The A.V. Club's Reviews
Batman: Arkham Knight works as a piece of summer blockbuster entertainment, even if it's not always pulling its weight as a game about being Batman.
There's bound to be some disconnect with the mortal world when you live forever, but I could have used a reminder why this war is worth spending 300 years to win.
A dedication to hostility keeps The Witcher 3 cohesive despite its sprawl
[F]or now, it's clear that Nintendo has succeeded in crafting a new, idiosyncratic take on the modern shooter. The bright colors, peppy music, and short bursts of action make it fun and easy to keep coming back. It's the sort of no-brainer we should have been playing for a long time now, and just like getting those hard and soft taco shells in the same box, it's sure to be a crowd pleaser.
Wolfenstein has always embraced gratuitous violence, but The Old Blood just feels a little gratuitous.
This is Not A Hero in a moment: a dark parody where every problem can be solved with bullets, and even Aunt Ruby is eager to get in on the action. Get to it, you sexy murder machines. Re-election time is just around the corner, and we've still got to deal with that scrotobiker gang BunnyLord keeps talking about.
That's the ultimate result of NecroDancer's genre experimentation: an invitation. An invitation to strap on your dancin' shoes, let the beat seep into the hole where your heart used to be, and follow the siren sound deeper and deeper into the dark.
So far, Climax Studios seems to remember what Ubisoft has long since forgotten: Assassin's Creed isn't about captaining a ship or poaching animals or curating an art gallery. It's about wearing a hood and assassinating people.
Let us try to imagine a world where crowdfunding somehow still exists 20 years from now. Perhaps then, we will all be invited to pay for a return to the halcyon days of Broken Age. We would probably do it. There would certainly be precedent.
The upsells are just a thin layer of corporate monetization atop a mountain of sincerity, love, and dismemberment.
Still, it's in the smallest moments where Pillars is most fascinating. Stories of dead gods resurrected, of divine plagues and magical obelisks jutting from the earth like broken bones, are the easy stories for fantasy games to tell. It's in the simple stories where they often falter. Pillars Of Eternity deserves credit not just for telling those stories but telling them well.
You kill many gods in Titan Souls, including a weird brain thing that lives in an ice cube, but the game's greatest victory is over the god of bloat. Long may he stay dead in the ground.
Yharnam is not some obstacle course waiting to be exploited for a cheap thrill. It's alive and well aware of its allure. That cure we all seek is in there somewhere, but this city isn't going to give it up without a fight.
Battlefield Hardline doesn't want to be a hero. It wants to be a toy. And despite what Harry Zimm might think, that's okay.
Put another way, it's a game that needs to be left unattended, so that you can return to it with fresh eyes and discover the surprises that seem to sprout while you're away.
White Night never reaches the possibility of there being a middle ground, in any respect. That's the issue with chiaroscuro, and it's why accusing someone of seeing in black and white is rarely a compliment.
But each cleansing of the palimpsest leaves the material beneath pulpy and weak, and Resident Evil was weak in the first place. The soap opera pleasures of this installment can be replicated in the next, but there are only so many times the series can get away with having action that's only serviceable set in a place that's entirely forgettable.
The first game, like a precocious child, asked a simple question: "Why do we like killing?" Wrong Number, like a disillusioned teen reading Vonnegut and lighting up a spliff, asks back: "Why do we, like, kill?"
Frustrating fights spoil the wacky premise of Nintendo's Code Name S.T.E.A.M.
Final Fantasy is too massive a cultural force to be in danger of failing after a few years of disappointing releases, but hope for the future of the series rests with Type-0 all the same.