Splatoon 2's basic gameplay has clearly benefited from a full two years of patching and examination of the original title's uneven launch. This is all we've wanted from Nintendo for years: to come up with wild new ideas, then actually adjust and respond to player demands for a better experience.
Does super-smooth Tekken on PC sound good to you? If so, buy. If not, try.
A high-water mark in the "interactive narrative" genre. If that sounds good to you, buy it.
A must-buy for horror gaming fans, HDR TV owners, and PSVR owners.
Special super-powered boats and airships also appear in Conquest mode, but only when one side dominates the other. As a result, they're not as impactful. In practice, they feel like a Mario Kart blue shell thrown at a racer who's already on track to winning a race handily. Conquest is a purely symmetrical battle, where both sides have equal shots at claiming and maintaining turf control. In the beta, super-powered craft turned the tide too severely and too often in Conquest; now, it's just a light perk to help way-behind teams have a little more hope in at least racking up XP or knocking out badge-related goals.
Bottom line: Online-shooter fans and 4K enthusiasts should buy.
Buy. Buy the heck out of this game.
Don't just wait for a sale; wait for a major overhaul.
Sci-fi story lovers should buy. Everyone else should rent or try it later.
more, everything about the game—its puzzle structure, its philosophical leanings, its mysteries—eventually comes together in pretty arresting fashion. Part of this is thanks to the game's multiple layers of puzzle-solving gameplay. We've been asked not to say more about that part. Players may need as little as an hour or as long as two weeks to figure out one of The Witness's coolest parts, but however and whenever players get to that point, it's a pretty clever one. (Some of the game's most incredible aesthetic trickery comes as a result of this part of the game, by the way. Kudos to Thekla for pulling it off.)
e told, we took a few extra days to finish this review in hopes that we'd beat the "normal" difficulty's 10 rounds even once. As of press time, we've yet to get past round 8. That is a huge asterisk for this game's appeal; the overwhelming role of luck rarely presents a clean feeling that you've accumulated real skill or progress. As a result, you'll quite honestly need at least two dozen sessions before you come to grips with a range of successful strategies, and therefore, the feeling that this isn't just a fancy-looking exercise in just rolling dice and dying. (We're hopeful that the upcoming free "missions" mode will offer these exact kinds of progress morsels, but Choice Provisions hasn't announced when we should expect those to launch.)
Don't cancel your pre-order, but don't rush to buy Fallout 4 if you didn't place an order already either.
Buy, buy, buy. A must-have video game.
There's a heartfelt story here, but it's one you can watch just as easily as you can play. Try it.
Spend this game's five-hour runtime catching up on a better story game you might have missed.
Buy it if you're an Xbox One owner who could use a deep dive into classic, super-hard games.
Try it if you have found modern platforming games to be too "soft."
Buy it if you have four controllers for one of the best couch games of the year; wait for working online modes if you don't.
Ultimately, there's more meat on the second act's puzzle bones, especially due to a memorable final-blast puzzle, and while the game's ending was more of a whimper than a bang—and it included some cockamamie ways to tie up the plot's loose ends—I appreciated the restraint on the writers' part to not force melodrama or melancholy on what eventually transpired. This game is the story of two young people who face the ups and downs of throwing off the shackles of youth—and it's also about their family and loved ones being there the whole way through.
Buy it for the kids. Rent or Twitch it for the remixes.