Taiko no Tatsujin: Drum Session! is a bright and cheery arcade drumming classic digitally packaged without the physical equipment normally used to play it, conceding a DualShock 4 as the solitary drum to bang across dozens of energetic pop anthems. It's a fun, albeit plain, rhythm game that you can imagine being even more fun with the hilarious drum controller that isn't included or available in North America.
GRIP: Combat Racing is a contemporary adaptation of Rollcage and its sequel Rollcage Stage II. This is a tremendous achievement for fans of Rollcage and a charming but narrow curiosity for everyone else. By splitting the difference between monument and movement, GRIP remains confident in its limitations.
Call of Cthulhu is an emphatic character sheet fed to a game deficient of opportunities for self-expression. Imagine if, instead of a dramatic exploration behind the power and poison of enlightenment, Lovecraft only wrote a flat outline. Call of Cthulhu is eldritch horror without emotion or agency, and its madness is entirely mundane.
This Missing is a heartfelt affirmation of identity expressed through emotional turbulence and macabre staging. Its performance as a puzzle-platformer—suspiciously slapdash and presumably exploitative—revels in instability, but finds resolution through a singular and concordant message. The Missing's pieces fit its puzzle, even if the player (and The Missing's protagonist) believe they won't.
Astro Bot Rescue Mission neatly unfolds platforming's trick and tropes with immunity from the traditional hazards of virtual reality. Immersed in Astro Bot's kinetic charm and engaged by its clever novelties, you're left admiring the medium's strengths rather than cursing its limitations. Astro Bot is a treasure for PlayStation VR enthusiasts.
While the original Puyo Puyo's festive brand of falling-block puzzle-action is a known quantity, M2's tireless determination to blend accuracy with accessibility persists as the best way to enjoy a classic game in 2019. The SEGA AGES line continues to be the Switch's secret-best asset.
In 2010, Bayonetta and Vanquish suggested modern action games didn't have to compromise between style and substance. In 2020, with a remastered tenth anniversary bundle, the acrobatic precision of both titles still feels ahead of its time. Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami, and their teams at PlatinumGames, created enduring action masterworks and Armature's 4K facelift varnishes them with another decade of luster. Bayonetta and Vanquish look and feel ageless.
If Guacamelee was a celebration riot through metroidvania, its sequel feels closer to an orderly parade across the same space. Guacamelee! 2 is a warm, expertly designed, devilishly preposterous, and, ultimately, safe return to its Mexiverse.
Dead Cells is a cultured, clever, and collected fusion of roguelike canon and metroidvania doctrine. Discovering its wealth of secrets drives the player's curiosity while a proficient performance, derived from countless combinations of weapons and options, rewards their personal dexterity. Dead Cells, from any imaginable approach, thrives in a powerful cycle of surprise and satisfaction.
Tempest 4000 is a euphoria induction apparatus designed to simulate the mystique of vector display technology and the ancient magnetism of exotic electricity. It is overwhelming and it is hard as shit and it doesn't care. Tempest 4000's score-chasing energy, in the wild purity of a "video game," feels like a magical retreat.
Red Faction: Guerrilla is ostensibly an open-world action game. It is actually an escalation of opportunities for artistic demolition. Other aspects of Guerrilla—shooting, narrative, driving, logic—may be generously labeled as dated or defective, but rarely distract from the lure of explosive Martian terrorism. Re-Mars-Tered Edition is a convenient and good-enough way to treasure its spectacle in 2018.
Donut County posits a world where raccoons crave not only trash, but also apocalyptic profit. This manifests into a physics adventure game with a primary mechanic of expanding the size of a trash-swallowing hole that also swallows everything else. Donut County is a meditation on greed interrupted by a mischievous heartbeat, which is probably what you want from some sentient raccoons outfitted with preposterous technology.
Vampyr drives the desire of the player against the will of its protagonist. It creates sharp edge, and the ensuing conflict has the power to bore, excite, and infuriate an audience. Depending on your admiration (and patience) for its rampant ambition, Vampyr is either an unassuming action game or a garrulous gothic network of austere vampire folklore.
Imagine a Western where scouring the American frontier is as urgent as calculating the severity of a hat. This balance sustains West of Loathing's mixture of zealous role-playing and profuse outpouring of absurdity. It's proof that capable writing can not only texture eccentric maneuvers in design and presentation, but also prevail as a primary attraction. West of Loathing celebrates Western ambience and revels in disciplined goofiness.
Detroit: Become Human is evidence that breathtaking production isn't effective camouflage for anemic dialogue and abysmal writing. By co-opting famous racial prejudices and projecting all of them onto society's assimilation of androids, Detroit spoils its power to create convincing drama. The sense of agency and control over its story remains exciting, but archetypal plotting and cosmetic platitudes leave Detroit without much to say about anything.
While Dragon's Crown remains the most refined and candid of Vanillaware's neo brawlers, it's absent of the range of improvements and adjustments that marked Odin Sphere Leifthrasir's transition to modern hardware. Dragon's Crown Pro is Dragon's Crown on the PlayStation 4 and it has no interest in being anything else.
Killing Floor: Incursion doesn't challenge the notion that shooting galleries are a shoulder-shrugging default for virtual reality. Any potential for dramatic tension and imaginative gunplay is squandered by repetitive enemy encounters, tedious action, and rudimentary objectives. Loud guns and roaring carnage are muted by Killing Floor: Incursion's nondescript comfort in inertia.
Detached is an exploration of space and occasional snuff film laden with mundane objectives. Like premise without plot, even the most satisfying sense of motion can't progress without an equivalent destination. In 2018, there isn't much room for Detached beside more mature takes on virtual reality.
Island Time VR is a survival game deprived of effective resources. Elements that should be in great supply—variability, actionable materials, and available real estate—are reduced to a minimum, instead depending on the novelty of virtual reality for sustenance. With PlayStation VR's incapacity for a proper room-scale experience, Island Time VR is left out to starve.
The American Dream presents a slice of Americana in which guns are fetishized to their idiotic maximum; guns for cooking, guns for dancing, guns for marrying, and guns for childbirth. While The American Dream's action is adjacent to conventional VR shooting galleries, its vicious political commentary satirizes gun culture and leaves no survivors. The obliteration of reality appears to be a natural side effect of defending the indefensible.