The A.V. Club's Reviews
Eden Industries leaned on excessive fights the way movie writers too often lean on their own tired tropes, and the result leaves us waiting on the punchlines for too long.
Upcoming chapters promise more action and excitement, but "Chrysalis" has already given me something I didn't expect: a representation of modern teen life that is neither romanticized nor condescending. Just as a chrysalis is the transitional stage in a butterfly's growth, Life Is Strange knows that teens are just humans in transition.
The humor keeps Gravity Ghost from taking itself too seriously, making the sadness a bit easier to swallow and ensuring the warmer moments don't come off too treacly.
Apotheon is attractive, vibrant, and challenging when Nikandreos is scrapping with a deity or exploring Mount Olympus, but it's dragged down whenever he has to squabble with its innumerable mortal thugs—which is all the time.
Under the right conditions, Evolve emerges from its chaotic approach as something sublime. But there are too many moments where I feel like a skinny 17-year-old kid hopelessly trying to guard LeBron.
[Y]ou'll probably never kick the stumbling habit entirely, which is fine, because you're always liable to stumble into something beautiful.
Kirby And The Rainbow Curse itself doesn't feel old at all, despite closely following in the footsteps of its decade-old progenitor. If anything, it feels like it belongs here right now. It's not taking us anywhere we haven't already been, or showing us a bold new future, and that's okay.
Most of the time, The Order barely allows you to play in any meaningful sense. The parts where you aren't killing indiscriminately amount to little more than pushing a button to move on to the next charnel obstacle course. And while this doesn't make it any worse than hundreds of other similar shooters, it's particularly disappointing here, because The Order has the potential to be something more.
An episodic Resident Evil premieres with great characters and gray rooms
Final Fantasy is too massive a cultural force to be in danger of failing after a few years of disappointing releases, but hope for the future of the series rests with Type-0 all the same.
Frustrating fights spoil the wacky premise of Nintendo's Code Name S.T.E.A.M.
The first game, like a precocious child, asked a simple question: "Why do we like killing?" Wrong Number, like a disillusioned teen reading Vonnegut and lighting up a spliff, asks back: "Why do we, like, kill?"
But each cleansing of the palimpsest leaves the material beneath pulpy and weak, and Resident Evil was weak in the first place. The soap opera pleasures of this installment can be replicated in the next, but there are only so many times the series can get away with having action that's only serviceable set in a place that's entirely forgettable.
White Night never reaches the possibility of there being a middle ground, in any respect. That's the issue with chiaroscuro, and it's why accusing someone of seeing in black and white is rarely a compliment.
Put another way, it's a game that needs to be left unattended, so that you can return to it with fresh eyes and discover the surprises that seem to sprout while you're away.
Battlefield Hardline doesn't want to be a hero. It wants to be a toy. And despite what Harry Zimm might think, that's okay.
Yharnam is not some obstacle course waiting to be exploited for a cheap thrill. It's alive and well aware of its allure. That cure we all seek is in there somewhere, but this city isn't going to give it up without a fight.
You kill many gods in Titan Souls, including a weird brain thing that lives in an ice cube, but the game's greatest victory is over the god of bloat. Long may he stay dead in the ground.
Still, it's in the smallest moments where Pillars is most fascinating. Stories of dead gods resurrected, of divine plagues and magical obelisks jutting from the earth like broken bones, are the easy stories for fantasy games to tell. It's in the simple stories where they often falter. Pillars Of Eternity deserves credit not just for telling those stories but telling them well.
The upsells are just a thin layer of corporate monetization atop a mountain of sincerity, love, and dismemberment.