Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve—Travis drives a facsimile of Kaneda’s bike from Akira and can transform into a Gundam rip-off—No More Heroes III shows no respect for the artistry or cultural context of the pop culture that it pilfers from. In fact, Given its alternately snarky, nihilistic, and condescending opinions of just about everything, you would be justified in feeling that the game doesn’t just dislike the things that it references but even itself.
Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players. Worse, Hired Gun turns its back to all that’s promising about Games Workshop’s fiction, such as the various spinoff novels that offer insights into a demented upper-class nobility as well as life in the Underhive, choosing instead to tell a meaningless, mostly incoherent story about archetypal characters who are unmemorable at best. Late in the game, a momentary detour featuring an iconic Warhammer 40,000 monster, one that’s wildly out of place and acting against its bestial nature, serves as a baffling example of how unmoored this game is to its own property.
At its best, the game sustains an effectively ominous atmosphere as it channels recognizable childhood fears.
In the end, Melody of Memory is very much a fans-only affair.
A successful tech demo that allows one to truly feel like Iron Man, the game is also a strong superhero narrative in its own right.
Luigi might be luckless, but he's still a force to be reckoned with across this, the most variety-rich Luigi's Mansion game to date.
It's unfortunate that A Plague Tale's story falls short of its technical accomplishments.
The little that's good here isn't enough for one to shake off the faulty nature of the game's narrative and thematic machinery.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.
There's no mystery to Union, which is grounded in exactly the way that the Beacon Mental Hospital was not.