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The art of a game, however distinctive, matters little if it isn't accompanied by functionality.
There are few greater thrills than discovering a new, powerful combo in Slay the Spire.
The game comes across like a love letter to everything that Super Mario Odyssey left behind.
At its best, the game leaves you by your lonesome to get to know the “deep blue” sky as intimately as possible.
The effectiveness of the game's humor doesn't always tie back to the concept of Bowser as a frustrated, impotent vessel.
Above all else, said developer needs a near-bottomless imagination to make it so that pitting the greatest video game characters ever created against each other is as exhilarating to behold the umpteenth time out as it was way back in 1999
It doesn’t matter how cool an individual set piece looks if all the smaller scenes leading up to it are marred by unresponsive vehicles, dumb AI, and shoddy physics.
Mutant Year Zero feels most of all like a promising start for something potentially greater. Indeed, for as much as the game offers an intense, occasionally brilliant spin on turn-based strategy, it’s tough not to imagine how a sequel could improve the writing and the exploration to realize what is, at this point anyway, mostly just a lot of potential.
There’s little to love about Darksiders III, even for longtime fans.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what moves you unlock throughout these games or how many new characters you encounter because few truly innovative twists are offered to the series’s gameplay loop.
Battlefield V‘s failure to communicate, whether the emotional disconnect of each War Story or the difficulty of organizing your fellow soldiers in a Grand Operation, is the crippling problem that holds the game back from greatness.
Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.
Mizuguchi has made strong, confident choices with his approach to Tetris, the Zone ability most prominent among them, but he’s done so uncompromisingly. And that’s an effect that’s as likely to leave tetrominos burned into your retinas as it is to simply leave you feeling cold and alone.
Even if the lavish detail, excellent writing, and world of possibility within vivid levels mostly just refine what came before, that’s because IO Interactive have all but perfected what they set out to achieve in Hitman: Codename 47 nearly 20 years ago
Apart from the fact that combat is resolved by placing cards into rows as opposed to moving units across a map, there's little difference between Thronebreaker and similarly hand-drawn, resource-gathering, unit-upgrading games like Heroes of Might and Magic and The Banner Saga. If anything, Thronebreaker offers a deeper strategic experience, given the distinct feel of these custom-crafted battles, with their special victory conditions and unique cards.
You know your beloved action franchise is in a state of mediocrity when it struggles to kinetically and strategically compete with games that it helped give birth to.
Call of Cthulhu's survival-horror elements don't come close to capturing the existential unease of Lovecraft's original story. Rather, they simply feel exploitative.
Red Dead Redemption 2 never quite squares its themes with the need to give players an open-world cowboy fantasy. And outside cutscenes and conversation, most of those themes don't seem to exist.
My Hero One's Justice fails to live up to the series's motto: You may get a "Plus Ultra" finisher, but your skill level will never "Go Beyond" the game's rudimentary requirements.
In the end, there’s a purity to how SoulCalibur VI is so focused above all else on its spectacular swordplay and world building.