Reviewed on:
PC
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PC
Publisher:
Capcom
Developer:
Capcom
Rating:
Teen
It’s no secret that Street Fighter V got off to a disastrous start, and despite years of course correction, its flawed foundation made a comeback difficult. By contrast, Street Fighter 6 is a thorough response to its predecessor’s failings, defined by well-considered central mechanics, formidable single-player offerings, and a plethora of smart decisions that make for a powerful opening punch.
Those primarily interested in duking it out against other players have a lot to look forward to; between the snappy movement and wealth of strategic options, it’s a joy to play. The biggest addition is the new Drive System, which elegantly combines several mechanics like powered-up special attacks, cancels, and defensive maneuvers under a shared resource. This meter starts fully stocked and replenishes automatically, giving ready access to a large arsenal of options, but leaves you vulnerable when depleted, setting up a compelling risk/reward dynamic that tinges on every interaction.
Additionally, the game’s pace feels more deliberate than Street Fighter V, creating rewarding back-and-forth exchanges allowing its more cerebral elements to shine. Specifically, the extended range of normal attacks makes careful poking battles more common, and strikes are less advantageous when blocked, meaning aggressors can’t single-mindedly run their offense. The 18-character roster is also a slam dunk, combining returning favorites with cleverly designed newcomers to deliver a wide variety of playstyles and degrees of complexity. Each has a robust move set, and almost every fighter has a unique gimmick that can transform the match.
For instance, Manon is a grappler whose command grabs become more damaging every time one lands, making her an imposing momentum-based character, while Jamie is a Drunken Master-style brawler who gains new moves with each chug. Every major character archetype feels well-represented here, from zoners to rushdown characters, meaning players shouldn’t have a hard time finding someone who speaks to them. While only time will tell how the metagame shakes out, Street Fighter 6’s starting roster and core systems offer an excellent platform to build upon.
And for those less interested in playing against others, the most noteworthy mode is World Tour. This lengthy single-player story lets you explore a semi-open Metro City filled with fisticuff-loving weirdos, side quests, and RPG-lite progression. In addition to being an enjoyably strange adventure, it also successfully introduces and tutorializes some of the game’s deeper systems while offering a largely satisfying series of brawls.
Battles in World Tour are enticing thanks to foes’ unique attack patterns and how each enemy is paired with optional objectives that grant bonus rewards. Best of all, your avatar can learn abilities from the main roster, allowing you to mix the best elements of grapplers, zoners, and rushdown characters into a hilariously broken fighter. I was genuinely surprised by how much there is to this mode, and it took me more than 25 hours to reach the credits. While the World Tour is far from perfect – some fights felt overly chaotic due to how they handle being sandwiched between multiple enemies, and the overarching storytelling leaves much to be desired – it is a solid entry point for new players that will give those uninterested in testing their mettle online plenty to do.
Beyond this, an abundance of inclusions demonstrates an impressive degree of polish. There are multiple control schemes aimed at beginners, party settings, a robust training room, Arcade mode, accessibility options, and a fully realized lobby system. Tack on well-implemented rollback netcode, quick rematches, and the ability to queue up for online games from almost anywhere, and Street Fighter 6 makes it easy to get in and play.
As the series that pioneered fighting games, each new Street Fighter comes with weighty expectations. Street Fighter 6 confidently meets this hype, catering to neophytes and genre veterans by offering the most extensive array of offline offerings the franchise has ever seen alongside a flexible set of core systems and a diverse cast. Between its cohesive aesthetic, the bounty of clever features, and crisp central gameplay, it’s one of the most impressive entries the genre has seen in some time.
Score:
9.5
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher:
Daedalic Entertainment
Developer:
Daedalic Entertainment
Release:
2021
Rating:
Teen
At times, an event or character can be profoundly impactful to its originating fiction, but not the right choice for a dedicated spotlight project of its own. It’s hard to think of a more potent case in point than The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a game that fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of its source franchise, focusing on a character who, by almost any measure, is the wrong choice for a lead. That said, it’s not impossible to imagine the game that might somehow have made the unusual premise click. This is not that project; like its miserable and piteous lead, this game is best avoided at all costs.
Gollum tracks the story of the titular fellow in the time period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, mostly during his slavery and misuse in Mordor and the related escape to pursue his precious ring. With its drab colors, focus on cruel and unappealing characters and chore-focused gameplay, it feels at odds with most of the core tenets and themes of Tolkien’s fiction. Even stripped of its connection to that vaunted legendarium, the storytelling is poorly paced, meandering, and often incoherent. A promising exploration of the dichotomy between the Gollum and Smeagol character initially seems compelling but is never leveraged in a meaningful way.
Gameplay is split chiefly between old-fashioned linear traversal sequences and clumsy, uninteresting stretches of stealth. In navigation of the stages, the jumping is imprecise, stages are poorly structured to communicate where you can go, and the camera is unwieldy, or sometimes even broken, flipping entirely upside down while climbing or refusing to rotate to view the next necessary jump. I died repeatedly and frequently to jumps that should have been easy or mistakenly guessed where the next platform could be reached. The only small blessing is frequent checkpoints to soften the blow of the endless repeats.
While terrible, I longed for those platforming sequences every time the game switched to one of its plentiful stealth sequences. Unlike any modern stealth game, Gollum has no interesting tricks or tools to enrich these passages. Instead, the slippery protagonist can only glide between the shadows past immeasurably stupid guards, along paths upon which it’s hard to know whether you’ll be seen. No sense of mastery or control over the environment emerges. Again, respawns are constant. Whenever the game asked me if I wanted to reload to the last checkpoint, it was a force of will to continue.
Technical problems and poor implementation abound. Sound mixing often makes voices hard to hear. Character faces (with the exception of Gollum) are poorly animated or not at all. Onscreen figures move in perfect synchrony with one another, like something seen in early PS2 games. Textures are muddy and lack detail. More than once, the game demanded an objective that didn’t function or appear and did not respawn upon a checkpoint restart; only redoing the entire level would fix the problem.
I constantly struggled against the controls, camera, and objectives as they were presented. And nothing about the story or characters of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum offers reason to push past the frustration. As a longtime fan of Tolkien’s fiction, it’s possible that I liked the game even less for the way it seemed to misuse the source material. It’s hard to have a more damning indictment than to say that this Gollum game isn’t for fans of The Lord of the Rings, but here we are.
Score:
3.5
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher:
Private Division
Developer:
Piccolo
Rating:
Teen
As a development team, the members of Piccolo Studio have an apparent interest in artistic interactive representations of uncomfortable realities. Their previous project, Arise: A Simple Story, was an affecting and powerful portrayal of death and heartbreak. After Us has broader ambitions, telling an allegorical tale about life after humanity and the complicated and often-devastating relationship we have always had with nature. The conclusions it leaves to the player to draw on those subjects are thematically heavy-handed but still impactful. The traversal-focused adventure that gets you there features moments of brilliance and beauty but some frequent frustrations along the way.
