Dan Stapleton's Reviews
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.
Being Batman in Akrham VR is a great way to more intimately experience Rocksteady's universe and to search for clues in this brief mystery. However, the world and characters around you are largely rigid and unresponsive to your actions, which leaves a lot on the table for a game about a character known as much for his brawn as he is for his brains.
It’s a shame these four games and one sightseeing trip aren’t sold separately, because as a mismatched hodgepodge it’s a lot harder to recommend as a whole than the good parts would have been on their own. The entertaining shooting gallery and drama of The London Heist carries the other three short and less interesting games and the passive Ocean Descent, and is likely the only one I'll remember.
Fallout 4: Nuka-World has a great setting that’s densely packed with spectacle, surprises, and tough battles (depending on your level), and the ability to conquer settlements back on the main map is a fun novelty, but the lack of meaningful decisions leave it feeling more like an actual theme park ride than a choose-your-own-adventure story. Next to Far Harbor’s intriguing storyline and moral decisions there’s not much nuance here.
No Man’s Sky has sci-fi spectacle of strange new worlds on its side, but not much else. Its gameplay is underdeveloped and repetitive, and in my dozens of hours played it’s introduced very few new ideas to mix up its crafting, upgrades, combat, or universe. The promise of limitless exploration ended up working against it when I lost faith that it had any more meaningful things to show me no matter how far I traveled. This ambitious game reached for the stars, but its reach exceeded its grasp by light years.
Human: Fall Flat’s slapstick controls and ridiculous animation do a great job of making repeated, frustrating, and unfair failure at physics puzzles seem fun for a while. And when that fun runs out, you can extend it by bringing in a friend and drawing silly things on your goofball character. If you don’t play it, watch someone play it.
The story mission of Shen’s Last Gift is briefly interesting for its new location and escape mechanic, but the real reason to get this DLC is the sixth soldier class that expands your squad composition options with super-durable mech troops.
Edge of Nowhere stands out in the current library of VR games only because it’s one of the longer and more polished games out there, but compared to the conventional third-person action-stealth games it closely emulates it’s competent but unremarkable. If you’ve played a game in this genre before, Victor’s platforming and sneaking will do very little to surprise you, other than the way the sense of isolation you get from putting on the Oculus Rift enhances the setting.
Fallout 4: Far Harbor adds a large amount of great quests and content within its gloomy but distinctive island setting. Thanks to some well-written, morally ambiguous characters, its choices are as gray as the weather, and much more interesting. Though the new companion isn’t the strongest and the supposedly ruinous radioactive fog is more annoying than threatening, all of the adventuring and new gear absolutely made it worth my while to return to Fallout 4 for Far Harbor.
Alien Hunters’ battles are by far the toughest, trickiest fights in Firaxis’ XCOM games to date, and the new weapons and abilities we get expand our tactical options in interesting ways. However, where XCOM 2 initially impressed me by making the equipment upgrades it doles out unpredictable, this expansion is a move that will make every subsequent game feel more similar instead of more different.