Sunless Sea's contemplative pace and reams of text won't appeal to every player, but if you have a little patience, and an appreciation for atmospheric story telling, then it'll be hard to pass this one up.
The true misery of Valkyria Revolution is how much of the series' roots show through, and how much Revolution itself doesn't know what to do with them.
While Telltale's other recent games have very broad appeal, most of them are decidedly intended for a more mature audience. Minecraft: Story Mode feels like it's aiming lower… in more than one sense. It's incredibly easy to underestimate the complexity of material that younger audiences can handle, and it's something that happens constantly.
With core systems opaque and unnecessarily limited, all I ever felt equipped to do in Rain World was fail.
Sword Art Online is built on high-stakes drama and a compelling premise--Hollow Realization delivers on neither.
With or without friends, Metroid Prime: Federation Force is a slog
Moon Hunters has a good story to tell, but grinds it to dust in the process.
Toren shoots for the moon but lands nowhere special.
If you had asked me just two weeks ago to name the biggest storytelling sin a game could commit, I would have told you it was making players ask questions without giving them a reason to care about the answers. Ask me today and I'll tell you something different. Lost Sphear buried me under convoluted logic and explanations, lore and jargon, only to cast it aside with a shrug whenever the details were inconvenient to the action. It answered my questions, but in ways so fundamentally disconnected and absurd that I regretted even caring in the first place.
This take on classic turn-based RPGs struggles to give its fresh ideas room to breathe.
Devilian doesn't ask for much, and delivers just enough to pass the time.
Dragon Quest Heroes 2 never finds it stride — but at least it has warfans
Paper Jam's cute and punchy moments are offset by its frustrating repetition
Believe it or not my biggest problem with The Sims 4 Get to Work isn't that my bakery was a bust. It's that pretty much everything it adds to the game is one-sided. As far as I can tell I can't send my sims to the hospital or the police station or the lab to look around. It's interesting enough to work in these locations, but how much more interesting could it be with outward-facing interactions?
Yakuza Kiwami makes it clear just how far the series has come, and just how far it still has to go. It's keenly designed to bring newly minted Yakuza fans more firmly into the fold by providing all the contemporary comforts they might expect, while also giving longtime fans more to chew on than a shot-for-shot remake ever would have. It's a patchwork, for better and for worse, and as much as I enjoyed my time with it, there's no denying that some of those patches are looking more tired than others.
Rakuen's unique setting and sweet sensibilities make up for its technical shortcomings.
Hey! Pikmin did exactly what it needed to do, without extending itself any further. It gave me a series of interesting places, a series of clever puzzles, a series of cute vignettes and soft storybook scenery. The worst thing to say about Hey! Pikmin is, simultaneously, a recommendation — it's perfectly pleasant, well-rounded, and didn't leave me dying for more.
A lot of different things can happen in Divinity: Original Sin 2; it's an RPG that is overwhelmingly about planning ahead yet still being completely taken by surprise.
Bravely Second takes after its predecessor almost to a fault
Don't let Fire Emblem Warriors get lost among the many Switch releases