The A.V. Club's Reviews
Let us try to imagine a world where crowdfunding somehow still exists 20 years from now. Perhaps then, we will all be invited to pay for a return to the halcyon days of Broken Age. We would probably do it. There would certainly be precedent.
So far, Climax Studios seems to remember what Ubisoft has long since forgotten: Assassin's Creed isn't about captaining a ship or poaching animals or curating an art gallery. It's about wearing a hood and assassinating people.
That's the ultimate result of NecroDancer's genre experimentation: an invitation. An invitation to strap on your dancin' shoes, let the beat seep into the hole where your heart used to be, and follow the siren sound deeper and deeper into the dark.
This is Not A Hero in a moment: a dark parody where every problem can be solved with bullets, and even Aunt Ruby is eager to get in on the action. Get to it, you sexy murder machines. Re-election time is just around the corner, and we've still got to deal with that scrotobiker gang BunnyLord keeps talking about.
Wolfenstein has always embraced gratuitous violence, but The Old Blood just feels a little gratuitous.
[F]or now, it's clear that Nintendo has succeeded in crafting a new, idiosyncratic take on the modern shooter. The bright colors, peppy music, and short bursts of action make it fun and easy to keep coming back. It's the sort of no-brainer we should have been playing for a long time now, and just like getting those hard and soft taco shells in the same box, it's sure to be a crowd pleaser.
A dedication to hostility keeps The Witcher 3 cohesive despite its sprawl
There's bound to be some disconnect with the mortal world when you live forever, but I could have used a reminder why this war is worth spending 300 years to win.
Batman: Arkham Knight works as a piece of summer blockbuster entertainment, even if it's not always pulling its weight as a game about being Batman.
You can't ever really know other people, after all. But the empathy and intimacy that Her Story evokes is a reminder that the strides we can make—incomplete and uncertain as they are—can be reward enough.
This game feels like something that would interest the two New Zealanders who watch Grown Ups 2 every week and talk about it on their podcast, Worst Idea Of All Time. Because unabashed masochism is the only discernible justification for putting any time into Godzilla.
Lost Dimension livens up its plodding action with high-stakes traitor hunts
As a result, A Knight To Remember has little identity of its own. If the goal of this first chapter is to act as a bridge between old and new, and the later chapters offer more original themes, storytelling, and puzzles, then we might be looking at a lesser piece of a greater whole. There's reason to believe this might be the case, as the most interesting part of the story, the development of Gwendolyn, takes center stage by the end of the chapter. But right now, this new take on King's Quest is hoping that a fondness for the fairy tales of yesterday will hide that it has nothing new to offer. It doesn't, but at least it has time to find its purpose.
Looking at the progress page after a session, that silly 3,000 percent completion number feels less like a friendly joke and more like a snarky challenge: "How much can you handle?" N++ seems to be asking. It might not be a challenge you want to meet.
Then, after an increasingly desperate three-hour session of sparkle-seeking, Rapture crashed, and I gave up, unwilling to keep pretending that I cared. The screen froze on an image of a road emblazoned with the word "SLOW," like it was mocking the torturous pace of my progress. If only Rapture had such a puckish streak, its sluggish march might have been more bearable. Instead, I found myself wishing that I could go to the rapture, too.
Like the cartoons that inspired it, there are big ideas displayed within Galak-Z, ideas that are exciting and worthy of deeper exploration. Also like those cartoons, the resulting product feels rushed and indistinct.
Submerged doesn't want to see you fail, but it doesn't trust you to succeed without its help, either. It bears repeating: Children aren't morons. Submerged knows this, but it still treats its players like they're just kids.
Volume makes full use of its updated setting and, in doing so, tells one of the freshest Robin Hood tales in decades—maybe even centuries.
Until Dawn distills the tone of teen horror perfectly with scenes that bounce between chilling and cheesy every few minutes. The characters are hapless and often stupid, and the dialogue is just stilted enough to feel a little campy. Until Dawn offers the rare opportunity to experience one of these horror stories from a position of power. The characters all start out fairly prissy, petty, and unlikeable—again, standard for the genre—and it's up to you to decide who you want to survive and who, if anyone, you want to "accidentally" meet an untimely death.
Walking in and out of it in frustration, desperately looking for the missing inventory object needed to advance a puzzle, is banal. And that's the fundamental paradox of Stasis: Its adventure-game components do not serve or enhance its horrific nature and instead act as roadblocks and impediments to the storytelling and tone. The disconnect isn't bad enough to make the game impossible to recommend