Reviews
46
Evil Empire reimagines a largely dormant series with striking visual panache, kinetic side-scrolling action, and a genre-twisting score.
'Star Wars: Galactic Racer' reaches new heights for the entire racing genre while also serving up a fairly good 'Star Wars' yarn.
The gameplay doesn't break the mold, but it's a finely tuned experience that builds on the mechanics established across the series.
A bit of confusion or frustration, though, is a very small price to pay for the giddy creativity on display throughout Antonblast. Indeed, a single level like the Mad Mall feels more inventive—between you having to scramble through a ball pit maze, race on a Segway-like device, and solve a shooting gallery puzzle—than the entirety of other platformers. And you don’t need a magic mirror to tell you how priceless that sort of novelty is.
This atmospheric Metroidvania is mechanically, emotionally, and philosophically electrifying.
The atmosphere remains captivating, which has allowed the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series to endure no matter how many technical issues the games may launch with. But this sequel too often buries its best qualities beneath contrived hardship, an artifice that fails to obscure that this world, at least in its current state, is as shallow as it is wide. What might once have been intended as a rebuke to open-world excess is instead a cautionary tale, an argument for all the little carrot-on-a-stick elements that make a game like this feel like more what it is: a wasteland.
Even when Slitterhead gets to its wilder stretches, and time travel enters the mix, the fundamentals fail its ideas early and often, making the relatively reasonable length of the thing feel so much longer and more arduous as a result. Slitterhead would have felt lackluster on the PS3, but it feels downright draconian now.
This sequence is surprising, creative, and, most importantly, unambiguously hilarious. And someone on the Acquire development team clearly knew that they were on to something with it, as the game heroically stretches the joke out for about 10 minutes. It’s a shame, then, that the bit doesn’t last even longer. Certainly that would have given Brotherhood a chance to say something interesting about, well, brothership. It would’ve been funnier too.
Rise of the Golden Idol was never going to be the revelation that the original was. But by playing to the strengths of the first game’s concept through even more intricate puzzle design, it offers a worthy follow-up in a spirited new setting.
Jamboree may not be about to hit the tournament circuit, but its very recognition of demand for a Mario Party with game balance is encouraging. Its basic game rules preserve series norms in all their highs and lows, while its motion-based gimmick modes offer nostalgic throwbacks to the wrist-twisting game designs of the Wii. But it’s the overtures to a more tactile, grounded, skill-rewarding board game experience that indicate developer Nintendo Cube’s interest in a future, and not just a past, for the genre of party mayhem.