Latest Reviews
ScreamRide
Screamride’s three jobs allow you to play and pass its thrillride levels in a variety of ways, but I reached the greatest satisfaction when I discovered the perfect way to traverse a track, build a coaster, or demolish a string of buildings in ScreamRider and Demolition Expert modes. Although career...
There’s essentially no limit to how good you can get at OlliOlli 2. Just when you’ve mastered beating levels in a single combo and timing every single grind and manual perfectly, there are a host of other mechanics to integrate into your skating to bump that high score even further...
Aaru’s Awakening is a beautifully stylized game with some interesting ideas that are clearly designed to challenge hardcore platforming fans. However, it’s lack of accessible controls or incentive for laboring through arduous stages, combined with the sloppy presentation of its story suggests that Aaru woke up a little prematurely.
When you’re in the midst of a tense, down-to-the-last-read match in the middle of a battlefield erupting with explosions, Dead or Alive 5: Last Round is great. When that fight is compromised by out-of-place barely legal schoolgirls in bikinis or a game-crashing bug, it’s decidedly less than great, and the...
Homeworld: The Remastered Collection does a fantastic job of polishing up and reintroducing these formerly hard-to-experience classic real-time strategy games. Over the 15 years since it first came out, these exciting, large-scale space battles haven’t been matched, much less surpassed, and its outstanding atmosphere and story can teach modern game...
Hand of Fate takes familiar elements from collectible card games, action RPGs, and choose-your-own adventure games and jumbles them all together to create an experience that generally feels unique and fun. Isolated technical glitches, an overly generous dealer, and simple combat dampen some of the fun, but the novelty of...
Sunless Sea
Sunless Sea gives you a wonderful world to explore and packs it with memorable written vignettes. Its permadeath flirts with repetitiveness, and combat is disappointing, but it’s far from running out of ways to inspire one more trip back across the Unterzee.
The basic conflict at the heart of The Order: 1886 is that considerations for a cinematic approach are prioritized above the needs of basic gameplay. Its best aspects are its stunning looks, atmosphere, and style – which are truly fantastic – and entertaining fiction. But the shallow, slow, and generic...
Kick & Fennick
Kick & Fennick is a pleasant surprise in a crowded platforming field. The obstacles present--portals, bounce pads, zip ramps--have all been seen before, but their implementation is anything but stale. It's a spartan world with only the barest hint of a story, and the futuristic environment looks the same from...
The Escapists
As a mix of sandbox, puzzle and open-world action, The Escapists offers something fresh and entertaining. The nature of what it’s simulating leads to some annoyances and careful handwaves to keep things light, but with both enough space between those moments to feel like I was actually producing my own...
Evolve
It’s rare for a big multiplayer game like Evolve to feel so considered and intelligent. Everything – skills, mechanics, and design choices – seem to interlock in a way that’s both natural and purposeful. That it’s so mechanically rich and still conveys the raw energy and fun of duking...
Attila is an adept refinement of Rome 2. From the desperately paced campaign map down to each individual skirmish on the ash-specked earth, it’s a cleaner, better thought-out experience. There are more impactful decision to make, and better utilities with which to make them. The political systems are still some...
