Chris Compendio's Reviews
Possibly the most original puzzle game in recent memory, Baba is You is also an exercise in frustration and stretched-out logic.
WOAH! Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a fun remake that plays well, with weaknesses being unlockables and the Crash property itself.
Until Dawn follow-up Man of Medan has amazing ideas in the cooperative space but collapses under the weights of performance issues.
Pinball-inspired dungeon crawler/hack-and-slash Creature in the Well is short, sweet, and satisfying, whatever that word means.
House House's Untitled Goose Game is undoubtedly a hilarious experience, but it lacks a varied toolset to maximize said hilarity.
Short, sweet, and simple, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a package of positivity, with music and visuals that will sure to win anyone over.
Side-scrolling sequel Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair has creative ideas, assuming you have the patience to wrangle with its difficulty.
Despite being built from previously-used parts, The Jackbox Party Pack 6 is still one of the more solid and consistent collections.
Night School Studio's Afterparty falls short of greatness, with an unrewarding narrative, underutilized gameplay concepts, and technical issues.
A magnificent blend of genres makes Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order a solid game, but technical hitches prevent it from taking the high ground.
Colorful brawler Super Crush KO has a lovely art style, a great sense of humor, and tense sidescrolling brawling that should charm anyone.
There can still be fun gained from playing Marvel’s Avengers, but it may give you a headache — existential or otherwise — long before you reach that point.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2: Grand Prix is an anachronism of a video game, looking like it came from the 2000s while including characters from recent television shows. The first Nickelodeon Kart Racers, from 2018, was soulless and cynical, but I can say that the sequel is twice the game its predecessor was. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean much, as the first game set the bar so low that it’s below even Rock Bottom.
One of the most endearing traits of any Jackbox Party Pack is how high-concept most of the games contained within are — you can explain the premise of these games to any novice and create unlimited hijinx. But with Jackbox Games turning in a new collection every year, more concepts are going through the pipeline, and the mass volume of them are diluting the ease of use of these packages. The Jackbox Party Pack 7 is undoubtedly fun, but explaining these concepts to new players is more of a challenge than ever.
With The Dark Pictures Anthology, it is quite obvious and explicit that Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games is attempting to muck about with as wide a spread of horror tropes as possible. It’s certainly an advantage for the ambitious project — there are countless horror cliches and gimmicks stuck in our collective minds. But in the midst of my first playthrough of Little Hope, the sophomore entry of The Dark Pictures, I questioned whether or not these tropes were worth having any affection over.
As ineloquent as this may sound, Black Ops Cold War is a weird game. It plays like a tug of war between the advancement attempts that Infinity Ward put forward in last year’s Modern Warfare and Treyarch’s own mechanical contributions to the series over the years. What results is a product that tries to have its cake and eat it too, except that Black Ops Cold War seems to want to eat multiple, different cakes. It’s a strange entry in the series that lacks polish and quality. Still, I have to admit that I am having a lot of fun with it, in the way I would with a flaws-and-all action flick.
Before playing this game, the sheer existence of a third new Hitman game was enough to excite me. Because of how familiar I was with the gameplay mechanics, I was eager to hone my skills, take on new challenges, and learn new locations in and out. With that, Hitman 3 was almost exactly the game I wanted and expected — sometimes predictability and familiarity can be that comforting.
Whenever a video game utilizes classic narrative and gameplay tropes, it may be difficult to not see it as derivative rather than as a homage. The previous title from developer Hazelight and director Josef Fares, A Way Out, had this pitfall. However, the studio’s follow-up cooperative-only title, It Takes Two, demonstrates that variety and humor are key ingredients for turning familiar elements into a unique blend.
There are countless video games designed to bring simple joy to players, usually with adorable visuals and relatively easy and relaxing mechanics. Even still, mainstream video games are obligated to include objectives and a sense of challenge, often to a point where you have to work and jump through hoops for some solace and a pleasant shot of dopamine. Enter New Pokémon Snap, the long-awaited sequel, and a game that has you grind to earn that wholesomeness.
Regardless, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl serves as an example of how surgical marketing can be, feeding competitive players with specific bullet points while trying to cast a wide net with its popular IP. Playing it may certainly make you smile, and moments of hype can follow. But in the end, it’s an extended meme at best and a monument to capitalistic cynicism at worst.