Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe is a great time. The remake is faithful in the ways that count and adds enough new content to be well worth revisiting, even if that content isn’t universally brilliant. I could take or leave the theme park conceit, and I wish the Mecha ability was as good as Sand, but with an enjoyable epilogue campaign and a bunch of unlockable masks that I couldn’t stop thinking about, there’s no denying this is a remake that puts the work in to justify itself. I like it when things do that.
In all the ways “open world” could be used as a pejorative, Forspoken excels.
Metroid Prime Remastered is a faithful beat-for-beat recreation of the GameCube classic with a comprehensively polished visual makeover. It remains a solid adventure shooter, even if its straightforward approach to player progress is a little unexciting these days. I’ve certainly not hated my time with it, though I do hate its refusal to properly credit the team that worked on the original.
Everything good about Dead Space 2023’s basic gameplay, combat, and narrative is a result of what Dead Space 2008 built. Most of what this remake adds is either less appealing artistic alterations or side content that generally amounts to unnecessary padding, and quite frankly I’d have been more interested in a remaster than a glitchy new take that’s less enjoyable and costs more. When you add the repulsive context of EA benefiting from a series it once destroyed right down to the developer, you get a game that leaves a sour bloody taste, even if it’s an acceptable mimicry of its predecessor.
The Callisto Protocol isn’t scary. It isn’t fun. It isn’t entertaining, fascinating, or mildly enriching. It lays a self-entitled claim to Dead Space’s stylistic and mechanical elements yet wields not a single one with grace, instead performing a crude pantomime.
Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic.
Combining multiple genres and examining the relationship between game and audience, The Hex is a poignant, witty, cleverly written adventure spanning six protagonists and six very different – but smartly cohesive – stories.
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