzzles of Valiant Hearts.
All the elements to recommend Iron From Ice to Game of Thrones fans are there.
The challenge in recommending The Dark Below at this price point to anyone other than a hardcore Destiny fan (who was likely never on the fence about the purchase, anyway) is that this DLC tries to please too many masters. If you don't care about the Crucible, that new content doesn't matter. If you don't have a Raid group, Crota's End is irrelevant. And what Destiny really needs—a satisfying narrative—is still entirely absent.
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.
I have no doubt Hardline represents the best efforts of two talented studios, Visceral and DICE, to cough up a satisfying cops-and-robbers Battlefield. Despite best efforts, the pairing doesn't work.
Firewatch delivers a forest adventure that never really ignites
The story feels as confused about its direction as Until Dawn feels confused about its identity.
That nostalgia, much more than the current depth offered by Battlefront is going to drive adoption of this game. You'd probably be better off waiting to see what the expansion packs are going to offer, and then getting the total package for much less than the $110 it's going to cost you if you buy everything on release. Then again, who wants to wait for their Star Wars video game pew-pew fix when it looks and sounds this good?
Cranking up the difficulty in Starships and thereby eliminating the margin for error can address shortcomings of the tactical mode, but the strategic mode will always remain simple. Hence the feeling that Starships is more like a mini-game than a fully-fledged title, an observation held up by the game's low asking price of $15.
The studio has a 10-year release plan for new Destiny content, including the first two expansions some players have already paid for. What Bungie has released so far is merely a scaffolding, which isn't immediately honest with the player about its core identity. It's a beautiful scaffolding, though, and in the triple-A video game industry, merely beautiful is almost always enough to satisfy the baseline consumer.
Endless jogs through and hiding in forests and combat that wasn't satisfying for all its vagaries made Evolve palatable for me only in small doses. It was nothing I wanted to play for extended sessions.
In Minecraft, I can invite other people to share my discoveries. In No Man’s Sky, I am utterly alone.
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.
If you're a Transformers fan who grew up with the original 1980s universe, Devastation is gold. Everyone else should take this game under advisement.
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.
Star Fox Zero fails to capture the magic of its predecessors
The more we played The Pre-Sequel, the more dubious we became as to whether it warranted a standalone release. Oxygen consumption and verticality were the only fresh elements in the level designs. The new weapons classes—cryo and laser weapons—felt like additions to our arsenal that we could take or leave. The writing was full of references to the previous two games.
Sunset Overdrive tries too hard to make you love it
The endings for Season Two collectively did the worst thing an ending can do for a video game franchise: They made me unsure that I cared about season three. [WARNING: Spoilers in this review]
That's not an uncommon motivation for a lot of Game of Thrones fans—and the same goes for many of the characters in the story. I can therefore think of no finer way to describe just how authentic a Game of Thrones experience Telltale has crafted.