It experiments with all the weakest parts of the series and ties them together with a new, tedious progression system.
Its repetitive tasks are like the usual arbitrary gates to reach a cutscene in a mediocre video game.
Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting is the effect it has on the game's atmosphere.
Playing Pathologic 2 feels like suffering, and it's meant to be that way.
It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.
The setting of the game is the familiar stuff of science fiction, but the lens through which it's viewed is not.
The game meets the baseline level of quality we might expect from a big-budgeted joint, yet it remains a tiresome, empty experience.
The game is ambitious for its translation mechanics and its big-picture look at the evolution of culture through the ages.
The game masterfully uses its microcosm of the internet circa 1999 to examine the way society functions when it's extremely online.
The Occupation's fierce commitment to immersing the player in its credible world is also the game's undoing.
The game not only gets you to behave like a rampaging gorilla, it forces you to adapt like one.
The game ultimately seems less interested in the process of how humanity breaks down than its grisly end results.
The world the game shares with its predecessors is detailed and bizarre in equal measure.
There are few greater thrills than discovering a new, powerful combo in Slay the Spire.
Mutant Year Zero feels most of all like a promising start for something potentially greater. Indeed, for as much as the game offers an intense, occasionally brilliant spin on turn-based strategy, it’s tough not to imagine how a sequel could improve the writing and the exploration to realize what is, at this point anyway, mostly just a lot of potential.
Even if the lavish detail, excellent writing, and world of possibility within vivid levels mostly just refine what came before, that’s because IO Interactive have all but perfected what they set out to achieve in Hitman: Codename 47 nearly 20 years ago
Red Dead Redemption 2 never quite squares its themes with the need to give players an open-world cowboy fantasy. And outside cutscenes and conversation, most of those themes don't seem to exist.
The game should feel wrong or disjointed with the conflicting elements it includes, but it all creates a strange, poignant, and often beautiful whole.
Barrows Deep is a shaky throwback that, despite occasional success in its stripped-down, straightforward approach, suggests that maybe simplicity and escapism has limitations of its own.
As much as this is a better, more confident game than Yakuza 6, the series still has plenty of room to grow.