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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
SNK'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...
Borderlands 2 is a denser, richer version of it's predecessor, never compromising on the gunplay that made the series worthy of a sequel.
Torchlight II is a joy to experience, with vibrant landscapes packed full of interesting monsters, items, and lore just begging to be explored.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla review on Xbox: Ubisoft delivers its best open-world RPG yet with unprecedented freedom, exploration, and combat.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales from Insomniac Games is a tighter experience and gameplay improvement on PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 5.
Bastion is an intriguing and eclectic action-heavy RPG with great audio and visuals, and it mixes some interesting mechanics with tried and true gameplay. $15 might be a little steep for some gamers given its length, but this is a game you ought to play, particularly if you care about replayability.
Immortals Fenyx Rising from Ubisoft Quebec is a great start to a new franchise. It owes a lot to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In the interest of brevity and my own personal sanity, I'm keeping this review of Minecraft encapsulated to the game itself as you would download straight from Mojang. While recreations of J.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth and The Death Star Trench Run capture our attention and fascination, it's easy to be blinded by the grandeur and forget about the simple mechanics that make it all possible: a 16 pixel texture cube. This shape becomes the quite literal building block for vast and expansive worlds that can be constrained really only to the limit of your imagination. We have, however, collected some of […]
You don’t need to love Kirby to love Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Anyone who enjoys a quality platformer or just family-friendly co-op will find a tremendous amount of entertainment in this game. The vast number of upgradeable abilities and the delightful imagination of Mouthful Mode present constant gameplay variety, and the visuals and sound work in tandem to deliver one of the more memorable experiences Nintendo Switch has ever seen. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is an easy recommendation for almost any Switch owner.
In any case, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is absolutely wonderful all around. Each of the 13 protagonists gets relatively equal screen time, and they’re all brought to life by both the great English and Japanese voice tracks. You’re sure to have your favorites, but it’s incredibly satisfying to see how each of their stories intersects through time and space and coalesces into the battle for mankind against the alien invaders. This is one adventure you simply don’t want to miss.
If there was any question whether Daedalic is the inheritor of the LucasArts adventure gaming crown, consider it settled. The Night of the Rabbit is an outstanding example of the genre and an impressive next step in the ongoing evolution and refinement of its creator.
Legacy of the Void offers a stellar single-player RTS experience, which is nothing new for Blizzard. But the story provides a strong emotional pull that hasn't been achieved in previous installments, making it an exceptional framework for the overall RTS experience. The new co-op campaign most definitely falls flat, but Archon mode and Automated Tournaments make up for it by providing something new and exciting for both beginner and advanced players. [OpenCritic note: Single player was rated 4.5 / 5 stars. Multiplayer was rated 4 / 5 stars.]
Triangle Strategy lacks the gameplay depth of Final Fantasy Tactics, and it doesn’t come anywhere near the story richness of Tactics Ogre despite borrowing its branching-path narrative design. However, Triangle Strategy’s streamlined battle system is significantly more approachable and less likely to invoke frustration. Likewise, even with the narrative being as bland as it is, it’s exciting for its own sake to see what happens when you make a big, story-altering decision. The final result is a strategy RPG that is extremely easy to recommend to newcomers, and longtime enthusiasts will probably appreciate it too. Triangle Strategy isn’t Square at its best, but it might be Square at its most fun.
A solid, accessible city builder, Tropico 5 gets out of the way and lets you have the fun you came for without pissing around in fiddly details.
95 percent of what makes up Titan Souls is boss battles, and fortunately, that's the 95 percent of the game that Acid Nerve nails. Its story is nearly non-existent, and its on the short side, but the quality of the battles against the many Titans mostly make up for Titan Souls shortcomings.