Imagine a roller coaster that stops for maintenance every 30 feet and doesn’t allow you to exit, even after you’ve already been around the track a few dozen times.
The story crafted by Tales isn’t just a fine Borderlands sequel, but one of the most enjoyable sci-fi adventure stories in recent memory.
In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the action set pieces come first and the narratively satisfying reasons to do them second.
The aesthetic of the game is immaculate, stark yet beautiful, suggesting what a Fast and the Furious might look like as helmed by Michael Mann.
This spectacle is impressive on its own merits, but it spins the story’s wheels for way too long.
It isn’t quite the game to finally thrust Assassin’s Creed forward into new territory, but it’s the one to point the series at true north for the first time in years.
This is the best kind of remaster: a lovingly crafted technical update that’s also a master class on how a developer can evolve ideas.
It’s an experiment that acts as a deconstruction and overjoyed celebration of everything Super Mario Bros.
It asks us to buy Max as a wasteland messiah whose life consists of spending his most sane years playing fetch.
Worst of all, unlocking the new monsters involves trekking through the tedious campaign over and over again, grinding for experience.
It’s not the polishing of the old that makes it worthy of the current gen, but how far the game is willing to present a twist on mythology.
It’s the same brick wall of a problem Netherrealm Studios has been running into since Mortal Kombat vs. DC.
Even with all the gadgets, all the exhilaration of success, its greatest achievement is in making it feel like it just might not be enough.
The comedic lengths the game goes to make the series’s trademark wanton cruelty palatable is impressive.
Season three of Orange Is the New Black breaks the cycle the previous two established of creating an obvious antagonist.
Two lackluster RPGs slapped together with a basic matching game, sans any gotta-catch-’em-all glee.
The film lets Marty and Doc honestly and truly understand each other for the first time in the series.
Even the zombie material, which is still painfully boring and overdone conceptually, manages a few surprises.
The part of the game that matters is an impressive romp for anyone whose inner adolescent is looking for a cheap, satisfying, bloody thrill.
This isn’t just a nostalgic copy of the games of the medium’s youth, but also a fever dream of what the 8-bit era was capable of.