Lee Mehr's Reviews
While some gameplay limitations dampen its mechanical & narrative potential, Loretta remains a harrowing & surreal ride through a twisted psyche.
While it's impossible to ignore the surfeit of launch-window technical issues, Abstraction Games recaptures the mechanics & magic that places Gigantic among the best multiplayer games of the past decade.
Between its great pacing, breezy atmosphere, and more, Botany Manor shows Balloon Studios has a green thumb for game design.
No copycat should be satisfied in reproducing its inspiration without incorporating a visual, aural, story, and/or mechanical nuance alongside it. None of these four categories are met here, so what's left is a ditto platformer that's content with showing yet another hellish landscape after humans are nearly wiped out.
All of Bulwark's building blocks are here for any genre fan to appreciate, but the finished construction is still left wanting.
While certain design qualities feel anemic compared to the original's legacy, Pieces Interactive's reboot contains a special atmosphere & story that survival-horror aficionados will likely appreciate.
With catchy & enticing rhythm gameplay through pleasant dreamscapes, Half Asleep's debut title ensures you'll be anything but.
Even after correcting some of its predecessor's foibles, Coming Home reveals that the series' core gameplay & storytelling contradictions remain deeply entrenched.
Mediterranea Inferno's potent mix of enflamed sexual energy, pandemic frustrations, and tattered friendships is slightly too inconsistent in execution, but still earns some appreciation nonetheless.
For a title so reverent of history, it feels like divine justice that Obsidian's special narrative adventure earns such a high spot in the annals of its own.
Between wonderfully-addictive combat, encouraged comradery, & consistent tongue-in-cheek humor, Helldivers II is a fantastic way to spread liberty & prosperity through patriotic destruction.
Despite a few infractions in its paperwork, Border Bots VR deserves a stamp of approval for its inventive & well-paced puzzle design.
Between an insanely tedious gameplay loop, inferior writing, avaricious scheming, and more, Suicide Squad ranks among the most villainous & disreputable live-service games.
Tequila Works' latest skates by with just enough nuance & personality to keep engagement from freezing over, but its derivative qualities could tempt some into giving it the cold shoulder.
While Immortality can't consistently maintain its tempo, Sam Barlow & Co.'s avant-garde approach to FMV game design & storytelling remains a genuine achievement.
Season's Greetings' monotonous delivery-sim structure, inconsequential narrative, & rough technical audio errors are the chief reasons why anyone's enthusiasm would be frostbitten by the end.
As a modestly-priced expansion, The Pale Reach's frozen wasteland introduces just enough new visual, narrative, & design baubles to keep one's enthusiasm continually burning.
An interactive kaleidoscope successfully blending survival-horror design, self-referential humor, and boundless absurdity, Alan Wake II ranks among the most fascinating sequels in recent memory.
Even by the tempered expectations of this fatigued franchise, Modern Warfare III deserves nothing less than a dishonorable discharge.
Apropos of The Symbiote, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a faster, bigger, & stronger sequel, but also partly corrupted by certain design & narrative decisions.