Polygon's Reviews
Ultimately, focusing too closely on any puzzle solution misses what’s special about Humanity. In the days since playing, I’ve found myself most often thinking not about a specific mechanic, but what each level looks like once completed. By removing my ability to influence the stage, the completion screen presents the purest form of the game’s beautiful aesthetic: an unending river of people jumping, swimming, climbing. Orderly, but overwhelming. Moving, united, toward a singular goal.
Inkbound, like all early access games, is bound to change as updates are pushed out — but what I’ve played thus far is a strong foundation. Presently, my main gripe is that NPCs feel less distinct than I’d like, which makes it hard to invest myself in the story. I do, however, appreciate the nod to creative writing dictums in the form of naming the player character “Needless,” with commentary from the supporting cast saying that you’re not a real character if you don’t have needs.
These are moments where I’m gently reminded that true player freedom is, of course, a fallacy. Nintendo created this world, and I inhabit it. Weeks, months, or years from now, I may affect it in ways its creators didn’t intend, but still — I will be using the tools they provided. The brilliance of Tears of the Kingdom lies in how well it imparts the fantasy of player freedom. Sure, Nintendo shakes me out of the daydream every now and then, and in those moments, I see flashes of its old rigid self. But no matter: At some point, I’ll fully escape its watchful gaze.
The game currently has a campaign that plays out over the course of a month in-game, and the player is periodically presented with choices — do they stay loyal to glorious Acaristan, or do they cast off their shackles and choose to be an inside man for the rebellion? Developer Crazy Rocks is working on an endless mode with more paperwork and police ranks, which I’m looking forward to. The campaign can be completed in a few sittings, and it’s punctuated by some fun choices — but I’m hungry to keep checking for contraband.
At the end of the day, Cassette Beasts is a remix of a song you like. Just don’t expect a remaster.
If this tone takes center stage in the back half of the story, combined with plot developments that add some momentum to the proceedings, it may be easier to overlook the game’s weaker aspects and appreciate it as a compelling narrative work. At this point, though, the town of Redfall is sucked too dry of liveliness for players to be invested in whether its vampires triumph or not.
Much of the game involves strategizing around these quirks when possible. Upon snapping a guard's neck, for example, the "guilty conscience" trait sends your character hopping around in an uncontrollable panic for a few brief yet potentially pivotal seconds during which they might blunder into a trap or the sightline of another guard. To circumvent this, you can take care to kill exclusively (and presumably more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to some secluded area where it's safe for your assigned agent to shake off any post-murder jitters.
Rusted Moss’s unique mobility options may be overwhelming at first, but for those looking for a unique and challenging spin on the Metroidvania 2D platforming genre, this game might get its hook into you faster than you’d expect.
Perhaps my focus on the story mitigated the excitement of seeing how the computer was going to screw me over; perhaps the alignment agenda, while useful for a moralistic fantasy setting, undercut the chaotic spontaneity that usually makes 4X games so delicious. Maybe it would simply be more unpredictable in a multiplayer setting, because no one will sabotage you in 4X like a friend. The reality of 4X games that nobody likes to admit is that they aren’t as fun if you’re not winning, so half the battle is trying to keep new players engaged while they learn how to improve. Tending to the drama of an immortal pantheon is enough to keep me around, though I’m not sure for how much longer. If the repetition doesn’t kill you once you start struggling through higher tier realms, maybe the marauders will.
In many ways, Honkai: Star Rail shows a refinement of Hoyoverse’s work up to this point. The game eschews the excesses of an ever-expanding world from Genshin, instead creating tightly designed, linear worlds and dense systems from start to finish. You’ll fight to save the world with dazzling snow bunnies and text your new friends in the meantime. Rather than restricting the developers and their vision, Star Rail’s design leaves ample room for them to build out other aspects of the game. By pairing a refined, turn-based system with a comedic, lighthearted writing style, Star Rail’s future route looks like it’ll be a smooth ride.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor almost swept me off my feet
The new Advance Wars, just like the original, arrives at a strange time. Nintendo appeared to recognize this last year when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it delayed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp indefinitely. But the toylike soldiers exaggeratedly stomping cities into submission and cartoon characters being wiped out by artillery fire feel disconnected from the real-world war that gave Nintendo pause in 2022. In other words, it’s less off-putting than one might think to have fun with an urban military wargame right now. If anything, the return of Advance Wars feels like a link to a simpler time, made better with age and reverence for a long-ignored, still-great franchise.
