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207 games reviewed
74.9 average score
80 median score
55.0% of games recommended

PCWorld's Reviews

Feb 2, 2016

Inkle is fast becoming one of my favorite studios. 80 Days was excellent. Sorcery is much the same, forsaking the off-kilter Victorian Age for a more cliched land of swords and spells and knavery—and yet, by some combination of Inkle's own talents and Steve Jackson's original source, managing to wring some truly compelling ideas from the game's thin sword-and-board pretenses.

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I enjoyed myself, though. The ABC Murders makes for lighthearted detective fare, clean and colorful like a Saturday morning cartoon. And make no mistake—when I say it cribs from Frogware's Sherlock Holmes games, I don't say it with any malice. I'd love to see more classic mysteries turned into adventure games, and Frogware just happens to be the current studio to beat.

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Feb 8, 2016

Firewatch is beautiful. Firewatch is intriguing. But ultimately I don't think Firewatch is very good. At its best, this is a quiet game about two characters struggling with real-life insecurities. But when that's sidelined to make room for a main plot, Firewatch suffers. It's a game perfect for trailers, a game full of excellent dialogue and breathtaking moments and stunning vistas that ultimately amounts to nothing much at all.

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The fetch quests need to go. Or they need to be dressed up better. Either way. I thought Dying Light was over-reliant on them in its first incarnation, and that was in a pre-Witcher 3 world. Playing The Following, I often found myself pulling open the map, looking at how far I needed to go to reach any objectives, and simply quitting for the night. Not a great feeling.

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[SPOILER WARNING] The White March has its issues—pacing problems in the first half, an over-reliance on huge groups of enemies in the second, and three companions who aren't given enough time to breathe before their quests are over—but it's a solid expansion with some incredible moments sprinkled throughout.

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Feb 20, 2016

Suspense is an important tool, in horror. Suspense is what makes scares work. Five, ten, fifteen minutes of excruciating emptiness makes the eventual jump scare effective because we're lulled into complacency. The pacing in Layers of Fear is numbing, with "scares" coming at you so often they quickly lose their potency.

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Feb 24, 2016

Two weeks ago I went to a doctor and they told me it might be cancer. Not a thing anyone wants to hear. I came home, told my editor I'd probably take a few days off work, and then launched Unravel. Why? Because I wanted to think about literally nothing at all.

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Feb 25, 2016

Is there enough here? I think so. Superhot is a gimmick game, and it was always going to be a gimmick game. I never expected otherwise. But as far as one-trick ponies go this one is pretty stellar, doing its damnedest to make you feel like the consummate badass and leaving you with all sorts of "That was amazing" moments, feats that could never be pulled off at full-speed. Or, at least, not on purpose. And at two hours it gets in, hits hard, and then knows when to get back out again. A rarity, in games.

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Feb 29, 2016

Yearly releases are hurting good games. I don't know what the sales data looks like, so I can't speak to that claim from a financial perspective. I'm sure the backroom at Ubisoft has done the calculations and concluded that the number of consumers lost per year is offset by the amount of money made.

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Mar 8, 2016

Shardlight is pretty damned decent though. The story’s a bit more straightforward than some other Wadjet Eye games, it ends a bit too abruptly, and a few of the secondary characters needed fleshing out, but all-in-all it makes for an engaging six or seven hours in a world with some great ideas—a bit like Dead Synchronicity, except with an ending. Very grim. Very adult.

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Mar 9, 2016

Either you never thought Need for Speed was top of the arcade racing pack or (like me) you at least think they abdicated the crown a long while back. I don't anticipate much dispute there, and this Need for Speed is unlikely to put them back on top. A lot of love's been put into this PC port, but the game that's been ported over is a mediocre arcade racer at best.

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Mar 10, 2016

IO's built the bones of a fantastic Hitman game—certainly the best since Blood Money (though that bar is practically nonexistent) and possibly one of the best in the whole series. Skip it for now if you're just looking to one-and-done each level, but if you were hoping for a sandbox experience? You've got one.

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New journey, old friends. I don’t know what possessed Beamdog to make Siege of Dragonspear an expansion to the original game, nor do I know what devil’s pact coerced them into making it thirty-odd hours long. It’s insanity.

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Apr 2, 2016

It feels borderline useless to try and write a review of a game like The Division because it's packaged under this games-as-a-service banner, expected to bandage its problems and evolve into something wholly different in six months/a year/two years.

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Apr 16, 2016

This is the most frustrated I've been with a shoddy port in years. There have been other high-profile trainwrecks in the recent past, like Batman: Arkham Knight and Assassin's Creed: Unity. But I didn't like those games, aside from their obvious PC woes.

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Day of the Tentacle is a classic, but not in the old musty way where you brush off a copy of some old SNES game and realize it isn’t as good as you remember. This is still one of the finest point-and-clicks ever made, with a witty story and some brain-bending puzzles. Also, a hell of a lot of dumb puns.

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May 7, 2016

Same great art, same tense tactical battles, same bewildering sense of scope emanating from such delicate pieces. I never knew slow pans across landscape paintings could instill such awe, and yet certain sequences in The Banner Saga 2 support tension that belies the game's humble budget.

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May 9, 2016

Stellaris is great. Maybe not Crusader Kings II great yet—give it a few expansions to fill out—but it's a compelling bit of player-directed science fiction. Freed from the chains of history Paradox has created something creative and bold and inspiring, something that illuminates just how vast and unknowable space is and how tiny our place in it.

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- Doom
May 16, 2016

It may not be as influential or creative as either the original Doom or Doom 3—which, although it hasn't aged well, ushered in a dozen monster-closet copycats. Still, Doom in 2016 is successful because it knows it's dumb and leans into the fact. There are no pretensions towards artistry here, no delusions of grandeur. It's a popcorn flick where the main character can only speak in gunshots.

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Homefront: The Revolution ends up a more fitting sequel than I think anyone could've predicted. Like its predecessor, this is a kludged-together mish-mash of trendy design ideas from other, better games, glued to a story that punches far above its weight and aspires to something much greater.

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