This week’s relentlessly bleak Homeland finally catches the audience up on what Nicholas Brody has been up to.
The game still tells a beautiful, gripping tale, thanks in part to the voice and motion-capture performances of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, making 2011’s L.A. Noire, acclaimed for its facial graphics, seem decades old.
You can remodel a bathroom, but you can’t remodel a human being; intangible things, like reputations, are not so easily mended.
The game expends all of its invigorating freshness within the first 10 minutes, and what follows is more of a tedious and waterlogged slog.
Like Dana Brody’s storyline, Peter Quinn’s mission is also lazily dramatic and lacks subtlety.
With a deeper roster of cards, a wider variety of missions, and a better balance to the existing cards, it might feel like a complete game.
Puppeteer’s creative even in the intermission between levels, where you can review the back stories of the various heads you’ve collected or read Edward Gorey-ish picture books that fill you in on the supporting cast.
FX’s Sons of Anarchy seems more intent on pushing the envelope with more and more exploitive violence than anything else.
By the end of this two-to-three-hour journey, it isn’t just the house that’ll seem lived-in, as the characters are equally realized and relatable.
The game is far from sleepy, and as with previous installments, Dream Team takes on the properties of its new hero. It’s a more confident, more attractive, and more powerful RPG.
Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded is both the longest and shortest two hours of your life.
This clumsy attempt at RPG matchmaking throws together a super-casual dating simulation with a sluggish battle system.
Once a fleet-footed and hot-blooded gothic drama, True Blood hasn’t aged gracefully, and instead grown long in the tooth.
The Underhell atmosphere has some brilliant set pieces, from a carnivorous train that wants to make you its passengers forever, to a menagerie of angry hybrids in the middle of the Yggradasil Zoo.
Throw in the cloaking melee enemies and shielded elite agents, and the game feels like one long riff on Mass Effect 3, which isn’t terrible if you loved grinding through that game’s co-op multiplayer.
While it lasts, the game is a challenging blast, even if the story offers only the skin-deep and all-too-familiar choice of siding with a potentially mad scientist to defend and use the Anomaly for mankind.
Monaco’s tagline reads “What’s yours is mine,” but it’s fairly clear that these levels are designed for the robust co-op, in which up to four thieves must combine their powers to clear each heist.
While you may lose days of your life to the lengthy dungeons and the micromanagement of your demonic menagerie, you won’t lose your soul.
The attentive design has also yielded a story as daring as the original’s, though the focus has shifted from a cautionary tale of unchecked capitalism to an alternative world of segregation, class warfare, and religious fanaticism.
This handheld release is meant to tide hardcore fans over until the next console release with some too-familiar gameplay and the tidying up of the retconned mythology.