Sadly, even loading an MP3 of ‘90s favorite “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows didn’t make any of these four music mini-games and passive experiences any less boring or more bearable. If my friends came over to check out my new $400 VR headset, Harmonix Music VR is the last thing I’d want to show them.
NBA Live 14 marks the return of the once-excellent basketball sim, but that excellence is long gone.
It's all such a disappointment. I very much wanted to like Lucky, because the Xbox could use a decent answer to Nintendo in the 3D platformer genre. Unfortunately, Super Lucky's Tale definitely isn't it.
I still love Telltale's take on the Bat-verse, but the remaining episodes of The Enemy Within have an uphill climb to get this season back on track.
Carmageddon: Max Damage feels like it was designed in and for the year 1999, which on paper is a noble goal when trying to revive a franchise. Unfortunately, in practice it just doesn’t work, instead reminding us that time moves on. Max Damage is a collection of ideas that looked good on paper and sounded good in its Kickstarter pitch, but in practice it would only have been an acceptable sequel if it’d come out in 1999.
I badly wanted Beyond Eyes to use its attractively whitewashed look and novel, visually limited ideas to tell a much more moving story whose empathetic lessons could've stayed with me long after the end credits rolled, but it didn't. Only its ending taps into this potential, and it's a shame the rest of its short playthrough time couldn't follow suit.
Alien: Isolation erases the memory of Colonial Marines, but it's still not the great Alien game we were hoping for.
Super Bomberman R’s multiplayer versatility and boss-filled story mode are laudable retreads of classic gameplay, but its depth and customizability are disappointing. By contrast, the aforementioned Bomberman Live was a brilliant, fully featured Bomberman for Xbox 360 that came out 10 years ago, and it only cost $10. It’s reasonable to expect a bit more from a $50 Bomberman game in 2017.
Though Black deserves credit for adding new puzzle mechanics along the way, it could've easily seen its 6-8 hour runtime chopped in half and still gotten its message across. That entire time I found myself wondering if, like Inside, Black would have anything to say. When I finally discovered its message at the end of the campaign, it did inspire me to look up the real-life issue it was drawing attention to and learn more about it. I applaud it for that. Sure, it could've done so with a bit more subtlety – it's a bit heavy-handed at the very end – but at least Black does have a point to make. It's just a shame that it wrapped that in a game that's so shamelessly and distractingly derivative.
Saints Row 3 is still as fun as it is crazy on the Switch, but be warned if you're going to play it on a TV.
The staples of Mirror's Edge remain refreshing and unique in the first-person genre in 2016, but Catalyst's attempts to keep up with the open-world Joneses don't always jive with its design strengths of movement and momentum. On top of that, muddy-looking console versions and a lame story filled with unlikable characters doom Mirror's Edge's return to fall short. I was so happy this game was being made, but in the end I'm just as disappointed in how it turned out.
Danger Zone is a simple and barebones game that manages to recapture some of the car-smashing action of the classic Burnout series, but not enough of the joy. Though Burnout's Crash mode was always the star of the show in those games, it turns out that Road Rage, Burning Lap, etc. defined Burnout just as much as Crash did, as well as its personality. Their absence here is felt deeply, though to Danger Zone's credit it's priced accordingly at just $13. As such, it's worth a look for Burnout veterans, as long as you calibrate your expectations appropriately.
Somerville has ties to modern legends Limbo and Inside, but it’s equally reminiscent of another Hall of Famer: Out of This World. The end result is a unique physics-based puzzle adventure that isn’t quite on the level of the games that inspired it, but is nevertheless an extraterrestrial nightmare worth exploring.
Gearbox's New Tales from the Borderlands successfully recaptures the charm and humor of Telltale's original adventure-game spinoff of the Borderlands first-person shooter series, but its attempts to stretch out the gameplay and the story don't fare as well.
Story isn't its strong suit, but the rest of The Ascent delivers a wonderfully realized cyberpunk world mixed with satisfying twin-stick gunplay to create an enjoyable action-RPG.
Cold War's quiet times are more memorable than the loud ones, even if the story's ambition outweighs its execution.
The "Saints Row The Third" part of Saints Row The Third Remastered is good. The "Remastered" part...not as much.
Much of Modern Warfare 2 has aged pretty well, and the remaster is very well-done, but the 2019 reboot casts a shadow.
Rebounding from a weak second episode, Batman: The Enemy Within's third episode restores my hopes that this season will turn out well. Major developments around Batman's big secret and strong interactions with Harley Quinn, Selina Kyle, and John make Fractured Mask work, right up until the extremely abrupt ending.
Part 1 of BioShock Infinite's story-centric DLC returns to Rapture but doesn't give you long to enjoy it.