Players control a nymphlike girl who embodies the spirit of Gaia, moving through a world long left in shambles by human mishandling. Across an impressive variety of large interconnected stages filled with symbolic representations of nature’s destruction, players leap, sprint, and flit to chase down and recover the spirits of animals driven to extinction by humankind’s arrogance.
After Us’ most memorable elements are these surreal landscapes, filled with towering monuments to consumerism, piles of refuse, and towering human statues in anguish over what they’ve wrought. I looked forward to discovering each new destination. As exploration continues, the discovery of different animal spirits begins to populate each area with ghostly blue apparitions of the long-dead animals, sad and moving in equal measures.
The core gameplay of jumping and fighting back the devouring human spirits along the way fails to hold up to the surrounding visual feast. Leaps and other traversal mechanics are often imprecise, leading to too many respawns because landings are so floaty and hard to detect. The infrequent and rudimentary battles lack even the most basic abilities to lock-on or move laterally, resulting in strange retreats to gain some distance before the occasional quick turn to fling out an attack. I was eager to push past those moments and get back to exploration.
Most areas introduce clever new twists and gimmicks that help to keep the action lively. In one ruined landscape, I had to dodge between covered areas before the poisoned rain dragged me down. In another, I could teleport between abandoned televisions if they were tuned to the same image. Light puzzle solving comes into play with these new mechanics, but the solutions are rarely involved or complex.
While I was entranced by each locale I visited, each place I uncovered seemed to drag on too long. After Us is a game that could have scaled back on its scope and size significantly, and I would have felt its impact all the more. As it is, the long stages and vaguely ethereal music sometimes have a soporific effect.
After Us poses some well-tread but timely questions about our impact on the world and its living things. However, optional discoveries throughout the game suggest that Piccolo is trying to present a slightly more ambivalent take on the subject. Some of that is best left for the player to discover for themselves. I recommend After Us strongly as a piece of visual artistry. It’s less successful as an interactive experience, but none of its problems are so glaring that it should dissuade someone from discovering its striking and haunting world.
Score:
7.5
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Reviewed on:
Xbox Series X/S
Platform:
Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC
Publisher:
Thunderful
Developer:
Wishfully
Rating:
Everyone 10+
Since the release of Limbo in 2010, cinematic puzzle platformers have relied on capturing players’ attention and imagination with beautiful art directions and compelling, often enigmatic storytelling. As typically brief experiences, the moment-to-moment puzzles must hit hard with clever, memorable obstacles and not meander by rehashing familiar mechanics too often. Planet of Lana almost hits this sweet spot by boasting a gorgeous presentation, but trekking through this strange world doesn’t always inspire the same awe.
Planet of Lana wastes little time throwing players into the fire. As the young Lana, your small village, including someone close to you, has been abducted by alien machines. It’s up to you to find and free everyone, and you’re joined by an adorable (and pettable) cat-like companion named Mui. Watching tender and somber moments between the pair is a treat because everything looks so wonderful. From painterly grassy plains to postcard-worthy beachside vistas, several snapshots are worthy of being framed as art pieces. The majestic soundtrack sits high on my list of the year’s best, with the main theme, in particular, becoming a welcomed earworm that also has intriguing narrative significance.
The game delivers an adequately entertaining tale, and it’s tough not to smile at Lana and Mui’s cute, though limited, interactions. The more exciting world-building happens along the edges, primarily through collectible, easy-to-miss fragments of an illuminating wall carving. Is this Earth or another planet? What are the machines, and where did they come from? Planet of Lana leaves some answers vague, but the intrigue helped propel me forward even if I’m still drawing my own conclusions.
Lana’s deliberate, momentum-based movement feels fine but occasionally causes headaches, such as watching her slip over an edge after landing a big jump. Problem-solving involves the sometimes tedious task of moving objects into their correct positions and doing things in the proper order so that both characters can bypass obstacles. Mui’s superior agility means you’ll be commanding them to drop climbing ropes for Lana, activate distant switches, or lure away enemies. I just wish Mui didn’t halt after performing actions so I wouldn’t have to call them to my side constantly. Eventually, Mui and Lana can hijack animals’ minds or hack machines, respectively, to make them serve as platforms or weights for pressure-sensitive switches. These are cool abilities I wish the game utilized more often.
These traversal puzzles have some clever ideas, but they don’t evolve much or hit that next gear. You push objects, climb ropes, and crouch in tall grass to avoid patrolling machines for the bulk of the journey, albeit in moderately more elaborate ways. Some less recurring exercises break up this routine, such as manipulating the water level in lakes, but nothing I tackled truly wowed me, and I sometimes groaned when puzzles returned to the status quo. I solved a few obstacles on the first glace, and others can be disappointingly simple even deep into the game. Puzzle-solving may be middling, but Planet of Lana has a sprinkling of adrenaline-pumping moments. I got a kick out of a quick-time-event-driven race across the desert as your mount sprints through an armada of colossal marching machines.
While I would have liked gameplay to have more bite and variety, Planet of Lana is still an enjoyable and beautiful romp. The art direction and main jingle are likely the only things that will stick with me in the long run, but Lana and Mui’s journey is a competent rescue mission that doesn’t always soar as high as the machines pursuing them.
Score:
7.75
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher:
2K Games
Developer:
Visual Concepts
Rating:
Everyone 10+
Best known for working on the publisher’s WWE and NBA games, Visual Concepts has found itself behind the wheel of 2K’s latest licensed experiment. Lego 2K Drive is a high-octane competitive racer full of destructible brick-y environments to crash through and a kid-friendly narrative full of fourth-wall-breaking fun.
The game’s best feature is Bricklandia, the playful Lego landscape in which 2K Drive is set. It’s a world begging to be dismantled by the brunt of your screeching tires and custom boat masts. Accelerating across the open-world playmat (that a human would never want to step on) is a thrilling experience, made better by the carefully animated auto-morphing ability. As you cross different terrain, from road to off-road and on water, players automatically switch between vehicles to fit the context.
Tires and water noodles frame the world’s vistas and act as charming obstacles, and it’s this blend of real-world objects with Lego constructs that amplifies the delightful toy box atmosphere. As a budding racer dropped into this striking open world, you tackle an onslaught of revheads, claiming their flags to ascend to the honor of Sky Cup Champion. Mohawked egomaniac Shadow Z serves as your rival in this endeavor, popping up from time to time to remind you of how mean-spirited he is.
To even get close to taking him on, you must explore Bricklandia in search of rival speedsters, each with their own unique driving skills they exercise in instanced Mario Kart-style races. From an actual horse to an alien in a suit, they make for a charming ensemble and provide new cars and perks to play with, as well as Brickbux, with which you can buy new machines and parts. You can also build your own vehicles brick-by-brick at the garage, which let me create some truly cursed rides. While the building system isn’t the most intuitive, it does feel like an appropriate nod to Lego’s humble brick-building origins.
