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And while Monaco 2 sometimes stacks the deck too heavily against solo players (it seems better with a full house), striving to straighten out each new wrinkle in the plan makes for addictive, cheek-flushing fun.
For as big and ambitious as its levels may be, the most reliable way to progress in Commandos: Origins is a tedious process of luring each guard to his doom, one at a time.
Perhaps the highest praise that can be bestowed upon Blue Prince, and a validation of the near-decade that Ros has spent working on it, is the way in which the game successfully inspires players to follow the advice of the protagonist’s great-uncle: “Abandon the path and go where you want it to lead.”
Promise Mascot Agency is aimless by comparison, a linear story happening around the edges of a business sim that comes dangerously close to playing itself.
South of Midnight’s hero’s journey is ultimately an adventure in search of the reasons why those things are important, why we need communion and community, and more specifically how people of color have always built that sense of community when they needed it and always will.
Atomfall is still a journey worth taking and returning to, as using the knowledge gained across the first playthrough will allow you to truly take advantage of the game’s mechanics and savor the resonant little stories that play out within its end-of-the-world patch of England.
Whether Yasuke’s assassinations are your cup of tea or not (there’s a reason the game calls them “brutal”), it’s nice to see how this game breathes new life into a familiar formula.
Despite capitalism rearing its ugly head, WWE 2K25, like the WWE itself, is in a stable place, a leader worth acknowledging.
In just about any other game, even a single boss fight that displayed this level of carefully detailed lifelikeness would count as a major highlight. But in the context of Monster Hunter Wilds, the examples above can almost feel unremarkable, because—as in much of this series—the entire roster of creatures is suffused with the same level of care, detail, and life.
Funny and enjoyable as Wanderstop may be, it suffers from its inability to juxtapose Alta’s healing process with any of the hardship that made healing so necessary in the first place.
In the end, Split Fiction is, against the odds, a smile-inducing charmer. But it’s for that exact reason that it deserved a script that put its best face forward. Split Fiction offers up a meticulously crafted playground, but it’s disappointing that the framework around it feels like it was fashioned by the 10-year-olds who’d play there.
Perhaps the base game is just the tutorial and the real game is what awaits players after they return to the main hub and are reminded of the weekly battle arena challenges and the levels that can be accessed inside the Hillbert Hotel created by other players. So for those predisposed to wanting to see everything all at once, maybe that will be transcendent enough.
Even among more complex mechanical failings like the mind-numbing repetition of its awful religion system, the greatest flaw of Civilization VII is simply how bad it is at communicating with the player. If it’s still capable of sucking you in for hours on end, this latest entry in the storied franchise too often feels like a game that’s engaging in spite of itself.
After all, every single task in the game carries on the series tradition of having patently ridiculous scenarios play out with absolute sincerity. Indeed, just about the only thing the game doesn’t make room for is cynicism.
Because we’re free to choose what to include or exclude from each memoir, we begin to see objects as Swann does: how they tell a story about a larger whole, as well as how they look best when captured on grainy video. Swann’s enthusiasm becomes infectious, as the act of playing the game becomes about finding the joy in the everyday.
It’s easy to imagine another game in this same vein that sharpens things up slightly, maybe with a more urgent main story or a more engrossing setting. But as is, these minor shortcomings can’t dull the fundamental RPG hooks that make Avowed sing as well as it does.
More than its predecessor, Starward Vector is concerned with the relationship between the human soul (as one character warmly and plainly puts it) and its body, even and especially when that body doesn’t look or function how it’s expected to. More broadly, it’s about being a misfit in a world filled with other misfits and figuring out how to work together anyway.
Negative emotions may not be so easily dispelled for us as they are with Cadence’s magical guitar, but music can help us to motivate ourselves, making this a feel-good game in more ways than one.
In an impressive feat of adapting an established format for a unique setting, The Stone of Madness is cleverly attuned to perseverance through incremental progress.
Eternal Strands does its best to make each of your return trips through its seven main maps as interesting as possible, slowly throwing in stronger enemies, changing up the epic monster encounters, and varying the extreme weather and time of day.