GamesBeat's Reviews
RymdResa best shows what life is like for an astronaut — it's relaxing, and pretty boring. If you're looking to cool off and avoid bombastic affairs, RymdResa is the perfect game to play. Other than that, well, if you're fan of astronomy, I guess you'll have plenty to take away from it. But ultimately, RymdResa is a gorgeous roguelike that has a significant amount of untapped potential that could lead to a much better game to play. For now, you'll have to make do with passively exploring space and not much else.
Galak-Z: The Dimensional is worth the pain, but it involves a great deal of effort.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's greatest accomplishment is making you care for its departed characters. Their personal stories give you an incredible glimpse of what life was like in their little corner of the world. They're not the nicest group of people. They can be selfish, stubborn, and downright stupid. But that's what makes them feel real and memorable. The most tragic part? You can't do a damned thing to save them.
For better or worse, Daybreak didn't design PlanetSide 2 for instant gratification. I've had hours of playtime where enemy forces were so overwhelming that I barely got anything done. But I've also had hours that were full of tense battles filled with explosions, multicolored lasers, and missiles. When you play at night, it looks like a chaotic fireworks show.
Dark Room doesn't give you much room to complain, unless you hate things that make you have feelings. It's the best-paced, most emotional entry yet, and it handles its super-serious subject matter with skill and maturity. This is the chapter we've been waiting to play since the beginning.
Sorcerer King offers a nice strategic balance, and the feeling of carving a swath through a landscape already dominated by your enemy gives the game a fun, challenging feel. Galactic Civilizations may be a more-polished Stardock strategy title, but Sorcerer King offers more enjoyment and certainly a lot more humor.
Despite the bugs and painful moments, I love the story that Telltale and I are weaving together. I'm always a sucker for characters, and I'll forgive even the weakest and dumbest plots if a storyteller delivers believable, likable (or understandably dislikable) people who I want to get to know better.
It's July, but I can't imagine that I'm going to play enough games to knock Rocket League off of my "game of the year" list. It is that much fun. It's a blast, and it's actually just as much fun to watch — which is evident by the number of popular livestreams you can watch of Rocket League on Twitch.
Skullgirls: 2nd Encore is a good buy for anyone looking to get into fighting games, but it's far from a perfect one. After picking up a lot of good knowledge from the tutorials, you may want to move to a less intricate and combo-centric game with a less intimidating online crowd. If you haven't tried Skullgirls yet, this is this best place to start, but if you've already played it, there's not much reason to switch to this version for now.
Magicka 2 is good for some multiplayer laughs, but just how much fun you and your friends derive from it depends heavily on your willingness to repeat the cycle of casting a spell or two, running around like crazy until the cooldown on your revive spell is up, and bringing back one of your dead companions seconds before your enemies reduce you to an unmoving pile of wizard meat.
Splatoon is clever, creative, and fun. The multiplayer is a fun twist on the team-based shooter. However, the single-player campaign is surprisingly the best thing in the game. It offers the kind of quality level design you'd expect from a Mario title, but with a healthy dose of shooter mechanics.
Chaos Theory can't escape the shadow of its superior predecessor, but that's not to say it's a bad experience. Once you power through the dull fetch quests and irritating Chloe Time, it manages to provide some powerful moments and the best ending of any episode so far.
Devil Survivor 2 was already an enormous game, but Record Breaker nearly doubles up on that with a new epilogue. It also adds new voice acting, some script tweaks, and other enhancements to the original game. It's not easy, and it's certainly not short, but Devil Survivor 2: Record Breaker is one of the best strategy role-playing experiences available for the 3DS.
Playing The Witcher 3 with an eye for grand strategy can be both a densely engrossing and mechanically frustrating, overlong adventure. When played one move at a time, however, Wild Hunt is the supreme alchemical distillation of the role-playing experience. It's a bleakly human play at the heart of a dark fantasy.
It's pretty simple: If you enjoyed Wolfenstein: The New Order you'll like Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, too. And the same goes for people who like shooting Nazis in the face from the first-person perspective or just first-person shooters. With the exception of that stealth part that goes on too long, it's an engaging action-packed shooter that not only gives you options when it comes to taking out your enemies but also gives your enemies the same options when it comes to taking you out as well. That it's yet another chance to shoot Nazis, and their stupid dogs, is just the icing on the, well, dog food.
Act 1 was just an appetizer. Act 2 is the meaty main course that defines Broken Age — and not just because it finishes the story. It's where Double Fine let loose and went crazy with the puzzles (and the complex train of thought you need to solve them). It's where characters I previously thought were only there for a joke or two became much more important. It's where Shay's and Vella's rebellion against their preordained fates turned into a cause that is much bigger than themselves.
I've been in a bit of a gaming funk recently, but Crypt of the NecroDancer has reminded me how creative, original, and fun video games can be. I've switched it off at 2 a.m. more than once this week, forcing myself to break from a dangerously addictive "one more go" loop as I tried in vain to beat the damn thing.
Code Name: STEAM has gone from an unplayable tragedy to something that's not quite as terrible. Nintendo, thankfully, addressed the biggest problem when it enabled fast-forwarding with that recent update, but it shouldn't stop with that. Intelligent Systems needs to patch in a way to get a better understanding of your surroundings. The way it's set up now, this game is like playing chess where certain pawns secretly have the powers of a queen.
In some ways, Mortal Kombat X surprised the hell out of me. The art direction is superb, the fanfare is lovingly crafted, and so much interesting single-player content's going on that I'll never have to deal with playing online. The Faction War, in particular, is just the right addictive factor to keep me considering logging in daily, if only for a quick session, just to help my group out.
At $5, it's hard to find more puzzle content than what is available in BoxBoy. That's not always a good thing, as it feels scared of asking players to learn something new without making them study it for three too many puzzle rooms. But the harsh art design and excess gameplay fat don't do enough to negate the thrill of figuring out a solution or the charm of watching your little square friend celebrate. BoxBoy is a welcome, easy-going new entrant into puzzlers that deserves more attention than it will likely get on its current marketing trend.