Dan Stapleton
- XCOM: Enemy Within
- Fallout 4
- FTL: Faster Than Light
Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw does a great job of modernizing the spacefighter gameplay of classics like Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer.
Youngblood is aggressively okay, but doesn't come close to recapturing the joy of its predecessor.
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.
Rage 2's moment-to-moment combat is outstanding, making it shine among open-world first-person shooters.
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.
Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is a strong expansion that turns disaster into opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
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.