The A.V. Club's Reviews
Wolfenstein has always embraced gratuitous violence, but The Old Blood just feels a little gratuitous.
The game also sings because it's never a slave to the perceived merits of tradition. It would have been all too easy to, say, shove in some little floating Shovel Knight heads, making you collect pointless extra lives for no reason other than that's how things were done back in the good old days. Yacht Club Games is smarter than that, and their game is, too.
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.
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.
The upsells are just a thin layer of corporate monetization atop a mountain of sincerity, love, and dismemberment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
Most of the time, The Order barely allows you to play in any meaningful sense. The parts where you aren't killing indiscriminately amount to little more than pushing a button to move on to the next charnel obstacle course. And while this doesn't make it any worse than hundreds of other similar shooters, it's particularly disappointing here, because The Order has the potential to be something more.
An episodic Resident Evil premieres with great characters and gray rooms
Under the right conditions, Evolve emerges from its chaotic approach as something sublime. But there are too many moments where I feel like a skinny 17-year-old kid hopelessly trying to guard LeBron.
Apotheon is attractive, vibrant, and challenging when Nikandreos is scrapping with a deity or exploring Mount Olympus, but it's dragged down whenever he has to squabble with its innumerable mortal thugs—which is all the time.
Upcoming chapters promise more action and excitement, but "Chrysalis" has already given me something I didn't expect: a representation of modern teen life that is neither romanticized nor condescending. Just as a chrysalis is the transitional stage in a butterfly's growth, Life Is Strange knows that teens are just humans in transition.
Eden Industries leaned on excessive fights the way movie writers too often lean on their own tired tropes, and the result leaves us waiting on the punchlines for too long.
There's a game here that wants to be played. It's just buried beneath a game that wants nothing to do with you.
It speaks volumes that "Iron From Ice" packs much of the same emotional wallop as the books and show. I'm just as excited to see where this story goes as I am the next book, and the knowledge that the game's next chapter will be released on a regular schedule is a balm to this impatient fan.