The Escapist
HomepageSNK's Samurai Shodown is both an act of worship and discipline. The canonized developer and publishing house behind The King of Fighters and the classic Samurai Shodown brawlers is now decades out from its '90s heyday, when it defined the genre as much as Street Fighter creator Capcom. Playing this new Samurai Shodown, you can...
Judgment is as magical and grounded as true city life
The zombie apocalypse isn't worth surviving at first glance. Enduring a lifetime of horrible food, abysmal cellular reception, and the constant paranoia associated with living a day-to-death existence sounds overwhelming. Forget about whether or not we can strategically out-sprint an undead horde or can ruthlessly murder other survivors if necessary: the more important question is...
Stephen Hawking, real killjoy that he was, ruined the possibility of time travel in the span of a single sentence in A Brief History of Time. "If time travel is possible," asked the cosmologist, "where are all the tourists from the future?" Think about it: the nitwit snapping a selfie at the signing of the...
"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.