Polygon's Reviews
The no-frills quality of NASCAR Heat Evolution meant NASCAR Heat 2 had to show a little more than just great racing this year, and it does in spots. There's a lot of variety in NASCAR Heat 2, it's just more immediately seen in things like the one-off races or online multiplayer.
Hellblade is not an Orphean quest to retrieve a dead lover from the underworld. It's not some epic tale of revenge. It's an education and contextualization of being psychologically different in the time of Vikings and Celts. Nearly every facet of the game — whether it's combat, puzzles or exploration — is deliberate, pointing back to the overarching theme of what people called “cursed” during that time. Hellblade successfully weaves metaphors of grief and loss into fundamental game mechanics and rich folklore, and through these I felt like I truly was able to understand how someone else sees the world.
As an overall product, Destiny 2 is an incredible feat.
Knack 2 is an entertaining platform game like those of yesteryear. It's been created with due care and attention. Sure, it's old fashioned, and its story is appalling. But it's a reminder that the character-led platform combat game is still alive and well. Despite its good looks, it's more a work of engineering than it is a work of art. But, as my kid said to me after we'd mashed our way through a co-op level, it's kinda fun.
That story stops in a beautiful place at Episode One's end: a cliffhanger that makes me want Episode Two, stat. I'm a little nervous about having to deal with more of Chloe's pop-punk-esque "I'm not OK" pontificating. But based on what I've seen from Before the Storm's premiere, I'm willing to tough it out alongside her, and Rachel, and the rest of Arcadia Bay.
Songbringer is a game where playing it more than once is the point; it's what justifies the game's whole existence. But each time I fed in a new world seed word, I found myself enjoying the game less. The generated worlds are an interesting gimmick, but they spread Songbringer's shallow mechanics too thin. The game provides nearly limitless worlds to explore, but it didn't give me much motivation to keep at it beyond those first couple runs.
Last Day of June is a narrative puzzle game that makes full use of a wide range of powerful emotive devices to make its point. Its fairly straightforward puzzles won't keep you up, scratching your noggin at night, but the effect of its wonderful characters and the love they have for one another will leave you feeling like you belong to something bigger than yourself.
Absolver recognizes its singular goal of building a robust, satisfying martial arts combat system. It leans into those strengths, and it's a better game for it.
Mario + Rabbids manages to walk a narrow road, offering up a legitimately challenging squad tactics experience without alienating the family friendly Mario audience. While it doesn't quite have the full layer of spit and polish of an in-house title, Ubisoft comes damn close to capturing that Nintendo magic.
F1 2017 is a game that's as much fun to think about as it is to play, and as intriguing to plan out and strategize as it is to race. And it is a lot of fun to race, because so much of F1 2017's enjoyment comes from things built up over time, not the year-to-year bullet-point features of video gaming.
A handful of the ideas in LawBreakers seem like concepts that are past their sell-by date, from the dubstep soundtrack to the cyber soldier aesthetic. That's a genuine shame because beneath all that, is a mechanically exciting game. The aerial combat feels fresh, and the twists on standard shooter game modes are solid attempts at flipping the script. But LawBreakers' confusing hero design, poor tutorial system and unbalanced maps all sabotage an otherwise good game.
In XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, fighting a losing battle might be just as much fun as fighting and winning.
Yakuza Kiwami makes it clear just how far the series has come, and just how far it still has to go. It's keenly designed to bring newly minted Yakuza fans more firmly into the fold by providing all the contemporary comforts they might expect, while also giving longtime fans more to chew on than a shot-for-shot remake ever would have. It's a patchwork, for better and for worse, and as much as I enjoyed my time with it, there's no denying that some of those patches are looking more tired than others.
Despite the new protagonist, this game serves as a celebration of everything the Uncharted series has come to represent over a decade of mostly strong releases from Naughty Dog. And because of the new protagonist, it also offers a glimpse into what the franchise could become in the future, with some new developer leading the way. Naughty Dog did right by our memories here, and I hope that whoever takes on Uncharted next does right by them.
Madden NFL 18 doesn't shake up its gameplay but the new story mode is a success.
Subsurface Circular extracts maximum entertainment from limited resources through the admirable trick of great writing, excellent pacing, sparkling dialogue and bang-on story beats. It's a lovely little game, the fine work of a developer whose main skill differential is neither coding, art nor level design, but good old-fashioned storytelling.
You can swap between the three agents you bring into the field instantly, letting you chain their different special attacks together for maximum impact. There are some clever choices here too. Derby star Daisy, for example, has to cool off her minigun by dashing through enemies, which turns a typically boring weapon cooldown mechanic into a renewable power resource.Remember those great characters? Well, practically all their dialogue is bland beyond belief. Much of the writing in Agents of Mayhem is “joke adjacent,” meaning it's delivered with the tone, pacing and structure of a joke, but is not, in actuality, funny in any way.This has likely started to feel like a litany of sins rather than cogent critique, but it's the best way I have of illustrating Agent of Mayhem's failings. It is not felled by any one thing, but is rather undone by a thousand little cuts. Agents of Mayhem heaps theoretical fun on you. Characters, powers, upgrades, tons of missions — it's desperate to for the player to just have fun. It's a noble impulse, but one that it's depressingly incapable of consistently delivering on.
It is frequently a game which occupies two opposite spaces simultaneously. It is the best game. It is also the worst game. No game has ever made me as miserable as Dota 2 has. But no game has made me feel so consistently rewarded for my time, and as consistently, wonderfully connected to the friends I play it with.
If more of what Sonic is what you want, then this is very much that, but more, and bigger, and faster. But for me, as someone with fond memories but key criticisms, Sonic Mania seems content to paint over some of the series' problems rather than fix them, making for a game that falls a little short of what might have been.
In addition to shaking up old ideas, The Enemy Within also introduces some new things to its mechanical and narrative tool belt. The Riddler makes an early and violent debut in the game with an interesting new backstory, and with our new big villain, there's a new big ally ... maybe. Amanda Waller has brought her mysterious government task force, known only as The Agency, to Gotham on a hunt for the Riddler. Indeed, we are in something of an Amanda Waller renaissance these days, with her featuring in no less than three concurrent franchises in television, movies and games.Batman: The Enemy Within makes incremental improvements on a successful formula — and the introduction of a new, relationship-focused choice mechanic was a big hit. It might drag here and there, but it sets up for big things to come in further installments. If Enemy Within is anything like its predecessor, a little patience will pay off.