Control is a once in a generation game in terms of world building and atmosphere. Games this richly detailed do not come around that often. While the game has a myriad of technical issues that occasionally take you out of the experience, it is still a game I cannot recommend enough.
I knew very early on that I would like the game. By the end, I knew that I loved it, and I am already imagining my trip back through The Outer Worlds, and that is something that only truly special games can do.
An integration of the Control and Alan Wake universes is an incredibly exciting premise on paper. AWE promises this as the final DLC for Control, but the execution doesn’t meet what was possible. At the end of AWE, I felt excited about any future exploration of these universes, but underwhelmed about what I had just played.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a standout in the series, the best game since it adjusted the formula and became more of an RPG than stealth-action game, and a great way to end the Xbox One generation and begin the Xbox Series X|S generation of consoles.
The Medium has a lot of good ideas that come together in a mixed bag of a game. I found the story to be involving and well written; the atmosphere and ambience unnerving. The environments are often hauntingly beautiful to look at, and the soundtrack is a genuine highlight. The good in this game is forced to carry you through the bad, which in some ways, is the gameplay itself, where a lack of challenging puzzles, a shallow yet innovative dual reality mechanic, and an over reliance on exposition pull you out of the detailed and interesting story Bloober are trying to tell. The Medium is then, perhaps, a victim of its own gimmick – a game of two halves, one full of detail and intrigue, the other somewhat lost in the gloom of the veil.
State of Decay 2 is a legitimately great game. The zombie apocalypse genre is oversaturated at this point, but State of Decay is able to find its own lane and provide genuinely unique and interesting mechanics that very few other games can pull off. The game as it stands today has seen a massive improvement over what launched in 2018, and Undead Labs should be proud of how the game has evolved.
Dishonored is still a great game nearly a decade later. This stealth-action game will go down in the history books as one of the best games in the genre and put Arkane Studios on the map as one of the world's best developers.