Ars Technica's Reviews
Every other racing game studio now realizes it has to double the number of cars on track in its games
Buy it if you have four controllers for one of the best couch games of the year; wait for working online modes if you don't.
Try it if you have found modern platforming games to be too "soft."
Buy it if you're an Xbox One owner who could use a deep dive into classic, super-hard games.
Spend this game's five-hour runtime catching up on a better story game you might have missed.
Until Dawn is entertaining in all the ways it needs to be, even if it isn't perfect in all the ways I'd like it to be. Try it, or wait for a discount.
There's a heartfelt story here, but it's one you can watch just as easily as you can play. Try it.
If you ever had a good time with a previous Rock Band game, buy it and remember what you've been missing.
Buy, buy, buy. A must-have video game.
This isn't Nintendo at the height of its powers, but it's hard not to be smitten with Yoshi's Woolly World's wonderful visuals and throughly entertaining platforming.
Maiden of Black Water polishes an old formula almost perfectly, though the game itself isn't so polished in spots. Buy it anyway.
With a cleverly reinvented guitar and whole music video channel of songs backing it up, Guitar Hero Live is the rhythm game for the people who got bored of rhythm games.
Life is Strange makes some odd design choices, but its ability to make your choices feel important to its strong leading protagonists more than makes up for it. Buy it.
Syndicate is a step in the right direction for the series. It's not as innovative as it could be, but it's an entertaining adventure worthy of the name Assassin's Creed. Buy it.
With a huge world to explore, heaps of secrets and puzzles to uncover, and some great action, this is the best Tomb Raider since the original Tomb Raider.
Don't cancel your pre-order, but don't rush to buy Fallout 4 if you didn't place an order already either.
This is the most complete version of Football Manager yet, offering up something new for both seasoned veterans and newcomers alike.
e told, we took a few extra days to finish this review in hopes that we'd beat the "normal" difficulty's 10 rounds even once. As of press time, we've yet to get past round 8. That is a huge asterisk for this game's appeal; the overwhelming role of luck rarely presents a clean feeling that you've accumulated real skill or progress. As a result, you'll quite honestly need at least two dozen sessions before you come to grips with a range of successful strategies, and therefore, the feeling that this isn't just a fancy-looking exercise in just rolling dice and dying. (We're hopeful that the upcoming free "missions" mode will offer these exact kinds of progress morsels, but Choice Provisions hasn't announced when we should expect those to launch.)
more, everything about the game—its puzzle structure, its philosophical leanings, its mysteries—eventually comes together in pretty arresting fashion. Part of this is thanks to the game's multiple layers of puzzle-solving gameplay. We've been asked not to say more about that part. Players may need as little as an hour or as long as two weeks to figure out one of The Witness's coolest parts, but however and whenever players get to that point, it's a pretty clever one. (Some of the game's most incredible aesthetic trickery comes as a result of this part of the game, by the way. Kudos to Thekla for pulling it off.)
ll shows a worrying lack of polish in spots. The UI is often too small to hold all of its own information. Sometimes my health bar just outright lied to me. It's often unclear which gaping holes in the ground are part of a texture and which will instantly kill you if you fall through them.