In a medium that evolves by the day, 11 is content just to be a pretty good Mega Man game—for better and for worse.
Looked at as a whole, there’s something defiantly refreshing about how brazen a departure Déraciné is from Miyazaki and his team’s flashiest, most cash-catching work.
Like all of Quantic's games, Detroit is a big, stupid swing for the fences, yet another attempt to get Cage's dream of "playable movies" off the ground. Skeptics of the studio's previous games won't be convinced, but there are plenty of small improvements that make it Quantic's best offering to date
Montana features some of the most beautiful country in all of America, and Ubisoft has done an amazing job of capturing its rural glory. And the freedom to get credit for just f***** around in this gorgeous world, doing whatever feels most fun, is legitimately intoxicating.
Pyre spins a powerful tale of redemption, religion, and monster dunks
Exploring ruins has gotten no less satisfying. Risking it all to secure a glowing item or a stash of souls still provokes baseline thrills. The basic back-and-forth of combat maintains its addictive rhythm. And the whole world is incredibly beautiful, especially the lush panoramas of the Ringed City itself.
Nioh's brutal swordplay is exhilarating, when it isn't stabbing itself in the foot
Gears Of War 4 doesn’t reinvent the chainsaw, and it doesn’t need to
Virginia’s intimacy makes it more than a Twin Peaks wannabe
Obduction is the perfect reminder of what made Myst so great
Battleborn is too flashy for its own good
The Division might be the glossiest Skinner box ever created
[T]hrough it all, XCOM 2 never loses sight of the basic thrills that made its predecessor such a welcome surprise. The feeling of holding the line against seemingly impossible odds, of pulling a mission from the jaws of death with a timely rescue and a wounded comrade on your back, of watching an experienced squad slice its way through pod after pod of once-formidable foes—they're all still here, as satisfying as ever.
Oxenfree tells a great horror story by taking its teenage heroes seriously
But even with its irritatingly slow cutscenes, its immature objectification of women, and its determination to keep players away from its best moments for as long as it can, it's hard to dismiss Xenoblade Chronicles X completely. There's just too much of it, for one thing. The simplest play-through will take at least 60 hours, and is likely to scratch only the barest portions of the game's stories and content, some of which, owning to the law of averages, will turn out to be both charming and fun. And there really is nothing quite like taking to the air for the first time, looking down at terrain that you've become intimately familiar with through hours upon hours of exploration of its lush, mesmerizingly beautiful world. It's just a shame that the game chooses to spend so much of its energy preempitively punishing you, before it lets you get to the business of actually enjoying it.
Considering that it's only the second game from a relatively untested team, it's a fantastic PC debut, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other members of that aforementioned physics puzzler hall of fame.
Walking in and out of it in frustration, desperately looking for the missing inventory object needed to advance a puzzle, is banal. And that's the fundamental paradox of Stasis: Its adventure-game components do not serve or enhance its horrific nature and instead act as roadblocks and impediments to the storytelling and tone. The disconnect isn't bad enough to make the game impossible to recommend