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.
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.
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.
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.
Mech Land Assault is not here to make friends. This piece of DLC is made up of some of the most fun—and some of the least fun—you’ll have in Just Cause 3. It’s harder to get your hands on a mech than it should be, but it’s a power trip every time you do.
Sky Fortress cranks up Just Cause 3’s bombastic effects more, if that were even possible. The addition of the jetpack wingsuit and Bavarium rifle make a video game-y video game even gamier. They change up the game enough—and in enough good ways—that I wouldn’t want to give back the new toys.
Always fun to watch, sometimes tedious to play alone. Star Wars and LEGO solidify their meaningful relationship once again. The developers just need to address a terrible save-game system, and need to clean up some of the bugs forcing reloads. But the LEGO video game formula is still the LEGO video game formula. Just be prepared to still be left wondering "What do I do now?" from time to time.
Take simple, Pitfall-like platforming (minus the rope swinging), mix in a hint of Sword & Sworcery's art style, and then you have an overreaching X-meets-Y makeup of The Deer God. I feel like its motivations are far better than half-hearted; creatively and intentionally. But The Deer God keeps asking me to return to a life I find less and less interesting with each reincarnation.
Hatoful Boyfriend is not the pigeon-dating sim you're looking for: It's more than that. Curb your enthusiasm for branching storylines after playing through the early romance portion of the story. After you cross the point of no return, the game is out of your hands, and you're left with an on-rails storyline progression. Regardless, it will subvert each and every one of your preconceived notions of what Hatoful Boyfriend could even remotely be about.
Sometimes you're a rat in a cage. Sometimes you're a lion. But when all your planning, patience, and possibly plain old good luck finally pays off, The Escapists rewards in a rare way. Because in The Escapists, whether you catch a break or catch a beatdown, you'll know you've earned it.
Marvel's Avengers–Age of Ultron looks like a 10-car pileup glued together with overly looping dialogue and a few forgivable missteps. Even without prior existing knowledge of these superheroes' thoughts and motivations, it's still a challenging table with subtle rewards.
The premise behind Nom Nom Galaxy wears thin after a can or two. Its neatly focused premise and evolving puzzles don't progress at a rate to keep things stimulating for more than a few planets' worth of corporate conquest. The minimalist art is, at times, print worthy. The music makes me want to move back into a dorm room. But Nom Nom Galaxy doesn't often inspire the sense of exploratory wanderlust that should underpin Terraria-like worlds such as these. And the narrow gameplay and tightly wound clock makes everything feel like too much work, not enough play.
When you're advertising 34 different endings, your survival journey needs to be survivable. But Ashwalkers rarely made me feel like my survival was on the line. I was hungry for more human interactions between squad members. But the bulk of the writing is saved for the badge-ridden hall of fame at the end of this post-apocalyptic Oregon Trail.
The Dark Souls of zoo tycoon sims. Start slower than you'd like to, YouTube yet another tutorial, then watch Planet Zoo blossom before your eyes. This is a slow, mindful, niche of a sim that demands more patience and learning than you'd expect.
Obsidian set out to make a Fallout game, but didn't think we'd mind if they actually made it a Firefly game along the way. So now we have an anti-capitalist Firefly mired in labor issues but elevated by rapidfire gunplay, peppered with chuckles from a tryhard sense of humor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Psych Ward can feel small, but its intent is to draw you back in to the even smaller lives of the criminally insane. Likewise, you'll have to make small but important design shifts that require more attention than your regular prison wings. But if you build with purpose and intent, you just might be able to reform the toughest customers introduced to Prison Architect yet.