The A.V. Club's Reviews
Transformers: Devastation is the best Transformers game ever
At some point, it dawns on me that my new friends-in-loot and I have become the sad souls playing the dollar slots in Vegas at 2 a.m.—sitting alone with watered-down drinks in hand, blank faces peering into a screen, moving only to insert another token and pull the lever. But so what. They can't stop, and I can't stop, and none of us can stop and oh god, will I hit it big tonight?
Without an ounce of real musical talent required, Rock Band helped people feel like real-life superstars in the comfort of their own homes. Rock Band 4 takes that feeling and makes it personal. It's no longer just about being a rock star but finding the rock star in you.
The feeling of connection might be an illusion, though, and that tension is what gives The Beginner's Guide its strongest moments. Even as it reaches out from within its prisons, it won't let you forget the bars. If it is a desperate desire to be known and understood, then its intentions come fraught with the same doubts as any authentic relationship.
Given Animal Crossing's sickeningly cutesy look and feel, it's tempting to play tricks on it, to fool its adorably simple-minded denizens into living in squalor and liking it. But the game is just too sincere to prank, the way that toys can't feel embarrassed of how they're played with.
More than the carefully constructed language or the fidelity to a story that doesn't need to be told, Mad Max is at its best when it offers some of that silence its hero swears to seek. It's when Chumbucket shuts up, when no deals need to be bartered, when you can just drive—just you belching out fire and black smoke across the highways, shiny and chrome.
In 2015, and with no mind digitization in sight, the questions Soma raises are difficult to answer without dreadful introspection.
Controlling Big Boss is so precise and supple, and the number of play choices so enormous, that failure can almost always be attributed to the player and the player alone. As a result, The Phantom Pain is a game where loss is often as empowering as victory is satisfying.
As both a user experience and dream fulfillment, Super Mario Maker is far from perfect, but it is still hugely charming and packs a copious helping of fan service for longtime Mario aficionados. Its greatest accomplishment, though, is showing how such a simple collection of toys can be used in so many different ways. With an active and passionate community, Super Mario Maker could very well be the last Mario game we ever need.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lost Dimension livens up its plodding action with high-stakes traitor hunts
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.
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.