Homefront: The Revolution is a red yawn
Quantum Break looks to the future by mining the past
Darkest Dungeon is a huge asshole of a game—in a good way. It's punishingly hard, and progress is made in small increments.
At this point, with less than a month to go before The Force Awakens hits theaters, Battlefront is a necessary balm for Star Wars fans to get their fix. But it's difficult to say whether it's anything more than a temporary pick-me-up that will be forgotten the minute the movie is released. Despite the myriad modes, the scope of the game feels small. Channeling Emperor Palpatine, EA has foreseen this and promised additional content in the coming weeks and months—for a price, of course. Hopefully, the company's powers of prophecy are better than his.
Does it even really matter that the single-player campaign is disappointing? Maybe not. Developer 343 Industries is still faithful to Bungie's original vision, and the game has remained remarkably intact since Halo: Combat Evolved was released nearly 15 years ago. This continuity is admirable. That said, Guardians feels like a huge missed opportunity to evolve Halo beyond simple combat.
Transformers: Devastation is the best Transformers game ever
This game feels like something that would interest the two New Zealanders who watch Grown Ups 2 every week and talk about it on their podcast, Worst Idea Of All Time. Because unabashed masochism is the only discernible justification for putting any time into Godzilla.
Witcher 2 was a promising but flawed game. The seeds of a truly brilliant experience were there, but too often it turned into a slog. The Wild Hunt fulfills all of that game's promise and more. Some day, I even hope to finish it.
Wolfenstein has always embraced gratuitous violence, but The Old Blood just feels a little gratuitous.
You kill many gods in Titan Souls, including a weird brain thing that lives in an ice cube, but the game's greatest victory is over the god of bloat. Long may he stay dead in the ground.
Most of the time, The Order barely allows you to play in any meaningful sense. The parts where you aren't killing indiscriminately amount to little more than pushing a button to move on to the next charnel obstacle course. And while this doesn't make it any worse than hundreds of other similar shooters, it's particularly disappointing here, because The Order has the potential to be something more.
It speaks volumes that "Iron From Ice" packs much of the same emotional wallop as the books and show. I'm just as excited to see where this story goes as I am the next book, and the knowledge that the game's next chapter will be released on a regular schedule is a balm to this impatient fan.
Ubisoft has proven that it is capable of pushing the series in a novel direction, and that's why the complacency of Unity is especially disappointing.
Shadow Of Mordor, though, successfully draws on some of that material in a way that is simultaneously engaging for a fan of Tolkien's extended works but not alienating for those passingly familiar with the story.
Valiant Hearts gets most of it right. In the end, it's just an incredible relief—if a decidedly un-American sentiment—to play a memorable war game that isn't some Rambo-inspired revenge fantasy. Well, that's not exactly right. It's a memorable game that just happens to be set during a war. And that makes all the difference.
Episode 2 presents a potential pitfall for The Wolf Among Us to avoid as it goes forward. When the choices are too easy, it's hard for Bigby's story to pack an emotional wallop. Instead, it descends into choosing for choosing's sake.
If anything, the game's limitations—the wooden conversations, the nonsensical and uneven means of resource management, the repetitive combat, the lack of real agency in determining your fate, the possibility of game-ending failure—become more glaring as it goes on, but unaccountably, they all add up to a coherent whole.
While it's not the strongest Walking Dead chapter we've seen—the episode's final choice, in particular, is somewhat baffling—it's prudent to withhold final judgment until the rest of the game is in.