Javy Gwaltney
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Game InformerLatest Reviews
Ion Fury is loud. From its introductory level, packed with hooded transhumanist cultists for you to mow down with your handy revolver, all the way to the epic showdown that marks its end, this is a first-person shooter with no patience for realism or a slow pacing. Ion Fury (formerly called Ion Maiden and inspired by Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior) is a glorious pixelated playground for you to run around with high-powered weaponry, reducing armies of monsters and henchmen to goo, as you search for countless secrets tucked away at its fringes. It’s a hell of a time.
MachineGames’ mainline Wolfenstein titles have both taken risks, either endearing or repulsing gamers with a focus on challenging, resource-fraught gameplay as well as a narrative that glues together aching emotional trauma with slapstick pulp. Youngblood is a side-story that opts for something different than what’s come before by embracing spongier combat, skill trees, cosmetics, and even live-service aspects like daily challenges. These smart changes make Youngblood an immensely enjoyable co-op first-person shooter about bashing in Nazi skulls.
My Friend Pedro is a game about finding a particular moment. Usually, you’re upside down and falling in slow motion, watching as the bullets from your pistol ricochet off the broad side of a frying pan and zoom toward a foe’s skull. In these instances, Pedro’s systems come together in bloody harmony, letting you conduct a goofy and violent symphony of bullets, dodges, and even the occasional punt of a decapitated head. However, the sheer amount of effort it takes to reach these moments of glory often makes the enterprise more trouble than it’s worth.
Over the past few years, medieval-themed melee games have been gaining popularity. The multiplayer-focused Mordhau struts onto a field crowded by titles like For Honor, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. With its intriguing combination of realistic combat and kooky physics-based chaos, Mordhau stands out among its peers and in the entire contemporary multiplayer landscape.
Horror games are often loud and immediate when it comes to the shocks they deliver. Even the more restrained of the genre’s offerings, like Soma and Amnesia, often have indestructible hunters that consistently instill smaller jolts of fright pursuing you. Observation is different, trading pulse-pounding scares for a sense of creeping fear. You play a space station’s artificial intelligence in the aftermath of a disaster, and this angle on puzzles and exploration produces a unique kind of horror – one that takes the time it needs to tell an ambitious story without interruption, letting players marinate in its lake of dread before unveiling the terrors at its core.
Some games like to take their time and introduce you to their worlds and characters, doing the necessary legwork to draw you in and make you feel invested. Other games prefer to show you what they’re all about from the get-go, and Ape Out is definitely the latter. You begin in a cell. You break out. Your job is to make it across each procedurally generated maze while fending off attacking soldiers. This is the whole game – and it’s an utter delight.
Leaving the past behind can be tricky. With Titanfall, the team at Respawn Entertainment built its legacy on the concept of titans, massive robots that beat the gears out of one another on a raging battlefield. Titanfall 2 also endeared itself to a huge number of players because of its single-player campaign, which devotees adored just as much as genre staples Half-life, Halo, and Modern Warfare. With the newly released (and free-to-play) Apex Legends, the developer is throwing most of its legacy to the wayside to put its own spin on gaming’s biggest trend.
In Return of the Obra Dinn, you play an insurance inspector investigating an abandoned merchant ship to determine what happened to the crew. Armed with only a notebook and a handy device called a Memento Mori (which is capable of turning back time to the moment of someone’s death), your job is to run through the fates of the 60 people who once called the ship home. While this premise seems ripe for spooky thrills, Obra Dinn leans away from horror. Instead, it presents a quality puzzler that plays like an ambitious, surrealistic version of Clue.
In Monster Hunter, you quickly learn to treat the quiet moments of preparation with the same seriousness as the hunt itself. Taking a trip to the market to buy potions or scarfing down a stat-boosting meal might be what separates a close-call victory from a brutal defeat. Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate offers more than enough thrilling challenges to test the skills of tactical-minded players. Generations Ultimate is a Switch remaster of the dense 3DS title from 2016, presenting players with systems that take hours to learn. For dedicated monster slayers, deep rewards await as you carve pieces from your fallen foes and craft the fantastic armor and weapons that fuel this engrossing adventure.
Poor Kazuma Kiryu. Everybody’s favorite Japanese gangster with a heart of gold just can’t catch a break. A year after the explosive and tragic events of the previous game, this second entry finds him and his adopted daughter Haruka spending their days in melancholy peace. A violent clan dispute brings a retired Kiryu back into the fold to help settle things between the crime families in Kamurocho. However, events rapidly spiral out of control and our hero must confront a massive, looming threat the only way he knows how: with his fists. Kiwami 2, a remake of Yakuza 2, utilizes the standout elements of its predecessors while cutting away most of the flaws to create one of the best Yakuza games yet.