Dropsy's a pretty good point-and-click, but more importantly it's clever and weird.
It's an unconventional game with interesting ideas—questions we don't ask often in games, mainly because most games aren't interested in this sort of dialog. We subsist mainly on a steady diet of summer blockbusters, and it's not often a weird art house game like The Beginner's Guide comes along, let alone gains any traction.
Prison Architect is a mostly-honest and unflinching look at our modern society and its approach towards prisoner rehabilitation...or lack thereof. It's a fascinating game, in no small part because it so expertly casts a real-world debate in video game terms and in doing so forces players to examine their own beliefs. And it's a hell of a lot of fun, besides.
A few of my complaints from last year remain - the user interface could still use some beautification and the tech web is borderline impenetrable for first-time players. But Firaxis has made some smart choices with Rising Tide. It's starting to distinguish itself from Civilization V finally, and not just in terms of the way units look. Playing Rising Tide - especially on a water-heavy map - feels appreciably different from previous Civ games.
Transformers: Devastation is a B-tier game that succeeds only by expertly capitalizing on its source material and your nostalgia.
Playing as Batman? Awesome. Playing as Batman through repetitive, empty missions? Less awesome. Playing as the Batmobile? Awful.
Yeah, you should get Hearts of Stone. It's pretty good.
I've been addicted to 2205 all week, but remain disappointed Blue Byte doesn't push its ideas further with each new entry. The future's impressive. Just not quite as different as you might think.
Fallout 4's setting and conceit are strong as ever, but it feels quite a bit less daring and honed than its predecessor.
It's not Battlefront III enough for the Battlefront diehards. It's not Battlefield enough for the Battlefield crowd. And it's not deep enough ... for me to believe the game has staying power - though it's noob-friendly enough that it may (temporarily) appeal to the masses of Star Wars fans that have never touched its predecessor or a modern shooter, but want to pick up a fun video game after seeing The Force Awakens.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate is a "return to form," but maybe a change would do the series some good.
Just Cause 3 embraces the series' dumb thrills to create a ridiculous sandbox orgy of wingsuits, tethers, and explosions.
Rainbow Six Siege is, to me, an indicator that maybe we don't always need new genres of games as much as we need to reexamine our approach to old ones. It's not that anything Siege does is particularly new—tactical play (Counter-Strike, Arma, et cetera) mixed with a bit of destruction physics (Battlefield, Red Faction). But by taking these two aspects and expanding them to a scope supported by current hardware, Ubisoft has created a compelling game that feels unique.
I imagine the day Gearbox gave Blackbird Interactive permission to use the Homeworld name was triumphant, but also terrifying. Triumphant because the project involved a lot of the original team members and they got to resurrect their mothballed series. Terrifying because doing so meant making a successor to—seriously—one of the best strategy games ever made, and doing so after twelve years of rose-colored glasses.
Add in more than a few grammatical errors, some spelling mistakes, and a few bugs (the ending crawl described how one of my staffers both stayed at and simultaneously left the newspaper), and it's hard to recommend The Westport Independent. Which is a shame because I think it has at least one extremely important learn-by-example thing to say about media bias, and how it can manifest in something as simple as a lie of omission. That's a powerful message, and one it would be useful for more people to understand. To ask questions of the media, people need to understand how the media operates.
The Witness has taken hold of my brain, both waking and sleeping. If I'm awake, I'm playing. If I'm not playing (for whatever reason) I'm inking possible solutions into a pad of graph paper. Writing this review I've solved two more puzzles and I think have a lead on a third. It's compulsive. When I'm done and this is all filed away, I'll go right back to playing.
I do not recommend you play this game.
Inkle is fast becoming one of my favorite studios. 80 Days was excellent. Sorcery is much the same, forsaking the off-kilter Victorian Age for a more cliched land of swords and spells and knavery—and yet, by some combination of Inkle's own talents and Steve Jackson's original source, managing to wring some truly compelling ideas from the game's thin sword-and-board pretenses.
I enjoyed myself, though. The ABC Murders makes for lighthearted detective fare, clean and colorful like a Saturday morning cartoon. And make no mistake—when I say it cribs from Frogware's Sherlock Holmes games, I don't say it with any malice. I'd love to see more classic mysteries turned into adventure games, and Frogware just happens to be the current studio to beat.
Firewatch is beautiful. Firewatch is intriguing. But ultimately I don't think Firewatch is very good. At its best, this is a quiet game about two characters struggling with real-life insecurities. But when that's sidelined to make room for a main plot, Firewatch suffers. It's a game perfect for trailers, a game full of excellent dialogue and breathtaking moments and stunning vistas that ultimately amounts to nothing much at all.