IGN's Reviews
Valkyria Revolution tells a decent tale of war, but the strength of that story is dulled by overlong, boring, and poorly animated cutscenes. It sacrifices the unique historical setting and art style of the Valkyria Chronicles series proper in favor of generic JRPG elements that fail to leave a strong impression, and its hack-and-slash combat offers little in the way of strategy and ruins its own flow with an poorly matched magic system.
The Crimson Court pumps Darkest Dungeon full of disturbing blood-sucking enemies, a challenging new class, and a marathon-style new area that forces you to think differently about how to sustain your team over a long run. While there's definitely enough new content in The Crimson Court to come back to Darkest Dungeon for, it's more the kind of DLC that mixes things up for a new replay than an essential upgrade you should install from the beginning.
Despite the frustrations its upgrade system often caused me, I had a good time navigating Nex Machina's array of twin-stick shooter challenges. The appealing art, energetic soundtrack, and pixel-perfect gamepad controls made me own every failure and look forward to whatever might come next. Arena mode seems to be where most of the lifespan on this one will come from, and I look forward to seeing people who are better than me at it pull off some crazy runs to climb the rankings. Nex Machina is not for the faint of heart, but a recipe to delight those looking for an attractive, arcadey challenge to overcome.
Arms' clever take on boxing provides a simple premise with a startling amount of depth for those who would seek to master the stretching appendages. Its rapidly evolving lobby system had me sticking around for “just one more match.” There may not be a lot worth unlocking right now, but planned free updates may just give Arms some additional legs.
The Nintendo Switch version provides an authentic Minecraft experience that is hugely benefitted by the ability to play it anywhere with physical controls. The one drawback is the lack of voice chat, which makes online multiplayer less fun than on other platforms, so it's best enjoyed in the same room as your friends.
Minecraft is now available on Switch, and it combines the portability of Pocket with the comfort of a console.
Accessible yet tough and grimy yet gorgeous, Dirt 4 sets a new standard in rally racing – and its well-considered career mode and endless stages inject it with tremendous stamina. Absolutely stonking brilliant.
Morrowind feels like it begs you to come home, and what a welcome it has in store when you get there.
Under Pressure transitions us off of the high-tempo radio hit that was the season opener and into a more relaxed slow jam punctuated with some meaty action riffs. The slower drip of meaningful events meant I didn't come off of it with the same level of feelgood euphoria I had after finishing Tangled Up in Blue, but Telltale is still doing an excellent job adapting this eccentric hero team to its tried-and-true format - particularly when the focus is on developing the characters and the relationships between them.
Tekken 7 truly is a hallmark, a fighting game crafted with obvious affection. It strikes a fine balance between accessibility to series newcomers and retaining much of its technical traditions. The soundtrack is an electronic treat, and while the story can at times seem a bit cliche, the fact that it never takes itself too seriously lets it bring in a tremendous amount of flexible character customization. Its dedication to the details helps push it into the position of my favorite fighting game of 2017 so far.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew feels like a promising first draft of a fantastic Trek simulator, but it only goes boldly for a few hours. After the novelty of finally sitting on a beautiful Federation starship bridge wears off and you've exhausted the handful of mission types, all that's left is the goofy physical comedy of messing around with your friends or strangers in VR. That's nothing to scoff at, but with such a basic combat system and so much time spent twiddling virtual thumbs in two of the four chairs, Bridge Crew's needs a refit before it'll be ready for anything close to a five-year mission.
When you're playing as Jason, this is unquestionably the best Friday the 13th game ever made. I really appreciate the genuine love for the franchise on display here. Hunting down players and executing them in spectacularly gory scenes is an homage that warms my lifelong Friday-fan heart. But the fun of its asymmetrical multiplayer-only action is heavily skewed toward Jason, which means you'll mostly be stuck playing as teens rummaging through drawers. Despite that lopsided gameplay and some pretty heinous glitches, there is some dumb fun to be had here – which is all the movies ever really offered, anyway.
Danger Zone is a simple and barebones game that manages to recapture some of the car-smashing action of the classic Burnout series, but not enough of the joy. Though Burnout's Crash mode was always the star of the show in those games, it turns out that Road Rage, Burning Lap, etc. defined Burnout just as much as Crash did, as well as its personality. Their absence here is felt deeply, though to Danger Zone's credit it's priced accordingly at just $13. As such, it's worth a look for Burnout veterans, as long as you calibrate your expectations appropriately.
When The Long Journey Home focuses on interactions with a diverse and entertaining cast of aliens across its procedurally generated star systems, it's possible to find a degree of wonder and personality that many roguelike seldom achieve. Unfortunately, such interactions take a back seat to a barrage of frustrating minigames with rewards that rarely match the risks. The experience as a whole suffers for it.
“From the Gallows” makes good on the gamble of season 3 in shifting focus to a new main character and making me care about Javi as much as I cared for Lee and Clem back in season 1. The fifth episode encompasses both what worked and didn't about A New Frontier — namely, the ideas of allegiance, love, and family for the former and erratic pacing and an inability to make the overarching story of much interest in the latter. But the season finale spends much more time on those successful aspects, capping A New Frontier in satisfying fashion while setting up a potentially exciting continuation down the road.
Thanks to the imprecision of its shooting controls and the cheap behaviour of its AI, I could never really develop any confidence in Tokyo 42's frustrating combat. Which is a shame because, glitches aside, I really loved exploring the wonderfully crafted world and the simple yet still challenging nature of its stealth-based assassinations. This tiny hitman game dresses smart, packs the right kind of ammunition and certainly aims its sights high, it just doesn't quite nail the execution.
Rime's superficial beauty and interesting mysteries provided enough enjoyment to make me willing to put up with its shallow and familiar elements under the hood. While nothing about Rime is necessarily bad, you can find more interesting versions of nearly every single element of it in other, better games.
A cool license and a clever time-twisting idea both go to waste in Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days. With more mission variety, character development, and technical polish I could see this being an unexpectedly fun top-down shooter. As it is, its lack of ambition in scenario design makes too little use of its unique mechanic which, in itself, doesn't always work the way you'd expect it to. Bloody Days also fails to really capture the feel of the movie on which it's based, presenting iconic characters as cheap knock offs that spout their signature lines at odd moments like pull-string toys. While the shooting can be fun and challenging, this one's definitely not worth losing an ear over.
Steel Division: Normandy '44 succeeds both at being an entertaining real-time tactics game and a compelling simulation of historical combat, which is a remarkable combination. Not to get ahead of things, but playing this excellent World War II game makes it hard not to get excited about the potential of Steel Division: Stalingrad '42 or Rome '43. Future games or expansions might even smooth out Normandy ‘44's small drawbacks, specifically its occasionally overwhelming amount of detail and lack of context to its huge number of options, but its successes wildly outweigh its failures.
Perception is as much a disappointment for the clever and inherently frightening idea it wastes as it is for the mistakes it makes. At its heart, there's the promise of playing something genuinely new, from a perspective that could help teach and thrill simultaneously. It's unfortunate that, like its echolocation mechanic, the more I saw of Perception, the more there was to worry about.