There’s only two questions that matter: “Do you love Nintendo?” and “Do you enjoy hitting things ’til they go flying off into the stratosphere?”
There’s a good game buried here, and when they finally plant the headstone, the cause of death will be chiseled as “trying too hard.”
There’s no avatar here; it’s your hands causing the violence now, your eyes staring directly at victims, and you facing down being shot dead, run over, blown up, or falling from insane heights.
The glue holding it all together as more than just a stale repurpose of the previous games is the story.
That it only receives the slightest of graphical upticks is less a sign of laziness in porting the game to next gen so much as a testament to how well-crafted Sleeping Dogs was to begin with.
Gamers appear to be ready for developer ambition when it comes to not just the quality of the games, but how to play them.
Freak Show is an excuse for American Horror Story to literally let its freak flag fly higher and prouder than ever before.
The initial joy that comes from mashing buttons and watching Link and his cohorts slash down mindless scores of imps, goblins, lizardmen, wizards, and dragons gives way to a steadily increasingly pile of nitpicks when repeated over several hours.
Playing around in Bungie’s galaxy for its own sake is still just so undeniable and compulsive a draw that the disappointingly threadbare “why” starts fading into the background.
This is the truer definition of a mature title. This is what happens when first-person shooters strive to be more than a vulgar display of power.
The fundamentals of Second Son are present, obviously restricted to Fetch’s flashy Neon abilities, which is fine since Neon was the most free-flowing and fun of Delsin’s stolen powers to begin with.
At least it has a solid core of morbid humor that distracts one from the rest of the train wreck.
It very much tries to reach perfection with the tools Naughty Dog and the industry as a whole, really, are all very well aware of.
On paper, Advanced Warfare is the best kind of step forward, taking any semblance of our modern world out of the equation.
There’s definitely a conversation to be had about the right and wrong of what the player is asked to do in order to get off of the space station.
Jeremy Snead’s doc comes off more as a commercial for a grand, overarching product that isn’t finished being developed.
Valiant Hearts isn’t necessarily lacking in quality or polish, just that perhaps we’re looking at one game that feels like it wants to be three.
We’re meant to believe that solving the mystery of the Bell Killer would redeem Ronan and allow him the peace to move on, but nothing about the game gives the impression that he deserves it.
The profiling system isn’t as deep as expected, but still offers remarkably strong and subtly creepy world-building away from the main plot.
Someone will likely prove this statement wrong, but there hasn’t been a game that’s run this far with the storybook conceit, and if there is, it’s a near-certainty it wasn’t executed with this much beauty, heart, and care.