If I managed to enjoy Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator despite the stressfulness, that means everyone else should absolutely love it. It’s completely nuts, but it’s got enough imagination that if you like betting it all on the role of a die, you’re guaranteed to get addicted to it.
As someone approaching Painkiller with a fresh set of eyes and no preconceived ideas of what it should be, I can’t say that I found it that much better. I mean, I didn’t loathe it, but I certainly can’t recommend it to anyone, either.
Beneath is pretty terrible.
It’s hard to say that The Outer Worlds 2 is a bad game, or one that doesn’t offer players plenty to do. It’s undeniably a well-made game. But that doesn’t make it particularly compelling.
The problem is that Saborus is a stealth puzzle-platformer where the stealth sections aren’t that interesting, the puzzles aren’t difficult, and the platforming is a mess.
The competition today is a lot more fierce than it was a decade ago – and yet, even with that tougher playing field, Yooka-Replaylee still manages to stand out as being one of the better 3D platformers you’re likely to come across.
Sometimes, all you want is a game that provides a quick blast of action, and Clawpunk delivers that in spades. If you just want to cause mayhem and blast away enemies for a few hours, there are worse ways to pass the time than with this game.
In any other year it would stand head and shoulders above the competition. But in a year like this, where we can compare and contrast CrossWorlds with Mario Kart World so easily, its faults seem a lot more glaring. As it stands, it’s a very solid kart racer that has the misfortune of being compared to one that’s just more enjoyable.
It’s absurdly easy to pick up, and it only sucks you in more and more as you see your accumulated wealth get bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s not likely to replace Balatro (or whatever your deckbuilder of choice may be), but if you want something that gives you a quick hit of adrenaline without being too demanding, you should probably check it out.
Hitman: Absolution represents the series’ awkward, stumbling growth period. Play it you want to see where some of the ideas in the World of Assassination trilogy got their start, but don’t expect the game to reach anywhere near the same heights.
If you have a Smash Bros. hole in your life and can’t wait for SSB Ultimate’s official successor, you should definitely give Kirby Air Riders. You may just love what you discover.
SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide is kind of like comfort food for 3D platforming fans. Even if you aren’t a fan of the TV series, it still delivers the kind of action you want with a minimum of fuss, and it’s not like you need to know the show very well to keep up with what’s going on. It wraps all that up in a solidly competent package, which means that if you’re a fan of the genre, you could do a lot worse than picking this up.
I wish I could say that everyone wins in the end when playing Jackbox Party Pack 11…but they really don’t. It’s certainly a step up from last year’s Naughty Pack, but the games on offer here are too inconsistent to be worth your while. As always, a good group of friends can always probably make anything fun, but it’ll take a lot more effort here than you’d like.
No matter how cute and whimsical Dog Witch may be, you still need to play it in the end – and that’s where it doesn’t quite measure up, in no small part because the field is so incredibly crowded right now. Still, it gets all kinds of bonus points for effort, and if you want a bit of adorableness injected into your roguelike deckbuilders, you’ll get that in spades here.
You’d have hoped that after ten years trying to recapture the brilliance of Burnout, Three Fields Entertainment would be further along than this. Wreckreation is better than anything they’ve done so far, true, but it’s still very far from the kind of racing game that anyone will want to play.
Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted is still the great game it was all those years ago, just a tiny bit better. Is that enough to justify the higher price? Maybe, maybe not – but it’s one of those games that always feels worth it to me, no matter how many times I’ve played it or how much I’ve paid.
Even with controls and camera work that feel slightly like a relic, there’s nothing here that would make you think the world got it wrong 15-20 years ago as far as these games are concerned. They were pinnacles of 3D platforming then, and they remain that way today as well.
Death on the Nile isn’t a must-play adventure, but it’s at least generally tolerable – which is more than can be said about it as an Agatha Christie adaptation. On that front, it fails, so if that’s why you’re interested in it, prepare for disappointment. Still, if you’re fond of point-and-click mysteries, there’s probably enough here to be interesting.
I feel like Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny is meant for a very, very specific target audience: you need to a) have been a big fan of Nicktoons about 15-20 years ago, b) have grown up and become a huge fan of Diablo and other similar ARPGs, and c) now have kids of your own that you’re trying to make into fans of both Diablo <I>and</i> Spongebob, TMNT, and other cartoons from that very specific point in time.
It feels like CloverPit relies on the same kind of inertia that compels people to sit in front of slots, feeding coin after coin for hours at a time. It’s an intriguing idea for a game, but it’s not nearly deep enough to sustain itself