The A.V. Club's Reviews
Abstracted through pixels, text, and the lens of science fiction, God Will Be Watching is a fantasy that captures a very real, disturbing hint of apocalyptic reality.
Valiant Hearts gets most of it right. In the end, it's just an incredible relief—if a decidedly un-American sentiment—to play a memorable war game that isn't some Rambo-inspired revenge fantasy. Well, that's not exactly right. It's a memorable game that just happens to be set during a war. And that makes all the difference.
The game also sings because it's never a slave to the perceived merits of tradition. It would have been all too easy to, say, shove in some little floating Shovel Knight heads, making you collect pointless extra lives for no reason other than that's how things were done back in the good old days. Yacht Club Games is smarter than that, and their game is, too.
It's times like that one, when Murdered actually feels like it is thinking about what the player wants, that it's possible to enjoy the game's elusive premise and nonviolent eeriness. But most of the time, it's an unfocused experience that breaks its own rules and serves up the barest of challenges. It's much easier to accept that Murdered isn't really thinking about what it's doing at all.
Mario Kart 8 may look different from its pixelated forebears of the '80s and '90s, but it's infused with the same magical spirit and exacting craftsmanship. It's the kind of game that's bound to inspire nostalgia someday.
Content to be normal, Watch Dogs speaks more potently to the intellectual chill within its industry than it does to any oppression without.
Beyond its mechanical parts, The New Order is a relief because it's a reminder that profundity doesn't necessarily need to be linked to big, universe-shattering ideas.
So yes, Transistor is slow and annoyingly coy. You shouldn't have to play it twice to perceive all of its lovable quirks. Playing it twice, though, is still preferable to not playing it at all.
That goofiness belies what is ultimately a showcase for Capybara's serious game design chops.
Child Of Light is a joyous story about how tragedy, be it in achievement form or otherwise, shapes the strongest of us, how the only way to measure love is through pain. Aurora's coming-of-age is disguised as a righteous fight. There is a lot of tragedy in Child Of Light, but she chooses to see the triumph.
[I]t's not just about exploring a lost civilization but also about giving back in some way to ensure that ours is not left to the same fate.
Yes, plenty of compromises were made to create this hybrid of a traditional Elder Scrolls game and a traditional MMO. Those compromises will leave purists on both sides disappointed, but this is an ambitious and exciting epic that promises to only grow with time. It's a sandbox worth sharing, provided everyone is willing to play nicely with others and Bethesda keeps it clean.
Second Son wants players to experiment and decide what kind of hero they want to be, and it gives them plenty of leeway to do so.
It is just a polished spy game that has something to say, but not too much and not for too long. It speaks well. But for those of us who spent years tuning ours ear to Metal Gear's strange language, this is the first small sign that it might soon be time to throw all that work away.
[I]nstead of expending energy on the bells and whistles, Titanfall saves it all for the moment-to-moment thrills, like slamming your titan's eject button at the last second and shooting down an enemy pilot while you rocket hundreds of feet into the air.
Dark Souls II wants you to play it—all of it. Each dimly lit room and crumbling bridge offers a chance to die but also a chance to fight for your life. You'll still run across messages of encouragement left by other players, but now the game itself is quietly rooting for your success. It's still a hell of a journey, but unlike your character, Dark Souls II isn't soulless.
Park: The Stick of Truth is South Park. Even coming back to it after years of not watching the show, there was something for me here. That something was good comedy, which is rare in games or anywhere, and never gets old.
The game is as confused as its protagonist, and it's hard not to wish that the studio could have conquered its inner conflict and found its wings.
Jokes fly at the player like angry hornets from the hive, hinging on intimate knowledge of games like Warcraft II or Quake, and the references swarm and sting. There are more than enough punchlines, but there's too little setup.
Episode 2 presents a potential pitfall for The Wolf Among Us to avoid as it goes forward. When the choices are too easy, it's hard for Bigby's story to pack an emotional wallop. Instead, it descends into choosing for choosing's sake.