IGN's Reviews
Hitman Episode 4: Bangkok gets proceedings back on track after the somewhat bland Marrakesh malarkey of Episode 3. The Himmapan resort may lack the size and scope of Sapienza, and it isn’t quite the classic Hitman hotel level I was after, but it still boasts plenty of problem solving and murderous mayhem within its walls.
Madden has finally found its comfort zone between the tackles, and offense and defense have reached a great balance. The community’s gameplay wishes were granted with a new focus on Franchise mode, led by the Play the Moments feature. Outside of its mood-killing commentators, Madden 17 is just about everything we’ve been waiting for since EA Sports took full control of the NFL license. Football is back, and it’s only a yard or two short of becoming an all-time great.
No Man’s Sky has sci-fi spectacle of strange new worlds on its side, but not much else. Its gameplay is underdeveloped and repetitive, and in my dozens of hours played it’s introduced very few new ideas to mix up its crafting, upgrades, combat, or universe. The promise of limitless exploration ended up working against it when I lost faith that it had any more meaningful things to show me no matter how far I traveled. This ambitious game reached for the stars, but its reach exceeded its grasp by light years.
Nova Covert Ops Mission Pack 2 is definitely more enjoyable when it comes to the meat - the actual missions - of the experience. However, the storytelling remains sub-par. Many characters Blizzard has spent years making us care about have up and disappeared, while others are given barely anything to do or only a tenuous reason to even be around. In its final moments, it did hook me with a plot development that would make me go out of my way to play Mission Pack 3, just to see where it’s headed. But it simultaneously fails to fill me with hope that there will be anything but another bucket of lukewarm storytelling waiting for me if I take the bait.
Telltale’s Batman is an unpredictable, multi-faceted adventure told through Batman the brawler, Batman the detective, and Bruce Wayne the politician. The three almost entirely separate characters and play-styles keep the familiar Telltale formula feeling fresh and inviting. While some of the dialogue does feel overly expositional, it’s hopefully only there to provide concrete padding for future episodes, and the gorgeous, high-action combat sequences and creative detective work provide the right amount of contrast.
Abzu takes the graceful feel of movement and subtle push toward discovery that I've enjoyed in similar exploration games like Journey and Flower and builds a refreshing-yet-simple underwater adventure around it. The colorful settings, beautiful soundtrack, and basic controls made it a great experience that constantly piqued my interest, even if it never challenged me to master it other than deciphering its cryptic environmental clues. Instead, Abzu relishes in giving you freedom to simply enjoy exploring the fascinating deep blue sea.
Human: Fall Flat’s slapstick controls and ridiculous animation do a great job of making repeated, frustrating, and unfair failure at physics puzzles seem fun for a while. And when that fun runs out, you can extend it by bringing in a friend and drawing silly things on your goofball character. If you don’t play it, watch someone play it.
Starbound excels as a crafting and exploration game, as a 2D platformer with varied and engaging combat, and as a Zelda-esque story RPG with a detailed world and memorable alien cultures to interact with. The sheer volume of different kinds of locations to discover, items to craft and build great structures with, and flashy ways to vanquish aliens prevent any part of the experience from getting boring quickly.
Quadrilateral Cowboy’s puzzles are mostly a joy to play. Its command line hacking is surprisingly accessible and pleasingly tactile, and when combined with its many interesting gadgets it allows for plenty of creative problem-solving and freedom in tackling all manner of whimsical cybercrime. While not all of its levels shine as brightly as the rest, I’m already feeling beckoned back by its replayability and charm, eager to experiment more with the futuristic, hacker-themed playground it so stylishly constructs.
Vault-Tec Workshop’s wealth of new structures and tools make it essential for hardcore crafters and Overseer wannabes alike. Its handful of hilarious characters and quests don’t stand up on their own, but they’re not the reason you’d attend the show in the first place. This is settlement builder’s dream, through and through.
