Nuka-World is a monument to the raider aesthetic, poor life decisions and sugary soda-induced diabetes. You'll need a higher-than-normal glitch tolerance. But if you’re willing to assume a raider's principles for good, then you’ll want the uncompromising, combat-heavy lifestyle that Nuka-World provides.
Jupiter's Forge is an intimidating economic battleground. That's entirely intentional. Don't come here waving your old strategies around; they won't gain much traction. Only veterans need apply to this meaty, punishing DLC.
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.
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.
What goes down must come up. The Sinking City is more than the sum of its glitchy b-game parts. Balanced detective work makes up for shoddy gunplay. A gruff and well-realized cast makes up for brain-dead AI. This is unironically a highwater mark for both detective fiction and Lovecraftian Horror in video gaming.
If you like going on long walks, if your favorite color is safety orange, or if you're never taking "must love dogs" out of your Tinder bio, then Hunting Simulator 2 is sounding your mating call.
While you were partying, Narita Boy studied the techno-blade. Impossibly good pixel art is locked behind bad-but-gets-better platforming and okay-but-gets-cool hack n' slashing.
Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse - Part 1 is thoughtfully constructed with low-pressure environments and the promise of a global thriller with a supernatural curse reaching back to Biblical times. It's strung me along this far, so I'm ready for part 2, but part 1 is doing very little to hint at any major payoff for this sleepy but good-natured point-and-click adventure.
The moral of this story is: No man is an island—not even Sean Murray and his buggy mathematical superformula. No Man's Sky is an ironically small game, but it has a big, beating heart at its center, even when the procedural generation and the sometimes narrow-scoped world building tries to hide it.
Koi is cute, it’s simple, but worth a swim if you’re in the mood for a low-rent Journey.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Urban Warfare brings dynamic changes to the battlefield unlike anything before it. Those changes are surprising, challenging, and push the exploding, collapsing city in new directions. The graphics engine groans under the weight of urbanization. But the city is bright and beautiful.
Warsaw is World War 2's Darkest Dungeon. Excellent narrative beats hide under the gameplay rubble, telling the story of Poland's guerrilla fighters being turned into bullet sponges for Nazis.
Rack N Ruin is a twin-stick shooter (sort of) with a juvenile appreciation for wanton destruction. The role-reversal, with you as the bad guy, brings up some interesting questions, but the story doesn't take neart enough advantage of that fact. It can be good to be bad, but Rack N Ruin's character isn't all that deep.
Catlateral Damage isn't a cat simulator, really. It simply takes the shove-things-off-the-ledge aspect of a cat's personality and runs that concept into the ground. Different cats don't do anything different, and different rooms don't feel all that different either. Cute for a little while, and fun for a couple swings, but boredom set in before I'd even unlocked every cat or wrecked every room.
Divide doesn’t excite, doesn’t surprise, doesn’t reach out, and doesn’t look in. It tests my patience, wastes your time, and can’t keep its eyes on the prize. The cool architecture is basically copy-pasted to death. And the gameplay, which is thankfully short on bullets, is still rehashed ad infinitum. It's a twin-stick shooter that removed the gunplay but replaced it with little more than checkpoints and crate scrounging. It often feels like there’s no end in sight.
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.