IGN's Reviews
Randal's Monday has a clever premise that deserves better treatment than it gets in this crude, baffling adventure.
A a grim, unsatisfying and morally dubious exercise in frustration and empathy suppression.
Decay of Logos is an adventure that tests your patience more than your gaming skills.
It looks great and the story is decent, but One Piece World Seeker's 20 hours of one-note combat and repetitive, misleading quests aren't worth suffering through.
At the Gates tries some ambitious new ideas that, in time, may leave a mark on the 4X genre. But today, it's far too broken to recommend.
Besides the fact that there's absolutely no evolution involved in it, Jurassic World: Evolution is a bad game because it's just a bore of a park sim. Sure, the dinosaurs look nice enough, but the process of unlocking new species is beyond tedious and actually running the business is shallow and quickly gets stale. It beats getting mauled by raptors, but after careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse this park.
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.
Though it has a few unsettling, adrenaline-pumping moments, Here They Lie fails to deliver believable psychological horror. It definitely tries — it’s filled with the requisite creepy, gargling monster sounds and reality-bending that can contribute tension to scares — but it doesn’t blend its horror elements well enough to be consistently terrifying. Relying so heavily on overwrought surrealism and a few haunted house-style jumps to create tension rather than fostering any true discomfort (besides nausea) leaves it feeling flat.
Tharsis can never stop reminding you that you don't have control over its interstellar disaster, just the illusion of it. Every time I watched my ship fall apart, and every time I watched new events propagate across the ship that were completely impossible to stop, I felt like, win-or-lose, Tharsis was having all the fun.
Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is a bare-bones, lackluster addition to Mario's sporting adventures.
Planetary Annihilation's
Codemasters' F1 2015 racer falls far behind the pack this year due to a lack of expected features.
The best-case scenario for ELEX is that it'll be worth picking up on sale a year or two from now after it's been heavily patched to fix its rampant bugs and infuriating balance problems. It has enough good ideas that one day it might be talked about as one of those hidden RPG gems that people play and wonder why it wasn't successful at launch. But the frothy mix of joy and frustration that ELEX presents today skews too heavily toward the latter. I wish it well, but I don't think I'll be calling it up for a second date.
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.
All the little reasons The Technomancer is worth experiencing, all the little moments where the vision of a better game shines through, aren’t quite enough to justify choking down its shortcomings.
Even with a super-short running time, the repetitiveness that pervades Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan makes this fight a slog. I've heard all the jokes the team has to tell and have marveled enough at the rogues gallery of bosses – both of which I could’ve done by watching this game on YouTube rather than playing it – so I'm not planning another trip to Manhattan.
RBI Baseball 15 slightly improves on RBI 14's biggest faults, but game-breaking bugs make us want to charge the mound.
A good Transformers game has good transforming and good robot-blasting. Rise of the Dark Spark has neither.
The First Descendant has all the building blocks of a fantastic looter shooter, but they’re buried under a pile of monotonous quests, a terrible story, and an infuriating free-to-play model that has influenced its game design in the worst possible way.
Homeworld: Vast Reaches gets the atmosphere of this classic strategy series right, but oversimplifies and speeds up its space battles to the point where it loses the feeling of being in command of a fleet – all without doing anything that couldn't have been accomplished outside of VR.