The A.V. Club's Reviews
In a medium that evolves by the day, 11 is content just to be a pretty good Mega Man game—for better and for worse.
Hitman 2, like most of its predecessors, is catnip for perfectionists: It rewards patience, careful preparation, and attention to detail—an obsessive-compulsive alternative to trigger-happy action gaming. But as satisfying as it can be to successfully weaponize your understanding of the game’s teeming environments, to convert chaos into control, there’s a lot of fun in watching your best laid plans go astray, too—to having your disguise fail to fool someone, to getting caught dragging a body to a hiding place, to failing to clear out of a restricted area fast enough and suddenly having five bodyguards raining hellfire onto you.
With the way Gold brings 15 years of WarioWare together and slathers them in new layers of weird, manic energy, it serves as a much-needed salute to this underrated, often genius series. More than that, it’s a fitting testament to the last 15 years of daring ideas and handheld consoles from Nintendo, an era that’s possibly coming to a close.
Looked at as a whole, there’s something defiantly refreshing about how brazen a departure Déraciné is from Miyazaki and his team’s flashiest, most cash-catching work.
Like all of Quantic's games, Detroit is a big, stupid swing for the fences, yet another attempt to get Cage's dream of "playable movies" off the ground. Skeptics of the studio's previous games won't be convinced, but there are plenty of small improvements that make it Quantic's best offering to date
Montana features some of the most beautiful country in all of America, and Ubisoft has done an amazing job of capturing its rural glory. And the freedom to get credit for just f***** around in this gorgeous world, doing whatever feels most fun, is legitimately intoxicating.
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is a worthwhile but weightless spin-off
The '90s are alive and better than ever in Sonic Mania
Hellblade's battle with mental illness is an agonizing story only games could tell
In Tacoma, the creators of Gone Home tell intimate stories at a galactic scale
Splatoon 2 is in a love-hate relationship with the internet
Pyre spins a powerful tale of redemption, religion, and monster dunks
When you get down to it, this is a game with a cast of 35 characters, including two bears, three robots, a vampire, history's buffest grandpa, a dude from another game series who's now been inexplicably written into Tekken lore, a lady who throws tigers, and whatever the hell Yoshimitsu is. It's a flashy, delirious mess whose love for all that messiness is tangibly honest and infectious.
It's as fundamental as fighting-game fundamentals get, and it's not afraid to be a punishing teacher.
The Wind Waker-inspired island world of Rime is a beautiful puzzle worth solving
Injustice 2 is a fantastic tour of DC Comics' ridiculous multiverse
Be careful what you wish for, lest it become Yooka-Laylee
Exploring ruins has gotten no less satisfying. Risking it all to secure a glowing item or a stash of souls still provokes baseline thrills. The basic back-and-forth of combat maintains its addictive rhythm. And the whole world is incredibly beautiful, especially the lush panoramas of the Ringed City itself.
NieR: Automata is a great, teetering game tilting from possible profundity to surreal spectacle on a delightful lurch.
Nioh's brutal swordplay is exhilarating, when it isn't stabbing itself in the foot