Polygon's Reviews
Sekiro meets me with just as much effort and enthusiasm as I’ve put into it. It lets me know I’m capable and skilled, and that I can figure it out.
It all adds up to a game that feels like an excellent first draft. Fans of battle royale games and open-world survival games should feel right at home — that is, until they run up against a mob that’s too big to handle on their own.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a hilarious satire on internet stupidity and venality
The game has over 200 puzzles, and I’m roughly 50 deep. I plan to make my way to the finish line, not just because it’s a great game — and it is! — but because its obsession with rules has me rethinking the rules in every other game I love. It’s selfless in a way, a game that lets you bend its rules to appreciate the rules in everything else.
Devotion is beautiful and mesmerizing, contorting mundanities into menaces.
Sci-fi adventure set in ’60s Germany is a beautiful, artsy letdown
I hope the next Assassin’s Creed gives me as much joy as this one.
It’s a gory, metalcore-driven, imperfect romp. It didn’t ask me for much: just 15 hours of my time and a willingness to admit that, all right, dragging a motorcycle across a demon’s face is, in fact, pretty b****s.
Playing The Occupation is like puzzling over a dense little knot of tangled priorities, information, and pressures. It’s tense to play through, and even more fun to go back and try the process again, armed with information from previous runs.
An immensely fun fighting game with some flaws
Newcomers might surprise themselves how much they really can handle in a tough-as-nails driving sim
This is the Trials I fell in love with.
Like so many games, Ape Out is a power fantasy. Unlike so many games, Ape Out seems keenly aware of its purpose.
There were moments where it felt like I was playing the same game that came out when I was 11. But the look was just a bit more lavish, and the funky bass line was arranged just differently enough. Back in the Groove is the perfect mix of polish and nostalgia, and one that I can’t wait to play through again.
The Stillness of the Wind is a lovely, sad spin on farming games
If Ubisoft had embraced the game’s fundamental silliness instead of cutting its narrative off at the knees by spackling over it with morality, I can only imagine what kind of truly Mad Max-esque shenanigans would have been possible. Its enemies and I are both the villains, but they’re allowed to be comfortable with their morbid, violent fun.
Anthem trips over itself trying to blend two genres into one
It would be remiss of me not to point out the small but diverse roster of characters in Apex Legends. Out of the current band of eight Legends, the presence of four people of color and two LGBTQ characters is a heartening first step. In particular, the mysterious hunter Bloodhound is probably the most — if not the first — prominent example of a nonbinary character in a mainstream shooter. Yet Apex Legends also faces the same narrative challenges that the relatively progressive Overwatch had with inclusivity. In a genre that carries a greater emphasis on gameplay rather than storytelling, injecting meaningful representation can admittedly be a trying process.
Crackdown 3 is a playpen of combat and destruction that sets itself up as a liberating journey into a barbarous fantasy of wanton mayhem. But its central proposition — the freedom to do as I please — is undermined by frustrating design compromises.
On my journey aboard the Aurora, I encounter pockets of humanity that have already lost hope. But on this train, beside my friends and family, there’s still hope yet.