Village isn’t quite as elegant a revival; its Doom vision doesn’t suit frantic warfare as well as it did the old-school hiding and running of RE7, and there are times when a player might wish that the camera would drop behind the shoulder again, completing the RE4 effect. But this is still a fast-paced, addictive, and gorgeously immersive addition to Capcom’s undying series. And for one tense, inspired detour—an unarmed ramble through a haunted house, adding some Conjuring energy to the grab bag of genre tricks—the game finds an angle Resident Evil never has. You may think you’ve seen every unspeakable monster these games have to throw at you. Baby, think again.
But it’s usually smart to bet on Naughty Dog sticking the landing, and Part II invests so heavily in these characters—new but especially old—that by the time the actual ending finally arrives, it’s gutting in a wholly different way than the original’s. All of which is enough to make you hope against hope that this will be the last of The Last Of Us—and to suspect that if it isn’t, everyone involved will again justify the decision to continue it.
Resident Evil 3 delivers that uncomplicated rush of old pleasure in spades; it should satisfy anyone who’s squirmed through the flagship titles of the series and wishes now for more, maybe to kill some hours in self-imposed captivity. Only in that beautifully rendered first act, though, does Resident Evil 3 threaten to find something new in an old blueprint, bringing a city of the dead to vivid life.
Every few minutes, Marvel’s Spider-Man delivers a jolt of pure, liberating pleasure.
Hitman 2, like most of its predecessors, is catnip for perfectionists: It rewards patience, careful preparation, and attention to detail—an obsessive-compulsive alternative to trigger-happy action gaming. But as satisfying as it can be to successfully weaponize your understanding of the game’s teeming environments, to convert chaos into control, there’s a lot of fun in watching your best laid plans go astray, too—to having your disguise fail to fool someone, to getting caught dragging a body to a hiding place, to failing to clear out of a restricted area fast enough and suddenly having five bodyguards raining hellfire onto you.