Across Bricklandia’s varied biomes, you also encounter On-The-Go Events, ambient missions that you can drop in and out of for pockets of absurd fun, such as jumping over houses or drifting through a minefield. Conquering the criteria to earn XP and resources feels like getting your license in Gran Turismo on a schoolyard sugar high.
Lego 2K Drive’s constant barrage of dialogue kept me giggling throughout, though the intensity of some missions, like the less-interesting wave-defense or NPC rescue expeditions, left me unable to focus on the jokes. This was always disappointing, given the evident talent of the writers and voice actors, who provide an effective satire of conventional racing games.
Bashing and smashing your way through the map is easy junk food fun, but the must-win races can be punishing due to some devastating pickups and brutal slow down when you veer off track. Some of the open-world missions require you to drive with dexterity and attempt deft movements while herding rockets or smashing through tiny robot invaders, which can lead to frustration, where I often felt too fast for my own good. While I relished how it got my heart pounding, I was left longing for a more low-key approach to exploration.
While it is a little buggy, another delightful surprise was Lego 2K Drive’s couch co-op, which allows you and a partner to peel through the open world together, pooling XP as you go. I found myself getting in the way of bombs or smashing into targets for my partner to make sure one of us got the top spot. Notably, this feature made the dreary defend and rescue missions much more palatable thanks to the collaborative nature of the gameplay.
Unfortunately, the elephant in the room, or in this case, a monkey, is the game’s storefront, Unkie’s Emporium, introduced during the tutorial by its eponymous primate mechanic. Here, you can purchase premium currency with real money that can be exchanged to access cars and characters previously locked behind a costly Brickbux wall. Of course, you could earn all these items by grinding, but the temptation lingers, which is troubling for a game so clearly geared toward younger audiences.
Lego 2K Drive builds an incredibly inviting world where speed and silliness reign supreme as you race and morph across its delightfully destructible setting. Despite some frustrating mission design and a smattering of bugs, Lego 2K Drive quickly won me over with its absurd narrative full of irreverent dialogue and moreish open-world challenges. If only the specter of microtransactions didn’t loom so large in this kid-friendly game, it would make for an even smoother ride.
Score:
8
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation VR, PC
Publisher:
Enhance Games
Developer:
Tha LTD
Release:
2020
Playing god is a familiar feeling for many video game genres, like action titles where your character is unstoppable or sims where you control everything. Roleplaying a god is rarely something I feel while playing puzzle games, but Humanity provides it in new and surprising ways. The unique style of puzzle solving uses directional signs and commands to guide droves of miniature people to an endpoint. The puzzles start simple, but Humanity builds on this core system throughout its 100-plus stages in exciting and challenging ways, pushing me to my limit while telling a heartfelt story about human nature.
Humanity is an immediately striking game. Its visual style is minimalistic, focusing squarely on the 3D puzzle area. But soft and beautiful backgrounds spotlight my actions as I guide colorful hordes of humans across various challenges. I begin with one simple command: a direction. I place it on the ground, and when the line of humans crosses it, they follow that direction. My journey through Humanity introduces me to plenty more commands, like ones to pause actions completely, jump, and use lightsaber-like weapons and guns to take out the enemy – The Others – that sometimes work to stop my progress. These new commands keep Humanity’s puzzles feeling fresh, and it was especially interesting to see how developer Tha Ltd used challenges to change my perception of how a command can be used.
I often felt there was no way Humanity could up the ante as I marveled at my solution after spending more than 30 minutes on the most complex trials. But each time I doubt its ability to be even more challenging, Humanity introduces another wrinkle to its puzzle rules. And each time, I go from, “There’s just no way I can figure this out,” to feeling omnipotent 30 minutes later.
Humanity is peaceful and relaxing on its surface, which is often the case, but it is a challenging game. That is, if you don’t want to use Humanity’s built-in solution videos. However, these don’t show you how to pick up the optional Goldy humans in each level, which unlock cosmetic changes for your humans and details like in-depth stats about your efforts.
These videos make it clear Tha Ltd wants all its players to experience the storytelling at play in it. Tetris Effect studio, Enhance, publishes Humanity, and like Tetris Effect, Humanity does more than provide satisfying puzzles. It serves up puzzles with a surprisingly human narrative about our nature as a society, how we can work together to progress, and how we’re all more connected than not. It’s sweet and simple but effective, especially after guiding thousands of humans across challenges toward the light.
Despite providing solution videos, there are moments when Humanity feels like a chore to play. Because some puzzles have solutions that take minutes to play out as lines of humans walk in real-time toward the end, Humanity allows you to speed up what’s happening on screen by pressing R2. This doubles the speed, but when a solution takes minutes to achieve, I’m still waiting a while. And because I often had to restart puzzles from the beginning to see if a new command would fix what prevented my humans from progressing each time, I waited a lot.
With trial restarts, you can keep your commands from the previous attempt, which helps dampen this issue, but waiting through all of your other commands to see if a new one at the very end solves the puzzle gets boring; in the back third of the game, I often grabbed my phone while holding R2, waiting to see if a new command works. Critically, the satisfaction I feel when successfully solving a puzzle always overrides the frustrations I have while solving it.
Humanity features a level creator and a way to try out other players’ creations. While these seem like worthwhile efforts to continue the puzzle fun, I’m not creative enough to make my own. And after playing through Tha Ltd’s handcrafted levels in the story, I am well satisfied – enough that I don’t have the urge to dive too deep into someone else’s puzzles. But level creation might provide the additional, longer-lasting fun someone else might want from this game.
Humanity strikes a delicate balance between challenging me at every turn and allowing me to feel like the god its narrative props me up to be. It’s an imaginative experience that provides a rush I imagine computer programmers feel when dozens of commands and lines of code finally work together to create a desired outcome. Its puzzles come wrapped in a beautiful package, from its minimalist visuals to its excellent clicky electronic beats. And best of all, these elements work together to emphasize a simple but effective message about what it means to be human and why life’s most intricate puzzles are easiest to solve when we work together.
Score:
8.5
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Reviewed on:
Switch
Platform:
Switch
Publisher:
Nintendo
Developer:
Nintendo
Rating:
Everyone 10+
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is battling impossible expectations. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild represented a radical and successful reinvention of The Legend of Zelda – a series considered by many to be the apex of game design. Despite its numerous changes to Zelda’s formula, Breath of the Wild was a massive success and its legacy only grows stronger with time.
To give Breath of the Wild a direct sequel (a rarity in Zelda canon) is a dangerous prospect. The resulting game lacks the admittedly difficult-to-recreate, undeniable impact and newness of the prior game. Instead, it gives players a chance to revisit the world through a completely new lens with new abilities for a brilliant adventure providing players a staggering amount of agency in how they approach nearly every gameplay instance.
