The A.V. Club's Reviews
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.
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.
Conquering a kingdom, as Inquisition proves, can be much easier than ruling one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the new additions in The Pre-Sequel! don't ultimately matter, then this is essentially an add-on to Borderlands 2, spread out over desolation. "The Blue Danube" never actually plays, but if it did, it would no longer signify marvel, only déjà vu, the nagging feeling that you've done this before, and it was better the first time.
Is any of this scary? Often, yes, insofar as I remained terrified of being killed and forced to replay the 30 minutes since the last save point. Mostly, it's just annoying.
Between that and the sublime feel of its combat, it's difficult to see even a passing interest in one of Bayonetta 2's passions not turning into a memorable experience.
Shadow Of Mordor, though, successfully draws on some of that material in a way that is simultaneously engaging for a fan of Tolkien's extended works but not alienating for those passingly familiar with the story.
Nintendo overcomes Super Smash Bros.' identity crisis on the 3DS
While Hyrule Warriors could've gotten away with a simple "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter / you got peanut butter on my chocolate" mash-up and wiped their hands all the way to the bank, the end product is more of a love letter to its audience than either series could have attempted on its own. This may not count as a proper Zelda game, but it is still a valiant step forward for both Zelda and Nintendo in its efforts to explore new territory with the nearly 30-year-old series.
When it's understandable, Hack 'N' Slash can be as satisfying as clearly seeing the Matrix for the first time. But for those of us without the requisite coursework, clarity feels a long way away.
Once I settled into The Sims 4, I discovered that I didn't want to go back to The Sims 3. This is definitely an upgrade, but with the small towns, loading screens, and all the missing content, it doesn't feel quite finished—it's like moving into a fixer-upper. After a bit of construction you might actually have your perfect house, but it's going to take some time and will likely be quite expensive.
After a few dozen hours under its spell, the title of Destiny sounds like cruel irony. The game's marketing materials would have you believe that the title means your ultimate heroism is somehow inevitable, like a mythical hero of legend. But the term might as well refer to the state of grinding through the same tasks and seeing the same pretty but sterile scenery over and over again, like a space-age version of Groundhog Day, in the fallow hopes of pimping out your Guardian to the max.
Had it gone with a more crafted experience, zeroing in on a consistent tone and a series of clearly defined challenges, CounterSpy could have been more Three Days Of The Condor rather than This Means War. All it needed to do was remember the 7 Ps, one of the British military's enduring adages: Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance.
Above all else, Hohokum is a constant reminder that the verb used when we interact with games is "play."