Separate Ways is no longer a superfluous extra because of all of these astute changes. With its focus on replayability, upgrades, and unique encounters, this expansion more deeply understands what makes Resident Evil 4 Resident Evil 4 and has all the unpredictability of the remake. But unlike the remake, Capcom couldn't just maintain the essence of what was already there because the original Separate Ways was so underwhelming. Instead, it deftly rebuilt Ada's side story and turned it into an integral part of the Resident Evil 4 remake.
With an inconsistent story, total absence of scares, and clunky combat, Final Transmission makes for a shallow last gasp of air for The Callisto Protocol. This new franchise has been lost in space since launch and an onslaught of patches and DLC hasn’t made it any less of a disappointment. Final Transmission just highlights what was already bad about The Callisto Protocol, and ensures that it has ended as poorly as it began.
Like its protagonist, The Surge 2 is built from disparate parts from other things, but unlike its protagonist, the game ends up being a boorish abomination that can’t properly combine the various elements that it has directly lifted from other sources. It’s not only one of the worst Souls-likes; it’s also an awful game above all else that should be sent straight to the scrap heap.
With such a lackluster suite of systems, samey objectives, awful single-player missions, and underwhelming demon gameplay, Evil Dead: The Game is unlikely to live long enough to get a vacation down to Jacksonville and more likely to be dead by daylight.
Between its sticky brawling mechanics, repetitive level design, and extremely low difficulty, Hellboy Web of Wyrd simply feels like an unfinished game that was early on its journey to greatness. There’s a heft to its combat, yet the controls aren’t nearly snappy enough, and it’s too easy to be engaging. The striking art design means its worlds look nice, but they’re made up of the same rooms and hallways. Incomplete or not, it utterly fails to realize what could have been and only continues Hellboy’s video game curse.
A remaster of this scope can’t give the game a better camera, liven up the combat, or spruce up the tacky pre-rendered backgrounds. It’s a shame too since somewhere in this game lies a decent core that could serve as a fantastic base for a more fully fledged remake willing to go beyond a simple touch-up.
For a game all about destroying the manifestations of sin, Darksiders 3 is guilty of a lot of them.
Narcosis' voice acting and writing might hold water but the outdated visuals, laughable horror, and poor gameplay weigh the game down and cause it to sink faster than a corpse with cinder block shoes.
Outside of some trippy, awe-inspiring vistas that throw Yara into space, the only impressive thing about this DLC is that it is the fourth time Ubisoft has failed to turn Far Cry 6 into a compelling roguelite.
With such a rushed story and sloppy mechanics, The Callisto Protocol betrays the legacy it was built upon.
“Disjunction” sounds like a made-up word, but it is used to describe something that has a “lack of correspondence or consistency,” according to the dictionary. And that is an apt description of this game that wears this word as its name. It attempts to blend two diametrically opposed gameplay systems — a novel concept — but does so sloppily, resulting in a disjointed, discordant, and disappointing experience that substitutes repetition for depth. Hotline Miami and Metal Gear deserve to be fused together to form some sort of upgraded cyborg, but the two have just been haphazardly fused into a mass of bloody flesh and rusty metal that’s better off left in either a biohazardous waste bag or the scrap heap.
As ironic as it seems, gliding around a tropical archipelago is a tiresome chore because of its empty world and how its core Soul Jumping power falls well short of its potential. Tchia may jump into souls, but Tchia, as a game, isn’t good enough to jump into any hearts.
Frey may “do magic” and “kill jacked-up beasts,” but she can’t overcome the mediocrity that surrounds her and spills out of her mouth at nearly every turn.
Unless the studio reverts its unwise focus on individuality and five-on-five play, then Overwatch 2 will likely remain a disappointing and fundamentally unfulfilling game that has frustratingly taken the place of its vastly superior predecessor.
Sniper Elite 5 already aims low by being only a small improvement upon its underwhelming predecessor, but it still manages to fall short of its target.
Dawn of Ragnarök could have righted some of Valhalla’s wrongs, but it mostly inherits and compounds them. The more imaginative setting is betrayed by its mundane and uninspired open-world trappings that focus almost exclusively on the quantity of trivial and all too familiar activities at the expense of discovery.
While its brevity impedes the story, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is thankfully a lot shorter than the last few entries. However, its relatively slender figure only points out how the series has used quantity to overcompensate for its stagnation.
Myths of the Eastern Realm is so repetitive because it changes almost nothing about the repetitive game it was based upon aside from the setting. This expansion could have been a chance for Ubisoft to address criticisms of that core experience by implementing a more varied toolset, moving away from block pushing, and allowing for more freeform exploration all while taking fulling advantage of Chinese mythology. Instead it makes all the same mistakes, which are more unforgiving this time around. Immortals itself was already awash with unoriginal ideas and Myths of the Eastern Realm is only following that trend, making it a derivative expansion of an already-derivative game.
Obsessing over playtime and Content™ at the cost of innovation and depth puts Valhalla‘s ability to actually get into Valhalla in question, as it doesn’t quite earn the kind of glory that only the best Vikings achieve.
Little Hope’s namesake has somewhat of a dual meaning. It is the name of the town in the game and it’s also representative of the little bit of hope that Supermassive would learn from its mistakes and get back to making classic horror adventures. But its multiple thematic troubles, pathetic cavalcade of jump scares, and abysmal twist ending paint a dark future for The Dark Pictures Anthology, leaving little hope that it’ll ever recover from two disappointing adventures in a row.