Tears of the Kingdom mostly takes place on the ground in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, but it doesn't feel like a retread. New traversal options that change how you explore the world combine with the passage of time to make this Hyrule different, like visiting the town you grew up in after being away for many years. You have a good idea of where things are, but they are different and exciting to explore when you get there. That balance of novel and familiar on the ground is well-executed, and the islands in the sky create wholly new, substantial areas to explore. Figuring out how to leap from island to island in the sky is consistently thrilling, and exploring Hyrule’s caves is dark and intimidating, creating potent exploration options to suit your mood.
Link's new abilities are the main draw of Tears of the Kingdom. Fuse, which lets you combine weapons, shields, items, and more, rewards experimentation and impressively makes every single item in the game – every rock lying on the ground, every plant you pick up, every Zonai technology-infused shield – have some value. It makes the act of collecting even more fun because you can ask yourself stupid questions like, “What if I attached an acorn to a bladed staff?” and arrive at answers.
Item degradation makes a return, which is a system I appreciate for making everything I pick up become something I actually use. Quality-of-life improvements also make managing your various tools much easier, and Fuse means you can collect and combine more weapons if you just hate the idea of leaving things behind.
Ascend, allowing Link to move through any ceiling within a certain distance, is impressive in its implementation and practicality. It’s one of the abilities that radically changes how you move through the sometimes familiar world. Recall, which makes objects in the world move backward in time, frequently had me questioning if something would work, only to discover that, yes, it absolutely works in joyful ways.
The king of the abilities, and frankly the king of Tears of the Kingdom, is Ultrahand. The simplified pitch is it allows Link to connect objects. I was intimidated by the new mechanic when it was introduced, and the controls do take some getting used to, but it did not take long for me to become Hyrule’s number one combination contractor and engineer, and I relished the title.
Combining objects to solve simple puzzles to creating complicated flying contraptions with a series of fans, rockets, and batteries is a delight without ever making you spend too much time on any one project. Tears of the Kingdom recognizes what you are trying to make in nearly every instance, which means simple acts like attaching a steering wheel to a platform with four tires works with little fuss. But it also accounts for much more complicated builds, and I was frequently surprised at what I could quickly create and implement into puzzle solving.
Ultrahand is the rare mechanic that sneaks into your brain and makes you contemplate it while outside of the game. The highest compliment I can give is that I dreamed about Ultrahand, rotating pillars and attaching them to boxes in my sleeping brain the same way I saw orange and blue circles in my dreams when I first played Portal. It is Tears of the Kingdom’s most significant achievement.
The adventure is full of other highlights, as well. The story begins with an engaging conceit and only builds to an excellent conclusion. It also doesn't repeat a big narrative issue of the first game: Where was Zelda the whole time? Thankfully, the story knows it's a sequel and acknowledges what came before. You can check in on characters and locations of the past to see how they have changed. The story does not step too far out of the bounds of what we have come to expect from a Zelda plot, but I liked the turns it took, and I was eager to see where it was going.
Structurally, Tears of the Kingdom is familiar with combat working functionally the same. New Shrines that are fun to solve and reward fast-travel locations litter the map, and there are a few traditional Zelda dungeons. The new dungeons are simplified but don't sacrifice puzzle design while being easier to understand. The new dungeons also have great bosses. I appreciated that they are more varied and allow you to lean on recently learned, specific abilities to claim victory.
Video game sequels are often iterative on what came before them. It looks a little better, plays a little smoother, retains important mechanics while introducing new ones, and continues the story. Tears of the Kingdom checks most of these boxes, but getting rid of the Runes from the first game and giving players new ones to use in exploring a familiar but undeniably new world is ingenious. Nearly every encounter, whether puzzle, traversal, or combat, must be reconsidered. It makes you think in new ways. I didn’t get the same goosebumps exploring Hyrule as I did in the past, but I did experience new emotions both on a granular level from solving individual puzzles and on a larger scale by going back to one of my favorite video game locations. They say you can never go home again, but I adored returning to Hyrule with all new tools.
Score:
9.75
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Reviewed on:
PC
Platform:
Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher:
Bethesda Softworks
Developer:
Arkane Studios
Rating:
Mature
Redfall is my biggest disappointment of 2023. As a massive fan of developer Arkane Studios’ previous work, from Dishonored through Deathloop, my expectations were high for the company’s new release. However, this vampire-hunting first-person shooter is messy, plagued with technical flaws and head-scratching design decisions counterintuitive to the game itself. The result is an often-bland experience, made frustrating by occasional glimpses of potential, and it’s sucked the life out of me.
The fictional harbor town of Redfall, Massachusetts, is overrun with vampires and their cultic worshippers. Your goal as one of four unique protagonists is to restore the haunted region to its former state. Standing in your way are the Vampire Gods, a wealthy group of scientists-turned-monsters whose backstories never impacted me despite the campaign’s surface-level attempts. That’s about as much as the introduction gives you before throwing you into the action.
After completing Redfall’s introduction, you conduct story and side missions from a centralized base of operations. The first few hours of the narrative follow The Hollow Man, a mysterious entity proselytizing from the town’s radio signals. The Hollow Man seems to have been everywhere you go, and his presence is unnerving. This stretch features Redfall’s best missions and locations, which require you to explore a dilapidated mansion and its gruesome past, fight a powerful enemy at a cliffside lighthouse in a lightning storm, and rescue hostages from a boatyard that The Hollow Man’s followers control. Unfortunately, the game tries to replicate its early hours throughout its remainder; hard-to-follow story revelations, repeating side activities, and a second, less-interesting map leave it feeling hollow and formulaic. Lastly, Arkane presents the Vampire Gods’ storyline via flashbacks in which you stand in an abandoned space watching vaguely humanoid ghosts speak to each other. The result is largely forgettable.
On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists: Remi and her robotic companion Bribón; a teleporting cryptozoologist named Devinder; Jacob, who is a marksman with a psychic eye; and Layla, a biomedical engineer who inherited telekinetic powers after a medical trial gone wrong. Each character has unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-sufficient skill tree, but with only three total abilities per character, you won’t use them nearly as much as your firearms. The experience could’ve been more interesting if I could pick and choose from the game’s 12 abilities to carve my playstyle, but sadly you must select one character and their pre-determined skillset for the entire game.
Redfall’s shooting mechanics and armory of weapons are serviceable, with the heavy-hitting stake launcher and ultra-violet raygun – which petrifies vampires – being the highlights. You’ll discover new weapons as you explore the world and complete missions, each slotting somewhere into the rudimentary tiered-loot system. Despite guns having randomized perks, like increased damage to petrified vampires, I didn’t pay much attention to them because the loot system recycles the same dozen or so weapons repeatedly, with slightly higher stats each time. Notably, it does the same with enemy vampire types, too. I’d often fight the same kind of vampire frequently, but my character would remark that it was a new vampire simply because it had a different name.
Looking at the world of Redfall, I become sad by its wasted potential. For every great location, there are a handful of forgettable ones. The result is an empty-feeling game with several puzzling problems, like a lack of proper stealth takedowns, a tedious quest and waypoint system, and the inability to pause gameplay in single-player mode. Rampant technical issues hinder brighter moments, including frequent server crashes during multiplayer, inputs failing to work, broken animations, and numerous other bugs that make playing Redfall a frustrating experience. For a game about fighting the undead, Redfall feels soulless in all the wrong ways.
