It’s easy to imagine Suda Gôichi out there taking notes on what this game has accomplished.
Its occasional pizzazz, including Shoji Meguro’s blissful J-pop soundtrack, is undermined by how hard it often is to actually look at the game.
The game’s attempts to distinguish itself from other first-person shooters ultimately feel superficial.
The scarcity of the game’s puzzles is frustrating, because, slight repetition aside, every one of those puzzles is cleverly designed.
It retreads the same ground of the prior games’ fetch-quest-driven, backtracking-filled action-adventuring.
The world of the game may be small, but it brims with a weird sense of life.
The game reveals its brilliance by constantly and subtly reconfiguring the emotions behind erasure.
There’s considerable joy to poking at the edges of its ingenious interlocking systems to see what happens.
The game’s campiness doesn’t extend to the shark combat, which flounders as a result of it mostly hinging on button-mashing.
Saints Row: The Third is a game with an identity crisis, both within the context of its story and outside of it.
It has just enough bells and whistles to suck you into its world, but not enough to compel your immersion.
Right now, we’ll take whatever form of escapism we can get.
Its characters already lacked personality, and the 3D makeover is mostly successful at bringing that deficiency into sharper relief.
This is a game where the triumphs come from tiny marvels of efficiency and careful planning rather than kinetic skill.
For Cloudpunk, hardship is merely the wallpaper for a pretty yet thinly conceived gaming experience.
It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.
Moving Out is a fast-paced, arcade-style co-op that leans into carefree, chaotic, over-the-top gameplay.
The game flips the script on the very idea of nostalgia being the only guiding creative force behind a remake.
Greatness is about the way a game can capture the imagination regardless of genre or canonical status.
After a while, the game inadvertently becomes about the cost and upkeep of civilization.
The game offers a refreshing focus on its sense of place rather than ease of play.