Polygon's Reviews
It won’t take you long to work your way through Tron: Identity — two to three hours at most. That said, the nature of the story itself encourages replayability, especially for eagle-eyed Tron enthusiasts scoping out references to the political landscape of the Grid’s inhabitants and the occasional hint to what exactly is going on in the human world of the Users. Truth, as much as identity, is all a matter of perspective. Your Query will likely choose a different path than my own, arriving at a “truth” that itself is only one part of a far greater and inscrutable whole. Whether said truth brings you any closer to the game’s central mystery than mine did will depend on your vigilance, your cunning, and your willingness to adapt and change beyond the duties of your station. Good luck, program.
It’s a lovely gem of a game that touches on my nostalgia for Zelda but still managed to tell a unique story through the gator and their sister’s relationship. It’s a story about the little gator’s deeper desire to connect with someone again in the present, and how games facilitate that. So if you’re looking for a charming pick-me-up before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out, don’t ignore Lil Gator Game.
There are a few typos in the game’s UI, like the status effect ‘inmune’, or receiving a blessing with an extra S. But despite a few small issues, I otherwise found this Riot Forge title to be another smooth ride through League’s increasingly complex canon. The Mageseeker makes the smart move of setting up some truly hateable villains, and then lets me smash their hopes and dreams — what more could I want from a game about toppling the elite?
Minecraft Legends is a charming portmanteau of genres that manages to simplify the RTS formula while still demanding a fair amount of concentration and strategy. I’m interested to see where the game goes in the future; players might use its mechanics to create truly terrifying multiplayer strategies that escalate in amazing ways. Or they might just enjoy the campaign and then go back to their own realm, to tame their own wilderness away from the chimes of quest givers. Legends is a charming and colorful adventure, and it’s nice to finally befriend the humble Creeper.
In 2019, Warframe’s then-creative director Steve Sinclair called the live-service game’s community a “hungry monster to feed.” For as many newcomers as these “endless” games attract, there are also swaths of dedicated veterans, with hundreds or even thousands of hours logged, craving more: more loot, more story quests, more characters — the list goes on. Path of Exile, for its part, has its own beast to feed. Its inexhaustible trickle of expansions and updates is a testament to that fact. How Grinding Gear plans to sate its community in the future remains to be seen — for now, there’s plenty of food to go around.
I’ve tried each of the three Chorf factions, in both the base game campaign and the Immortal Empires game mode. And although they’ll likely get their fair share of nerfs and minor reworks in the coming months, I can confidently say that they’re one of the most consistently engrossing races in the vast world of Total War: Warhammer. Their armies are flexible, their economy is robust, and their political mind games keep campaigns interesting into the triple-digit turns. As with any addition to this digital facsimile of the Warhammer Fantasy world, their presence will have ripple effects in the game’s future. And as usual, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Dredge parses out these moments of rewarding exploration without losing focus on its core conceits of fishing and discovering new creatures. But it also masterfully balances two distinct tones. It comprises the sort of dread and horror that sneaks in, eyes jittery, after too many nights with too little sleep. It’s not a boiling terror and panic, but more of a simmer. There’s enough daylight for something of a reprieve, but it never sticks around for too long. Dredge is the perfect sort of dark yet cozy game. It can be unsettling, yes, but it never swims too far into the abyss.
Against all odds, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog has a more sincere script than you would expect from anything that was released on April 1 for free ninety-nine. This is a fun game with genuine laughs, terrific art, and a killer soundtrack, and you don’t have to pay a dime to play it. I could quibble about minor stuff if I wanted, but at the end of the day, I’m happy it exists at all, and that it not only exists, but that it’s this joyful.
I am almost 50 years old now. I was once the daily newspaper reporter for Cooperstown itself. Buddy, I chewed tobacco when I played T-ball, and I am bonded to baseball through my father and friendships going back to kindergarten. Still, MLB The Show 23 found a way to teach me something about the sport, and give me new reason to love it.
