Civilization: Beyond Earth is, in many senses, the next logical step forward in a series that has always been about celebrating the human drive to understand, control, and expand our environment.
This is Call of Duty coming to terms with itself—pushing and pulling between social responsibility and the joy of instinctual, itchy trigger-fingered chaos. Not since Modern Warfare has an entry to the series felt much more than casually disinterested in humanity.
This War of Mine manages to convey an important message very well. By turning the player into an active participant in the cutthroat rationale of life as an ordinary person attempting to survive a warzone, it encourages a level of empathy only possible through interaction. Instead of simply hearing the stories of people who suffer unimaginable hardship as civilians during war, the audience is asked to inhabit these narratives. When our choices became their choices—as completely awful as they may be—we can better understand the ground-level tragedies taking place across the globe at this moment. 11 bit Studios' greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.
Leviathan often feels more like a short novel than it does a traditional videogame.
Resident Evil HD Remaster . . . achieves the same sense of lingering horror as its source material while simultaneously making the entire experience easier for modern audiences to appreciate.
Chrysalis, Life Is Strange's debut episode, introduces a fascinatingly weird tone where the ordinary is coupled with the bizarre.
The end result is something that feels like little more than the finished product of a well-oiled entertainment machine—a safe appeal to a mass audience. This is unfortunate since there is genuine joy to be had in simply navigating Techland's fictional city. If the same attention was paid to narrative development and visual design as has obviously gone into the player character's movement, Dying Light's world would be much more inviting.
When the pieces come together as they're meant to, Evolve is satisfying in a bone-deep kind of way.
There's a great urge to celebrate what Type-0 is trying to do. There's a temptation to laud the concept of a series best known for simple fantasy making an effort to grapple with the seriousness of a topic of which it has skirted the significance for so long. But Type-0 shows that Final Fantasy, despite its best efforts, probably doesn't know how to grow up in the way it wants to—that it can only grasp at greater dramatic impact even as its battle systems are further refined, its attempts to dig something out of the ancient muck of a subject as heavy as war itself constantly curtailed by concessions to the iconography of its past.
Wrong Number, more than a direct continuation, is an expansion and affirmation of Hotline Miami's themes.
As interesting as exploring the ramifications of [the main character's] time-manipulation abilities are here, the most resounding moments are those centred on less fantastic issues.
None of this is anything like progress—Westerado isn't exploring new frontiers when it comes to genre work—but the romance inherent to the game's emphasis on freedom sometimes comes close to overpowering a bitter remembrance of the very real history it cribs from.
Needless to say, the 2013 release of Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto V generated a great deal of excitement.
MachineGames' latest take on Wolfenstein is a very good shooter that is only a few missteps away from being, like its predecessor, a truly great one.
Life Is Strange has already proven itself to be capable of making an interesting story out of its premise, but it's in this third episode that it has begun to develop a real level of confidence in its narrative.
Not a Hero's ultimate statement is a brutally cynical one, but its political nihilism is always portrayed with such glee and good cheer that the unease is hard to feel until the game is shut down.
A certain type of player will find a lot to enjoy in simply puzzling out their location and trekking toward the objectives.
The hand of [Her Story's] developer never intrudes far enough to spoil the basic thrill of solving a narrative puzzle completely on one's own.
There's the outline of a great game one whose aesthetic would likely attract audiences young and old—but it only ever appears in glimpses.
A Knight to Remember manages to capture the spirit of its predecessors without ever feeling like an empty exercise in nostalgia.