Dan Stapleton Avatar Image

Dan Stapleton


Favorite Games:
  • XCOM: Enemy Within
  • Fallout 4
  • FTL: Faster Than Light

123 games reviewed
77.1 average score
79 median score
49.6% of games recommended

Dan Stapleton's Reviews

I'm IGN's Executive Editor in charge of game reviews. I've been a professional game critic since 2004, when I started at PC Gamer Magazine, and served as Editor in Chief for GameSpy.com from 2012 to 2013.
7 / 10.0 - Maneater
May 22, 2020

Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.

Read full review

8 / 10.0 - Gears Tactics
Apr 27, 2020

Gears Tactics does an excellent job of grafting Gears' signature look and feel onto XCOM's turn-based battle format and looks great doing it.

Read full review

10 / 10.0 - Half-Life: Alyx
Mar 24, 2020

Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.

Read full review

8 / 10.0 - Black Mesa
Mar 13, 2020

Black Mesa is the best way to play the classic original 1998 Half-Life today, but it's a remake that already feels old enough that it would benefit from a remake itself.

Read full review

7 / 10.0 - Phoenix Point
Dec 12, 2019

Phoenix Point's more complex take on the classic X-COM formula has some great ideas, but most of them feel experimental and in need of fine-tuning and balance.

Read full review

Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.

Read full review

Nov 15, 2019

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order makes up for a lot of lost time with a fantastic single-player action-adventure that marks the return of the playable Jedi.

Read full review

8.5 / 10.0 - The Outer Worlds
Oct 22, 2019

With The Outer Worlds, Obsidian has found its own path in the space between Bethesda and BioWare's RPGs, and it's a great one.

Read full review

6.8 / 10.0 - John Wick Hex
Oct 8, 2019

John Wick Hex is a simple, smart tactics game but its distracting lack of polish often thwarts its attempt to distill the fast action of the movies into deliberate gameplay.

Read full review

Aug 26, 2019

In Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, survival is easy once you decipher the basic mechanics of evolution and sit through the cutscenes, but the journey is full of moments of discovery.

Read full review

Aug 13, 2019

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw does a great job of modernizing the spacefighter gameplay of classics like Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer.

Read full review

Jul 25, 2019

Youngblood is aggressively okay, but doesn't come close to recapturing the joy of its predecessor.

Read full review

9.5 / 10.0 - Beat Saber
May 30, 2019

Beat Saber should be the go-to for introducing people to the potential of VR gaming. Its simple to learn, damn near impossible to master rhythm gameplay is outstanding.

Read full review

8 / 10.0 - Rage 2
May 13, 2019

Rage 2's moment-to-moment combat is outstanding, making it shine among open-world first-person shooters.

Read full review

Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Story - Episode 1 is mechanically simple, but it does a fine job of letting you bask in Star Wars surroundings and the impressive presence of Darth Vader himself.

Read full review

Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is a strong expansion that turns disaster into opportunity.

Read full review

7.9 / 10.0 - Just Cause 4
Dec 4, 2018

Just Cause 4 is a slightly better version of Just Cause 3's destruction-fueled action, but lacks a big new idea to give it an identity of its own.

Read full review

Civ VI is a fantastic strategy game that, for the first time, has been successfully adapted to a console in a way that controls well.

Read full review

Sep 20, 2018

Star Control: Origins does a great job of creating a new universe and stocking it with a diverse range of weird and funny aliens to fight in intense arcadey space battles. But everything you're forced to do on a planet's surface is boring at best and an annoying chore at worst, and that kills a lot of momentum. Because of that, I didn't really start to click with Star Control: Origins until the last third of the campaign when money became mostly irrelevant and the focus shifted to its strong points of story and space combat.

Read full review

Jul 28, 2018

Flying from planet to planet in search of the universe's rarest materials and technologies in No Man's Sky NEXT scratches an exploratory itch. It still carries a lot of caveats: It's mechanically repetitive no matter what planet you're on, the dull combat should be avoided whenever possible, and bugs are plentiful. But buying new ships and building new things is enough motivation to make it entrancing – for a while, at least.

Read full review