Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare is the perfect antidote to Call of Duty and Battlefield fatigue, replacing the grim, decrepit, gray-and-brown battle zone with vibrantly colorful gardens and crypts, where unlikely nemeses face off in hilarious, and strategic, skirmishes.
Year Walk is a minimalist point-and-click chiller that affectingly and disturbingly strains for meta-fiction.
While it's to The Room's credit that the graphics and sound design remain impressive with the transition to PC, and able to compete against other PC titles, the gameplay does not, and without a compelling story the experience ends up being sadly forgettable.
If one is really so inclined to play the game, this Ultimate Evil Edition isn’t even the best version to take on. Despite the smart design decisions made porting the typically PC-based game to consoles, the interface makes it more complicated than necessary to find numbers and statistics, digging through menus that lack the finesse of the original PC version, and Adventure mode remains locked until the campaign is complete, a frustrating decision considering how many may have already completed the now two-year-old game on original release.
Some of the best features are frustratingly kept out of the player's hands for hours, by which time many will have lost interest.
Think of Rare Replay like an entire Criterion Collection for video games in one package.
This series reboot fails to replicate the cleanness of the original games’ racing mechanics.
Dead Rising 4 is a defanged sequel unlikely to satisfy fans of the series or appeal to new ones.
Driven to Win's Takedown mode feels like exploitation, the video-game equivalent of tying fireworks to G.I. Joes.
The game's propensity for indulging counterintuitive elements feels like a willful act of self-sabotage.
There's no mystery to Union, which is grounded in exactly the way that the Beacon Mental Hospital was not.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.
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.
It's unfortunate that A Plague Tale's story falls short of its technical accomplishments.
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.
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.
In the end, Melody of Memory is very much a fans-only affair.
At its best, the game sustains an effectively ominous atmosphere as it channels recognizable childhood fears.
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.
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.