PCWorld's Reviews
Narrative is the most sophisticated video game of recent years, blurring the genres of horror, psychological thriller and art house in an artistic way and never playing it safe, but always taking full creative risks. A masterpiece.
Phantom Liberty is CD Projekt RED’s masterpiece. Not only is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty graphically easily three generations ahead of the entire industry and redefines how we experience video games with pathtracing, it’s also written even more thrillingly and staged even more explosively. Anyone who doesn’t enjoy this several times in different play styles has never loved video games. A clear must-play.
Bethesda has finally landed another hit. Starfield is the space RPG epic we’ve been wanting for so long. It has the incredible expansiveness and variance in design of No Man’s Sky mixed with the dialogue depth and creative quests of Fallout or even Mass Effect. The only thing that might bother some people is the heavy reliance on fast travel and that many planets only make sense when you build bases and production facilities there.
Top Gun: Maverick certainly won’t put as many demands on your time as, say, Elden Ring, but it’s absolutely worth spending a couple of hours in it. And when the electronic guitar of the original Top Gun theme kicks in, it’s like returning to the 1980s for an hour or two.
[Bethesda] hammered and hammered and hammered and finally forged Fallout 76 into not only a better game, but one that deserves a second chance—from me, from you, and from all the naysayers.
Maybe it will win me over yet. It’s running out of time though.
As someone who’s already sold on VR, I think Alyx is a hell of a good time. I put in four or five hours straight on Saturday (thanks to Dramamine) and few VR games manage to hold my attention that long. But I don’t think it’s the revolutionary new experience that people might expect, particularly people who owned a Vive or a Rift and have been living in this future for a while.
Doom Eternal kicks ass. It's smarter than it looks, faster than it looks, and somehow even more fun than it looks. A triumph—except for the platforming.
the Wisps is more than the sum of its parts. Is it just another Metroid homage, one among many? Absolutely. I think it’s one of the best-playing, sure, but it’s still well-trod territory of late.
Above all, Kentucky Route Zero is an argument that games can be more. That argument isn’t nearly so revolutionary now as it was in 2011 when development began, or 2013 when the first act released. We’ve (thankfully) made some decent progress in the years since. People bought Kentucky Route Zero, and those people did go start their proverbial bands.
Jedi: Fallen Order borrows liberally from other games, but a strong supporting cast, clever level design, and a cute little droid companion make Respawn's Star Wars story more than the sum of its parts.
Need for Speed: Heat is probably the best series reboot EA's put out this generation, though it arrives just as the open-world racing formula is running out of gas.
Planet Coaster was already excellent at release, but an entire game’s worth of content has been built atop it in the ensuing years.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare tries to be a serious commentary on present-day conflicts, but is mostly just another Call of Duty game by nature of the series's longstanding blind spots.
While it bears surface-level similarities to Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's created a deeper and more meaningful role-playing experience in The Outer Worlds.
Gears 5 still feels like a series in need of an identity, but a more charismatic lead and experiments with open-world structure hold promise for the future—even if they don't quite pay off now.
Overall I really enjoyed Man of Medan though and I’m looking forward to replaying it—and to whatever comes next for the series, as it’s pitched as an anthology.
Control is the culmination of Remedy's entire oeuvre to-date, pairing a top-tier action game with a dizzyingly dense and layered story about the Federal Bureau of Control, and the everyday horrors within. It's so good, you might even stop asking for Alan Wake 2.
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an impossibly ambitious game, attempting to summarize the whole of human evolution into the span of a few hours—and succeeding to a surprising degree.
Dinosaur-soldiers, character customization, and strong storytelling help Age of Wonders: Planetfall get over the early-game onboarding hurdles and micromanagement woes.