Luke Winkie
In early access, The Anacrusis fails to match its distinctive and colorful setting with compelling co-op shooting gameplay. For a game that looks this cool, it gets boring quickly.
Vanguard's Zombies mode is goofy, gory, and adventurous, but it suffers from a deadly lack of content.
Dragon Ball: The Breakers is the latest game to cash in on the cat-and-mouse multiplayer boom. Unfortunately, it does so without any of the mechanical depth that makes those games great.
Fans of the fighting game's cast of lunatics will enjoy this nostalgic reboot, but its combat fundamentals have remained largely unchanged
Drag voters to the polls as your physics-defying goat runs for president in the silliest game of the year which can now be savoured in multiplayer madness
Beyond The Wire provides a delightfully hefty incarnation of World War One. Redstone Interactive makes its massive, 100-player servers sing with Arma-quality realism, complete with jolting firearm kickback, brutal melee beatdowns, and a huge number of dynamic character classes that can shift the tide of the battle. All of this takes place on beautiful multiplayer maps that capture the nightmarish truth of early 20th century warfighting.
If you're not enthusiastic about being on the front lines of Arma development, Arma Reforger's early access version is not ready for you - you're better off with Arma 3 until further notice. But when it cooperates and you have the right crew, this military sim sings.
Torchlight 3 does a great job with its class design, but the world feels barren and unfinished.
It's hard to play El Hijo without wishing for a little more flair in its stealth system.
Oddworld: Soulstorm's charm, characters, and sincere narrative are imprisoned within buggy, erratic software.
Not Tonight 2 does a decent job of adapting Papers, Please to a terminally hateful America, but the premise wears thin with every pit stop.
Don't get me wrong, Octodad is a ton of fun. It's got a self-aware irreverence—call it the Katamari factor—that you usually only find in indie games. That being said, with games like that, I usually focus on the stand-out moments, like the big reveals in Gone Home, the progressive decay of Limbo, or even the silly mysteries of something as slight as Frog Fractions. Octodad doesn't have anything like that. It's a giddy little glide full of heart and genuine goodwill, but never manifesting into anything more than a distraction.
The Great War: Western Front is a bleak, conservative attempt to capture the brutal battles of World War I.
It's still good to have Madden back on PC, but a stagnant odor is creeping in.
Isonzo is a well-made shooter that welcomes all comers to its gorgeous, mountainous World War I multiplayer battlefields, though a lot of that approachability and familiarity comes at the cost of period authenticity and distinctive gameplay.
Rainbow Six Extraction brings some great new ideas to the venerable first-person shooter as it morphs to a sci-fi co-op game, but it doesn't distinguish itself quite enough to stand out on its own merits.
A surprisingly good time when you're not forced to reload your checkpoint after a game-breaking bug.
A bold genre shift, but not a completely successful one.
Surgeon Simulator 2 is a clever, funny puzzle game that renders its "surgery" mechanics almost ancillary to the final product.
How ironic is it that by making their storied franchise an online experience, Bethesda has somehow created a less immersive Elder Scrolls game? I used to feel like The One, now I'm just a customer.