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Beast of Reincarnation is like a cheap soda, as the first fizzy sip may excite you, but it only ever gets flatter from there.
Splatoon Raiders is a bit like one of those paint-spinning machines. When the game is only pitting you against hordes of foes, the whole thing bleeds into one indistinct blur. It’s only when the game slows down, either by focusing on a single boss (like the train-shaped Paincourse) or on the preset gadgets you must master to clear “sampler” dungeons, that you can really appreciate all the intelligent, playful gameplay decisions beneath the chaos.
Denshattack! is about commuter trains doing skateboard tricks, and it takes many of its stylistic and narrative cues from the likes of Jet Set Radio.
At one point, Kenway says, “It ain’t work if you love it,” but it’s hard to love the work that goes into a lot of the sailing you do. But push through the tedium and you may just be gobsmacked by the game’s beauty, as in the way you weave between lightning blasts and massive waterspouts during a storm, until the Caribbean returns to its natural state.
Rhythm Heaven Groove introduces great new competitive and cooperative multiplayer minigames, and their lunacy is inspired.
Velan Studios has turned Star Fox 64 into a graphical stunner, bringing it up to code with a more photoreal art design, and top-to-bottom script rewrite for cutscenes and mid-mission banter. For the most part, these are all improvements, making Fox’s mission more meaningful, and his crew feel more, well, human.
There’s a gripping experience nestled in the final few hours of The Adventures of Elliot, when its world, in its sweeping history, becomes your oyster.
But being a highly trained super-spy should feel more intricate than being Nathan Drake does, and every time that First Light tries to be that, it feels half-hearted.
The Dark Knight’s legacy goes extremely deep here, and it’s certainly not a bad thing that the developers want to make sure every player gets the most out of it before leaving them to their own devices.
Where Yoshi and the Mysterious Book really shines, though, is in the way it makes the player shift gears from simply playing the game to thinking about how the game functions.
In this lineage, Mina the Hollower, in all its textured detail and ambitious expansiveness, counts as a new high-water mark.
A few cheap jump scares aside, nothing about Directive 8020 is surprising: In fact, if you glimpse at the game’s Turning Points menu, a shiny flowchart of events, you can see everything that’s going to happen in a given chapter.
The game takes its time to reveal itself to be an intelligent and nuanced narrative RPG.
Mixtape frequently makes that flight not just fully interactive but literal—youthful freedom lighting up the world with a euphoric player-controlled fireworks display while sailing through the air in a caravan of convertibles.
Saros is a perfectly tuned bullet hell of astonishing kineticism.
Wax Heads ultimately shares the same central conflict as Empire Records, in which an independent shop is at risk of being bought up by a soulless corporation, but the interactive elements of this game really emphasize just how much there is to lose beyond one’s job. Music conjures powerful, immediate emotions, but it’s the game’s masterful story about how that music brings audiences together that produces all the lingering, magical feels.
This is the type of game that used to be Capcom’s bread and butter.
Thomson’s game proves to be an anti-roguelite. It begs you to leave the castle, to return to the realm of the living and dying, to let things be finished. And you will depart, ruefully but willingly, without turning back for one last look at the mess you’ve made.
Imitating cartoons from the early 20th century, even with all our current technology, is no easy feat. (Ask the makers of Cuphead about that struggle.) But Mouse: P.I.’s strengths as a piece of hyperreal noir are a breathtaking wallpaper over a fairly linear, basic FPS that still demands that we take everything about it seriously. It’s a game trying to have its cheese and eat it too.
People of Note is a nuanced turn-based RPG but a forgettable musical.