Randy Kalista
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Writing For
Gaming NexusLatest Reviews
Warsaw
Warsaw is World War 2's Darkest Dungeon. Excellent narrative beats hide under the gameplay rubble, telling the story of Poland's guerrilla fighters being turned into bullet sponges for Nazis.
Control
I haven't found a more binge-worthy single-player action game this year. Control is wonderfully built, smartly written, and already dying for its season pass content.
While interesting on paper, The Church in the Darkness is mostly just a collection of anti-capitalist audio logs blaring over harder-than-it-needs-to-be stealth gameplay. There's no love lost in this place.
I can’t say enough good things about Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. It’s a sucker punch aimed at all the bloated, morbidly obese space sims out on the market today. Yes, there’s room for them, too. But Outlaw distills the ‘90s space-combat and trading sim into a great-looking, great-playing game for a...
What goes down must come up. The Sinking City is more than the sum of its glitchy b-game parts. Balanced detective work makes up for shoddy gunplay. A gruff and well-realized cast makes up for brain-dead AI. This is unironically a highwater mark for both detective fiction and Lovecraftian Horror...
It took a few hours to get under my skin. But now that I've gotten into a rhythm with its post-apocalyptic horror-survivalist aspects, Days Gone puts on a good little self-serious road drama.
This isn't Call of Duty in the land of Swedish meatballs, it's Boston Dynamics in an IKEA-effect hunting sim. Come for the difficult robot fights, stay for the Arctic Circle sunsets. The technical issues will make you rage quit one day and then bring you back the next.
New Dawn adheres to Far Cry's by-the-numbers open-world formula that's reaching old age. In other words, "It's a good one of those kind of games."
Vane
Vane exists in an enormously stressed and jagged world of puzzle-platforming. Simply moving around feels rough and unfinished, and that's not always on purpose. If only Friend & Foe had more time to incubate its creation.
Gris
Beautiful 2D platformers are practically a meme when it comes to indie game development, but Gris still rises above its contemporaries. Artful in both its watercolor design and broad-strokes storytelling, Gris is a gentle reminder that good puzzle platformers can make you feel smart without smarting, and that being succinct...
Tetris Effect is the most optimistic game of the year. Plus, nobody saw it coming. It shouldn't be possible to say this, but this is the best Tetris has been in decades.
Original Sin 2 shakes your hand a little too hard when you first meet. It needs to relax until you get to know it better. It's endlessly surprising, with characters that lose their stiffness over time, in dialogues and battle logs that piece together a dangerous, thoughtful world. It's tough....
