Together, these pieces come together to create a great twist on the classic 4X formula.
Shadowrun Chronicles is a bad use of the Shadowrun license, and a bad tactical RPG.
Van Helsing III is fun, but its reliance on old assets and disappointing brevity make this action role-playing game less than incredible.
The Galactic Civilizations series has returned with more ships, bigger maps, and new ways to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.
With the move to current-gen consoles and a few new levels, horror hit Slender continues to offer up scares, but at the cost of its own mystique.
Worlds of Magic is the spiritual successor to the 1994 game Master of Magic, but it disappoints even by 1990s standards.
That distinction between the two doesn't retroactively make SimCity a better game. A failure is still a failure. It does, however distinguish a visionary-but-broken game and one that works enough to please an itch without pushing boundaries. Skylines is a merely competent game that's smart enough to let the community innovate for it. All its problems and all its genuine innovation will come from the creative ambition of its players. It's comforting in a way, because with that you feel that you share your struggles with a larger community, but there's still the nagging feeling Cities: Skylines lacks a magic of its own.
Instead, there's disaster and disappointment at nearly every turn. With a team that wanted to put the effort in, that had the time or the money to build on this, we might have had an interesting game. Every time I was able to sail to a new island or port, I found myself excited. I wanted to probe around and see what wonders the locale held, but every single time my curiosity was met with tedium and mediocrity. I want to think that my eagerness to explore was a sign that there's something interesting about this setting and this world, but now I think I may have been projecting my own hopes onto a broken, buggy lump.
Apotheon builds a wonderfully modern game upon classic Greek tragedy.
When I play #IDARB, I don't feel like I'm trusted. Hashbombs are a neat idea, but they come when someone else wants them to. Playing with others is amazing, but #IDARB doesn't help me out if I don't have quite that many friends available. Instead, it's watchable. It can be hard for the untrained eye to grasp everything that's going on in Smash, but #IDARB is easy, it's digestible. Unfortunately, that means that for all it gets right, #IDARB can be a lot more fun to watch than it is to play.
As tired as the series can often seem, these games still shine.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is among the best fighting games ever made.
Never Alone carries the sensibilities of its inspirations, and it feels and looks just as it should.
As someone that simply waits and arranges the location of towers, I felt as if I was incidental. Any other character in the game could just as easily have replaced me, and the plot would remain largely the same. Still, there's something special about waiting. About that patience. As I saw wave after wave of alien soldiers ground to shreds by my turrets, I was sad. I wasn't out for blood. I wasn't revelling in the destruction of my enemies. I was defending myself. I was waiting.
Smash Bros. is a cavalcade of cartoonish violence and chaos, and it's never been better.
Wasteland 2 is an intricate and triumphant return of a role-playing classic.
Velocity balances platforming and shoot-em-ups as well as modern aesthetics and retro play to create a nearly perfect action experience
Halfway is an emotional tale of mystery and survival that occasionally lacks the courage of its own convictions.
Light should be better than it is, but it was doomed from the start. Very few great stories have come from such an uninspired setting, and hiding all empathy and humanity behind a haughty desire for a slick minimalism doesn't help. Light is admirable insofar as its visuals and music create a sharp world with a brilliant artificiality about it. That works, in a way, with its narrative, but it can't stop the whole thing from being just plain boring. You go where you're told and do what you're told even while you're told that the thing you want most is your own freedom. It doesn't make sense on any level.
Xenonauts is an excellent strategy game that casts you as Earth's only line of defense against an apparently omnipresent extraterrestrial threat.