Jed Pressgrove's Reviews
The game often feels like a survival-horror experience with its sharp emphasis on the senses.
The uninspired material is unable elevate the game's moth-eaten ramblings about good and evil.
SELF rejects the power-building, level-gaining escapism that typifies the majority of pop games.
The game fulfills a vision of steadfast humanity within the framework of a martial arts revenge tale.
Perhaps its efforts to fit in with the big dogs of the gaming world would be more tolerable if there were more variety to its challenges.
Not only does the game cheapen the idea that a dog is man's best friend, it also falls apart like a cheap chew toy.
Fire Emblem attains an especially epic, moral grandeur with this game's focus on the interplay between education and religion.
What hurts the game the most isn't the lack of follow through on its initial critical gumption, but rather a lack of compelling drama in its later levels.
Its boss fights highlight the contrived lengths that FromSoftware has gone to in order to satisfy players' thirst for difficulty.
Throughout, you may be gripped by the feeling that you've seen all that there is to see in the fighting game genre.
As you watch Talma's existence fade, you grasp the importance that every moment can have on a mortal plane.
At the very least, the game's epic trials will make you respect the practitioners of this most insane of sports.
The art of a game, however distinctive, matters little if it isn't accompanied by functionality.
The effectiveness of the game's humor doesn't always tie back to the concept of Bowser as a frustrated, impotent vessel.
You know your beloved action franchise is in a state of mediocrity when it struggles to kinetically and strategically compete with games that it helped give birth to.
With so many different factors to manipulate on your way to reaching ridiculously high character levels, it's almost impossible to see any end in sight to the game.
The fact that Capcom can't make this decades-old maneuver feel effortless is evidence that this series might need to go in a trash compacter like old machinery.
Though visually sumptuous, the game doesn't do much to strike a bolder, more mature path within a tired series.
The game comes down to two rival parties blandly lumbering toward each other on largely identical stages.
The world design and storytelling often fail to match the high standards set by the game's ambitious ancestors.