Randy Kalista


84 games reviewed
80.1 average score
80 median score
61.9% of games recommended
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8 / 10.0 - Days Gone
Apr 25, 2019

It took a few hours to get under my skin. But now that I've gotten into a rhythm with its post-apocalyptic horror-survivalist aspects, Days Gone puts on a good little self-serious road drama.

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6.5 / 10.0 - Generation Zero
Apr 9, 2019

This isn't Call of Duty in the land of Swedish meatballs, it's Boston Dynamics in an IKEA-effect hunting sim. Come for the difficult robot fights, stay for the Arctic Circle sunsets. The technical issues will make you rage quit one day and then bring you back the next.

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Feb 22, 2019

New Dawn adheres to Far Cry's by-the-numbers open-world formula that's reaching old age. In other words, "It's a good one of those kind of games."

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6.5 / 10.0 - Vane
Jan 21, 2019

Vane exists in an enormously stressed and jagged world of puzzle-platforming. Simply moving around feels rough and unfinished, and that's not always on purpose. If only Friend & Foe had more time to incubate its creation.

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Dec 24, 2018

As a singular purchase, Flashpoint appears rather modest on the surface. But taken as a whole, it would be impossible for me to go back to a pre-Flashpoint campaign.

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9 / 10.0 - GRIS
Dec 14, 2018

Beautiful 2D platformers are practically a meme when it comes to indie game development, but Gris still rises above its contemporaries. Artful in both its watercolor design and broad-strokes storytelling, Gris is a gentle reminder that good puzzle platformers can make you feel smart without smarting, and that being succinct is not a bad thing, especially in the current culture of exhausted replayability.

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9 / 10.0 - Tetris Effect
Nov 29, 2018

Tetris Effect is the most optimistic game of the year. Plus, nobody saw it coming. It shouldn't be possible to say this, but this is the best Tetris has been in decades.

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Sir Hans Capon's DLC could've been chopped up and interwoven into the vanilla game's numerous subplots, but it was much more fun, this way, taking it in as a whole. It's a romantic comedy with a bloody start, but that's medieval Europe for you. I was only disappointed the DLC starts off with a mission structure that's a little too tried-and-true for Kingdom Come.

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Original Sin 2 shakes your hand a little too hard when you first meet. It needs to relax until you get to know it better. It's endlessly surprising, with characters that lose their stiffness over time, in dialogues and battle logs that piece together a dangerous, thoughtful world. It's tough. But the reward is that you get tougher, too. It still needs to clean up some of its tactical sloppiness, though. Having a ton of options in battle is only good if its rules are fair and make sense.

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Leaving my mark on the map, and contributing to the history and legacy of a town once long gone, From the Ashes adds a meaningful economic layer whose influence stretches across the entire map.

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8.8 / 10.0 - The Banner Saga 3
Jul 26, 2018

If you've played the first two, The Banner Saga 3 is impossible to ignore. In this final chapter, everything is broken and mended and broken again. I was never sure if there would be--or even could be--any kind of happily ever after to this massive mythology Stoic Studios has built.

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May 24, 2018

This is a transhumanism story for the android set. I devoured every chapter of these artificial intelligences shedding their artifice. And I learned that being human is filled with daily acts of self-sacrifice.

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8 / 10.0 - BattleTech
May 14, 2018

Monitoring everything from your debits and credits to your hit points and heat levels, BattleTech is brutal, fragile, smart, and struggling a little under its own weight. It has more heart than you're expecting. Couldn't stop playing.

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Dressed as a lion-wrapped Roman or a hawk-headed god of Egypt, season one takes Bayek above and beyond the events of Origins. Building up the Brotherhood in the Sinai Peninsula is solid and unsurprising, while becoming a god killer in eternity is surreal and unexpected. The season goes from monotonous to magnificent and back again in several imaginative leaps.

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Feb 13, 2018

Kingdom Come is a walking simulator merged with an RPG that takes you down a Wikipedia black hole. Accepting its historicity and deciphering its cerebral game systems is like completing a religious rite.

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Jan 30, 2018

Shadow of the Colossus is one for the books. Twelve years later, it's still a powerful, immutable, singular experience. A masterwork of the genre.

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Oct 26, 2017

Origins was worth taking the year off. Egypt will be hard to top as a location. The series' dry, ironic, corporate sense of humor is still dull. But nobody can beat Assassin's Creed's architectural history lessons, even if you're still just stabbing folks and jumping out the window while you're sightseeing the entire timeline.

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7.4 / 10.0 - Songbringer
Oct 5, 2017

With a particle-heavy 8-bit paintbrush, Songbringer is a glam metal Zelda. Songbringer doesn't try to finish what Hyper Light Drifter started; Songbringer has heart of its own. It's easy to like but hard to love.

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7 / 10.0 - Serial Cleaner
Aug 4, 2017

While groovy from its soundtrack to its illustrated style, Serial Cleaner's ‘70s ‘stache and sharply defined stealth-action is often tiring. I'd rather have somebody else clean this up.

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9 / 10.0 - Pyre
Jul 25, 2017

Pyre teaches you to fight tirelessly for your freedom, but to question the definition of that freedom as well. I like the sports-combat a little more each time I play. And Pyre fetishizes the tools of the writer's trade, but more importantly focuses on the art and dialogue of good storytelling.

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