The A.V. Club's Reviews
The game stumbles, though, when it focuses more on the "octo" and less on the "dad."
The completed Broken Age could well be an excellent game, and I'll be back when it's finished to review it in its entirety. But the better the game turns out to be, the more of a disservice it is to play the first act now. To play it now is to be a part of a process. To play it later is to, well, play it.
If anything, the game's limitations—the wooden conversations, the nonsensical and uneven means of resource management, the repetitive combat, the lack of real agency in determining your fate, the possibility of game-ending failure—become more glaring as it goes on, but unaccountably, they all add up to a coherent whole.
Few games involve this much personal reflection, both in and out of playtime. Doki-Doki Universe may start as a story about cartoon wackiness, but it ends as a story about you.
While it's not the strongest Walking Dead chapter we've seen—the episode's final choice, in particular, is somewhat baffling—it's prudent to withhold final judgment until the rest of the game is in.
This is a bigger, bolder Peggle, but it's the little musical details that end up making the difference.
And so in the absence of any new ideas, Killzone: Shadow Fall exists as worshipful paean to the technical power of the PlayStation 4, not as a game to actually play and enjoy.
Super Mario 3D World isn't some perfect fix for the aging game maker, but it is Nintendo's tomorrow.
The chapters are so long, they become tedious, even on the surprisingly vicious "Normal" difficulty setting. The challenge of the game could be a draw, but when coupled with the nonsensical morass of Knack's fantasy, there's no good reason to keep pushing forward. Without a clear center, Cerny's game feels as hollow and vulnerable as its hero, a pile of disparate parts all too ready to crumble at a moment's notice.