Latest Reviews
My time at Portia is, first and foremost, a game about building, and I've had a great time doing it. From mining to taming wild llamas to dating, there’s a lot to do here, and I’m still discovering and unlocking new and usually interesting things. While each of its parts...
Slay the Spire takes some of the best parts of deckbuilding games, roguelikes, and dungeon crawlers and mixes them into a wholly new and extremely satisfying package. It encourages experimentation, gives you time to make mistakes, and will challenge you immensely as you navigate your way through floor after floor...
The Hong Kong Massacre is an intense and spectacular shoot-’em-up with a stylish slow-motion hook. While some corners have been cut in terms of its presentation and boss fights, those issues are easy to overlook when the core gunplay is so fiercely challenging, unashamedly violent, and relentlessly enjoyable.
Capcom did a fantastic job of resurrecting all the best parts of the classic Resident Evil 2 and making them look, sound, and play like a 2019 game. If you’re of the mind that the series had lost its way for a while there, this game is very much a...
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is a great-looking arcade flight combat game, and zipping over high-quality terrain trying to establish missile locks and evade pursuers can be a lot of fun. But the experience often gets weighed down by its weird and convoluted but persistent story and poor communication of...
I definitely had fun with Onimusha: Warlords, despite many of its mechanics and visuals aging poorly since 2001. A lot of my enjoyment comes from revisiting an old favorite, but there's not enough new stuff here to recommend this to someone new to the series. The save system, terrible animations,...
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes is a low point for the action franchise. While each of the game worlds try to introduce new mechanics, they all devolve into predictable fights with waves of bland enemies. Slicing through them with the Beam Katana isn’t as satisfying as before because of...
New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a broadly approachable and feature-rich platforming game. Toadette is a welcome addition to the roster for those after a more forgiving way to tackle some of the more challenging levels, and the inclusion of the New Super Luigi U mode extends its lifespan...
Insurgency: Sandstorm isn’t the prettiest shooter of 2018, but the places where it excels are the places that matter most. Its gunplay is superb, its arsenal is exemplary, and the maps and modes are serviceable enough to facilitate its memorably frantic and immersive FPS combat.
Below
I wanted to love Below for its amazing art, stellar sound design with echoing chambers and atmospheric music, and clever, inspired environmental storytelling. But their light isn’t bright enough to shine through all the darkness of the hunger, instant death, and corpse run mechanics, which actively get in the way...
Gris
Gris is, at times, a meditative, affecting exploration of complex emotions that uses its levels as a canvas for some of the most beautiful visual design in any platformer, backed by a fantastic score. At others, it’s a maddeningly simple and confusing game that lets its artistic ambitions run roughshod...
Artifact
Artifact is a challenging, deep, and surprisingly approachable card game that breaks many of the conventions I’ve come to expect from the genre. That mechanical bliss is complemented by countless Easter eggs and detailed lore, but I am starting to miss a more meaningful progression system to keep me engaged...
