Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Massive Chalice's aggressive tactical combat would be stronger without so many opportunities to lose due to bad luck.
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.
Without the Nemesis system driving its battles and creating consequences for failures, Middle-earth: Shadow of War - Blade of Galadriel feels smaller and less interesting than the main game. Its short story missions are creative and its colorful uruks are good splashes of personality, but the repetitive battles against more than a dozen Legendary uruks get old, even with the promise of new gear sets.
Because of its diminished graphics and clumsy combat controls, Skyrim VR definitely isn't the best way to actually play Skyrim. However, if you leave the difficulty on the default lowest setting and roam the world as a god who can slay enemies with the flick of the wrist, it's a good way to experience Bethesda's legendary RPG from a whole new perspective.
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.
Thief has good stealth going for it, but everything connecting its few relatively open scenarios is a mess.
Free-form Street Sweep missions steal the show from T-Bone in Watch Dogs: Bad Blood.
Playing as The Bright Lord Celebrimbor isn't bad, but it's a big step away from what makes Shadow of Mordor special.
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.
Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.
It may look extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors' clever one-stick shooter idea a chance to sink its teeth into you it might not let go for a while.
The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos isn't a grand finale for Obsidian's RPG, but it gives us an intriguing whodunnit in a new location and a reason to return for another adventure with the crew of the Unreliable.
The Outer Worlds’ Peril on Gorgon DLC is mechanically unambitious in that it doesn’t introduce any new ideas to change up gameplay, but it does take the crew of the Unreliable to several new locations around the Hyperion system as it unveils a fairly lengthy and entertaining detective story.
The Destroy All Humans! remake recaptures the simple, campy joy of of rampaging through 1950s America as an angry gray alien.
Orcs Must Die! 3 is very familiar to players of the second game but still a fun and goofy action/tower-defense challenge.
Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.
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.
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.
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.
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.