Kotaku's Reviews
2K19's MyCareer represents some of the very worst in exploitative, money-hungry design in all of video games.
Chaos still reigns, yet with more opportunities for strategy, Super Mario Party has aged at pace with its audience.
Although it's a solid, well-made game, it ultimately left me unsatisfied.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey's defining characteristic is how often it seems to be anything other than an Assassin's Creed game.
Most every task the game has set before me has been entertaining, challenging, and rewarding. Yet I feel my former student's weariness mixing in with my usual optimism. There's always something else to go do, but on the other hand, there's always something else to go do.
Many come to Tomb Raider games for adventure and escape, to visit beautiful places and solve befuddling puzzles. There's plenty of that in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, too. It all depends on how much, or how little, you want to dig and how much you want to play as Lara Croft.
Valkyria Chronicles 4 is a confident game that doesn't always earn its bravado. It is beautiful, thrilling, and paradoxically fractured. But if you're able to endure the clumsier scenarios, you'll find a rousing war story with plenty of challenge.
As a playground for one of the most idiosyncratic superheroes of all time, Marvel's Spider-Man is sheer bliss. It's a sandbox platformer first and foremost, and a damn good one. Throughout playing the game I was constantly hounded by the question of whether this—sublime superhero traversal in a gorgeous, idealized version of New York—were enough. After countless hours later spent cleaning up every last icon on the map, I'm convinced they are.
Or will Blizzard just give us more of the same, because I am completely fine with that at this point. Stories so interesting I've defected to the Horde to make sure I get to enjoy them all? I guess I can live with that.
In conclusion, everything I have said about Dragon Quest XI being one of the best games of all time is definitely correct, because I played the game in Japanese for 300 hours. I wouldn't have done that if it weren't a masterpiece.
A worthy successor to the first game, bigger in almost every way but without an inch of space wasted. But as it's grown in size and ambition, so too has the gulf between the herculean feats of strength Juan is asked to perform and the incomplete feeling of the universe he's doing so to save.
Its best parts feel basic in all the best ways, both classic and modern at the same time. It never made good on the dream of seeing another more tragic, more complicated side of Master Chief, but years later, through endless updates and balance patches, it's made good on the promise of its multiplayer. Even if that were all that Halo 5 was, at this point that would still make it a very good game.
When a game is as finely tuned as Dead Cells, that tuning is all it needs. I've found its punishing, live-die-repeat rhythm plenty engrossing without a narrative wrapper, to the point that more of a story might just be a distraction.
The story I ended up with, with its highs and lows, felt like my story, forged by the calls I made in the stress of battle, and I own them. For better or worse.
I'm happy there's another Metroidvania game for me to dig into, especially one that feels as taut and classically inspired as Chasm. It's just that after such a long wait those things no longer feel like enough.
Octopath Traveler is a beautiful game with one of the best soundtracks I've heard. The combat system rocks and will hopefully be used in more Square Enix games to come. There are plenty of good ideas in here. But the game is too grindy, too repetitive, too full of structural problems to be viewed as much more than another botched JRPG experiment.
It does not reinvent; it refines. It does not rebuild; it polishes. It contains few ideas that I haven't seen in other games, yet it feels fresh all the same due to how much care has been put into every character, every battle, every frame of animation, and every square inch of its massively minuscule subterranean civilization.
Dark Souls Remastered is a close replication of the source material, allowing new players to see what the big deal was and veterans to test their mettle once more. There's already been a generation of undead warriors who completed their journey and rang the Bells of Awakening. Now it's time for another.
Pillars of Eternity II could've been brilliant were it more focused. It has a lot of good ingredients—scraps of interesting narrative, clever characterizations, a complex faction system, and pirate-themed spins on the RPG tropes of yore. The game's got so much unfulfilled promise that, even though I think it's a plenty enjoyable game on the whole, I can't help but feel disappointed by it.
Detroit tells a story of robots who look and act relatively human, making their way through a nonsense world where everyone, even the humans, doesn't actually look or act human at all. It's a fragmented radio broadcast from a valley within the uncanny valley, so many layers deep in unreality that it could never hope to make it out intact.