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There’s little to love about Darksiders III, even for longtime fans.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what moves you unlock throughout these games or how many new characters you encounter because few truly innovative twists are offered to the series’s gameplay loop.
Battlefield V‘s failure to communicate, whether the emotional disconnect of each War Story or the difficulty of organizing your fellow soldiers in a Grand Operation, is the crippling problem that holds the game back from greatness.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.
Mizuguchi has made strong, confident choices with his approach to Tetris, the Zone ability most prominent among them, but he’s done so uncompromisingly. And that’s an effect that’s as likely to leave tetrominos burned into your retinas as it is to simply leave you feeling cold and alone.
Even if the lavish detail, excellent writing, and world of possibility within vivid levels mostly just refine what came before, that’s because IO Interactive have all but perfected what they set out to achieve in Hitman: Codename 47 nearly 20 years ago
Apart from the fact that combat is resolved by placing cards into rows as opposed to moving units across a map, there's little difference between Thronebreaker and similarly hand-drawn, resource-gathering, unit-upgrading games like Heroes of Might and Magic and The Banner Saga. If anything, Thronebreaker offers a deeper strategic experience, given the distinct feel of these custom-crafted battles, with their special victory conditions and unique cards.
You know your beloved action franchise is in a state of mediocrity when it struggles to kinetically and strategically compete with games that it helped give birth to.
Call of Cthulhu's survival-horror elements don't come close to capturing the existential unease of Lovecraft's original story. Rather, they simply feel exploitative.
Red Dead Redemption 2 never quite squares its themes with the need to give players an open-world cowboy fantasy. And outside cutscenes and conversation, most of those themes don't seem to exist.
My Hero One's Justice fails to live up to the series's motto: You may get a "Plus Ultra" finisher, but your skill level will never "Go Beyond" the game's rudimentary requirements.
In the end, there’s a purity to how SoulCalibur VI is so focused above all else on its spectacular swordplay and world building.
The game should feel wrong or disjointed with the conflicting elements it includes, but it all creates a strange, poignant, and often beautiful whole.
Before you know it, Starlink turns playing with toys into something that feels an awful lot like work.
Super Mario Party has enough rough and baffling components such that the "Super" tucked into the title feels a bit undeserved, but it shows a developer operating with the best of intentions, attempting to offer up a party for every sort of player.
There's plenty of power and glory to be had in Odyssey. This is a vast swords-and-sandals epic that's rendered in the finest of details, and there's little else like it. Seeing it through to conclusion, however, has a major cost: your money or your patience.
Barrows Deep is a shaky throwback that, despite occasional success in its stripped-down, straightforward approach, suggests that maybe simplicity and escapism has limitations of its own.
With so many different factors to manipulate on your way to reaching ridiculously high character levels, it's almost impossible to see any end in sight to the game.
The fact that Capcom can't make this decades-old maneuver feel effortless is evidence that this series might need to go in a trash compacter like old machinery.
Though visually sumptuous, the game doesn't do much to strike a bolder, more mature path within a tired series.