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When the pieces come together as they're meant to, Evolve is satisfying in a bone-deep kind of way.
What remains to be seen is whether there is such thing as a redemptive arc in Game of Thrones, or if feebly limping out of a string of unfair compromises is truly as "good" of an ending as Westeros has to offer.
This isn't a game of jump scares, but it is one of dread. When you're running from a herd of volatiles, and you look behind you and see them all chomping at your heels, there's a rush of adrenaline.
Apotheon wants to make us citizens, but it ultimately leaves us tourists.
Although it suffers from the dated standards of structure and action—acting more as an imitation of what we might remember of the SNES-era than a succession—Citizens of Earth flourishes when it embraces its own silliness.
You have to find a way to fill it and restore the balance, as with anything in life. A sense of humor's just part of the symmetry.
Xrd expounds upon that tendency, eschewing nostalgia in favor of profound iteration that will likely only register to the niche-loyal. And as someone who successfully made it inside the club, even if it feels at times that I did so with a fake ID, the band in here is playing some mind-blowing stuff.
This narrative distance and the slow difficulty curve both point to the same thing: an over-reluctance to lose or alienate an audience unwilling to engage with philosophical thought or difficult puzzles. But that belies the ideal audience for a philosophical puzzle game: an audience willing to try.
The latest from Dejobaan therefore seems like a stepping stone, a strong premise and peaceful beginning with little longevity and little to do outside the foundation of the game. You have to wonder if there will be more to write in the future.
As adventure park, Far Cry 4 performs admirably well. There are ample opportunities and excuses to do within its bounds whatever it is you want to do. The particular darkness of its narrative might be a bit more basic cable than HBO, but there are other parks if that's not your sort of thing. This is the kind of place where even your enemies love you, as long as you say yes to everything. That's the price of admission. Well, that and $60.
In its best moments, The Old City: Leviathan toggles seamlessly between enchanting dreams and dark realities, tragic memories and tragic futures, and deeply touching realizations on what is actually happening. But they're all never really meant for the player; they're meant for the protagonist.
The Dark Below, and Destiny in a wider sense, specifically exploits the player's relationship to its systems. Like the processes of neo-liberalism that have clearly, through intentional design or not, been the inspiration for its various systems, Destiny asks one thing of players—that they are more productive. Through both reward and limitation, the game is constantly encouraging the player to commit more work and time to its processes, demanding constant attention.
For a videogame based on grown men and women in spandex fighting each other while forwarding overblown soap opera storylines, WWE 2k15 is surprisingly misanthropic. The game seeks to be a "realistic" portrayal of the WWE career arc, asking you to grind your way from an unknown to a Superstar, and finally winning the WWE Championship. WWE 2k15 certainly propagates that fantasy, but along the way, it also stumbles into a repetitive pattern that, completely by accident, reveals a harsher and poignant truth about what professional wrestling, and being a sports entertainment performer, really is: it's a job, just like any other job.
Lumino City is a real world filled with relationships as thin as its papercraft inhabitants. Whether intentional or not, it seems to be the focus, given that there's not much in the way of "adventure" in this point-and-click adventure.
While Telltale's Game of Thrones may not be quite as epic in scope as the HBO show or Martin's books, it comes off as a focused deep dive into what's happening in some of the more minor houses while other self-declared kings and queens battle for the Iron Throne. And to its credit, the game does have at least one good shocking moment to keep you on your toes going into episode two, just don't expect a new "Red Wedding"—at least not yet.
You are not the greatest force in the world, one video tells us. And you feel it—through wind, through ice, through snow. Through the spirits bigger than you, and your dependency on the fox that keeps you alive and moving with its magic—on the backs of fish that dance across the waves, or breathing in the belly of a whale. Yet the humble hero, as fragile as a little girl, can still stop a blizzard.
Fortunately, Rollers of the Realm shares enough in other joys. It's clear it likes pinball as much as it likes role-playing games, because the whole game is one big love letter to both, the things mashed together into some odd blender without reason or deeper purpose. It doesn't really need any; what's here is a kind of pure, childlike delight, one that makes it okay to grind gold to buy daggers for my pinball-shaped rogue forever. Nothing about it makes sense, but who cares? Rollers of the Realm just wants to turn you into a pinball wizard.
It's finally happened: Ubisoft broke Assassin's Creed.
Captain Toad has its little secrets, tiny rewards, difficulty level that blooms at a leisurely pace. By the pound, what Captain Toad offers most is interactive charm. Nintendo confirms that the chef received your compliments and your complaints. This experience is new and old, the closest approximation of the feel of 8-bit NES friction in some time. Here we have a simple broth that plays on the tongue in a zesty way, both familiar and fresh.
In a game about big-picture, important ideas of societal problems, a lot of the choices feel not-so-important, and this isn't so much admonition as it is a warning: the following planned episodes must come to term with the choices set forward in the first, must tackle those ripples in a genuine, authentic manner or else we're basically playing a comic book and imagining different actions between panels.