Score:
5
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Reviewed on:
PC
Platform:
PC
Publisher:
Red Hook Studios
Developer:
Red Hook Studios
Darkest Dungeon II is cruel. A simple miscalculation or bad luck can ruin your two-to-three-hour expedition before the chapter’s final boss. There are no checkpoints; if your party dies, it’s time to start fresh from the very beginning. Only some unlocked upgrades stay with you. When you have to make tough choices all the time while keeping in mind various systems, this can (and will) be frustrating and nerve-racking. At the same time, Darkest Dungeon II is the most cathartic and rewarding experience since the original in 2016.
Much like its predecessor, you create a party of four distinct heroes who must survive exciting turn-based battles with a focus on position, synergy, and a certain degree of luck. Your attacks have a range of possible damage points they can deal, plus there are buffs and debuffs that give you the chance of missing your shot or earning a critical hit, among other outcomes.
The combat system is hard to master but incredibly satisfying. As you get to know your cast, you dive into the thrilling experience of learning who goes well with whom, in what position, and against which creatures. I spent hours experimenting with the best combinations for my playstyle, trying out new things every time. The battles feel like puzzles, making you feel great when you succeed with your party in one piece. But they can also frustrate you when you deal one less point of damage than you need and receive an unexpected counterattack.
Things get more complicated when you add the stress system, the signature core mechanic of the series. When their white gauge is complete, your hero can have a meltdown, losing most of their HP. They can also earn a positive outcome and heal up, though it’s less common. If a single meltdown in a difficult encounter can ruin your whole expedition, imagine what it feels like to have five in a row in the same battle. It’s a disheartening feeling that should make you stop playing immediately, yet there I was, so angry and fascinated at the same time, willing to try again one more time. This game sunk its hooks into me that deeply.
A new affinity system will show how well your party gets along with each other. This quickly gets tense when you realize that all your small decisions can turn your heroes against themselves, adding negative effects to specific skills. Having to change your complete strategy is both infuriating and a tremendous challenge, one that made me feel fulfilled when I defied the odds and overcame it. Fortunately, this mechanic can also make your heroes good teammates, adding combo attacks and other astonishing surprises.
Apart from fighting, you explore disturbing but beautifully designed regions before reaching the final boss of your expedition. You travel in a Stagecoach, a vehicle that can get damaged by hazardous roads, adding unwanted battles. You also get to choose which path to take, sometimes knowing what to expect and others being completely in the dark.
All these mechanics create an experience I simply can’t get enough of. Even now, 40 hours in, I still want to get back again to refine my team and unlock the rest of the items and upgrades. While some journeys are blatantly unfair, there’s also a remarkable achievement in finding balance in something that should be completely chaotic. I wish there were more shortcuts to ease the pain of failing a three-hour run at the end and having to start again. And more user-friendly items in the early stages, which can be extremely overwhelming and will likely deter players, would go a long way.
When I found myself shouting in relief and frenetically raising my fist in the air after a hard battle ends in my favor, I can’t deny the following fact: Darkest Dungeon II is a harsh but fantastic game whose white-knuckled battles and hazard-filled exploration will trap you for hours. If you’re willing to make the needed sacrifices, it’s a journey well worth taking.
Score:
8.5
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5
Publisher:
PlayStation Studios
Developer:
Guerrilla Games
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores serves fans a substantial dessert that brings the main course of the campaign to a satisfying close. A dangerous new sandbox and a compelling story await Aloy, offering a nice wrap-up that also provides some tantalizing glimpses into the future.
Unlike Zero Dawn’s Frozen Wilds DLC, which was a good but skippable side story, Burning Shores has enough relevant plot advancement to make it closer to required playing. Taking place immediately after the sequel’s conclusion, this abbreviated tale sees Aloy travel to the volcanically fractured remains of Los Angeles to confront perhaps the series’ most twisted villain yet. The adventure takes some exciting turns and provides what I wanted most: a potential narrative blueprint for the third game. Burning Shores’ conclusion lays a good foundation for how Aloy and friends will tackle the next threat, so it’s a bummer PlayStation 4 owners have to settle for watching it on YouTube. I also enjoyed getting to spend more time with the Quen, my favorite faction in Forbidden West, especially because they introduced us Seyka, Aloy’s new companion and one of the primary highlights of Burning Shores.
This capable warrior serves as the catalyst of Burning Shores’ story and sticks to Aloy’s side throughout the expansion. Seyka is essentially a more charismatic version of Aloy herself: steadfast and sometimes bull-headed, but gentle and loving to those in need, and with an endearing sense of humor to boot. Though the blossoming of their bond feels a little rushed to fit within the DLC’s shorter runtime, the two huntresses have some amusing interactions, such as trading humorous observations while exploring a crumbling dinosaur theme park. I hope we see more of Seyka in the future because she quickly skyrocketed toward the upper echelon of the series’ best characters.
The islands that make up the former Tinseltown look unsurprisingly stunning; the volcanic lava rivers offer a great change of visual imagery. It’s a bummer that these molten hazards don’t factor more directly into gameplay, but LA sports a fun emphasis on verticality that takes more advantage of your flying mounts. Skyscrapers boast hidden entrances and secrets situated multiple stories above ground, letting me get more mileage out of my Sunwing or Waterwing, a new swimming variation that’s now my favorite mount. Aerial versions of the VR scenery puzzles further encourage going airborne, to the point that flying overshadows Aloy’s new motorized boat. Despite being the centerpiece mode of transportation for Burning Shores, the boat’s slower speed and its access being tethered to docks can’t overcome the thrill and convenience of flying anywhere at will (or fast travel, for that matter). As a result, I rarely used it outside of the required segments.
The handful of new machines that occupy the Burning Shores, such as a giant frog and oversized mechanical flies, aren’t as jaw-dropping as some of the existing machines, but they provide enjoyable new tests of your combat prowess. On top of dismantling these foes for new upgrade parts, I spent most of my time hunting a valuable new resource called Brimstone, glowing crystals used as the primary crafting material for Burning Shores’ new suite of powerful legendary weapons and armor. I appreciate that Brimstone is relatively abundant, letting me quickly acquire a fresh arsenal and wardrobe.
Still, outside of obtaining a powerful new firearm mid-way through the expansion, Burning Shores doesn’t introduce features that dramatically shake up combat encounters. However, Sekya’s near-constant presence adds a welcome helping hand in a fight. She’s genuinely useful, often picking apart foes on her own or tying them down with her ropecaster so I can go in for the kill. Early on, puzzle-solving takes on a neat cooperative edge, such as Aloy and Seyka working together to build climbing paths for one another using a siege weapon. These sequences can trick you into thinking you’re playing with another real person, though I wish these ladies had more obstacles to tackle together during the rest of the experience.
