The A.V. Club's Reviews
The Evil Within eventually gives Seb a reason to soldier on, far too late into the story. At that point, he's the only one it helps.
The Legend Of Korra game is the "much, much worse" scenario, and the kindest thing to say about it is that it serves a similar function to the anemic stage performance in "The Ember Island Players." Through sheer inferiority, it's a reminder of what makes both the series it's based on and the games it imitates so beloved.
Sunset Overdrive can't escape the fact that it's a harmless product of the machine it pretends to rage against. After all, it's hard to keep defiantly flipping the bird at authority and the conformity of comfortable adulthood when you're the middle-aged guy calling the shots and your milieu has become interchangeable from the culture at large it claims to be subverting. Squint hard enough and all that angry fist pumping looks an awful lot like an eager thumbs up for the status quo.
When approaching the final boss in "Ivory King," I discovered a bonfire so lit up with summoning signs that I couldn't find the floor. Players wanted to fight this boss on repeat—one hello right after the other, defeating sadism with genuine excitement and camaraderie.
This sort of ridiculousness proves a good fit with Call Of Duty's metamorphosis. The removal of any meaningful ideology—however toxic it was when present—has diminished Call Of Duty to the level of pure fancy. It is, in other words, free to be silly.
Ubisoft has proven that it is capable of pushing the series in a novel direction, and that's why the complacency of Unity is especially disappointing.
Conquering a kingdom, as Inquisition proves, can be much easier than ruling one.
The emails you can rifle through at Abstergo Entertainment tease a potentially exciting future for the series—Russia, Brazil, China, Japan—but unless it can get over its current identity crisis, the best we can hope for from the future of Assassin's Creed is more near-hits.
With an almost staggering variety of new creation tools and a whole new training area designed to teach about them, LittleBigPlanet 3 is clearly a game with creators in mind. Those tools alone cannot justify the price of admission, though, and the package that accompanies them lacks the series' signature imagination.
Persona Q combines fan service and brutal dungeons for a delightful crossover
[I]t's a confirmation of what Smash Bros. has been all along: a raucous, reverent celebration of Nintendo games and the people who play them. And the best part is everyone's invited.
Maybe a better name would be Sonic The Spine Mammal.
Far Cry 4, for all the action it includes, for all the things it lets you do, proves woefully unengaged.
The most promising surprise, though, is how Nintendo transformed a popular genre that had become all too steeped in darkness and hand-wringing seriousness into a family-friendly affair without losing any of its edge.
Never Alone is not just telling a story—it is connecting the player to a culture. To play it is to be transported to two places simultaneously. First, to the world of Nuna and Fox, and their epic journey through the blistering cold. And second, to the warmth of a fire, listening to an old man tell a story that is as old as the Earth, feeling it sink into you for the first time.
Ten years after its launch, Blizzard wants to reassure potential adventurers that they don't have to have been a part of World Of Warcraft's past to join the fight to save its future.
It speaks volumes that "Iron From Ice" packs much of the same emotional wallop as the books and show. I'm just as excited to see where this story goes as I am the next book, and the knowledge that the game's next chapter will be released on a regular schedule is a balm to this impatient fan.
There's a game here that wants to be played. It's just buried beneath a game that wants nothing to do with you.
The Talos Principle is what it is, though, and inflexible puzzles don't dim the inquisitive light shining inside this game. Croteam has made something rewarding and ultimately knowable but also something that inspires reflection on what isn't.
In an environment where so many games are about achievement and experience, Elegy For A Dead World proves to be a game about inspiration.