USgamer's Reviews
Currently, it's not my favorite tactical strategy experience, but I admit I enjoy seeing my BattleMechs tromping across the landscape to stomp out a fallen foe.
This is how you do a reboot. After Kratos lost his way, Sony Santa Monica has set the God of War on a new path. A more measure, nuanced character, a great supporting cast, an excellent combat system, and some of the best graphics in the PlayStation 4 game to-date add up to a winner.
MLB The Show 18 remains one of the most beautiful and polished sports sims around.
Far Cry 5 is a game that struggles in trying to serve two purposes. On one hand, there's a dark, horrific tale of a cult taking over a small town. On the other, it's a playground of destruction, letting players fly and drive around, blowing up things with a bear and a dog. Both sides are good, but they don't really meet in the middle. If you can survive the tonal whiplash, you'll find a great game here and Far Cry Arcade only makes it better.
After a year or two, I think Sea of Thieves might be a complete winner. Right now, it's uneven.
Even with a cliched story at its center, A Way Out's persistent co-op elevates it to new heights for the newly married co-op adventure genre. The split-screen ebbs and flows according to what's happening with each character, enriching what would usually be a more-typical, stagnant co-op experience. While the middle of the game drags in some sections and finds itself littered with lousy, inessential combat, its first few hours and superb finale sequence are strong enough to make the whole journey worth seeing through.
Ni No Kuni 2 is a sweet-tempered and attractive RPG with a strong castle-building mechanic, but it's dragged down by a jarringly ugly overworld, mandatory fetch quests, and a lot of padding. It's a pleasant throwback for fans of the genre, but it ultimately fails to meet the high bar set by other big-budget JRPGs.
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life might be the end of Kazuma Kiryu's story, but it represents a new step in the series.
Bayek heads to Thebes to retrive another lost artifact, only to find himself taking a trip into the afterlife. The base map for this expansion seems about as big as the Hidden Ones expansion, but the additional afterlife regions add scale and scope to this DLC. The regions also untether Ubisoft's artists from reality, allowing them to come up with some grand vistas as a result. Curse of the Pharaohs is what Origins needed and stands as one of the better expansions for an Assassin's Creed game.
Kirby Star Allies' friend-making gimmick adds layers of playful fun to this solid Kirby adventure. It's a perfectly pleasant way to pass a weekend by yourself, or with friends of your own—though the game is best enjoyed via the Switch's handheld mode. You might not be impressed by Star Allies if you're just not into Kirby at all, but everyone else should say "Hiiiiiii~!"
Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a game that stands alone, as one of the few follow-ups to the cooperative formula that Left 4 Dead established. It also perfectly captures the feel of Warhammer fantasy: the missions are hard, with players wading into blood and fire to dispatch the hordes of Skaven and Chaos. Being a coop game, your fun will live and die on matchmaking and group composition. Unfortunately, that matchmaking is sometimes spotty and players lack tools to really manage the group. Despite that, Vermintide 2 is still the best time you can have hacking apart evil together.
On the surface, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine seems like it has a recipe for an incredible game. It stretches the lengths of what story-driven, Twine-like games can accomplish in scope—thematically, narratively, and in terms of the dozens of writers from different cultures and backgrounds behind them. And yet, the game's onerous pace and the way it relegates the stories you collect to flash cards ends up doing a disservice to the game's strengths.
With some tweaks and changes, Survive could be great, but as it stands, it's just good.
Rise and Fall adds a lot of well-meaning nuance to the base game of Civilization VI. The new Loyalty system allows for more peaceful play, offering border expansion and bringing back city flipping as a strategy. The combination of Golden/Dark Ages and Emergency Situations mean it's now harder for one player to surge ahead in a game. There are still issues though, including illogical AI decisions and espionage needing another pass. It's a great addition to the base game, but Civilization VI isn't quite done yet.
Assassin's Creed Origins' first downloadable content, The Hidden Ones, takes players to a brand-new region and continues Bayek's story. If you were expecting something vastly new and different from this DLC, temper your expectations, as The Hidden Ones is just more of the same. More fortresses, more targets to kill, more Stone Circles, more treasure, and more levels. It's good enough for the price, but it lacks something new to make it really great.
Monster Hunter has been in need of a big change for years, and this reboot-of-sorts could have easily gone wrong. Instead, Capcom took a careful look at Monster Hunter's design and cut all the fat while leaving the series trademark dense gameplay completely intact. All the changes, from the broad, sweeping ones to the granular alterations, only serve to improve an already winning formula. The next generation of Monster Hunter has finally begun, and, with Monster Hunter World, it's off to an incredibly good start.
Platformers, especially those with a retro flair, come along often. But so rarely do they work as well as Celeste does. Celeste is an exercise of excellence in the well-trodden platforming genre. Whether it's the score that kicks up just as busily just as heroine Madeleine does, the mechanics that build and build with each new room you uncover, or its lushly pixelated landscapes: there's a lot to love in Celeste. It's the sort of game that makes you feel strong while playing it; if you can dash-jump through impossible holes between narrow icy spikes to climb that goddamn mountain, you can probably do anything.
I'm feeling good about Dragon Ball FighterZ
After two years of additions and tweaks, Capcom has finally gotten Street Fighter V into the state it should've launched in. What was only a tournament-ready fighter is now a robust package. A roster of 29 characters, the long-awaited Arcade Mode, Extra Battle, Challenges, a great Training Mode, and solid online play add up to a release that shouldn't be missed for avid fighting game fans.
PUBG is such a pure and fun experience that it overcomes its many flaws. There are glitches, there are crashes, there is jank. The game will probably never be fully done. But parachuting down onto that island feels new and exciting every time. A number of simple ideas comes together to make a great game and establish a great genre.