The sheer looseness is part of the Demon Tides charm.
Styx: Blades of Greed is filled with so many ways to sneak through areas that you really do feel like you're crafting your approach to each thieving challenge
A lack of definition goes some way to explaining why combat feels a bit lifeless.
Yakuza 3 has, despite its flaws, long been one of my favorites in the series.
Within its actual levels, Metroid Prime 4 is triumphant.
Each Morsel is impressively and radically transformative on play.
Dispatch isn't a freeform RPG – it's telling a specific story that it allows you to a degree of authorship over.
It's an electric concept that works just as well in Lumines Arise as it does in Tetris Effect.
The exacting detail with which it's all been put together keeps the illusion strong.
Newcomers like Calamo and company offer enough new to spark interest.
Carimara: Beneath the Forlorn Limbs is a slight but wonderful mystery and, to be fair, it's only a few dollars for the privilege of puzzling it out for yourself (the developer even says in the credits that it'd be excellent to bring this puzzle formula forward into new adventures – which I'd love to see). Estimated to take a little over an hour to clear, it took me more like thirty minutes.
Each stage is full of delightfully posed little jokes, characters, and charming anachronisms before you roll them up.
Ninja Gaiden 4 is a bloody good time.
Silent Hill f is fantastic at evolving that sense of unease and vagueness that's so defined the series in the past.
Enemies also feel much more aggressive in general, rising to meet the increased skill ceiling of Hornet's more acrobatic moves.
There's little sense of impact to blows.
While everything does eventually come together, what's perhaps pitched as a victory lap through what came before ends up a bit of a slog, spending an incredibly long time reiterating what you already figured out.
After all, I love Metal Gear Solid 3 in its Metal Gear Solid Delta form just as much as I loved it when I last played it as part of the Master Collection. There's no question about it though, this cardboard box still contains the same game at its core, there's no sneaking around that.
The thing I love most about these dust ups is how critical hits are managed.
Trickier plays, while cool to witness and to pull off, often don't feel worth it.