Polygon's Reviews
I can picture myself weeks from now, strolling among the creations, gadgets, and objects that my friends and I have left littered across our worlds, thinking back on these early days in Wild Hearts. These constructions are marks of solidarity in a game that could have been mere homage. Building in Wild Hearts isn’t just a mechanical conceit. It’s the pillar of its identity.
Pizza Tower may be inspired by platformers of yore, but it’s much more than nostalgic fluff. It has sharpened, tuned, evolved, and damn near perfected this odd niche of platforming. It’s the rare homage that is actually better than the things that inspired it, and I think you should give it a try.
In Metroid Dread, you are encouraged to sprint through, keeping clear of enemies that, at the outset, you have no means of defeating. Your central relation to the game world is that of anxiety and, yes, dread. Metroid Prime, by contrast, wants you to feel inquisitive toward its lonely landscapes, to seek understanding of your enemies as much as mastery over them. Through its contemplative gameplay loop, wherein entering a new area means taking time to consider it, 20 years later, Metroid Prime might have even more to say about what it means to slow down, taking time to view the world with curiosity and wonder.
Hitman’s Freelancer mode is something rare: an intoxicating blend of challenge and approachability. It plays on the hubris of longtime players, but also guides newcomers with thematic objectives and a more explicit overall structure. It may not allow for the micro-repetition that makes the base trilogy tick. But it does maintain a rapid momentum from the beginning of each run to its bitter, comical end. After so many hours spent with this trilogy, combing each of its locations for something, anything I missed, I did not think it possible for IO to surprise me anymore — but here we are.
The shadow drop was novel in and of itself, but the game is a triumph. The gorgeous animations and Jet Set Radio-esque art style are vivid and arresting. The array of tutorials, visual aids, and clever mechanics makes the rhythm aspects approachable to genre newcomers. And the vibrant, positive energy is present in every beat, keeping you tapping your feet as you take down a corporation built on a lack of vision. Hi-Fi Rush is a cathartic anthem that arrived at the perfect time.
The Dead Space remake changes all the right things
Season is about every little thing we can value in a life as fleeting as the seasons, and it’s one of my favorite games in years.
Although Midnight Suns has its hits and misses when it comes to character development – I may have leveled up my friendship with Tony Stark, but I didn’t enjoy a single minute – the Deadpool DLC finds the mark well, emphasizing this character’s most annoying qualities while also letting his inner softie burst through. His playstyle in combat didn’t exactly blow my mind, but his personality was the real draw for me, and the writers got that part right. Firaxis has three more DLC packs on the way, each featuring a new character, and after Deadpool’s arc, I can’t wait to spend more time with the next weirdo who joins the squad.
Forspoken’s opening hours are by far its worst. It took me 16 hours to complete the game, taking in a fair bit of the side offerings in this open-world action RPG, being careful not to sprint too quickly toward the game’s conclusion, though the temptation was there.
It’s clear, both in Odyssey’s thrilling combat and colorful art direction, that ILCA harbors a lot of love for its source material. But these fleeting moments of joy make their counterparts — hapless storytelling, terrible pacing, and stilted navigation — all the more exhausting by comparison. The kernel of a good RPG exists within Odyssey’s framework, but it’s surrounded by so much muck that it can’t shine through. One Piece has a long, storied history, but I suspect Odyssey will soon be forgotten.
It can’t quite reach the crescendos that Three Houses did, and it certainly doesn’t achieve the longevity of Awakening. But it is consistently great. And it’s confident enough to let me take the reins.
Still, after getting fully sucked into Persona 5 in 2017, I had fully intended on playing Persona 3 after so many people had told me it was their favorite entry. While the systems don’t hold up when stacked against the newer titles, I found its bleaker tone more endearing and lovable. It takes work to get to the end, but the complicated, messy, weird story is worth it.
Some people will understandably be put off by all of this. Yet, for all the flaws in its script, Persona 4 Golden manages to mine heartfelt stories from other veins. Persona 5 Royal is a veritable amusement park of side activities that can sometimes be overwhelming. In Inaba, however, having fewer distractions lets you focus on your bonds much more closely. It will take some time to adjust to being away from the city, especially without a smartphone constantly buzzing to let you know where everybody is at all times. But there is no need for one. You’re bound to stumble upon a friendly face on your way to the riverbank.
Look no further than the integrated proximity chat, which incorporates voice and text. It's not nearly as nuanced as the Teamspeak plugins utilized by dedicated military simulation groups like Shack Tactical (a group of which I am a member, for what it's worth). Camelpoop420 sounds just as loud and shrill when he's across the street as when he's right next to you, and the directional audio in these situations is a bit hit-or-miss. But it gets the job done. You can heckle, you can taunt, you can make people panic as you stalk them through the smoke... or you can make friends.
The next-gen upgrade is going to make that available for more people, and I’m excited for that. But it did leave me with a melancholy feeling about where we’ve been and, given the future of The Witcher franchise, where a post-Cyberpunk Witcher game might go. I hope CD Projekt Red’s 2015 RPG, rather than the one it released in 2020, is the foundation that’s built upon.
Expressive visuals and refined combat bring the 2007 game back to life
If ray tracing can have this sort of impact on a game that was never meant to have it, imagine what artists will do when incorporating the feature from the very beginning.
Dwarf Fortress operates under a similar logic. It will instill in you, the player, that “slender intuition” of what to do. It may, as it did for me, invoke a sense of anxiety as you feel unsure what it is you ought to be doing. But in following your instincts, stories will begin to arise, just as they do for a novelist when they sit down to write. Your base motivation (survive the winter) will be supplanted by something else as you respond to what unfolds before you — whether that be drunken cats or, in my case, a dwarf who struggles to find purpose in life. Your only role, then, is to see that story through.
Heat, a solid game that built up a dedicated audience, probably didn’t get the fairest shake in public opinion after it launched three years ago. Electronic Arts reorganized its action-racing development in response. Unbound arrives with the same lack of glamour, the same diminished cachet, but it is so much more fun, and so much more worth my time racing and running from the law, that the game feels like racing’s comeback player of the year.
The Callisto Protocol could have borrowed a few more lessons from its spiritual inspiration, and further refined its mechanics to make a game that plays as good as it looks.