IGN's Reviews
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia disappoints on multiple levels, from a flat main character to unintuitive insta-fail stealth levels to clumsy combat and platforming. The few times it nails it with diorama-like puzzles and Helix powers only serve to make the rest of this side-scrolling spinoff look even worse by comparison.
Unravel took me on a surprisingly thoughtful and reflective journey, which encouraged me to appreciate the small and the insignificant with every step. As a puzzler it has charm due to Yarny's engaging skills, but as a platforming experience it's less remarkable. But to judge it solely on these mechanical aspects would be to overlook its greater achievement: the way it provokes subtle and complex emotions through the use of nature and nostalgia. It all makes for a sincere, warm-hearted, and extremely likeable adventure.
Firewatch is amazing for many reasons, but above all because it's an adult game that deals with serious issues, with realistic adult dialogue to match. And it deals with those issues just like actual adults would: sometimes with humor, sometimes with anger, and sometimes with sadness. It is among the very best of the first-person narrative genre, and it reminds us what video game storytelling is capable of in the right hands. It's a game I can see coming back to every year or two just to revisit its beautiful sights and memorable characters – just like a good book.
With a focus on variety and replayability, this sequel has an answer to most of my complaints about 2012's excellent XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and aside from some mostly cosmetic bugs, it comes together brilliantly. Thanks to a new spin on the same great tactical combat, plus unpredictable maps and randomized objectives and loot, XCOM 2 is an amazing game I'll easily put hundreds of hours into.
Bombshell is a fast-paced, energetic, deliberately absurd action shooter that's mostly competent at everything it tries to do. Stunningly crafted, downright epic environments and tight, responsive gamepad controls steal the show. But it certainly doesn't pull off anything innovative or revolutionary, and the whole experience is dragged down by spiky difficulty, half-baked RPG mechanics, and poorly constructed (though varied) boss battles.
If you like the LEGO game formula, you have a preference for playing solo and you're a huge fan of MCU, there's still a lot of value for you in LEGO Marvel's Avengers, even despite a disjointed plot and annoying audio mixes. If you haven't played any of the others and you're thinking about picking up this one, I'd advise starting with just about any other game instead. This the weakest LEGO game I've played thus far, and had me missing games like LEGO Marvel Super Heroes and LEGO Dimensions.
Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch is a brief, but mostly entertaining chapter in Rise of the Tomb Raider's lore. While I would have happily swapped the return to the Soviet Installation for a new challenge tomb, its supernatural elements added a noticeably different feel and a welcome sense of tension to Lara's new adventure.
Darkest Dungeon is a grim and merciless tactical strategy game whose great tension comes from its many layers of complexity, unpredictable randomization, and willingness to put our fragile characters in mortal danger if we dare to venture into its depths in search of treasure and glory. Brilliant narration and stiff yet surprisingly expressive animation make it easy to be drawn into its vague but tantalizing world, though the end feels artificially out of reach.
The Witness has a power and pull that carried me throughout the more than 40 hours it took to complete it for the first time, and that, even now, beckons me back to confront the mysteries I left unsolved. Its graceful combination of tangible goals, obscurity, and freedom creates ample opportunity for small victories and grand revelations alike. For the most part, its themes weave themselves beautifully throughout the gorgeous world and wide variety of puzzles, but even when it breaks subtlety in favor of a more heavy-handed approach to exposition, it never detracts from the truly fulfilling moments The Witness offers in terms of solving its physical puzzles and unlocking its deepest mysteries.
For a few hours at least, Final Fantasy Explorers is a charming little adventure that's fun to play alone with your monster buddies or with real-life friends. But repetitive quests, the lack of a serious challenge until late in the story and a poor travel system eventually broke the charm spell that Explorers had cast upon me.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a deep, exciting, varied RTS with all the right tools.
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.
Gemini: Heroes Reborn is short, drab, and derivative, but it nevertheless generally remains fun throughout its five-hour running time. In its best moments, it mixes familiar elements from beloved platformers and puzzlers to create an experience that, at least for brief moments, captures the essence of the show.
Resident Evil Zero HD Remaster has the look and feel of a modern game, but its real problems started in 2002 and were never solved. It's a forgettable entry in an outstanding series that just doesn't measure up because of its story problems, overwhelming inventory management, and horrible predictability. Reanimating this limp corpse of a survival game in high definition only brings back the disappointment I felt when I played it the first time.
I greatly enjoyed the two or so hours it took me to play through Pony Island. This is a game that delights in toying with your expectations and in breaking the fourth wall, in revealing its sinister yet playful world, and in building up a compelling antagonist and telling an ambiguous story. Pony Island is about as punk rock as they come.
Although not every part of That Dragon, Cancer works, it's a crushingly intimate game that left me thankful for the people who are still in my life, and reflective on those who are not. I'm so grateful to the Greens for sharing their experience.
Oxenfree is elegantly simple, using branching dialogue and a little something supernatural to develop three-dimensional characters and drive the coming-of-age story. There's not much else to it in terms of gameplay, which is absolutely a good thing, but pacing issues in its story can make it feel sluggish between conversations. Mostly, though, it's like walking through a stunning painting, listening to the idle chatter and revealing talks of (sometimes unnatural-sounding) teenagers.
Part Persona, part The Sims, and part Fight Club, Punch Club is deceptively deep, with a rewarding life simulation and RPG systems. It's bursting with personality, (though regrettably very little of that is its own) reliant on bygone eras and pop-culture references to establish its lighthearted and fun tone. Punch Club is tedious at times, thanks to an unfortunate level-down systems that artificially extend the road to the championship with grinding repetition, but its upgrades, stat growth, and more compensate with satisfying depth.
Telltale's love and deep understanding of Minecraft combined with a thrilling satisfying climax keep Minecraft: Story Mode Episode 4 - A Block and a Hard Place from reaching a new series low at the hands of poor dialogue and a meandering plot. It's still a little too slow-paced and predictable to recommend wholeheartedly.
While the gameplay foundation here is still competent, Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India just finds too many petty, annoying ways to keep me from truly enjoying it.