Polygon's Reviews
Sayonara Wild Hearts feels like the perfect game to relax to just before going to bed, with hopes of washing my dreams with the pink-purple colors of a neon sunset, surrounded by beautiful people who fight as if they’re falling in love.
Familiar isn’t always bad, and in the case of The Surge 2, familiar is just aggressively fine.
eFootball PES 2020 doesn’t make me forget about its competition, but it does force me to reckon with what I really want from a soccer video game, and who really meets those needs.
The magic, when it really materializes, is punctuating a perfectly executed stealth maneuver with a quack.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is the perfect Zelda for younger fans
The theme is a bait and switch, but the gameplay is at least somewhat interesting
I may have expected a bit more polish from the remaster, but everything that’s important — namely, the simple and satisfying gameplay — remains intact.
Wilmot’s Warehouse is a small piece of chaotic zen
Overall, this puzzle game is short, sweet, and delightful ... despite occasionally crushing my dreams. And I’m always up for another try.
Gears, as a franchise, suddenly feels balanced in a way that it hasn’t in the past. I looked around. I paused. I tried to take it all in.
Having said that, I've once again spent the bulk of my time playing World of Chel. That's because my favorite mode, offline Be a Pro, hasn't changed since NHL 19 (and it's not like EA Vancouver gave the mode much love last year, mind you). I understand the realities of making these multifaceted games on an annual schedule — resources are limited, and it's simply not possible for the developers to overhaul everything every year. However, Be a Pro has been sidelined for ages, and it looks even more stale in light of the experimentation we've seen recently in single-player career modes from Madden, FIFA, and NBA 2K.
Blasphemous is unforgiving, brutal, and at times, unfair. Beneath the drudgery is a compelling and dark tale waiting to be uncovered. If you are willing to endure its frustrations, you’ll be rewarded with grim and spectacular visuals that’ll be forever burned into your mind, and an equally twisted story to match them.
NASCAR Heat 4 may not look different, at first, but it doesn’t take long before I can feel just how much better it has become.
Borderlands 3, if it works well at launch, is a competent game that feels like a passable continuation of the franchise instead of an evolution. It’s the same general idea with new vault hunters, but with little of the joy and danger that I fell in love with in earlier entries.
Realm of Magic works best in small doses, but much of the content makes the base game less enjoyable, not more.
While Creature in the Well looks like a game that would test my might, instead it tests my wits. It’s dark, a little bit funny, and it delivers puzzles that are more satisfying to solve than defeating standard dungeon crawling monsters.
Gears 5 is personal, like its predecessor, and insistent in focusing on its characters. It’s thoughtful, and unafraid to stop the action in favor of slower story beats and sections focused on exploration. And those are the parts that I enjoyed the most.
Monster Hunter’s newest expansion adds tons of monsters, and comes with a punishing difficulty
Before I started Remnant, I was worried that its ranged combat wouldn’t provide the same kind of challenge or depth as other, more melee-focused, action games. But Remnant is still finding ways to surprise and challenge me, after I’ve put nearly 10 hours into the game, and each boss teaches me something new about the game and how to play it. I can’t wait to see what I’ll learn next, and what I’ll see — and kill — on the way.
Of course, the classic question remains: Is Torchlight 2 better than Diablo 3? But I’m not sure that it matters. They’re both pinnacles of action RPG design that coming at the genre in different ways. And having both on the go via the Switch, where a lengthy commute can be whiled away while smashing rock elementals with big hammers, is a gift to us all.