Polygon's Reviews
But Streets of Rage, as a series, is a time capsule from a different, simpler era. While it's blunt and repetitive, it also manifests a relaxing social space with ease. Call it video games as loitering. The music is as good as it's ever been in the series. The stages and characters are beautiful, reimagining the original trilogy's '90s locales and punk-inspired band of baddies in a way that stands up to those games without scarring modern eyes. The action itself is so simple that you can get lost in a conversation about, well, anything as you play.
This is a near miss, but as anyone who has ever played a turn-based game will tell you, a near miss can be all the enemy needs to take you out. This is an interesting, but hardly essential, addition to the Gears family.
Despite its imperfections, fans of tactical strategy games should snatch XCOM: Chimera Squad up as soon as possible.
Without motion controls, it also becomes clear how basic the game is. There's no option to use the touchscreen in handheld mode, which would have at least offered the same style of play as the DS and 3DS originals. Replicating the inputs of those games seems like a no-brainer in terms of design compromises, and also a huge wasted opportunity to introduce the fun recipes from those games to a new audience.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a flawed, but fascinating, reimagining of a classic
Every so often, The Foundation produces a spark of what made the original campaign so memorable.
If you’ve never played Persona 5, and the idea of a lengthy JRPG about making friends, making evil adults admit their crimes, and fighting monsters sounds cool, this is the definitive way to experience the game.
When I first fired up Resident Evil 3, I worried that its tale of a pandemic turning cities into disease-plagued ghost towns would be more of a depressing reminder of our current reality than escapist entertainment. To wit: A live-action cinematic starts the game with doctors in hazmat suits and government officials telling of a CDC-enforced quarantine.
The Room VR traps you inside a wonderfully cohesive world with internal logic that doesn’t have to play by the established rules of our reality. It forces you to think your way out of things while greater powers always seem right around the corner.
Valve has succeeded at just about every goal it must have had for this project. The only thing left is whether hardcore fans will be willing to buy, and use, a virtual reality headset in order to learn what happens next in the world of Half-Life. The good news is that those who do will experience what is likely the best VR game released to date.
Doom Eternal’s power fantasy is funny, playful, and a welcome break
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a respite from the current state of the world. I find my general anxiety slowly subside as I run through my town, water my plants, and build furniture for the sassy chicken gentleman living down by the beach. It’s exactly what I need right now.
You can think of Mystery Dungeon games as ongoing gambles. How far can you go without depleting all your resources? Will you risk it and go deeper into the dungeon? Are you sure?
Others provide functionality, like Twilen, the opportunistic merchant who sells Ori shards, equippable stones that provide our hero with active skills or passive buffs. You won't need to interact much with Wellspring Glade's inhabitants to finish the story, but you'll unearth a treasure trove of side quests and secrets by dedicating time to the village. The more grounded, yet still clever, conversations with these new characters adds an extra layer of connection to the game's world.
Dwarrows doesn’t try to be everything, and the result is a welcome throwback to a game that was once lost to the late 90s.
They’re just as good as everyone remembers
Reforged ultimately feels like a dusty museum exhibit more than a faithful remaster or an update into the modern age. It could have been an excellent way to introduce this story and game to a new generation. Instead, it’s a halfhearted release that misses the opportunity to bring Warcraft 3 back to its old audience while hopefully finding a new one.
Sadly, Days of War feels like its developers tried and failed to reach a bridge too far, and that’s a real shame.
I like Not for Broadcast, but it looks like a The Fly-style experiment grafted together from two different games. I would like very much to play either of them separately, but putting them together weakens the final product. There’s time for developer NotGames to right the ship, however, and the mechanics are intriguing enough to keep me interested in the next chapter.
This is one of hundreds of games that ask us to kill and conquer, but never question our actions. The story tells us we’re here to have fun, and supposedly save the world.