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Superhot emulates Hollywood fight scenes by letting you make your own
Layers Of Fear aims for arty horror, but its strength is simple scares
Beasts are the beauty of the frantic, overstuffed Far Cry Primal
In truth, Street Fighter V is a lonely and impersonal game. You can't chat with your opponents, nor can you request a rematch once the initial fight is done. All you can do is take a deep breath and charge back into the endless horde of faceless opponents.
[T]hrough it all, XCOM 2 never loses sight of the basic thrills that made its predecessor such a welcome surprise. The feeling of holding the line against seemingly impossible odds, of pulling a mission from the jaws of death with a timely rescue and a wounded comrade on your back, of watching an experienced squad slice its way through pod after pod of once-formidable foes—they're all still here, as satisfying as ever.
Fire Emblem Fates has all the plot elements you'd expect from an entry in Nintendo's fantasy warfare series. There's a chosen one, a war between two kingdoms that represent the light and dark, magic swords, prophecies, and dragons. But at the core is the profound dilemma of nature versus nurture: Will you define yourself by your biological family or the one that raised you?
Fire Emblem Fates has all the plot elements you'd expect from an entry in Nintendo's fantasy warfare series. There's a chosen one, a war between two kingdoms that represent the light and dark, magic swords, prophecies, and dragons. But at the core is the profound dilemma of nature versus nurture: Will you define yourself by your biological family or the one that raised you?
If Unravel gains strength from its single-mindedness, it also never succeeds at becoming more than what it seems: a modest, melancholic but ultimately heartwarming effort.
Firewatch sees relationships rise from the ashes of loss
Darkest Dungeon is a huge asshole of a game—in a good way. It's punishingly hard, and progress is made in small increments.
[Spoiler Warning] The Witness makes a game of epiphany.
Those clever, dialogue-driven interludes are all the downtime Paper Jam needs. Yet it pads itself out with mindless chores that waste time and momentum.
The Deadly Tower Of Monsters has all the manic glee of a B-movie marathon
Oxenfree tells a great horror story by taking its teenage heroes seriously
Make no mistake: The game is a bruising experience. It fully commits to sharing a hard, unsentimental exploration of what it means to watch your child suffer, and ultimately succumb to illness. That Dragon, Cancer is smart about presenting that tragedy through a series of stylistically disparate interactions to prevent itself from becoming dull or numbing.
The original Amplitude broke this ground over 10 years ago, but the world just wasn't ready. Maybe in 2016 people will be more open to the idea of finding the music inside themselves.
Today, Devil's Third is a fossil, its best ideas buried under layers of strata. And almost nobody has—or should have—the patience to dig them up.
In Just Cause 3, bringing a jet to a gunfight isn't cheating—it's expected
A good trilogy is a hard thing to pull off. Far more common than success stories like Return Of The King are third installments like The Dark Knight Rises or The Godfather Part III, where the series ends with a fizzle rather than a bang. Legacy Of The Void rises to this trilogy-concluding challenge. It closes the door on a story that started 17 years ago but opens new ones of its own with a multiplayer mode that has the promise to live on for years to come.
But even with its irritatingly slow cutscenes, its immature objectification of women, and its determination to keep players away from its best moments for as long as it can, it's hard to dismiss Xenoblade Chronicles X completely. There's just too much of it, for one thing. The simplest play-through will take at least 60 hours, and is likely to scratch only the barest portions of the game's stories and content, some of which, owning to the law of averages, will turn out to be both charming and fun. And there really is nothing quite like taking to the air for the first time, looking down at terrain that you've become intimately familiar with through hours upon hours of exploration of its lush, mesmerizingly beautiful world. It's just a shame that the game chooses to spend so much of its energy preempitively punishing you, before it lets you get to the business of actually enjoying it.