Reviews

Hot Wheels Unleashed at its best is breakneck entertainment with a nostalgic coat of paint. At its worst, it’s a budget racing game hidden by the aforementioned nostalgic coat of paint. Milestone’s new racing game has a surplus of good ideas left unrealized by insufficient polish and ill-advised design choices. At times, Hot Wheels Unleashed...

In the early 2000s, Sega released two of the definitive games of the Nintendo GameCube era with Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2. The games were critical and commercial successes, but subsequent entries have been a mixed bag. In honor of the franchise’s 20th anniversary, Sega has gone back to the beginning with...

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is the first game that developer Ember Lab has made, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at it nor could you tell by playing. It doesn’t do anything dazzling or revolutionary in terms of actual gameplay, but it’s a solid throwback to the structures of games from...

Death Stranding: Director’s Cut offers players the opportunity to return to the world created by acclaimed game designer Hideo Kojima in his first project after leaving longtime employer Konami to form Kojima Productions. Initially released in 2015, the game proved divisive. Some celebrated Kojima’s worldbuilding and originality, while others criticized its excesses and gameplay, sometimes...

Skateboarding is one of those sports where the artistry and culture have always fascinated me, but I’ve never had the opportunity to really explore that. My accident-prone self isn’t about to hit the skate park and try it out in real life, and I completely missed the boat on games like the Tony Hawk’s Pro...

Although I’ve always respected developer Arkane Studios, the company has never crafted experiences that I have wholly adored. This combined with the notion that much of what I had seen of Deathloop prior to launch came across as obtuse and cumbersome made me a bit uncertain about how it would turn out. After playing the...

Sometimes a game comes along that seems tailor-made for your particular sensibilities, so much so that a flaw or two are unable to diminish the overall joyous experience you’re having in its world. Lost in Random from Zoink! and EA is one such game, an experience that pairs together dice rolls, an imaginative Tim Burton-esque...

When Ghost of Tsushima first released last year on PlayStation 4, I wasn’t as keen on it as some others. Although I definitely enjoyed my time with it, I did have some qualms, specifically with the more repetitious aspects of the game. As such, coming into Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, I was wondering if...

Video games are no stranger to playing with emotions, but Life is Strange: True Colors is notable for explicitly allowing people to literally play with emotions. Protagonist Alex Chen’s whole deal is the ability to read the emotions of other people, and while that in and of itself could be particularly heavy, the video game...

Tales of Arise, the 17th entry in Bandai Namco‘s Tales of series of games, is a fun and furiously paced action-driven RPG that features a story that relies a bit too heavily on extreme and senseless actions of oppression and cruelty. The new game is the first Tales of game in nearly five years and...