The faster it moves, the better it plays.
The game works the kind of narrative miracles the medium has no excuse not to follow suit on.
God of War doesn’t so much suggest its ready-to-rumble predecessors as it does a more forgiving Dark Souls.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice’s strongest sequences mirror specific physical symptoms or psychological fears.
When Darksiders II sticks to the actual essentials of the main story and not its so-called Deathinitive features, it’s a solid action-adventure-RPG hybrid.
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.
The game still tells a beautiful, gripping tale, thanks in part to the voice and motion-capture performances of Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe, making 2011’s L.A. Noire, acclaimed for its facial graphics, seem decades old.
Star Trek is plagued by bugs, monotonous co-op/single player gameplay, and flat, unexpressive graphics.
Defense isn’t nearly as important as a strong and constant offense, through which you can accumulate the AP necessary to trigger those killing moves.
Asura’s Wrath is basically a series of cutscenes that the player inputs commands to dictate outcomes, with occasional third-person sequences wedged in for some better-late-than-never variety.
The game wants you to play around with different combos; in fact, it allows you to use a shield, a primary weapon, and a secondary weapon, even though you’ve only got two hands.
The most interesting thing about the game is its JRPG-influenced fetish for opaque systems.
Aliens invade, blah blah blah, gruff-and-tough soldiers, yada yada yada, buried superweapon, hurf durf derp, terrified civilians, etc.
Between its quarrelsome banter, over-the-top goriness, and homages to its 2D roots, the game wisely keeps matters tongue-in-cheek outrageous.
Ultimately, the main selling point here is wielding Shadow as a weapon, and it’s a gimmick whose implementation is frustratingly rudimentary.