The series is unable to render any of the visual imagination its source material practically begs for.
The world the game shares with its predecessors is detailed and bizarre in equal measure.
There are few greater thrills than discovering a new, powerful combo in Slay the Spire.
Season three of True Detective plays to the first season’s strengths, but it also feels like an admission of defeat.
Mutant Year Zero feels most of all like a promising start for something potentially greater.
Hitman 2 is a dense assassination sim bursting with possibility, tension, and wicked comedy.
Red Dead Redemption 2’s evocative, often beautiful sense of place exists insofar as it is still convenient to the player, which harms some of the desperation and hardship the game means to convey.
The game should feel wrong or disjointed with the conflicting elements it includes, but it all creates a strange, poignant, and often beautiful whole.
The game’s focus is less on world-building than the simple, straightforward pleasure of its main mechanics: puzzles and combat.
As much as this is a better, more confident game than Yakuza 6, the series still has plenty of room to grow.
Spider-Man’s mechanics feel fluid and satisfying enough to keep players engaged throughout the entire campaign.
The game’s more successful cases ask you to evaluate your definitions of things like mercy and humanity.
This Is the Police 2 never contemplates police brutality, wrongful arrests, or anything whatsoever about race.
What saves this tossed-off narrative is the way it, like every other aspect of the game, interacts with the destruction.
Rather than going for size in the character roster, Dontnod might have done better to shoot for complexity.
The game takes so much more than it gives, forgetting that a journey isn’t simply about the means of travel.
More than just a faithful recreation of an old subgenre, its greatest strength lies in its impeccable writing.
It pushes back hard against the sort of easy dominance over people so common to city-building games.
Extinction compensates for a lack of variety by treating every minor detail as a momentous occasion.
Because Yakuza 6 spends so much time tying the story into knots, a strong villain never emerges.