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A cynic would be justified in thinking this edition still has its work cut out for it trying to bring back DmC fans who held the reboot in contempt.
There's no avatar here; it's your hands causing the violence now, your eyes staring directly at victims, and you facing down being shot dead, run over, blown up, or falling from insane heights.
It's weird to say that Fallout 4 operates under the principle that less is more, since its vision of Boston is dotted with hundreds of hours of things to do.
Gil Scott-Heron had it wrong, at least when it came to music: The revolution most certainly will be televised.
If Tearaway was a diamond in the rough world of Vita gaming, it's an exceedingly polished masterpiece on the PS4.
The story crafted by Tales isn't just a fine Borderlands sequel, but one of the most enjoyable sci-fi adventure stories in recent memory.
If there's a single downside, it's that with a cast of over 16 characters, only five of whom can physically be in your party, there's very little reason to play around with your party's composition.
Horizon Zero Dawn creates a world that captivates you just by the very act of having you feel as if you're living within it.
NieR Automata is the first game to truly stand up and greet ludonarrative dissonance as a friend.
A classic has been reincarnated as one of the most visually magnificent titles of our current generation.
Iconoclasts is an ironic, humanistic critique of religion as much as it is a masterful take on a traditional game genre.
Super-charged in almost every way, Guacamelee! 2 makes its predecessor look like a backyard wrestling match.
The game masterfully uses its microcosm of the internet circa 1999 to examine the way society functions when it's extremely online.
This is a rare adventure game in which the journey is actually more of a reward than the destination.
Kentucky Route Zero is about America in a way few games aspire to be and fewer still succeed at.
The game speaks in specific and effective ways to the sheer exhaustion of living in perpetual strife.
The game flips the script on the very idea of nostalgia being the only guiding creative force behind a remake.
Elden Ring is FromSoftware taming the monster they created, not by filing down its teeth and claws, but by giving players the weapons and armor to endure it. It’s the first of their games to not feel like a brick wall but a doorway, with allies in every direction all reaching out to help you tread carefully to the other side. The result is a paradigm shift, a seemingly once-in-a-generation recalibration of old ideas and taking them to the next level.
Ragnarok works the kind of narrative miracles that the medium has no excuse not to follow suit on. This is the kind of love and care that’s not only possible for a big budget game, but deeply necessary.
And that’s just scratching the surface of the game’s pleasures. There’s the professional match commentary, the surprising character details and bond system in World Tour, the fabulously nonbinary tournament emcee Eternity, the return of bonus stages, the battle-rap style intros for Versus matches, the create-a-character’s intricacies actually affecting gameplay, the character-specific voice lines during the Arcade mode’s final boss fights. Which is to say, Street Fighter 6 is the most feature-rich, welcoming, and inclusive package ever crafted for a fighting game—a stylish reassertion of creative dominance for the series that started it all, and an endlessly rewarding new foundation for its future. The next generation of fighting games starts right here.