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There’s still work to be done, but Cities Skylines 2 is an impressive improvement over the original. Its systems work together seamlessly, and you have more control over how your city develops without it feeling overwhelming or intimidating.
I’m not really upset that I went back to Gargoyles to re-explore some fun childhood memories. This game was special to me as a huge fan of the cartoon series, and I really liked how they adapted the old graphics into a new art style that was so much closer to the animation. I also like that the old graphics and sounds are still here and you can switch back and forth between them as much as you wish. I find it hard to credit Gargoyles Remastered for having a rewind button, because I think it’s simply a necessity to alleviate the frustration of a ridiculously difficult game. It also doesn’t fully alleviate that frustration because of its limitations. Gargoyles Remastered is an interesting and pretty walk down memory lane, but you’d better be ready to have any rose-colored glasses shattered by its unforgiving gameplay if you take that walk.
At its core Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a fun and fantastic escape from reality that will leave players smiling for years to come.
It's been a fun ten years, and The Jackbox Party Pack 10, like so many Jackbox efforts before it, is a worthy inclusion into your family game night rotation.
I went into Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 expecting it to be one of my favorite games this year and still walked away impressed by what the developer was able to pull off. Both story and gameplay have taken large steps forward, and I’m fully convinced that there is no studio that could make Spider-Man games better than Insomniac Games. It’s a massive win for the Insomniac, for PlayStation Studios, and for longtime fans of Spider-Man.
Wizard With a Gun is a strong start for Galvanic Games, and the effort that has gone into the crafting system and elemental mechanics is well-appreciated. You can lose a lot of hours simply shaping ammo and gathering resources. However, the controls are loose, the lore could be better integrated, and the endgame is bare. Despite these issues, though, Wizard With a Gun is a competent shooter that has a lot of potential and is well worth watching as it develops over time.
Honestly, unless you’re a big fan of Hot Wheels themselves, and derive a lot of joy from unlocking the different digitized versions of real-world toys, you can do better. Cruisin’ Blast came out the same year the first Unleashed did, and that game captured the essence of banging toy cars together in over the top racing environments perfectly. In comparison, Turbocharged is more scattershot, trying to be a Jack of All Trades and only hitting the bullseye with the IP’s aesthetic.
If Sonic Superstars is the future of the franchise, then it's bright enough that the blue hedgehog will have to wear shades.
As unfairly challenging as I could find Lords of the Fallen to be, I also appreciated its creativity. The Umbral world and mechanics surrounding it made for an extremely compelling and risky adventure where I often rode the line between safety and death. I feel like the game could have done better at making the threat of Umbral more than escalation of foes up to an unkillable pursuer that could one-shot me, but I can’t deny I was tickled by the possibilities and always curious of what was on the other side. Mix its intertwined-worlds mechanics into good melee, magic, and archery in a beautiful gothic setting and 2023’s Lords of the Fallen feels like something I’ll more than remember for what it did right and how it set itself apart. The duality of this game’s settings is both dastardly and dazzling.
Look at Wild Card Football as a late-round NFL draft pick that dramatically overachieves on the field. People likely didn't expect much from it, but what they have now is a pleasant surprise.
Every year I poll my friends on whether they’ll buy the new NHL game. Last year was tough, and to play together we had to give a couple of people copies of the game. When I polled them this year, it was nearly unanimous. Anyone who had to play NHL 24 for work was getting the game, and the four other people had zero interest. That may not seem noteworthy, but that’s about $400 in lost sales for EA among my friends alone. That is four people who are looking for games that can bring our group together and give us a nightly social experience opting out because the price tag has long outgrown the product. I said as much last year, and this year remains no different.
After six years of waiting for the next iteration of Forza Motorsport, Turn 10 Studios delivers a solid offering, packed with hundreds of cars, upgrades, and tuning options, all bundled in a gorgeous presentation package. Not outstanding, but good support for racing hardware means that the experience on track is exactly what Forza fans have been waiting for.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage is a worthwhile experience for invested fans of the series. It’s going to give you that stealth and stab gameplay that you’ve enjoyed before, even if it doesn’t build upon it outside of the tools. It’s bookended by exceptional first and third acts, but Ubisoft has again failed to create a detailed and meaningful world that you want to explore beyond its waypoints.
Because of its simplicity, Detective Pikachu Returns is an easy recommendation for young kids and their parents. Hardcore fans will have some fun comparing and contrasting the game's story with the 2019 movie. For everyone else, there are better, more challenging adventures out there, even if none of them feature an electric rat with a children's sized Sherlock Holmes hat.
Payday 3 gets most of the important stuff right: the heists offer a nice variety and encourage players to experiment with different systems and mechanics. Customization is deep and will keep players on the hook for dozens and dozens of hours. But it’s hard to overstate the blunder that is the online foundation that this game was built on. It makes Payday 3 needlessly frustrating and was the cause of one of the most severe online game outages I’ve seen in a long time. Payday 2 was a game that grew into a co-op masterpiece in the years following its release, so I’m confident that Payday 3 will only improve as time goes on.
A more coherent story and confident use of setting could've helped Ad Infinitum live up to its full potential. The dilapidated mansion, nightmare trenches, and horrible creatures still give it a unique identity that goes some way toward making up for the narrative shortcomings. However, I hope there's a "next time" for Hekate and Ad Infinitum and a chance for both to play into their strengths.
In an ideal world, the remasters probably would have worked better as proper remakes. Baten Kaitos and Origins’ pre-rendered backgrounds were gorgeous on the Gamecube, and they’re just as lovely now. Some aspects would have benefited from more improvement, though. Character animations, limited dialogue illustrations, awkward battle structures, and wonky localization weren’t great at the time and don’t hold up quite so well. Both games are still worth experiencing, but there are a few more hurdles to enjoying them than there should be.
The Expanse: A Telltale Series is a return to form, though that form is almost out of style. Each of the five episodes takes an average of about two hours to complete if you’re hunting for all of the collectibles, so the amount of content is on the shorter end. But if you’re looking for solid writing and characters that fit well within The Expanse universe, this adventure is another chance to revisit the series and see Camina Drummer be a badass all over again. However, the dated mechanics and the game’s choice to be a prequel impair the effort.
What impressed me the most about Cocoon throughout much of the adventure was the sheer intuitive nature of its puzzle-solving. You might think that with no dialogue or hints, jumping into worlds within worlds and carrying them around would be hard to wrap your head around, but this game does an incredible job in its presentation, making you aware of what you can do and what you want to accomplish. Just as well, it’s a beautiful and ambient game that drew me into its mystery and made me want to unravel more through the sheer joy of cracking each layer and digging into another. The team at Geometric Interactive made something truly compelling, mind-bending, and immersive in Cocoon, and though it can prove difficult to handle all its tools, solving its mysteries is an absolute delight.
Infinity Strash plays with its own legacy a bit, mostly by using models from Dragon Quest proper instead of imitating the manga’s art style. But the rest of the game, while fun in that lizard brain kind of way, doesn’t do a ton to separate itself from its peers. Fans of the series will have a decent time, but there’s not much here for folks on the outside. If you’re curious about Dragon Quest as a whole, we recommend starting elsewhere.