As fun as popping zombies in beautiful environments is, it's not enough to save Black Ops 3 from being just a miserable little disappointment, a cobbled together version of Deus Ex and Syndicate that can't do right by its pop sci-fi leanings or the series' run & gun entertainment. As someone who's always been an apologist for the series, it makes me a little sad to see that Call of Duty might finally be the creatively bankrupt game everyone believes it to be, unsalvageable even by the grace of Christopher Meloni himself.
Ultimately, Rise of the Tomb Raider is akin to a direct-to-DVD sequel. It apes the look and style of the original but nothing comes together in a way that's nearly as impressive. I played the reboot four times over and it remains one of the few games I've reached 100% completion, going around and collecting every trinket just because I wanted to explore every inch of its fantastic world. I doubt I'll ever touch its sequel again. It's a decent action-adventure game with some nice moments but it's also lacking in the ambition and artistry embodied by its predecessor. In the end it's merely a fun but mostly forgettable time.
On the whole Syndicate is entertaining and good at providing an enjoyable time while you thoughtlessly grind away at the completion meter, checking off lists of items and missions as you go along.
Most purposely difficult games that have arrived in the wake of Super Meat Boy, Spelunky and Dark Souls are embodiments of a failure to understand that there's more to those games than just how hard they are, often making the only thing enjoyable about them the fleeting sense of achievement you get when you finally overcome a poorly-designed obstacle through luck or trial and error. Downwell, with its velocity and elegant simplicity, does not make that mistake. It's a difficult game, certainly, but it's also a generous one, likely providing its player with great heaps of joy for a ludicrously small time investment.
Perhaps the best that can be said about this expansion is that it's ultimately a step in the right direction for one of last year's most disappointing games and offers a glimmer of hope that Destiny might, within a few years time and a handful of updates, actually be a consistently great game rather than a pile up of both great and poor design decisions that frustrates just as often as it delights.
It's a game that's often obnoxious and clumsy in the handling of its subject matter and the treatment of its own characters, but it's also that rare game that showcases the treasure of undying delights to be found within meticulously crafted interactive worlds.
There are moments of absolute joy to be found here, like leading a group of foes into the lair of a beast that will devour them or even juking over an enemy combatant and firing a missile up their exhaust, but they're rare instances, buried deep in the heart of a frustrating grind that doesn't do much to separate itself from the legion of rogue-likes out there. Sadly, in the end Galak-Z is yet another would-be great game undone by a ho-hum execution of ideas that must have sounded great on paper.
Rocket League, besides being a game that's pure, unbridled joy to play, has gotten me curious after all these years about soccer again. I keep finding myself thinking maybe I'll watch the next World Cup, maybe I'll rent a FIFA game and give the series another try, maybe maybe maybe. Regardless, for now, there's the rumble of cars blasting across a stadium, their miniature flags wobbling as the crowd cheers, and that's more than enough.
Her Story wants to be different from every other game out there and in that it succeeds. I can honestly say that I've never played anything like it. It's not text adventure, it's not something I would call an FMV game or a point & click. It's in a genre all of its own and what a grubby, welcome little surprise it is.
Sunset is a gift, an all too rare kind of game that focuses on people loving and hurting in mundane but almost unbearable ways. I will return to Ortega's penthouse in San Bavón soon, I imagine; if not in person, than in fond remembrance. It is, after all, the home I never knew I had.
For those who have played The New Order, The Old Blood is best characterized as "more Wolfenstein." For those who haven't, The Old Blood is a great introduction to the best first person shooter in recent memory.
Mortal Kombat X is fascinating in how parts of it seemingly want to get away from the nasty elements that made the series a household name and yet the gravitational pull of legacy and expectation is too strong. Mortal Kombat X is, in the end, no matter how much it wants to persuade you otherwise, just another Kombat game. It also happens to be one of the best ones in spite of itself but it's difficult for me to shake the feeling that Mortal Kombat has plateaued and that there's nowhere left to go without changing the fundamentals of the series in a radical way.
It is rare that I finish a game, especially one that's more than 6 hours, and immediately want to restart and play through it all again. Bloodborne is a deeply challenging game set in a fantastically realized gothic nightmare, an adventure of the highest quality for those willing to undergo the game's trial by fire and push past the technical hiccups.
The Deer God is, sadly, a mediocre game suffering from an identity crisis hiding inside of a grandiose shell.
When the credits rolled I was relieved. The final part of Roundabout was agony, a funny game that had overstayed its welcome and told all its jokes four times over.
What is [Apotheon's] song? One of delight and wonder, I would argue, an expression of unabashed love for myth. That it's possible to turn such love into an engrossing adventure that coalesces in a way so few games do reminds me of my own love for games and of their potential as a medium of beautiful expression. Apotheon, then, is the kind of videogame we need more of.
The primary characters are more fleshed out now that the story is occupied with making us sympathetic to them rather than showing off Westeros and Essos. As a result, this is a game that now feels more confident and standalone than it did a couple of months ago, more of a work that justifies its own existence than it does a dull, flimsy tie-in being hawked by HBO for marketing purposes.
Outside of the flying woes, Gat Out of Hell is content to let you be an all-powerful demigod or goddess. The game is just plain, hammy entertainment. It doesn't aspire to teach you a great moral lesson—outside of "don't fuck with Ouija boards," which is pretty sage advice—and it's not trying to wow you with 60 FPS photorealism. Gat out of Hell, like its predecessors, is that essential reminder we need from time to time that, yes, sometimes it's okay for videogames to be dumb fun and little else.
Tales develops an interesting world filled with rich characters that was imprisoned within the shoot & loot framework of Borderlands and Borderlands 2. Free from those constraints, Tales is already well on its way to telling a damn good story, and that's the best kind of loot there is.