Vessel of Hatred gives Diablo 4 a beating heart: Compelling characters to root for, creative loot to chase, and fiercely expressive action.
World of Warcraft: The War Within is a huge step up for storyelling in the 20-year-old MMO, but the daily grind threatens to suck the joy out of it.
Black Myth: Wukong blossoms with an eccentric cast of characters and expressive combat all wrapped up in the rich world of its source material.
A masterfully designed expansion to one of the best action RPGs of the last decade that not only complements the base game but expands its thematic and systemic scope even further.
Payday 3 could be one of the slickest co-op shooters around, but it's mired by a grindy progression system and its always-online nature. It needs some time to cook before it's worth digging in.
Diablo 4 is packed with powerful class builds and exciting loot to find, but clouds its most creative aspects with an overly bleak world and restrictive endgame systems.
Redfall's empty open world, flimsy shooting, and siloed systems make for a flat, dull experience.
Despite its gacha systems, Honkai: Star Rail is an impeccable turn-based RPG with a killer visual style
Despite it's killer opening act, Hi-Fi Rush fails to sustain its blend of rhythm and action all the way until the end.
Gotham Knights attempts to differentiate itself from the Arkham series with new characters and a new canon, but spends most of its length poorly imitating what made those games great.
Overwatch 2 revitalizes the stagnant hero shooter, but misunderstands what made it great.
An open world action RPG from FromSoftware that reaches new heights, but spends too much time in the familiar.
Maybe open-world games don't need to boast 175 hours of playtime even while torturing developers with months of crunch. Immortals, and by extension Ubisoft, isn't immune to this problem, but there are pieces here that argue for a shift in the scope of a genre that has historically been more interested in simulating the minute details of a horse's genitalia than caring for the people who worked on them. Immortals makes an impression because it's not a massive game like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, even if it benefits from the many systems and ideas that Ubisoft's open-world games have refined over the years. Its sharpest ideas have just enough time to dig in before the game smacks you back down into an experience you could have anywhere else.
[T]here's a cynicism deep-rooted in Calvino Noir, a heavy darkness you can't escape. Death is always lurking, success is futile. Maybe this is the best representation of noire in games that nobody wanted.
Combined with no challenge to its climbing, other than a few misdirections that effectively punish you with the tedium of having to go backwards, the game misses the mark on taking its promising and, at least, baseline effective parts and turning them into something as strong as Shadow of the Colossus. Even if you were to remove that comparison, the game stumbles to create a consistent experience on its own. And at some point, it would be fair to argue that the comparison is being a little generous.
But those disappointing moments are ultimately rare. Hatoful Boyfriend earns almost everything else it does. Like those fantastical and ridiculous movies and novels, it demonstrates an ability to rise above its base, absurd concepts and weaves several stories that last. It's much more than it seems, and begs for you to play it and discover its depth.
But when you're playing a character that chooses to do all the things you can make her do, she should have understandable reasons to do them. Elena doesn't, and that numbs most of the game. I don't think Whispering Willows intended for me to ask myself why I needed to keep playing for the majority of my time with it, but it did. It's the kind of game that lacks satisfying substance, the kind of game where all you can say is that you finished it.