Aaron Riccio
- Chrono Trigger
- Virtue's Last Reward
- The Stanley Parable
Aaron Riccio's Reviews
The more often you get stuck with the same items and abilities, the more redundant and shallow the game feels.
The similarities between SolSeraph and ActRaiser are unmistakable, but it's a joyless facsimile that lacks a single spark of innovation.
This is a rare adventure game in which the journey is actually more of a reward than the destination.
Even the few inventive stretches of the game are ultimately driven into the ground by a punishing sense of repetition.
The game's first few acts are its finest, particularly for their strong sense of physicality.
The game is clearly geared toward young players, so expect a lightweight experience.
This VR title boasts an endearingly goofy premise, but it's one that's executed in bumpy fashion.
The game doesn't rely on narrative reasons to entice the player, leaning instead on endorphin-releasing gameplay hooks.
By the time New Dawn reaches its rushed third act, it's broken down entirely.
At its best, the game leaves you by your lonesome to get to know the “deep blue” sky as intimately as possible.
It doesn’t matter how cool an individual set piece looks if all the smaller scenes leading up to it are marred by unresponsive vehicles, dumb AI, and shoddy physics.
There’s little to love about Darksiders III, even for longtime fans.
Battlefield V‘s failure to communicate, whether the emotional disconnect of each War Story or the difficulty of organizing your fellow soldiers in a Grand Operation, is the crippling problem that holds the game back from greatness.
Mizuguchi has made strong, confident choices with his approach to Tetris, the Zone ability most prominent among them, but he’s done so uncompromisingly. And that’s an effect that’s as likely to leave tetrominos burned into your retinas as it is to simply leave you feeling cold and alone.
Apart from the fact that combat is resolved by placing cards into rows as opposed to moving units across a map, there's little difference between Thronebreaker and similarly hand-drawn, resource-gathering, unit-upgrading games like Heroes of Might and Magic and The Banner Saga. If anything, Thronebreaker offers a deeper strategic experience, given the distinct feel of these custom-crafted battles, with their special victory conditions and unique cards.
Before you know it, Starlink turns playing with toys into something that feels an awful lot like work.
Super Mario Party has enough rough and baffling components such that the "Super" tucked into the title feels a bit undeserved, but it shows a developer operating with the best of intentions, attempting to offer up a party for every sort of player.
Super-charged in almost every way, Guacamelee! 2 makes its predecessor look like a backyard wrestling match.
WarioWare Gold slightly redeems itself only after you've suffered through the feeble punchlines of the Story mode and have unlocked Challenge mode, which puts bizarre roadblocks in front of the player that affect your interactions with the microgames.
Motion Twin's Dead Cells is a game designed for those who don't particularly like roguelikes.