If you commit and dig in, you'll be rewarded with that rare feeling of accomplishment in a videogame. Not because you leveled up or because you managed to get one over on the game, but because the puzzle feeling of Into The Breach makes the game appear to be extremely fair. I never feel like I've been tricked when I lose, and I never feel like I've done something out of bounds when I win.
Dynasty Warriors 9 exists at the nexus of a lot of different desires on the player community side and the development side. I just want to wander around inside a big space and win epic battles in long-ago China while coveting the throne. That's what I'm in it for, and that's what it delivers. If you're in it for that, you might like it too.
As a person who enjoys the stories and characters of the Final Fantasy franchise, I'm immediately more likely to be invested in Dissidia NT and what it's offering me. However, that's not enough; I need to love these characters and this complicated and opaque game type, and truly enjoying the heart of it isn't really possible for me.
Innerspace has all of the things I like in a game. It has an evocative plot, some well-executed flying and diving mechanics, and some tricky puzzles that genuinely require paying attention to the game world around you. All of this is, sadly, perched on top of a visual mode that made the game literally unplayable for me. A glorious few hours was all I could manage, but maybe you have the fortitude of eye and body to make it through the entire experience. I wish that I could.
player contests and player vs. environment puzzles. Currently, Hello Neighbor tries to have its cake while eating it too, and everyone goes home disappointed when that happens.
If you're in for some meditative classic gaming, Hyakki Castle is for you. It's a game that knows exactly what it is, and it has no interest in punishing you or making you feel like you don't get it. It's a friendly, old-style game that wants you to succeed, and that seems to be less and less present now. It also has cat people in it.
While new content will drip in over the next couple years, right now you really have to take seriously that Destiny 2 is like a microwave: you know exactly what it does, and it does it well, but you can't expect it to do more than that. It's very hard for me to look at the past five or six years of console and PC games, and then the things that are announced for the next six months, and think that I want to fully integrate Destiny 2 into my life as my primary entertainment appliance. It would be so easy to do so, but the cost of committing to this thing over any other thing seems so high.
Ultimately, I want to enjoy Before the Storm as much as I did Life is Strange, but I think some serious shifts will have to take place between this episode and the next in order for me to really get onboard.
"Easy to learn, hard to master" is the worst cliché possible, but Windjammers really evokes that feeling for me. I feel very comfortable handing the controller to anyone with a passing interest in games, or no interest at all, and knowing that they will figure out how frisbee tennis works. They'll also have a good time.
Borrowing from roguelikes, your character has one life, and the game is mostly about preserving yourself and leveling efficiently so that you can defeat the appropriate bosses so that you can win the game. This was not something that I found particularly interesting in itself, but I tend to not be super excited about games that are fundamentally concerned about making numbers go up. Lots of people are, and if you're one of them, you should try out Kingsway immediately.
It is the lightest possible complaint to say that I had a great time with a videogame, and I have already ordered the PS4 version of the first game to go back and play. I've also read the first year of the tie-in comic book to find out more about this weird fork universe of DC Comics. I guess I'm now waiting for Injustice 3 to come out. I need to know what's up with Swamp Thing and the wild world of a nature worth fighting for.
As I shoot robot enemies and monsters who want to slice me up, I am delighted. The screen goes red every time. I hit the restart button with a smile on my face.
For all of these reasons, I can't say that I think Shiness is a bad game. It's just a game that has leaned into its genre so hard that its spine is cracking. If you're the kind of person who wants to micromanage numbers within the framework of a traditional JRPG story in a fantastical world of animal-people and human-people, then this might be the game for you. If a single part of that sentence made you have a second thought, then it probably isn't.
Despite how much I enjoy that kind of experience on a conceptual level, it definitely isn't my favorite kind of game to play, and I generally felt like I was solving puzzles with half of the pieces. Rain World is a beautiful, forward-thinking game that points to a form of game design that I want to see more of. I just wish it made itself a little more accessible.
I’m already excited about the next Momodora game. I’m going to play all of the previous games, and then I’m going to anticipate and wait for the next one.
Ultimately, it’s an excellent game that delivers an engaging story, and that’s what’s expected and desired from Torment: Tides of Numenera. Sometimes it’s clunky, and other times it is sluggish, but mostly it’s an engaging game that rarely disappoints. If only everything was this way.
No matter what you think of that, if you've ever thought of playing a Hitman game, then this is the one to grab. If you haven't ever heard of a Hitman game before, then you should just play this damn game and embrace the weird, wild world of sandbox murderin'.
I had a really great time making my way through Resident Evil 7. It was a smart move to borrow from the last decade of horror-ass horror game design. Distancing it from its recent action game past gave me anxiety, but ultimately made me happy.
Ultimately, these first couple episodes show a promising beginning, and I’m excited to check out the rest of the season when it appears.
At the highest points, Call of Duty has evoked the flavors of films like Sicario. They show you the shape of things, and they present a messy world that soldiers make their way through. Sadly, the narrative of Infinite Warfare is closer to something like White House Down, a series of black and white tropes that merely tell us the same stuff that we knew already: we’re good, the enemies are bad, and we can murder the world into the shape we want it to be.