Kotaku's Reviews
Fusing classic series sensibilities with modern ones, Echoes of Wisdom is an inventive and endearing adventure,
Funko Fusion could have been something fun! A wacky adventure mixing together different franchises and worlds. Instead, its a boring, annoying, barely functional third-person action game starring ugly Funko Pops solving bad puzzles and fighting the same 10 enemies over and over again with guns and laser pistols. Don’t play Funko Fusion. Save your money, buy some pizza, and watch one of the movies included in this collection instead. It will be much more enjoyable and you won’t have to restart the movie five times to reach the end.
It’s not the biggest budgets or the most polish. It’s creativity and experimentation, a willingness to try new things and keep pushing a young medium forward. With any luck, we’re just getting started.
The Plucky Squire's inventive puzzle-platforming looks to the past and future of the medium
It’s tempting to call Wild Bastards an evolution, but that’s unfair to Void, which has its excellent crafting elements and the permadeath of characters (albeit with persistent progress). What’s crucially similar about both, beyond the excellent art and fantastic sense of humor, is that unlike so many roguelite games, they both want you to win. They’re about progressing forward, being able to reach an ending, and then starting all over to try it completely differently. It’s just that in Wild Bastards, there’s so much more that can be different each time.
Structurally, The Answer is an often frustrating epilogue that shaves off some of the best parts of Persona games. Thankfully, Reload’s quality-of-life updates make the grind more tolerable and the remake adds enough small social elements like reading books and watching movies with your friends that it doesn’t feel like it’s all business. But as a meditation on grief, it feels like a kindness afforded to characters who once had to rile in the ambiguity of the original ending. It would have been easy for Persona 3 to end on a nihilistic note, showing the entire group fall apart without their leader and denying all the lessons they learned. But grief never really goes away. We just learn to help each other live with it a little more each day.
I can confidently say WoW is back. Well, it was back in Dragonflight, but it’s extra back now. Not only does The War Within make the player experience better with great additions like Warbands and Follower Dungeons, but it also demonstrates that Blizzard isn’t afraid to keep refining good ideas like Hero Talents or reworking those that may have failed previously and molded them into nuggets of fun and flavor like Delves. If this is just the start of what to expect with Warcraft in the era of The Worldsoul Saga, then I’m eager to stick around and see where these new adventures on Azeroth take us next.
For what it is, though, Astro Bot is incredible, and that is worth celebrating here and now. I just can’t help walking away from the experience with a bittersweet taste in my mouth and a hope that someday soon, we don’t have to look to gaming’s past for the best bits of it all.
Come for the 12-hour campaign, stay for the co-op mode all about becoming the ultimate alien killer
This overly ambitious adventure game’s heart is in the right place
The first mainline Mana in over a decade is a wholehearted vision for a different kind of modern RPG
By the time the curtain closes on Stray Gods: Orpheus, I’m left conflicted. The DLC is a stunning improvement over the original game, thanks to a smart choice of lead and some excellent songwriting. However, the dialogue-wheel-esque system for changing song style remains as flawed as ever, and it means Orpheus still can’t reach those original ambitions of melding musical theater and RPGs. Still, the team at Summerfall Studios should feel proud of how well it addressed the issues in the base game. Stray Gods: Orpheus might not be musical greatness, but it is the rare musical sequel that I’d recommend over its predecessor.
Arranger is a brisk adventure, but it’s filled with so many clever, perfectly executed ideas that by the time it was over, I was just left wanting more. Jemma’s story might be over by the end, but I’d love to see Furniture & Mattress add new puzzles in future updates because the team has such an immaculate, clever eye for what makes puzzle games so satisfying. Now I’m just waiting for my memory of the game to fade so I can go back and try to solve those puzzles with fresh eyes once more.
This game came out of nowhere for me, but its tightly paced film noir mystery is built on such a fascinating world that it’s quickly become one of my favorite sleeper hits of 2024.
Despite Hinterberg telling me that I should confront my problems rather than run away from them, I’d happily run back to this game time and time again. The beauty of its rendition of the Alps is hard to overstate, and I was enamored by the mere act of jogging up and down its sumptuous trails. Its top-notch dungeon design only further complements what an absolute joy it was to sink into its world filled with magic. Like the best vacation spots, I can’t wait to be drawn in by Hinterberg’s magnetism again and revel in its luxuries for a long time to come.
It’s the cookie jar. I want to play and praise MultiVersus for everything it does right. But everything it does poorly, or even wrong in a sense, has me wanting to slap my own wrist. MultiVersus has even managed to bungle those aspects of the games-as-a-service model that players have largely come to accept. There has been some course-correcting since launch, but the fact that was even necessary only shows how some forces behind these kinds of games are always ready to push the boundaries on monetization. It feels wrong, ethically, to participate in, and especially to recommend this game to others. But at the same time, it’s so good! Not even in the skinner box kind of way; MultiVersus is a legitimately well-made and lovingly constructed platform fighter that celebrates cartoons and movies I enjoy in effective, gameplay-centric ways. Rick and Morty are there too, I guess.
Banana Rumble is fun. I love playing it. I thought I was mostly done playing it until, about 300 words into this review, something unexpected happened: I got The Itch. I’d beaten all the levels, but I wanted to beat them again. I wanted to take a crack at the missions, which I’d largely dismissed as frivolous on my first run. I wanted to go for some records in time attack, especially pre-release, when the sparse competition would all but guarantee me a spot in the top 5. (As of right now, 6:03 a.m. on June 23rd, 2024, I have Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert beaten by two seconds on the world 1 leaderboards. Dan, if you’re reading this: your move.) The game works, in all the ways I expect it to. Maybe not in all the ways I want it to, but so what? Banana Rumble doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be good. And for Super Monkey Ball, “perfect” and “good” are very nearly the same thing.
If Starfield is to grow into something beyond an impressively sized canvas just waiting for you to roll your own space game by way of mods, it needs to have these foundational issues addressed.
Blud may not play perfectly, but this seven-hour vampire-killing adventure is such a visual treat that I rarely cared when a boss crushed me or the menu bugged out and I had to reload it. If you can put up with a bit of jank, Blud is worth playing on a big TV screen with some friends, preferably folks who grew up loving late ‘90s animated cartoons. Just be prepared for people going “Oh wow!” a lot as you run around town and save the world with a pink field hockey stick.
If this year’s satiric but more aggressive New York Times Simulator is a less subtle game about the risks, responsibilities, and struggles of modern-day journalism, then Times & Galaxy takes the spoonful of sugar approach with sharp and funny writing that makes it endlessly entertaining—even if it stings a bit.