Hitman’s mechanics translate well to a 007 experience, though they’re sadly watered down.
The game’s faithfulness to its brutal and campy source material isn’t enough to make up for a litany of bugs and problems.
Elden Ring is FromSoftware taming the monster they created by giving players the weapons and armor to endure it.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe isn’t just recycling old content and adding new dialogue to it.
Citizen Sleeper works very hard to ensure that it remains a story of perseverance rather than failure.
The line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it.
The fondly conceived open world of Ghostwire: Tokyo isn’t bustling with life but defined by its unnerving absence.
In this bursting-at-the-seams collection of over 350 handcrafted puzzles, you’ll need to think both inside and outside the box.
The Forgotten Land may not nail the world-building or plotting, but it’s not snoozing when it comes to Kirby’s transformations.
It’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls.
Tunic focuses on the most unexpected elements of its forerunners in order to reward players with a rapturous sense of discovery.
Triangle Strategy is structured to give you the maximum amount of struggle and conflict, and to never give you an easy way out.
WWE 2K22’s only major problems stem from the fact that it’s, well, a WWE game.
The game is devoted above all else to making the player believe that its world is worth saving and that its people are worth knowing.
Ice-Pick Lodge’s game is in direct conversation with the developer’s Pathologic series, and seems to serve as a kind of inverse to it.
Sifu is built on parrying and timing to a degree that can feel brutally difficult, if not outright inaccessible.
Consistently, the world of Dying Light 2: Stay Human overwhelms us in lockstep with the dazzlingly dense gameplay.
Rainbow Six Extraction hopes to evoke the sensation of battling the unknown, and that’s terrific when it comes to each alien encounter.
The game runs away from any grand moment of clarity, skipping over self-reflection and settling for the thrill of nostalgia.
The best video games of 2021 prove, if nothing else, that necessity is the mother of invention.
For all of its sense of genuine, thrilling speed in its mechanics, Solar Ash fails to muster any sense of accompanying narrative momentum.