There’s an overwhelming fakeness and irony to Dead Island 2 that, without any oppositional hope or sincerity, can eventually make the experience of playing it feel like kind of a downer, similar to the feeling you get after eating a load of junk food. My partner turned to me during one of my sessions late into the game and said it looked like I was on autopilot. Instead of meaningfully engaging with its systems, I was mindlessly pushing through the hordes in search of more complexity, or a satisfying narrative crescendo that never came. Dead Island 2’s nostalgic charms can transport you back to a simpler time, but there’s often a reason why you don’t see old friends anymore.
It won’t take you long to work your way through Tron: Identity — two to three hours at most. That said, the nature of the story itself encourages replayability, especially for eagle-eyed Tron enthusiasts scoping out references to the political landscape of the Grid’s inhabitants and the occasional hint to what exactly is going on in the human world of the Users. Truth, as much as identity, is all a matter of perspective. Your Query will likely choose a different path than my own, arriving at a “truth” that itself is only one part of a far greater and inscrutable whole. Whether said truth brings you any closer to the game’s central mystery than mine did will depend on your vigilance, your cunning, and your willingness to adapt and change beyond the duties of your station. Good luck, program.
It’s a lovely gem of a game that touches on my nostalgia for Zelda but still managed to tell a unique story through the gator and their sister’s relationship. It’s a story about the little gator’s deeper desire to connect with someone again in the present, and how games facilitate that. So if you’re looking for a charming pick-me-up before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out, don’t ignore Lil Gator Game.
There are a few typos in the game’s UI, like the status effect ‘inmune’, or receiving a blessing with an extra S. But despite a few small issues, I otherwise found this Riot Forge title to be another smooth ride through League’s increasingly complex canon. The Mageseeker makes the smart move of setting up some truly hateable villains, and then lets me smash their hopes and dreams — what more could I want from a game about toppling the elite?
Minecraft Legends is a charming portmanteau of genres that manages to simplify the RTS formula while still demanding a fair amount of concentration and strategy. I’m interested to see where the game goes in the future; players might use its mechanics to create truly terrifying multiplayer strategies that escalate in amazing ways. Or they might just enjoy the campaign and then go back to their own realm, to tame their own wilderness away from the chimes of quest givers. Legends is a charming and colorful adventure, and it’s nice to finally befriend the humble Creeper.
In 2019, Warframe’s then-creative director Steve Sinclair called the live-service game’s community a “hungry monster to feed.” For as many newcomers as these “endless” games attract, there are also swaths of dedicated veterans, with hundreds or even thousands of hours logged, craving more: more loot, more story quests, more characters — the list goes on. Path of Exile, for its part, has its own beast to feed. Its inexhaustible trickle of expansions and updates is a testament to that fact. How Grinding Gear plans to sate its community in the future remains to be seen — for now, there’s plenty of food to go around.
I’ve tried each of the three Chorf factions, in both the base game campaign and the Immortal Empires game mode. And although they’ll likely get their fair share of nerfs and minor reworks in the coming months, I can confidently say that they’re one of the most consistently engrossing races in the vast world of Total War: Warhammer. Their armies are flexible, their economy is robust, and their political mind games keep campaigns interesting into the triple-digit turns. As with any addition to this digital facsimile of the Warhammer Fantasy world, their presence will have ripple effects in the game’s future. And as usual, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Dredge parses out these moments of rewarding exploration without losing focus on its core conceits of fishing and discovering new creatures. But it also masterfully balances two distinct tones. It comprises the sort of dread and horror that sneaks in, eyes jittery, after too many nights with too little sleep. It’s not a boiling terror and panic, but more of a simmer. There’s enough daylight for something of a reprieve, but it never sticks around for too long. Dredge is the perfect sort of dark yet cozy game. It can be unsettling, yes, but it never swims too far into the abyss.