As I played, I kept thinking, Let me love you, as I built so many pylons and tramway poles just to complete a scenario. I played the demo over and over again when it was first released last year, excited for what would come. Even if some of the gameplay feels unnecessarily rigid, I still have a lot of respect for the way this game emphasizes environmental stewardship, especially within a genre that tends to focus on the exact opposite. Despite the roadblocks, that sense of wonder is enough to bring me back into the game’s world.
Although some runs took me up to a quarter of my day, I was consistently entranced by the head-smashing music, and pulled along by the tactical decision-making process. Ishtar Games clearly knows how to induce a flow state, distort time, and balance challenge with approachability. Playing The Last Spell means settling in for the long haul; but when the long haul is this thrilling, I’ll keep returning.
Tchia could easily have filled the action-adventure mold of so many games before it. It takes even more of a risk by pulling so heavily from The Legend of Zelda. But, despite those influences, it isn’t weighed down by that sameness. Tchia’s transforming power comes from her eye, green where the other is not. It makes sense, then, that it would let us see Tchia’s world, and this genre, in a whole new light.
For all of the rough edges that it smooths over, RE4 pulls off the same trick that RE2 did in 2019, making a groundbreaking but now dated game feel brand-new again.
The game itself is beautiful and the battle mechanics feel great, but the deeper I dig into Have a Nice Death, the less value I find.
If you’re looking for a cute, cozy platformer with simple battle mechanics and a playful story, look no further than Cereza and the Lost Demon. For those, like me, hoping to see how Cereza truly gained her power, and harnessed the seduction and raw magical prowess required to become the ultimate umbra witch, this game is a miss. And that’s fine. I just wish this new approach excited me as much as the previous ones did. I appreciate approachability — but Bayonetta has always been a series about toeing the line, and nothing about this title took a risk. I hope the next approach is worthy enough to stand on its own among the series’ best games.
It’s impressive — especially for a game developed by a single person — how many disparate genres and how many distinct gameplay loops Patch Quest manages to juggle, without letting a single one fall. It may be a Pokémon, Castlevania, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon smoothie, but it’s a smoothie that I plan on ordering time and time again.
I’ve been enjoying Dead Cells since it first launched, and thus far I’ve been thrilled about Return to Castlevania. It’s one of the most polished and well executed of the game’s post-launch content. Castlevania fans, too, have plenty to swoon over, with numerous series references and large handful of unlockable costumes to discover, letting you explore Dead Cells as mainstays like Alucard, Richter, and Death itself. All we can hope is that this lays the groundwork for Motion Twin to pair up with other long-dormant franchises for similar passion projects. The Bubble Bobble x Dead Cells mashup is just begging to be made.
Considering that Lightfall’s story ends with many open-ended questions and is just the beginning of a year’s worth of narrative and gameplay content, which demands a level of time investment that many new players might balk at, it’s difficult to know whether the gameplay and the artwork — polished as they are — will be enough to draw in the uninitiated. Are they willing, once the campaign wraps up, to begin grinding, to devote themselves to this world that mostly ignores them, choosing to commemorate its “Veterans” (the title awarded to players who started playing six years ago) instead? There’s certainly something impressive about a game like Destiny 2, which has a history of its own, but also one that dates back to past franchises. But it leaves one wondering if there’s space at all for those who have no relationship with that history — who approach the game as visitors, witnessing just a sliver of what must feel like a lifetime of memories.
Surviving the calamities of Wo Long requires nearly obsessive hours of practice. But what comes after is the exhilaration of being able to deftly execute hordes of enemies and demons alike with merely a reflexive twitch of your well-honed limbs. With its intricate combat system and an equally evocative setting, Wo Long is a journey worth embarking on — even if it means devoting three more hours to your next boss fight.
I’d be able to forgive these UI foibles if they contributed to a cohesive thematic style. The busy interface of a game like Highfleet appears even more inscrutable than Phantom Brigade, but it funnels its droves of information into a gorgeously intricate cockpit UI. The sliding gray menus of Phantom Brigade, on the other hand, are bland and indistinct. The bare-bones story and setting, with their anonymous blue and red factions, could very well pass for a placeholder. The game’s unique command system manages to capture what is so intrinsically awe-inspiring about giant, fickle robots battling other giant, fickle robots — but the surrounding framework lacks the same refinement and clarity of purpose.