Polygon's Reviews
The care present in Ghost of Tsushima’s design makes its undercooked take on its own ideas harder to forgive. Take its themes seriously, and it becomes a story about a feudal landlord learning that maybe life isn’t about him, but centering on him anyway. The Jin Sakai that players engage with through play — the Jin Sakai that composes haikus, loves animals enough to play them little tunes on his flute, who never met a row of bamboo he did not want to cut for fun — seems to have the interiority that the Jin Sakai of Ghost’s narrative does not. One is a thoughtful guy you might want to hang around. The other is not. He’s kind of embarrassing.
You don’t play a No More Heroes game for its story. You play it for its style, and No More Heroes 3 has style in spades. The best thing I can say about No More Heroes 3 is that its combat and open-world design stay out of the way, letting its style take center stage, occasionally facilitating some truly great one-off moments.
This is all bolstered by strong art direction and technical design. Although the soundtrack and some instances of stiff character animation remind me that this was once a Skyrim mod, environments are nicely detailed, strikingly lit, and filled with era-appropriate pieces of clutter. If you want, you can even discuss the intricacies of Roman architecture with one of the NPCs and then observe those same intricacies throughout the city. The attention to historical accuracy is enthralling. I learned several things about real-life history during my playthrough, and not all were Roman-centric.
Normally, the first entry in a video game series acts as a rough draft for refined sequels. That’s not the case with Spelunky. It stands on its own as one of the most important games of the past decade.
Fights are long and involved, and even though the game is fast-paced, actually getting a kill (or dying) takes a lot of bullets to accomplish. This gives players plenty of time to outplay an enemy who got the drop on them. Splitgate's long-range fights are all about strafing and accuracy, while its up-close duels are most often decided by a quick peppering of assault rifle fire and swift use of melee attacks. Both types of fights are a fairly simple loop, but one that never gets boring, no matter how many times you do it.
In a recent session, I had a rival pair, and one of them was slain by the final boss in the last turns of the entire game. I was presented with an option to either allow them to slink off the battlefield with a career-altering wound or have them strike out with their dying strength, dealing massive damage and sealing the victory. I weighed my options and had them take out the boss. What better way to end a rivalry than by saving the world?
Psychonaut 2's levels are some of the most inventive in the platforming genre. There's an over-the-top cooking game show where you carry food stuff through a giant platforming gauntlet. There's also a humongous mailroom sorting office where you jump from flying envelope to flying envelope, all the while avoiding the vortex of letters below. You'll visit highly imaginative, gravity-bending dreamscape after dreamscape.
The game presents a solid foundation that manages to surprise in a few respects, but doesn’t quite take the plunge in full. I was hoping this iteration on the Aliens universe would finally be the one unafraid to take risks. But I’ll have to wait for the next attempt to find out if it’s not just a hopeless wish.
Sucker Punch Productions later explained that the lack of a target lock, and the awareness that goes along with it, more suited the Mongols' presence as a swarming, constantly deadly threat. Players would have to make affirmative inputs and precise choices rather than spam the buttons. But the absence of a lock-on was off-putting enough that Sucker Punch created one for Director's Cut - as well as in a patch to the original game - highlighting it as a fan request fulfilled.
It worked for me because of the earnestness and care with which Kitfox tells this empowered queer story. It's not always pleasant to experience, but it's a story that left me feeling satisfied with the outcome.
Twelve Minutes is an uncomfortable journey — maybe too uncomfortable
But Axiom Verge 2 doesn't let you forget that there's more to Metroid than backtracking. One of the most enduring things about that series is how isolating it can feel. And that's where Axiom Verge 2 finds its most powerful moments. After acquiring the aforementioned drone, I learned there's a second world I can explore called the Breach. It's uninhabitable by humans, but my little robot friend had no issue exploring it. At one point, though, I got stuck in the Breach, cut off from most of my bodily upgrades and vulnerable as a result.
One particular mission ended in a robot boss that was resistant to the types of weapons I had spent all of my upgrade materials on thus far. OK, I told myself, that's on me. I should have been prepared. The problem then became finding the requisite components to upgrade an energy weapon I had neglected. In order to do so, I had to slog back through previous environments and take on side quests that ran the gamut of quality: One sent me on a prolonged fetch quest in search of a suitcase, while another tasked me with gathering testicles from slain enemies. One hour and countless frustrations later, I was ready to once again take on that robot boss.
For Dark Souls veterans, Death’s Door provides a less stressful but moody journey through a new world that offers familiar gameplay from a new, top-down perspective. But for players who’ve never played a game like this, Death’s Door gradually leads you into the deep end.
Will you enjoy Cruelty Squad? I don’t know. It’s a hard game to recommend. It feels like it rips mechanics wholesale out of slick, satisfying shooters like the old Rainbows Six, Deus Ex, or Hitman. Except it’s also intentionally opaque, refusing to lend players a hand in deciphering its visuals or navigating its oppressive atmosphere. And yet, I’m still here gnawing on this coconut, because the pain is worth the taste of that delicious joy.
If you're a fan of the franchise, there's a lot here for you specifically. If you're coming in fresh, the game is going to throw a lot of jargon at you in a very short amount of time, and then it's going to hit you with references to prior events with which you won't be familiar. You don't need to play the previous game or watch its anime adaptation, but doing so might help with context. If none of the narrative stuff interests you, there's plenty of in-game stuff to collect: I'm currently working on completing my pin collection, whittling down my Noisepedia and hunting down graffiti (the game's version of achievements). When this game shines, it really shines, even if maybe too much of that shine is refracted by its past.
In the end, the most I can say is this: Yeah, over a week and change, I spent a lot of time in Warring States-era Japan making a series of emphatic Mermista “UUUUUUGH”s, but maybe that happened because when something shows occasional touches of craft and brilliance, your desire to sand off the last of its rough edges is all the stronger.
Skyward Sword wanted to keep Zelda fresh and exciting, but it did this by making the things you already did as part of its formula feel good instead of finding new ways to do them. But for a series about exploring at your own pace, simplifying dungeons to make them more fun to complete wasn't going to cut it for much longer. The focus on action, on pulling off simple-but-cool things, only works on a platform built around how fun its controller is to use, and it only works once. After this game, Nintendo had to do something different.
Codemasters’ F1 series has taken hundreds of hours from me since 2017, and in return it’s given me a rich, new sports fandom even in my late 40s. And now, F1 2021 is teaching me to expect imperfection, to own my mistakes, and forgive myself. The result may be messy, but it’s mine.
Instead, Chicory asks, "What if there's a better way?" A person's worth is inherent, and it's not chosen for us. If we tear down those systems and rebuild something new, we can shift legacies and choose them for ourselves - it's no longer a gift bestowed upon us by some unfair, undated structure. With a little practice, maybe anyone can wield a paintbrush.