Burning Shores is an entertaining epilogue for Aloy’s sophomore outing. It’s more Forbidden West with a few cool wrinkles, meaning it’s a good reminder of the things that the game did right while retaining a few old headaches (like the hand-holding during puzzles). More than anything, Aloy’s trip to Hollywood justifies its existence by meaningfully building upon the base game’s story, paving a solid runway for the next title to take off.
SIDEBAR: How To Access The DLC: To play Burning Shores, you’ll need to have completed the final campaign mission of Horizon Forbidden West. Once this is done, Aloy will receive a call on her Focus, which kicks off the DLC. If you’re returning to Forbidden West after an absence, this immediately occurs as soon as you drop back into the world.
Score:
8
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher:
Electronic Arts
Developer:
Respawn Entertainment
Rating:
Teen
If the only thought in your mind upon completing 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order was that you wanted more, then I have excellent news. Picking up where its predecessor left off, Jedi: Survivor isn’t just more of the same but more of virtually everything, with meaningful advances and improvements across the board. It’s a longer game with greater levels of customization, more enemies, more diverse approaches to combat and puzzles, and more storytelling and character development for its compelling cast of characters. While some structural and story choices start to wear thin, Jedi: Survivor is nonetheless a step up in almost all the ways that matter. It also manages to capture a lot of the tonal and thematic ideas that work about this fiction, helping cement its place as one of the best in the long history of Star Wars games.
As we rejoin Cal Kestis, there’s little of the step back in power that some action game sequels attempt. He's a full-fledged Jedi Knight, with all the Force powers and lightsaber tricks you worked so hard to earn last time still in place. Robust onboarding quickly gets into the action and story, making you feel powerful and capable. The flexibility of playstyle expands from there, with new saber stances and equipment that provide choice in confronting the galaxy’s dangers. The downside is that most upgrades to Cal’s use of the Force feel more like twists and tweaks rather than wholly new powers, but it’s a small price to pay for well-paced action from beginning to end.
Combat and dueling are excellent, demanding a Jedi’s patience for defense to master. It’s impressive to balance battle encounters across a big game like this so that they remain challenging at every step, but Cal’s new adventure manages to do so. A wide variety of formidable foes await, each demanding observation and canny button work. A few late-game bosses rely on frustrating cheap tricks, but they always make for climactic and affecting encounters.
I adore the mobility and navigation challenges, which nail that sense of controlling a Force-attuned hero leaping and swinging through seemingly impossible paths. Like the combat, a satisfying upward slope of complexity keeps traversal engaging throughout – no small feat in a game this big. Several scattered optional puzzles are also fiendishly clever, and I enjoyed them as a departure from the action.
While Jedi: Survivor includes several unique planets to visit, it grounds the experience in a single frontier world called Koboh, with more than a little Old West inspiration. Large swaths of the game unfold in the different corners of this semi-open world planet, filled with rumors to track down, bounties to hunt, and secrets to uncover. I like the locale, but by the end, I was growing tired of running in circles to the same destination after so many prior visits. Thankfully, whether on Koboh or visiting planets like Coruscant or Jedha, a new fast travel system makes navigation between meditation points easy.
Customization is foundational across the game and its reward systems, from tweaking hairstyles, jackets, and saber colors to character perks and powers. That extends to increased ownership over the world, through the ability to enhance a cantina with a garden, an aquarium, new visitors, and even musical tracks. I felt invested in the adventure and the improvements I found along the way.
Across its lengthy campaign, Jedi: Survivor takes an initially meandering course to find its plotline but eventually coalesces into a story about disparate people searching for a safe home. The moment-to-moment character interactions and dialogue help elevate the lack of focus, with some sweeping melodrama in the best traditions of Star Wars fiction. The distinctions between love and attachment, and the dangers of both, often lurk in the background of Star Wars stories. Those themes take centerstage this time, with memorable and rewarding results.
Developer Respawn Entertainment clearly took a measured and thoughtful approach to analyze what worked and what didn’t in its last Star Wars game, and Jedi: Survivor feels like a worthy attempt at evolution. It captures the magic of Star Wars as well as anything in the current canon, and it’s a stellar adventure in its own right. Still, nailing the fantasy of being a Jedi? Doesn’t hurt.
Score:
9.25
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, PC
Publisher:
Embers
Developer:
Embers
Rating:
Teen
Introducing something new to me in action combat is rare. In games that feature it, you’re likely using either guns to kill enemies or melee action to take them down, and I’m not often surprised by how this can work. I can, of course, fall in love with familiar combat despite that, but it’s always exciting to experience something I haven’t before, which is what Strayed Lights manages to do.
Relying almost exclusively on a unique parry system requiring you to switch between two colors to match your enemy’s attack, I couldn’t get enough of Strayed Lights’ action, even if it was repetitive. That this combat was wrapped up in a gorgeous, realized alien world and backed by a dynamic and musically diverse score from Austin Wintory (the composer of Journey and The Pathless) made my time with the game all the better.
Strayed Lights begins with a birth of sorts. You start as a spark of light – an ember – on a journey to transcendence. To succeed, you must confront your inner demons – darkness – using a defense-focused combat style, all while exploring more of this ethereal sci-fi world to learn about your existence. In my first hour, I felt overwhelmed because developer Embers does little to hold your hand or even guide you in a direction, but the game’s openness is more linear than it first appears.
Running around this world is great, but the platforming is sometimes less than stellar. Jumping feels strange because your character often hits the ground with a thud, and you must wait a few moments for them to recover and stand back up. This design choice makes larger jumps, of which there are many, feel burdensome. But platforming is rarely the star of this show as it’s more of a quick means to reach the next combat arena.
When an enemy is close, a shadowy substance smears the edges of the screen, a rocky monster (sometimes two) appears, and Strayed Lights begins to shine. By pressing the left bumper, I can switch the color of the fiery light burning inside my character from blue to orange and back. This is important to nail down soon after the game begins because every enemy switches colors like this too. And you need to parry with the right bumper with your color matching theirs. This mechanic starts simple, but a third color you cannot match – purple – is thrown into the mix, requiring you to dodge. At its height, a fourth color is added and enemies quickly switch between them as they wail at you with three, four, and sometimes five hits. I loved frantically switching my colors to match theirs with a parry, dodging when required, and getting in hits with my limited offensive abilities.
Parrying is the only way to regain health during combat, which required me to play more dangerously as my health dropped. There are abilities and special moves you can unlock for your combat repertoire but ultimately, learning Strayed Lights’ parry mechanic is crucial – there’s no reaching the end if you can’t nail the timing. I love a good parry in a game and this one remained satisfying through the end, but those who prefer to dodge in melee action games may struggle.
Collecting shards from enemies to spend on abilities is satisfying, as is exploring the open areas to collect items connected to lore, leveling up, and more. Fortunately, straying from the path to find these collectibles requires little effort, which is good because it lets you get back to combat. The action is simple but satisfying, and while the instances where I had to fight more than one enemy at a time were more frustrating than anything else, I still enjoyed almost every combat scenario I stumbled into.
