The A.V. Club's Reviews
The game stumbles, though, when it focuses more on the "octo" and less on the "dad."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Ten years after its launch, Blizzard wants to reassure potential adventurers that they don't have to have been a part of World Of Warcraft's past to join the fight to save its future.
When approaching the final boss in "Ivory King," I discovered a bonfire so lit up with summoning signs that I couldn't find the floor. Players wanted to fight this boss on repeat—one hello right after the other, defeating sadism with genuine excitement and camaraderie.
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.
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.
Once I settled into The Sims 4, I discovered that I didn't want to go back to The Sims 3. This is definitely an upgrade, but with the small towns, loading screens, and all the missing content, it doesn't feel quite finished—it's like moving into a fixer-upper. After a bit of construction you might actually have your perfect house, but it's going to take some time and will likely be quite expensive.
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.
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.
In an environment where so many games are about achievement and experience, Elegy For A Dead World proves to be a game about inspiration.
The Talos Principle is what it is, though, and inflexible puzzles don't dim the inquisitive light shining inside this game. Croteam has made something rewarding and ultimately knowable but also something that inspires reflection on what isn't.
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.