Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is a fantastic single-player shooter, but what really got me invested was the brilliantly written characters and the performances of its cast. BJ and his crew are full of spirit and personality, and General Engel is as memorable a nemesis as you're likely to find in games. Machine Games has once again turned the well-worn act of mowing down Nazis into something to get excited about.
South Park: The Fractured But Whole is another epic-length episode of the humor that's kept fans of the show laughing for 20 years. The Marvel vs DC parody delivers regular laugh-out-loud moments with only a few faltering gags, and the combat soon evolves into something much more complex and interesting than The Stick of Truth's simple system.
Similar to the way Batman: Arkham City built on the foundation of Arkham Asylum, Middle-earth: Shadow of War is bigger and more ambitious in scope than Shadow of Mordor, with great results. The way it expands the Nemesis system with far greater variety and fortress sieges makes even better use of the stand-out generated characters, and its battles with memorable uruk captains remain challenging all the way through the campaign and into the clever asynchronous multiplayer beyond.
With a set of thieving and assassination tools that beg to be used creatively, Heat Signature's puzzle-like missions are great for jumping into for a few goes at a time to try something just crazy enough to work. That's when the fun stuff happens.
Based on its colorful world, beautiful animation, and source material you might expect Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle to be “My first turn-based tactics game.” But you're in for a surprise: even for XCOM vets some of its battles are challenging puzzles. Some of its tougher levels do devolve into a trial-and-error slog, but a good mix of enemies, objectives, and character abilities keep things interesting.
War of the Chosen is a wide and deep expansion for XCOM 2 that improves variety in mission objectives, tactical options, threats, and strategic map activities. The Chosen are worthy adversaries who advance along with you to put up great fights without feeling cheap, and the new elite soldier classes add opportunities for interesting gameplay earlier in the campaign. Some significant balance issues show up, but especially for the first two-thirds of a campaign War of the Chosen restores the fear of the unknown to a game I know well.
Superhot VR's fantastically clever time-manipulating concept empowers you with the superhuman reflexes of a slow-motion action hero. Shattering waves of glass-like enemies while moving your face out of the path of incoming bullets is a thrilling challenge in both the cryptic story mode and the endless mode that follows.
Lone Echo and Echo Arena are the rare games that demonstrate the true value of VR and hand tracking. Its sense of movement feels great, and it couldn't exist in any other way. Lone Echo's well-acted story and interesting environments move at a slow enough pace that you can soak it all in and appreciate the sensation of virtual weightlessness before jumping into the fast, sweaty, competitive action of Echo Arena. The fact that you can experience the multiplayer without even buying it means it's one of the first things any Oculus Rift owner should download.
Lone Echo and Echo Arena are the rare games that demonstrate the true value of VR and hand tracking. Its sense of movement feels great, and it couldn't exist in any other way. Lone Echo's well-acted story and interesting environments move at a slow enough pace that you can soak it all in and appreciate the sensation of virtual weightlessness before jumping into the fast, sweaty, competitive action of Echo Arena. The fact that you can experience the multiplayer without even buying it means it's one of the first things any Oculus Rift owner should download.
The Crimson Court pumps Darkest Dungeon full of disturbing blood-sucking enemies, a challenging new class, and a marathon-style new area that forces you to think differently about how to sustain your team over a long run. While there's definitely enough new content in The Crimson Court to come back to Darkest Dungeon for, it's more the kind of DLC that mixes things up for a new replay than an essential upgrade you should install from the beginning.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew feels like a promising first draft of a fantastic Trek simulator, but it only goes boldly for a few hours. After the novelty of finally sitting on a beautiful Federation starship bridge wears off and you've exhausted the handful of mission types, all that's left is the goofy physical comedy of messing around with your friends or strangers in VR. That's nothing to scoff at, but with such a basic combat system and so much time spent twiddling virtual thumbs in two of the four chairs, Bridge Crew's needs a refit before it'll be ready for anything close to a five-year mission.
Prey's space station is fantastically explorable and its shape-shifting enemies maintain tension when combat doesn't.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 3 is flashy and loaded with complex, micromanagement-heavy warfare. Its single-player campaign is long and challenging, but feels uninspired because it rarely makes creative use of the three factions' abilities. In multiplayer it's even more demanding and intimidatingly chaotic, but with only one mode and not a lot of maps, it seems limited. Relic deserves credit for not simply remaking the same game with prettier graphics, but this hybrid approach doesn't feel as strong as Dawn of War 2's memorable tactical focus.
Mass Effect: Andromeda only occasionally recaptures the series' brilliance, but delivers a vast and fun action-RPG.
Robo Recall is an excellent demonstration of what a VR shooter can be on Oculus Touch. Thanks to highly physical action and tons of options for smashing a bunch of great-looking robots with both magically replenishing guns and your bare hands, the three available maps feel like plenty.
Halo Wars 2 will scratch a real-time strategy itch and give you a dose of Halo-Universe flavor with a decent story, but it won't go much deeper than that. A run-of-the-mill campaign, controls that hamper micromanagement, conspicuous bugs, and multiplayer that relies on luck limit its long-term appeal, but its fast and flashy action makes it fun for a while.
Watch Dogs 2’s distinctive hacking and puzzle mechanics do a great job of reminding you that you’re not playing just another Grand Theft Auto clone as you tear through it’s beautiful Bay Area map. Marcus is a bit too friendly of a guy to be believable as our instrument of mayhem, but the flexible missions let you get through mostly non-violently if you’re good enough at stealth. And when it works, multiplayer is good unconventional cat-and-mouse fun, too.
Civilization VI will go down in history as the most fully-featured launch version in the series. Many of those are smartly revamped versions of Civ classics, buy it finds its own identity with great new ideas like spread-out cities, customizeable governments, research boosts, and leader agendas. And even though the AI has some improving to do, it can put up enough of a fight to make world domination a challenge.
There is some single-player content, but other than the challenging wave-based survival mode, which is a great way to learn the abilities and limitations of a newly unlocked ship, the appeal wears off quickly. What passes for campaign missions are so quick and easy they’re barely there at all, and the enemy ships are so weak they might be made of tinfoil. There’s also a “scout” mode where you search uninhabited maps for hidden items to reveal extra bits of lore, which couldn’t be less exciting. Not knowing anything about EVE Online’s lore the story of cloned pilots signing up as mercenaries didn’t do much for me, though the voice acting isn’t bad.
At the end of the day, we’re mostly just stacking blocks in Tumble VR, and that’s rarely going to be exciting. Even when it challenged me with head-scratching feats of structural engineering it bored me with the mundanity of its theme. Adding onto that some of the PlayStation VR’s inherent limitations with tracking, and it was as often frustrating as rewarding.