Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhatten is both basic and overly complex, delivering almost none of the magic that made previous four-player Turtles games so memorable.
Falling Skies is a functional, unattractive, and uninspired XCOM clone.
Natural Doctrine takes strategy role-playing games one step forward, and several clumsy steps back.
The final nail in 'Slender: The Arrival's coffin is the simple fact that it's been uprezzed and cleaned up for the wrong gen, a generation where Hideo Kojima/Guillermo Del Toro's 'P.T.' has many of the same ideas, executed with maturity and expert dread, where progression isn't dependent on escaping the horror, but being forced to walk up and let it terrorize you face to face, and most importantly, it's an experience that's 100% free. 'Slender' offering something a similarly unique experience, but undoubtedly lesser, predicated on the success of successive, telegraphed jump scares and repetitive exploration can't hope to compete, and couldn't even if 'P.T.' wasn't in the picture. The result is a game that feels, pun unintended, thin on content.
Frontiers of Pandora is, in essence, just another Far Cry experience—one with breathtaking art direction and a thoughtful portrayal of an alien culture, but a Far Cry experience nonetheless. It’s a tired formula applied to a property that’s capable of showing us much more. This game’s Pandora is a beautiful place to visit, but living there makes for a boring existence.
The world here is littered with side missions out in the wild, and most of them amount to uninspired fetch quests.
The game's bland mélange of competence feels like the deliberate, calculated, focus-tested murder of ideas.
This game would still be hard to fall in love with if it didn't absolutely assault the laws of human physics.
For what it's worth, the no-frills street racing is a major improvement over that of the first game.
It bares itself emotionally but shines a harsh, unflattering light on David Cage's deficiencies as a storyteller.
Out of the three games in this collection, Devil May Cry 3 is the only one to stand up to the test of time.
Unless you're an extremely quick study, the game's weirdly unintuitive control scheme will very likely get in your way.
It's bewildering how so much of Volition's Agents of Mayhem feels like a show of conformity.
Whether intentionally or not, the game gives glory to a brand of grassroots militia fetishism that, just days before the its release, millions of Americans marched in the streets to oppose. Far Cry 5 posits that people would need to be brainwashed to follow men like Joseph Seed, blind to how deep Christian fanaticism already runs, and how many would follow such a man if he only said the word "please."
The game is dour and oblivious that its destination is more interesting and vital than the journey.
Africa and its people are, essentially, exotic props in this game, with no humanity or purpose.
It lacks for the two things Destiny has never been short on from day one: personality and imagination.
The game's successes as a continuation of Gears of War's narrative falter in the face of stubbornly archaic gameplay.
These are moments of impressive beauty and joy, moments blessedly unsullied by ReCore's technical lethargy.
It asks us to buy Max as a wasteland messiah whose life consists of spending his most sane years playing fetch.