Polygon's Reviews
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.
Against all odds, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog has a more sincere script than you would expect from anything that was released on April 1 for free ninety-nine. This is a fun game with genuine laughs, terrific art, and a killer soundtrack, and you don’t have to pay a dime to play it. I could quibble about minor stuff if I wanted, but at the end of the day, I’m happy it exists at all, and that it not only exists, but that it’s this joyful.
I am almost 50 years old now. I was once the daily newspaper reporter for Cooperstown itself. Buddy, I chewed tobacco when I played T-ball, and I am bonded to baseball through my father and friendships going back to kindergarten. Still, MLB The Show 23 found a way to teach me something about the sport, and give me new reason to love it.
As I played, I kept thinking, Let me love you, as I built so many pylons and tramway poles just to complete a scenario. I played the demo over and over again when it was first released last year, excited for what would come. Even if some of the gameplay feels unnecessarily rigid, I still have a lot of respect for the way this game emphasizes environmental stewardship, especially within a genre that tends to focus on the exact opposite. Despite the roadblocks, that sense of wonder is enough to bring me back into the game’s world.
Although some runs took me up to a quarter of my day, I was consistently entranced by the head-smashing music, and pulled along by the tactical decision-making process. Ishtar Games clearly knows how to induce a flow state, distort time, and balance challenge with approachability. Playing The Last Spell means settling in for the long haul; but when the long haul is this thrilling, I’ll keep returning.
Tchia could easily have filled the action-adventure mold of so many games before it. It takes even more of a risk by pulling so heavily from The Legend of Zelda. But, despite those influences, it isn’t weighed down by that sameness. Tchia’s transforming power comes from her eye, green where the other is not. It makes sense, then, that it would let us see Tchia’s world, and this genre, in a whole new light.
For all of the rough edges that it smooths over, RE4 pulls off the same trick that RE2 did in 2019, making a groundbreaking but now dated game feel brand-new again.
The game itself is beautiful and the battle mechanics feel great, but the deeper I dig into Have a Nice Death, the less value I find.
If you’re looking for a cute, cozy platformer with simple battle mechanics and a playful story, look no further than Cereza and the Lost Demon. For those, like me, hoping to see how Cereza truly gained her power, and harnessed the seduction and raw magical prowess required to become the ultimate umbra witch, this game is a miss. And that’s fine. I just wish this new approach excited me as much as the previous ones did. I appreciate approachability — but Bayonetta has always been a series about toeing the line, and nothing about this title took a risk. I hope the next approach is worthy enough to stand on its own among the series’ best games.
It’s impressive — especially for a game developed by a single person — how many disparate genres and how many distinct gameplay loops Patch Quest manages to juggle, without letting a single one fall. It may be a Pokémon, Castlevania, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon smoothie, but it’s a smoothie that I plan on ordering time and time again.