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The Old Hunters provides new riffs and deeper context to all the best, most memorable ideas in Bloodborne. The boss fight in the clocktower, too, completes a motif, this one in the form of a lesson. As this familiar figure rushes at you, intent on your demise, wielding a weapon you've never seen before, it's never been clearer: In Yharnam, knowledge can't save you. But a trick weapon might.
At this point, with less than a month to go before The Force Awakens hits theaters, Battlefront is a necessary balm for Star Wars fans to get their fix. But it's difficult to say whether it's anything more than a temporary pick-me-up that will be forgotten the minute the movie is released. Despite the myriad modes, the scope of the game feels small. Channeling Emperor Palpatine, EA has foreseen this and promised additional content in the coming weeks and months—for a price, of course. Hopefully, the company's powers of prophecy are better than his.
But these concerns are pushed far to the margins of Black Ops III in favor of explosion porn and the crushing pressure of a forward momentum that propels you toward more things to see and do and shoot. You can almost feel the writers butting their heads against the constraints of a big-budget first-person shooter when it feels like they desperately want to write the next Philip K. Dick story. It's hard to be smart when you're mandated to deliver a violent thrill-ride that doesn't stop to throw on the brakes.
The developers have already shown they're willing to listen to player complaints and have rolled out some fixes and announced a steady stream of new content, including plots that sync with recently released D&D campaigns. D&D has evolved and improved significantly since it was first released, and it's possible that Sword Coast Legends will, too, if players are willing to stick around after its rough launch. I'm hopeful the game will because it's probably going to be a while before Wizards is willing to lend its tools to anyone else.
In large doses, all that fighting can be tiresome, but the best thing about Fallout 4 is that it wants you to have something to fight for—more than just a vendetta, or some life-saving MacGuffin, or the player's own bloodthirsty whims. Grizzled, score-settling lone wanderers will feel at home in The Commonwealth, but this world offers something more: a chance to rebuild, to belong to something bigger than yourself and defend it from all comers. The most you can usually hope for is "This place isn't so bad, for a shithole," but at least it's your shithole.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider understands what's fun about being Lara Croft. It's not blowing away an army of underlings with an assortment of guns, something that straight-up shooters do better and with more commitment to variety. It's also not some bold new innovation in how to make a character run and jump, or unexpected deviation from a storyline. No, what's always been the key to Tomb Raider is the thrill of discovery. It's about uncovering surprising ways to use your environment, to solve puzzles and mysteries in order to access temples and tombs. It's the thrill of a smart and resourceful woman using every tool at her disposal to succeed where everyone else fails. There's nothing new about this—the template of the intrepid explorer has remained incredibly consistent, from the novels of Jules Verne to radio serials to Indiana Jones—there's merely the simple pleasures of a fast-paced adventure yarn, and Rise Of The Tomb Raider makes a strong case for why the fundamentals of a good game, well made, are their own reward.
Does it even really matter that the single-player campaign is disappointing? Maybe not. Developer 343 Industries is still faithful to Bungie's original vision, and the game has remained remarkably intact since Halo: Combat Evolved was released nearly 15 years ago. This continuity is admirable. That said, Guardians feels like a huge missed opportunity to evolve Halo beyond simple combat.
This is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself clearly. It's an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the people who play it. Through Freeman's relationship with Ichi, it also illustrates how the distance between people shapes the way they understand each other, and how collapsing that distance can be a profound risk. It's the same risk that permeates a project like Cibele, both in the creation and the playing. In sharing so much, with a friend or a lover or an audience, you give up just as much control. What if they don't like what they see?
The best parts of Assassin's Creed Syndicate are the things it does differently from other entries in the series, and its greatest frustrations are what it has in common with them. The series' heroes have been fighting the same battle against the same enemy for countless generations without success partly because they've always got one foot in the past. If Assassin's Creed never changes, it'll stay as stuck as its own stars.
At its best, playing Fatal Frame feels like a more interactive version of movies like Ju-On, putting the player in a terrible place where the only relief is the occasional pause before inevitable doom. The situation is slightly more optimistic, but the feeling of inevitability is hard to shake. Even the few supposedly safe spaces (Ren's study, Yuri's apartment) feel like flickering candles in a world of ever-growing darkness. At its worst, Fatal Frame is bogged down by repetition and a frustrating, if inspired, combat system. Your ability to overlook this will likely depend on your appreciation of candlelight.
That's part of the beauty of Woolly World, though. It's only as difficult as you want it to be. If you can't figure out how to get that bundle of magenta yarn tucked away behind a towering water monster, you can just forget about it and move on.
Chibi-Robo! Zip Lash tries to clean up the series but just makes a mess
Lego Dimensions is more satisfying for being a game my daughter and I can play together than anything the game itself does. She neither knows nor cares about half of the featured worlds, and that's just fine. You don't need to know the mythology behind Scooby-Doo to enjoy running through a level designed after the series.
Considering that it's only the second game from a relatively untested team, it's a fantastic PC debut, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as other members of that aforementioned physics puzzler hall of fame.
Transformers: Devastation is the best Transformers game ever
At some point, it dawns on me that my new friends-in-loot and I have become the sad souls playing the dollar slots in Vegas at 2 a.m.—sitting alone with watered-down drinks in hand, blank faces peering into a screen, moving only to insert another token and pull the lever. But so what. They can't stop, and I can't stop, and none of us can stop and oh god, will I hit it big tonight?
Without an ounce of real musical talent required, Rock Band helped people feel like real-life superstars in the comfort of their own homes. Rock Band 4 takes that feeling and makes it personal. It's no longer just about being a rock star but finding the rock star in you.
The feeling of connection might be an illusion, though, and that tension is what gives The Beginner's Guide its strongest moments. Even as it reaches out from within its prisons, it won't let you forget the bars. If it is a desperate desire to be known and understood, then its intentions come fraught with the same doubts as any authentic relationship.
Given Animal Crossing's sickeningly cutesy look and feel, it's tempting to play tricks on it, to fool its adorably simple-minded denizens into living in squalor and liking it. But the game is just too sincere to prank, the way that toys can't feel embarrassed of how they're played with.
More than the carefully constructed language or the fidelity to a story that doesn't need to be told, Mad Max is at its best when it offers some of that silence its hero swears to seek. It's when Chumbucket shuts up, when no deals need to be bartered, when you can just drive—just you belching out fire and black smoke across the highways, shiny and chrome.