Nicholas Friedman
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Writing For
CBRLatest Reviews
Of course, it's hard to review a title like this because of how ongoing it feels. It's Animal Crossing, plain and simple, but the best it has ever been. Thankfully, Nintendo plans to extend the game's legs with patched-in holiday events throughout the year -- simultaneously solving the famous "time travel" exploit and adding a bit of detriment to those who choose to use it anyway (seriously, it's awesome Nintendo left it in).
Overall, Luigi's Mansion 3 is a fantastic evolution for the spooky series, with developer Next Level Games learning from each and every bit of feedback on Dark Moon to elevate the series to AAA status. It's sweet, unsettling when needed and packed full of content. What more could you want from a game starring Green Mario?
Overall, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare makes a very solid case for renewed interest in the franchise. By playing into the nostalgia of the original series' characters, amping up the stakes in single player and bursting the door wide open for the multiplayer community, Modern Warfare re-asserts itself as a major player in the genre.
While nothing revolutionary Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a great example on how to tide fans over for an inevitable sequel. Bethesda has done this plenty with its other titles like Dishonored: Death of the Outsider or Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, and it's nice to see it continue. With the story revelations dropped by the time credits roll in Youngblood, we can only imagine what's coming next -- and we cannot wait.
In this case, the positives do really outweigh the negatives. Rage 2 is a strong shooter that tries its best to emulate the feeling of the more recent DOOM and Wolfenstein entries. It's story may be weak, but with a colorful, crazy open world and plenty of activities to sift through, its hard not to recommend this post-apocalyptic party. And honestly, its even better that it's single player-only game. We could always use more of those.
There is also downloadable content planned for the game, which only feels a little bit weird considering there are a number of characters you fight in the main story that aren't actually playable in the game. So, if they plan to sell us Cyrax or Sektor later, it feels just a bit shady to face fans to pay for them. Seriously, they have full move sets and everything.
That said, it's nice to see another iterative sequel from Ubisoft take things to the next level. In a shared-world space that includes games like Destiny and now Anthem, The Division 2 carves a lane for itself. It enhances mostly everything about the first game and plainly offers more of it. The game fixes the Dead Zone content to make its modes actually enjoyable without its forced cursed loot, offers a unique and incredible environment to explore in Washington D.C. and it mostly just ...
In addition to these two pillars is the game's online suite. Gone are the days of "For Glory" and "For Fun" from Smash 4. They've been replaced with some more straightforward options, including the ability to customize your "preferred rules" for solo and co-op online play, and a place to create custom "Battle Arenas" where you and your friends can join what is essentially a custom game and duke it out with others. The suite is pretty bare-bones, but if the community is strong, we could see ...