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This set makes the galaxy that you'll gallivant across for 90-plus hours feel so much more immersive, beautiful, and tangible-seeming.
Throughout Hired Gun, you very much feel its desire to emulate elements of genre-defining hits like the Half-Life and BioShock games, as well as its failure to understand how they utilized their systems and mechanics to engage and immerse players. Worse, Hired Gun turns its back to all that’s promising about Games Workshop’s fiction, such as the various spinoff novels that offer insights into a demented upper-class nobility as well as life in the Underhive, choosing instead to tell a meaningless, mostly incoherent story about archetypal characters who are unmemorable at best. Late in the game, a momentary detour featuring an iconic Warhammer 40,000 monster, one that’s wildly out of place and acting against its bestial nature, serves as a baffling example of how unmoored this game is to its own property.
Where other games tend to have a greater purpose and complexity behind more granular mechanics that demand closer attention from the player, Biomutant remains a rather simplified, if overstuffed, game of loot-hoovering. In practice, you’re still chasing objective markers and wandering salvageable areas in hopes of spotting the “interact with object” indicator. But while Biomutant’s breadth of options does indeed make that familiar process more rewarding than the norm, it never quite offsets the accompanying increase in tedium.
The choices you make throughout The Outer Zone's engrossing cyberpunk therapy adventure may just keep you up at night.
While these limitations have the potential for forcing nail-biting compromises, the irritating micromanagement clashes with other elements that otherwise suggest a breezier game experience, like the rudimentary combat and the way the environment practically overflows with currency and crafting material. So much of The Wild at Heart elegantly sidesteps the usual pitfalls of a resource grind that it’s disheartening whenever it devolves into busywork.
Village is marked by a maturity that’s new to Resident Evil. Even when it steers us toward the traditional climax set inside a laboratory, the route feels more intimate and thoughtful than it ever has in a Resident Evil game. What elements Capcom doesn’t bring into Village from its predecessor, they’ve carefully replaced with a striking sense of emotional logic. Resident Evil, as a series, reinvented itself in Biohazard, and with Village it continues to grow up.
The more you learn about Selene across the game’s gripping campaign, the easier it is to relate to or, at least, agree with her observation that “I deserve to be here.” That line is also more than a little apt, as it perfectly sums up just how simultaneously rewarding and punishing it is to live in the world of Returnal. Each time you make a perfect jump and air-dash to avoid a cluster of bullets, you earn your way forward, and each time you awkwardly fall off a cliff or gawk as an explosive squid flies at you, you earn the right to try it all over again. The terse thrill of all that fragility makes this a timeless adventure well worth returning to.
The shotgun blast of gameplay types and tonal shifts isn’t quite as varied or seamlessly integrated as it is in Nier Automata, but it’s still impressive just how far ahead of the curve the original game actually was.
Judgment isn't quite so ready to put away childish things.
At its best, Outriders is a looter shooter that's surprisingly generous with its loot.
Poison Control rarely goes beyond the cheap laughs to be had from its story.
It Takes Two uses a smorgasbord of gameplay techniques to set us adrift in the field of couples therapy.
Mundaun's greatest achievement is the Swiss Alps setting that's brought to life with tangible vigor.
Loop Hero functions as a statement of persistence in the face of the seemingly insurmountable.
Strikers is still a well-earned vacation for our heroes, an emphatic, energetic punctuation mark to a much larger experience.
Bowser's Fury finds Nintendo again pushing the envelope of Super Mario Bros. in exciting directions.
At its best, the game sustains an effectively ominous atmosphere as it channels recognizable childhood fears.
The gameplay throughout isn't freighted with moral urgency, which is disappointing given the game's eco-terrorist themes.
The Medium is at its best whenever the player gets to lives up to the game's title.
Hitman 3, for better and worse, splits the difference between player freedom and focused storytelling.