An example of what the Kinect can do when used creatively, Fru is a remarkably fun and hilarious puzzle-platformer that demands as much from your body as it does your mind. It’s bittersweet that it arrived so late to the party.
Route Zero: Act 4 constantly alternates between serene and unsettling, with the occasional dash of humor thrown in. The comic visual and dialogue nods help immensely, keeping the dense, introspective writing from simply becoming too much navel gazing. And Route Zero certainly seems to understand this about itself, poking cleverly at its own art-film aesthetic from within while still unapologetically engaging topics like spiritual exhaustion, death, orphanage, and existential angst. The balance works.
These redressings of Sapienza and Marrakesh are familiar levels, sure, but they’re done differently enough to feel new (if slightly easier). The first mission far outshines the second with its dark humor and appropriate execution options, but both warrant many, many more playthroughs.
A lack of balance robs the combat of much of its fun and renders many of the more interesting gameplay systems moot, but it didn’t dampen the emotional impact of I Am Setsuna’s heartfelt message for me. Few story-driven RPGs are so thematically focused or so gleefully disinterested with being “entertaining” or “fun.” To say it attempts to stand on the backs of giants is disingenuous really. I Am Setsuna isn’t a “Chrono Trigger-like;” it’s just a game that might easily have existed in the same time, if a creator with different storytelling sensibilities had been around. Its strength comes not from the ways in which it emulates the conventions of the classics, but the ways in which it defies them.
This is the sort of game that great uncles and grandmas are going to buy for the young people in their lives because they heard Ghostbusters was popular, or that littler kids will point out in the mall just after seeing the movie. But no informed gamer should fall for the siren song of that catchy main theme. It’s not actively painful to play if you happen to be at your eight-year-old cousin’s house and need a co-op game for six to eight hours that’s not going to require much skill. But you could do so much better. I can’t imagine ever wanting to drop a full 50 dollars on it, especially considering there are plenty of games out there that are equally fun to play for kids and adults.
Necropolis pulls many ideas together to ultimately deliver a satisfactory, short dungeon-diving experience that’s best enjoyed with friends. Some of its ideas conflict with each other (such as permadeath and teammate revival), its procedural generation doesn’t offer much in the way of replayability, and its intentional vagueness can be frustrating, but it’s good for at least a few monster-smashing runs before it gets old thanks to enjoyable combat mechanics, cheeky humor, and the promise of mystery.
There's a hint of a good game in 7 Days to Die's mix of zombie attack preparedness and crafting and cooperative stands against zombies, and it has valuable ideas to contribute to the genre. In fact, you can almost hear them screaming to escape from beneath terrible graphics, barely useable menu controls, and shoddy console optimization. This is an apocalypse amongst apocalypses.
There’s definitely fun to be had in Furi’s fast and frenzied battles against a colorful cast of quirky boss characters. While it finds its strongest moments in its rewardingly rhythmic, precision-based one-on-one duels, an unwelcome level of tedium and occasionally cheap sequences — made even more frustrating by janky mechanics — keep the action from being as consistently strong as it is visually stylish.
Carmageddon: Max Damage feels like it was designed in and for the year 1999, which on paper is a noble goal when trying to revive a franchise. Unfortunately, in practice it just doesn’t work, instead reminding us that time moves on. Max Damage is a collection of ideas that looked good on paper and sounded good in its Kickstarter pitch, but in practice it would only have been an acceptable sequel if it’d come out in 1999.
Monster Hunter Generations hits the core tenets of what makes this series great. Great gear drives the lust for the hunt even on the small scale, but the big, spectacular fights ultimately matter the most. Generations’ tweaked combat adds just the right tools to make slaying epic boss monsters a fun activity that’s just as fun online or off. Playable companions help shake up the gathering game without taking away resources, and its fun to play as a wackier character. Generations only falters during slower moments spent on fetch quests and in wrangling through menus before the hunt.