The game lacks enemy variety, though. It initially seemed like each new area might have its own enemy makeup, but halfway through the game, I realized Strayed Lights only had a handful of monsters to throw at me. Learning each attack pattern was a fun mental exercise, and I would have liked more.
Regardless of what I was doing, my eyes and ears were feasting. I entered each new open area in Strayed Lights delighted at the visual design before me. Suns and moons burn overhead, and landscapes are painted in beautiful hues of green, blue, neon pinks, and purples. My ember light of a character shined against these backdrops and my hard drive is home to a couple of dozen screenshots because of it. Wintory’s score matches the tone of each place, dancing between ethereal wind instruments and ritualistic percussion that seemed to be speaking its own alien language. Even when the gameplay falters, like in two-enemy combat scenarios or the game’s less-than-great platforming, I enjoyed being in this world because of Strayed Lights’ score and visual design.
Strayed Lights is short, sweet, and mostly excels at what it asks players to do. Its unique parry-required combat brings something new to the table, and I enjoyed nearly every instance of it, especially in the larger boss-fight setpieces sprinkled through the journey. Its exploration doesn’t require much effort, which is a good thing because it largely doesn’t feel great to platform through areas. Its misses are easy to put aside, though, when what I’m looking at and hearing throughout the game is such a delight. Strayed Lights is a strong debut from Embers in almost every way and serves to highlight the importance of a game’s foundation. At its core, Strayed Lights revolves around a simple, intuitive, and unique combat system, and with this strong base in place, it’s no wonder the game shines as bright as it does.
Score:
8
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Reviewed on:
Switch
Platform:
Switch
Publisher:
Nintendo
Developer:
WayForward Technologies, Nintendo
Rating:
Everyone 10+
Nintendo and WayForward took a risk in bringing Advance Wars back from the scrap heap with Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, releasing a set of tactics-heavy games in a genre now defined by character relationships. The remakes change little from the original releases and don’t deepen the story or cast, but they don’t have to change anything. Advance Wars’ unique features are as apparent as ever. If anything, they’re made even stronger by the series’ extended absence.
Advance Wars is light on story compared to other tactical RPGs. The nations of Wars World are on the cusp of conflict as a sinister figure manipulates them from the shadows. Your job is preventing war from breaking out by… going to war. The setup doesn’t warrant too much thought and has big Saturday morning cartoon vibes, a feeling these new updates help heighten. Re-Boot Camp features new toybox-style graphics, a remastered soundtrack, sporadic voice acting, and a slightly tweaked script that brings out the most of every character’s personality.
That new cartoon style also helps offset what’s otherwise a grim setup, where officers send scores of troops to die in battle without a thought for their welfare. Technically, that’s still what happens, but the new look makes each map like a game of toy soldiers, with maps even resembling a tabletop board when you zoom out.
What hasn’t changed is the series’ take on the genre, which, more than 20 years after the first game was released, still feels fresh and innovative. Both Advance Wars games blend traditional tactics elements, such as a rock-paper-scissors system of unit strengths and weaknesses, with features typically found in real-time strategy games. Resource and fuel management are critical in Advance Wars, for example, and controlling specific parts of a map is often essential for victory. The attention to detail is so acute that you even have to think about how tires and treads interact with terrain.
Every battle is a tense mixture of smart planning and wild improvisation, where victory feels well-earned – even if you barely manage to clear the objective. Each map has an optimal approach, but the strategic depth and variation mean you can experiment with unorthodox ideas and still earn a high ranking.
The remakes also include a feature that lets you reset your current turn as often as you want. It’s a helpful but clunky approach to making both games more approachable. If a choice you made three turns back turns out badly, your only option is to leave the mission and start over. You can increase movement speed and remove animations to save time, but a Fire Emblem-style rewind feature would have been a more elegant solution.
The range of choices may seem overwhelming, but Advance Wars does a superb job of teaching you the basics and even some advanced strategies at a steady pace – although it does this perhaps almost too well. Most of the first game plays like an extended tutorial, where you don’t get the full range of tools at your disposal until over halfway through the campaign.
Advance Wars 2 is a stronger and more confident game, however. This time, you control different COs from every nation, so each mission requires a thoughtful new approach with their strengths and foibles in mind. It’s a brilliant exercise in iteration, with a well-designed set of new officers, clever new CO powers, and complex, sometimes uncompromising, maps that make the most of the series’ unique mechanics.
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp might not include much new material, but it presents a strong case that classic games don’t always have to change to be relevant again. Sometimes, they just need a second chance.
Score:
8.5
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Reviewed on:
Switch
Platform:
Switch, PC
Developer:
Mike Bithell Games
Rating:
Teen
Taking established fictional universes in new directions is an idea we should all be behind. Too often, licensed games hew too close to established characters or scenarios, and those beloved fictional frameworks are never given a chance to grow. With Tron: Identity, Bithell Games takes the venerable Tron franchise and tries something entirely different – a visual novel with a light touch of puzzle gameplay. The novelty alone is worth some enthusiasm. However, despite a valiant attempt at a fresh take, this bite-sized release falls short in some key areas.
Tron: Identity is comparable to a classic noir detective story, presuming your investigator lived in a computer, wore a disc that contained his memories, and was constantly surrounded by pulsing colored lights. The entire story unfolds within an extensive repository of information on “the Grid,” and it’s up to you to solve the mystery of a strange explosion and possible theft that occurred there. Along the way, you meet a handful of other characters, or “Programs” in the vernacular, and make choices that will affect how each feels about you and how receptive they might be to your inquiry. The entire affair unfolds through written text set below art of the characters and locales within the Repository.
I like the limited scope and tight narrative constraints that are on offer. But I can’t say I ever felt like I was solving a mystery. New pieces of information dropped into my lap at regular intervals, but I never really felt like a detective putting all the pieces together. When the big picture revealed itself, it felt more like a surprising plot twist than the satisfying click of everything finally making sense.
Even so, the written descriptions and dialogue paint an atmospheric story and help create nuance around the mostly static image visuals. I enjoyed Bithell’s distinct take on the Tron world and the places the developer found to add new twists to that established fiction. I also liked the branching decision-making trees, which allow each player to craft their own take on the narrative, perhaps even with different characters who live or die by the end.
Along the way, my character has the singular ability to help clear up and clarify character memories, which recent events have inexplicably damaged. These repairs take the form of an unusual puzzle game of matching numbers and card suits in particular patterns. Players repeat variations of this puzzle structure several times over the few hours it takes to complete a playthrough. While not aggravating, I never warmed to the mechanic and usually found that trial and error was the best path to wrapping them up. On a subsequent playthrough to explore different storytelling paths, I was happy to pause and skip the puzzles entirely – an option that was wise to include, based on my experience.
