Dan Hodges's Reviews
Left Alive is a shoddily assembled mess with no real redeeming features. Its broken AI and glaring technical issues only serve to highlight the poor game design on display.
Immortal Unchained is a bad third-person shooter and a boring Souls-like. Its execution is poor enough to make you realize that Dark Souls-with-guns isn't actually as cool as it sounds.
Fade To Silence is a mess of ideas that don't come together well enough to be worth experiencing. There's plenty of potential here, but every idea is half-baked, undercooked, and buried by other systems.
Turf Wars feels like an unfortunate filler chapter in Spider-Man's DLC trilogy. It's too short and uneven to make any lasting impact on its own, putting a lot of pressure on its final chapter to deliver something worthwhile.
Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry is as crude as its title. The awful, lazy writing lets down what is otherwise a solid adventure game.
Pathologic 2 presents a weird, engaging, and wholly unique world to uncover and explore, but makes the act of playing it a clunky and laborious chore.
Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection offers a solid dose of Persona that fans off the series are sure to love, but the content is a bit thin and the rhythm game is mediocre at best.
Conan Unconquered is a deep and rewarding strategy-survival title with some unfortunate technical issues that could really shine with some updates. Grab a friend and you'll have a quality co-op game on your hands.
Dangerous Driving marks Three Fields Entertainment's first attempt at making a fully-fledged spiritual successor to Burnout. Its thrilling speeds and exciting action scratch the itch, but the tight budget, myriad of technical issues, and barebones content hold it back from being truly special.
In spite of its spotty localization, Dry Drowning is a compelling blend of visual novel and adventure game, providing a gritty cyberpunk world to explore, a brutal case to uncover, and Orwellian politics to navigate.
Warhammer: Chaosbane is a fun and satisfying hack-and-slash with enough combat variety and hokey charm to make this casual Diablo-like worth a look.
Although the premise of Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon: EVERY BUDDY! is bland, the game's charm and personality shine through in its writing and music. Meanwhile, the dungeon-crawling gameplay can be excessively punishing and tediously grindy, but the experience is ultimately satisfying and rewarding.
YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG is an earnest love letter to the culture and video games of the 1990s. Its novel take on JRPG combat pairs with an abundance of style and a memorable soundtrack to make a charming yet familiar experience.
The narrative surrounding Black Cat and Spider-Man is interesting and engaging, but the side stuff is recycled and disappointingly thin.
Darksiders 3 makes up its lack of depth in satisfying combat and memorable boss fights, making for a solid third entry in the series.
Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a marked improvement on its predecessor. Although the combat is still underwhelming, the rest of the package is sharp, charming, and loaded with stuff to build, crops to farm, and settlements to manage.
My Friend Pedro is like if Sonic the Hedgehog went on a drug-fueled killing spree. It's a ridiculous whirlwind of flashy dives, stylish shooting, and accidentally amazing trick shots that refuses to take itself seriously.
If you don't mind some wonky voice-acting, there's plenty of charm to be found in Trüberbrook's engrossing and rustic sci-fi tale.
Rules continues the compelling journey of the Diaz brothers, further expanding on the supernatural elements teased during the first episode's conclusion with less forcefully controversial and predictable writing. Unfortunately, the episode is hindered by some substantial technical issues.
Castlevania Requiem provides good versions of two great games. The trophies and upscaled resolution go a long way to reigniting interest in these games, but the packaging is bad and disappointingly limited.