The Escapist
Homepage"I just want you to know: I hate-respect you." I think about Alec Baldwin saying these words to a dramatically lit Will Arnett on an early episode of 30 Rock approximately 82,000 times a day. It's a little Zen Buddhist koan I use to rein in my critical brain when I experience revulsion. Two things...
Devil May Cry 5 is 99 percent about doing things that are totally sweet and looking totally sweet while doing them. There's no thematic depth waiting beneath its bombastic, blood-drenched glamour and its vulcanizing, improvisational violence choreography. But when Hideaki Itsuno's unlikely sequel drew me into a meditative flow of stabbing angry skeletons with a...
I did enjoy the mess that is Crackdown 3. In chunks, it can be exciting, but the story, multiplayer, and milquetoast character progression inhibit the Crackdown 3.The promised mayhem is here. But it isn’t more.
It only took 22 years of soul searching, but Resident Evil has finally found itself. The series has from the beginning shifted in tone, scale, and action that it's never been entirely clear what Resident Evil should be. Is it a first-person thriller? A campy survival spook out? A cooperative blast ‘em up where T-rexes...
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes doesn’t invite you in. If you’re unfamiliar with the huge swatch of game history, Grasshopper’s catalog, or even games industry business gossip, this will come off as a less entertaining surrealist action game overshadowed by Suda51’s old work like Killer7 or even No More Heroes.
While driven by nostalgia, the visuals make it feel new.
The soul is borne out of specificity. Every person, every work of art, is the summation of individual choices and moments. Details are where the spirits come from. How fitting then that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the most soulful work yet from Nintendo on the Switch, is an ocean of both literal and metaphorical spirit....
Darksiders III is as silly and awesome as classic heavy metal.
A progressive Assassin's Creed saddled with signicficant baggage.
Capcom didn't need to make Mega Man 11. Even if it's very good — and it is — it doesn't have to exist. More than 30 years after the original game brought the little blinking blue dude and his weird robot world to NES, the series has done its work. The 8-bit game series reoriented...
Shadow of the Tomb Raider would be a perfect game if no one spoke.
In World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth the pending apocalypse may not be canceled, but it's temporarily tabled
It will, without a doubt, stand for some time as the definitive Spider-Man video game.
It calls up any real experience of anxiety lickety split. But the threat's easy to escape and even easier to forget. The difference between a great idea and a great story is subtle, but important.
If you loved Tekken in the 90s, you'll love Tekken 7. It's a beautiful paint job, rather than a functional redesign, and it is glorious.
Endless Space 2 doesn't sugarcoat the 4x experience, and it can be daunting when you realize that all 600 icons on the screen have a tooltip you need to read to make just this one decision. Despite all that complexity, none of it seems unnecessary, which means every one of those tooltips has essential information.
For the first time in a long time I only have one complaint about a game I'm reviewing. This game really needs to add a single player mode. I have no idea how it would work but it's kind of pain finding people to play with. The game has occasional hang ups and graphical missteps on occasion. As I said earlier, the average player should expect to spend at least 15 minutes getting the hang of the games concepts and core principles of the game and that's mostly because of the seven house card rules.
This time around, Kickstarter actually did come to the rescue, delivering a game that is very much worthy of being called the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie. Yooka-Laylee is a game for fans who miss the N64 days of running around a huge, open map, collecting a bunch of stuff and having a bit of a laugh. It's cute, it's funny, and a few minor technical issues aside, it's exactly what it promised to deliver.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game that takes few risks and pushes few boundaries. It's a Mass Effect game designed to make fans of the series feel at home, but technical issues and lackluster writing leave it feeling like a missed opportunity to regain the prestige the franchise once enjoyed.
Bleed 2 is a great choice for anyone who loves extremely fast-paced action games that reward skill. Particularly if you've ever wanted to quadruple jump a path through a swarm of gunfire and flaming wreckage, riddle a bunch of enemies with bullets in slow motion, and finish off a hostile helicopter by deflecting one of the dozen missiles it's launched that you back in its freaking face with your sword before touching the ground. It's that kind of game.