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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.
Origins presents an excellent technical and mechanical basis from which the Dynasty Warriors can rebuild, and hopefully return to form in the wake of later entries in the series, like Dynasty Warriors 8, having fallen so short.
It all, again, depends on who Indiana Jones is to you. Great Circle is a wonderful Indiana Jones game if your Indy is a man keeping history sacred while jet-setting to beautiful remote locales with God, or gods, on his side. If your man is one who’s frequently outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched by forces natural and supernatural, where every encounter may end in failure, you might still have a good time, but by and large, you’re digging in the wrong place.
Indeed, a single level like the Mad Mall feels more inventive—between you having to scramble through a ball pit maze, race on a Segway-like device, and solve a shooting gallery puzzle—than the entirety of other platformers.
What might once have been intended as a rebuke to open-world excess is instead a cautionary tale, an argument for all the little carrot-on-a-stick elements that make a game like this feel like more what it is: a wasteland.
This atmospheric Metroidvania is mechanically, emotionally, and philosophically electrifying.
That’s something that the Prototype games got right 15 years ago, in the exact era of gaming Slitterhead shares most of its design ethos with. Even when Slitterhead gets to its wilder stretches, and time travel enters the mix, the fundamentals fail its ideas early and often, making the relatively reasonable length of the thing feel so much longer and more arduous as a result. Slitterhead would have felt lackluster on the PS3, but it feels downright draconian now.