Latest Reviews
No flashy new features or buzzwords, just magnificent racing stemming from a refinement of Grid 1’s greatness.
A failed mission to an alien world is standard stuff for games, but the Lifeless Planet twist—the discovery of an old, abandoned Soviet outpost on that world—is a good one. What happened to this planet that was thought to be so full of life when your mission began 15 years...
I'm just trying to pivot the camera around when I accidentally hit E. Suddenly, I'm looking over the shoulder of a squad leader with the US Marine Corps. His rifle is following my cursor and WASD moves him around. Men of War: Assault Squad 2 is an RTS—so what the...
It’s fitting A Story About My Uncle seems to have lept from the silver screen, given it’s a game all about, well, leaping. There’s a touch of the Percy Jackson or Inkhart about its story in which a young boy inherits a magical jumping glove from his explorer uncle and...
Kero Blaster
Kero Blaster's chiptune soundtrack is a perfect analogue for the game itself: effortlessly upbeat and cheery one moment, dramatic or laid-back the next, but always sounding like it could've come from an NES if a composer had spent the past 25 years mastering its sound chip. Kero Blaster is a...
Detective games have always been difficult to pull off. Mysteries are about fluidity of meaning—intuition, third options, non-binary solutions to binary-seeming problems. Most games are binary by their nature; you're right or wrong, you win or you lose. In this regard, Murdered: Soul Suspect sets a high bar for itself....
Your career is slipping through your fingers, you can't afford to pay your rent, and the person you once thought would love you forever has walked out of your life. When things go so wrong so fast, it's human nature to obsess over what you could have done differently.
Watch Dogs
I'm racing a stolen motorcycle through a sprawling cityscape, cops wailing behind me in pursuit, when I suddenly smash into a car, shoot through the air like a missile, and slam face-first into a wall. Nothing new—I've done this many times, in many games.
Wolfenstein: The New Order has been made with love. This might not be obvious to you when you are giving a Nazi both barrels as the world around you collapses in a shower of bone and blood and concrete. It might not seem like the most pertinent observation to make...
Tropico 5
Frankly, I am not the man you want running your country. Over the course of my extended presidency I’ve smuggled rum into a prohibition America, sided with Axis powers during both World Wars, systematically stripped away the rights of my citizens, and assassinated a grandma for opposing my regime. I’m...
Transistor
Transistor begins with a woman, a dead body, a talking sword, and a dying city. Red is a singer with no voice, trapped in a sprawling digital metropolis being erased by white robot programs called the Process. Byte by byte, block by block, Cloudbank is becoming nothingness in the shape...
