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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.
The end result raises the same question Destiny did right out of the gate: Who is this game supposed to be for?
Devoid of context, this is the action-adventure title of our dreams, executed on an astonishing technical level.
As much as this is a better, more confident game than Yakuza 6, the series still has plenty of room to grow.
Spider-Man's mechanics feel fluid and satisfying enough to keep players engaged throughout the entire campaign.
The universe of this game is one that could have benefited from a sense of atmosphere that's rooted in the past.
Super-charged in almost every way, Guacamelee! 2 makes its predecessor look like a backyard wrestling match.
WarioWare Gold slightly redeems itself only after you've suffered through the feeble punchlines of the Story mode and have unlocked Challenge mode, which puts bizarre roadblocks in front of the player that affect your interactions with the microgames.
The game's more successful cases ask you to evaluate your definitions of things like mercy and humanity.
Even when you fail miserably at at a task, the experience of playing the game is raucous and rewarding.
Motion Twin's Dead Cells is a game designed for those who don't particularly like roguelikes.
This Is the Police 2 never contemplates police brutality, wrongful arrests, or anything whatsoever about race.
The game comes down to two rival parties blandly lumbering toward each other on largely identical stages.