Digital Chumps
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The Evil Within has its fair share of weaknesses (some are patchable), but on the whole, as is, it's a powerful survival horror experience that I won't soon forget.
Driveclub delivers driving fun on gorgeous and expansive maps, offers a variety of ways to race and a bevy of cars to choose from. It won't satisfy your need for a Gran Turismo-esque experience, but it will certainly bring enjoyment to your racing lives.
Alien: Isolation projects an authoritative and unrepentant sense of despair consistent with Ridley Scott's 1979 classic. As powerful and affecting as its influence may be, it's applied with enough force to drive Isolation off its rails. It never crashes, but after an aggressively defiant start, it teeters and wobbles its way toward an unassertive and obedient conclusion.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel refreshes gameplay through some new mechanics and a whole new story, including a cast of familiar characters and brand new characters, while diving into the events that lead up to Borderlands 2. Fans of the series can look forward to plenty of new content and locations to explore, all while acquiring plenty of guns and equipment throughout, including a new weapon type and new equipment type. The game can feel focused on multiplayer at times, however the game is still a fun and enjoyable experience regardless, and will definitely give people the best bang for their buck, especially those who wish to know more about the Borderlands universe.
Bayonetta 2 expresses a meticulous devotion to excessive elaborateness of style and action. It's a calculated brawler that not only minds its rules with painstaking diligence, but trusts its operator with how to best interpret them. The delicate engineering of merciless destruction has long been Platinum Games' modus operandi, and Bayonetta 2 is the purest and most potent declaration of their intentions.
Deception's always been an implicit facet of Dark Souls' architecture. With Crown of the Ivory King, it steps out of the shadows and transitions to a palpable theme. Paired with Crown of the Sunken King and Crown of the Old Iron King, it's enough to wish From Software could extend Dark Souls II's life with interminable rounds of additional content.
Skylanders Trap Team for PS4 is better in almost every way than its predecessors. If you have the money, Trap Team is worth every penny.
Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments delivers a good system for finding clues and solving murders with a complex clues and deductions system, plenty of puzzles to be had, and good mysteries to boot. The gameplay can be a bit repetitive at times, however if your willing to overlook that, it can turn into quite a mystery game. The visuals and art are sure to impress, and you can expect hours of content from this title, all with a unique moral system to track how you compare to others who play the game.
Neverending Nightmares revels in tension and survives through conservation of its primal resource. Unfolding it exposes a weird paradox; a game that actively campaigns against a traditional desire to play it, and yet seeks to capture attention all the same. What Neverending Nightmares sacrifices in playability, however, it gains raw and relatable emotion.
Sprawling, addictive, and finding a potent balance between suspense and fun, Wasteland 2 fits great in any PC gamer's collection.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an impassioned monument to its prestigious foundations. A product-of-assembly depiction makes for an idle assessment, but it's difficult not to look at Ethan Carter and see narrative guidance from Twain and Vern, Lovecraft's proclivity for the destructive supernatural, and Chandler's pulpy detective fiction. The tale Ethan Carter ultimately aches to tell isn't as complex or natural as its influences, but it finds ample success in directing a curious story through an interactive ensemble.
All in all, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a beautiful third-person action title that has deep role-playing game elements embedded firmly into it. You also get enormously detailed and deep environments, with unique enemies to populate it. This is simply a superb game.
Super Smash Bros. 3DS is a wonderful addition to the series featuring great cameos, a return to strong fighting mechanics, and best of all, a viable, portable Smash Bros. experience. Though the game will soon be released on the Wii U, the 3DS version is the way to go for the various single player modes and unlockable content (though the multiplayer mode is great here as well). Fans of the series should pick this game up as waiting for the Wii U version may be a difficult task.
This title is a blast. The whole "festival" thing just works. It sets a fun vibe without coming off as silly or childish. The racing is serious business, but there are plenty of ways to play that aren't so ardently competitive. The simple act of choosing a car from the garage and aimlessly driving in no particular direction is one of the more enjoyable things I've done on my new Xbox so far. A dizzyingly long list of events to complete seems is counterbalanced with the truncated Road Trip campaign. Online Freeroam offers plenty of stuff to do, and can be a great time with the right cast of characters. And the audiovisual package is a stunning piece of work that can take you by surprise with its majesty every now and again. Horizon 2 is a very good racing game with strong principles, entertaining modes, a ton of events, and an envious catalog of vehicles.
Overall this game does what it set out to do, and it does it well, giving both veterans of the series and new players a chance to experience some of the original magic of Total Annihilation, while keeping it fresh and extensive enough to create new battles and new war stories on a galactic scale to tell around the Real-Time Strategy campfire.
Slight changes to the visuals and overall presentation paired with slightly frustrating teammate AI yield roughly the same experience as FIFA 14. Of the new features, none are significantly impactful on the core gameplay experience. If you are a diehard FIFA fanatic, you will not be disappointed. And if you are new to the series, FIFA 15 is not a bad entry point.
Hyrule Warriors delivers a wonderful Legend of Zelda action game with a large cast of familiar characters, identifiable worlds, a great upgrade/leveling system and endless amounts of action. It's far from a perfect game, especially in regards to controls and repetitiveness, but it's much better than expected. It has certainly raised the bar for the Dynasty Warriors series in regards to design.
Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm Curtain Call is a fun little game that tries to mix in some pseudo-RPG elements into a rhythm game, which sort of works and sort of doesn't. Some of the design decisions, such as having to unlock the settings or the ability to unlock DLC, as well as what seems to be every button in the game seem a bit counter-intuitive, though that may give you a sense of progression in a weird way. Fans of the Final Fantasy games (especially the soundtracks) will enjoy this game, fans of Rhythm games can enjoy this game, and fans of both may thoroughly enjoy this game, especially longtime fans who have played many of the games and have a fondness towards the soundtracks.
Destiny isn't a perfect game, but it's a perfect gaming experience. The girth of the planets, the endless exploration, a fun co-op element and a strong PvP structure has this series on the right track. I can't wait to see what else the future expansions have in store for the overall body of work.
NHL 15 may not be as feature rich as its last generation predecessor. But what it does offer is the most visually striking hockey experience available. The strong core gameplay for which the series has been lauded returns with slight tweaks to the physics. Everything looks great, plays well and feels like the NHL hockey I love. Even the tricky teammate AI can be addressed via settings tweaks. Where NHL 15 disappoints, however, is in the trimmed features and modes. NHL 14's fully featured practice mode is now just a single skater on ice who gets to practice his shootout skills only. And that kind of change just seems silly. I mean, we're talking about practice, man. Practice. Not a game. Practice. Ultimately, I prefer a solid core gameplay experience to a wealth of modes built around dodgy game mechanics. And with EA's announced content update schedule, fans can expect to find more reasons to return to the title in the coming months.