Saints Row: The Third is a game with an identity crisis, both within the context of its story and outside of it.
This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.
It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.
The game flips the script on the very idea of nostalgia being the only guiding creative force behind a remake.
The element of fear that Resident Evil is known for isn’t as fully baked into the mechanics of this remake as it could have.
The game speaks in specific and effective ways to the sheer exhaustion of living in perpetual strife.
The world here is littered with side missions out in the wild, and most of them amount to uninspired fetch quests.
Living in America as a kid with brown skin has never been harder, or more frightening, and the game is a harsh primer in that fact.
Fallen Order is powerful in ways that Star Wars hasn’t been in video game form in over a decade.
The most powerful statement the game winds up making is that work is worthwhile.
On the Nintendo system, the game will fare its absolute best with the uninitiated.
The brunt of the work here has gone into raising the game’s resolution and frame rate, and implementing higher quality assets all around.
This expansion marks a sea change for the series, from one that keeps players begging for scraps to one that sets players up for a feast.
It’s impressive how much the simplest acts here remain so gratifying hour after hour.
All that’s cool about flying a mech has been executed in the most leaden, user-unfriendly, nonsensical manner possible.
Gears 5 is the first time the series has made the brutality of its combat feel captivating and disturbingly intimate.
If you ask if something is possible for you or your Legion to do in Astral Chain, most of the time, the answer is yes.
From the second you power on the game, its entire toy chest is open to you, no strings attached.
As varied and intriguing as the game can get on a conceptual level, it outdoes itself in the minutiae of traversal and combat.
It’s not greed in this day and age to expect publishers to respect and preserve their history. At this point, it’s an artistic responsibility.