The current video game landscape is a very different one than its most public face.
The efforts of the player don’t always sync up with the rewards that the game itself produces.
Steeped in history but not bogged down by it, Ōkamiden is a grandiose adventure that also manages to remain chipper and airy.
In the game’s singe-player “Path of Champions” mode, which is essentially a lame ladder-climb through 10 increasingly difficult opponents, you’ll eventually find your attacks being countered more and more often.
You slash or blast your way around, Lego bits explode sometimes, you collect stuff to unlock other stuff, you get your LucasArts fix.
Yakuza 4 is 20 mini-games rolled into one and glossed over with a rampant action-RPG and hyper-stylized crime theater.
We were thrilled to interview the founder of Gaijin Games via the appropriately detached-yet-humanistic medium of instant messenger.
If familiarity occasionally breeds disenchantment, the game’s design is so sharp as to at least refine clichés.
So how does someone old enough to have voted for Paul Tsongas end up playing the new Pokémon game?
A first-person-shooter that delivers an updated version of the America-under-siege fiction of Red Dawn.
The in-ring dynamics have been polished rather than rewritten, with Fight Night Champion embracing a dual analog control scheme with even more conviction than 2009’s Round 4.
Consider the Rango game your stay of execution. At least until Cars 2.
Gaijin’s titles have featured fun chiptunes sounds, but the music in Bit.Trip Flux has a warmth that’s new for them.
And so it goes that Bulletstorm is an unfocused and repetitive mess, never completely succeeding in anything it attempts—excess without abundance, gravitas without weight.
Even the most graphically snobbish would concede that de Blob 2 is a candy-colored treat for the eyes, made even more so on an HD display.
The deceptive difficulty is one of the many elements that make this gleefully excessive brawler so easy to love.
If you just want more of what you got in BCR, this isn’t going to fully satisfy, but it won’t crush your dreams the way some Capcom sequels have.
Reinventing the wheel is no prerequisite to success, and in terms of its cacophonous sound design and gorgeous, fluid visuals, Killzone 3 is first-rate.
LittleBigPlanet 2’s visuals with beautifully rendered environments and enhanced liquid and particle effects
For the racing genre, Glacier 3: The Meltdown is not a game-changing game.
On paper, it should be ideal, and yet whenever I play I find myself feeling surly rather than delighted.