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If there's a single downside, it's that with a cast of over 16 characters, only five of whom can physically be in your party, there's very little reason to play around with your party's composition.
There's no avatar here; it's your hands causing the violence now, your eyes staring directly at victims, and you facing down being shot dead, run over, blown up, or falling from insane heights.
It's more interested in showing off just how beautiful (and deep) the multilayered design runs than it is in really elaborating on it
The process of earning respect is a key aspect of the game; establishing your team with only the most loyal companions is a tricky task among many other demanding objectives.
The glue holding it all together as more than just a stale repurpose of the previous games is the story.
The consequences of brash actions are glossed over, and the last three sequences of the game feel redundant, with back-to-back assassinations occurring first at public guillotines and then private dinner parties.
In a year that the Wii U gifted us with Mario Kart 8 and Bayonetta 2, games that displayed what the system could do graphically, Rise of Lyric's graphics are simply unacceptable in 2014.
The sorry "story" segments largely amount to random combinations of the four main characters trading bad jokes, such as running the difference between "who" and "whom" into the ground.
Some of the best features are frustratingly kept out of the player's hands for hours, by which time many will have lost interest.
In short, Advanced Warfare advances every single aspect of the already impressive Call of Duty series.
No matter what the type of scenery, the objectives are widely the same: lay waste to enemy officers, locate the boss character, defeat them in earnest.
Lords of the Fallen is trying to Goldilocks it, neither being too hard nor too soft, and that lands it in the rather generic and unadmirable position that last year's Bound by Flame found itself.
There's little of that symbiosis here, as The Evil Within's more serious tone and greater reliance on non-interactive cutscenes leaves the player disengaged from the rollercoaster of action.
The campy hypersexuality feels joyful, rather than oppressive, because the character's overdetermined gender presentation is an expression of her power rather than a contrast to it.
That it only receives the slightest of graphical upticks is less a sign of laziness in porting the game to next gen so much as a testament to how well-crafted Sleeping Dogs was to begin with.
The essential gameplay can be reduced to a series of shoot-'em-up fetch quests through hazardous landscapes, but even veterans will have to adapt their FPS techniques to make it through.
GTA may be more graphic, but I'd rather have kids play in that fully realized world, with the wealth of side-missions, beautiful views, and more authentic vehicles, than in this dumbed-down cartoon catastrophe.
There are too many dings on the chassis, from the constant inability to activate promised features and occasionally glitchy effects of current and standard modes.
Missions have unclear objectives and way too much backtracking, made more frustrating by doors that go from sealed to open for no good reason and checkpoints triggered by obscure means.
Over the last decade, Frogwares has been steadily eliminating the impossibly bad elements from their games, and what remains is the closest anyone's ever come to an authentic Baker Street experience.