Kotaku's Reviews
Well, if you never played New Super Mario Bros. U for the Nintendo Wii U, or if you want to experience it again with friends—or Toadette—maybe it’s worth it to you. If you absolutely require an official 2D Mario game on your Nintendo Switch, here it is. If you’re just looking for a platform game and you’ve never played either this or Celeste, get Celeste.
It’s difficult to imagine the type of gamer for whom Smash Ultimate has no appeal. This is a big game, and with the fat skimmed off, a remarkable one. Its core attraction—fighting on a platform—is as polished and brilliant and sharp as ever, its fighters the most unique and deep.
The action is faster, the controls more responsive, the visuals are sharper and the music is more full and lush. It improves on the original in every way. It’s even a little more sadistic.
Let’s Go tugged at my heartstrings all the more because of my nostalgia, of course. I found myself awash with memories of my childhood as I played.
Hitman 2 takes what its predecessor did best and improves on it visually and mechanically. It’s a cerebral game, a sandbox that can be bloodless or chaotic depending on who’s pulling 47’s strings.
I just wish there was more to do.
This game has heart; the kind of heart that is difficult to pin down but impossible to deny. It is a wonderful story about terrible people, and a vivacious, tremendously sad tribute to nature itself. There is so much beauty and joy in this expensive, exhausting thing. Somehow that makes it even more perfect—a breathtaking eulogy for a ruined world, created by, about, and for a society that ruined it.
I was glued to it until I was done. My only wish is that I could erase my brain and play it again.
There's plenty of you with 3DSes collecting dust somewhere in a drawer, like mine is. If that's you, go figure out where to grab a copy of the DS version of this game. It really is worth it, and if you're at the same place where I was when I first played this game, it might just change your life.
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.