Tron: Identity flirts with some pretty weighty themes across its concise playtime. Issues of fate, the meaning of memory, and purpose in the face of extinction – all of these and more are explored, primarily in connection with the game’s subtitle: identity. By the end, no matter your choices, the game doesn’t seek to offer any particular conclusive statements on those topics. But seeing diverse characters mull over these issues during a crisis is enjoyable.
While I applaud Tron: Identity’s unique structure, I never found myself drawn in and engrossed in the unfolding story. Everything feels authentic to the Tron universe, and fans like myself should appreciate new wrinkles in the setting. But even with some interesting ideas, I was ultimately a User who couldn’t manage to marshal a lot of interest in these Programs and their problems.
Score:
7
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Reviewed on:
PlayStation 5
Platform:
PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Stadia, PC
Publisher:
Deep Silver
Developer:
Dambuster Studios
Release:
Spring 2015
Rating:
Mature
Dead Island 2 was announced just a few years after its 2011 predecessor, but the sequel has taken nearly a decade to come to life. Developer Dambuster Studios is the third studio to work on the game, using this opportunity to create its own Dead Island 2 from the ground up. While assumptions might be made about a game that’s spent this long in development, jumping from multiple teams, the final game is a worthwhile follow-up, especially for fans of the original. Dead Island 2, much like its predecessor, isn’t breaking new ground narratively, but a good hook moves you through the game’s various Los Angeles districts. The star of the show is the zombies and the gory and customizable action that happens because of them. Over 2000 zombies were mutilated, maimed, electrocuted, burned, and obliterated during my time with Dead Island 2. I rolled credits most excited about this carnage my tour through LA brought me. I only wish the rest of the game was as enamoring.
Dead Island 2 doesn’t take long to get into the action. After a quick cutscene setting up this idealized take on Los Angeles and how it’s become a dead island of sorts, I selected Amy, one of six slayers you can play as in the game’s story. She’s a Paralympian and an agile, speed-based character. While each of the six slayers has a different personality and backstory alongside two exclusive innate abilities, I finished Dead Island 2 feeling like who I played matters little narratively. Amy would occasionally comment about how she needed to get out of Los Angeles to make it to her next running competition, but other than that, her barks and lines felt generic enough that I wasn’t concerned I was missing part of the larger Dead Island 2 narrative by not playing through the game as each survivor.
Unlockable skill cards offer more of that variance I wanted. With 15 equipable slots, I decked out Amy to play a lot like the zombies I was fighting, utilizing their ground pounds, screams, strikes, and more against them. While some cards offer abilities usable against the undead, others are best described as perks that activate in combat, like my favorite that restored a bit of health every time I performed a perfect dodge or block. This card, coupled with the ones that let me utilize moves learned from surrounding zombies, allowed my Amy to play to her strength: agility. I was focused less on hitting hard and more on hitting a lot, but I could see how other cards would result in different approaches to combat. The cards are easy to understand and fun to collect, encouraging me to try out different ones often. This system and the weapons are where players find the most contrast between playthroughs.
The story of Dead Island 2 takes Amy through many of the locations you’d hope to visit in Los Angeles, from Beverly Hills to movie studio lots to the Santa Monica Pier and, of course, Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not an engrossing story, and quickly takes a back seat to exploring the world and killing zombies, but it’s serviceable, sprinkled in with the kind of characters you’d expect to run into in a post-apocalyptic LA like a Hollywood A-lister or washed-up rockstar. It’s also paced nicely, rarely overstaying its welcome and letting me return to the action right when I start to miss it. But ultimately, it’s not a story that will stay long with me, even if the team is setting up more adventures with this cast.
I was excited about each location whenever I visited a new one. They’re lovingly designed, almost as if you were getting the greatest hits of each locale, perfect for the touristy romp through Los Angeles that Dead Island 2 ends up being.
Dead Island 2’s visual design made each location even more memorable – the game’s art is stunning at times. The landscape is bright and saturated, and so much of this world is soaked in blood, gore, and end-of-the-world storytelling. Zombies, dead and alive, paint the walls of celebrity mansions, caustic guts bubble in hallways throughout famed hotels, and my hacks and slashes only color the streets redder. The extreme gore remained shocking throughout my nearly 20 hours. Literal heads rolled, arms were ripped off, and guts spilled from inside stomach cavities as I watched my weapons tear through flesh. I would have liked this action to arrive a couple of hours quicker, but once it did, it continued to escalate until the end.
I loved how I could customize different weapons to inflict more damage on the undead. Weapons, of which there are a ton, vary in rarity and rarer weapons allow for more customization with mods and enhancements. Perks allow you to increase weapon damage, change speed, raise durability, and more, and I liked that some offered pros with cons, which forced me to think more about what I wanted a weapon to be. Adding fire, electricity, caustic acid, bleed, and other enhancements to my weapons lent itself well to the immersive sim-like nature present in much of Dead Island 2’s world, as did throwable ”curveballs” like chemical bombs and zombie-luring bait.
Throughout Los Angeles, I found water spouts, electrical wires, gasoline spills, and other environmental cues aiding destruction. And they’re easy to read, too. My electric wolverine claws could electrify water and the zombies within it, which gives them the persistently damaging electrified status effect. The same goes for fire and gasoline and other combos. Once the game introduced shotguns, pistols, assault rifles, and submachine guns into the mix, I had even more range in combat, both from a literal standpoint and in that I could interact with Dead Island 2’s immersive sim elements in a new way.
Dambuster Studios uses these elements to create short and sweet puzzles to reach loot and collectibles, and most of my post-campaign enjoyment came from these. Side quests are fine, with some of the better ones leaning heavily into the caricatured version of Los Angeles I imagine most people who don’t live there, like myself, have of the city and its people to great effect. I loved killing zombies atop a cringe hype house on camera so that an influencer could show her followers what was happening here, and using movie set pyrotechnics to destroy hordes of zombies in another. These side quests, much like the main quests, shined when they moved at a brisk pace. But sometimes, areas become wave-based arenas where killing zombies becomes exhausting, especially in the latter third of the game.
Combat is most fun in short bursts when taking down a handful of zombies. But some setpieces in the game throw dozens of zombies at you and the thrill of combat can become a chore. Immersive sim elements and Skill Card abilities help spice up these sequences, but ultimately, killing waves of zombies in the same arena gets boring quickly. This issue especially stands out often truncated by the more interesting open-area combat that happens throughout a lot of the game, especially outside of main story quests.
With Dead Island 2 behind me, I’m thrilled Dambuster Studios could take something we first learned about way back in 2014 and successfully bring it across the finish line with its own take on the series’ vision. Dead Island 2 plays, looks, and sounds like a B-movie horror comedy from the 1990s, and the team leans into that full bore with its systems. At the core of this game is zombie destruction, and Dead Island 2 features both plenty of systems with which to engage in it and plenty of zombies to destroy." Its serviceable story does just enough to move slayers across Los Angeles’ postcard locations at a brisk pace, and I appreciate how much side content is available within them to keep each visit entertaining. This game won’t stay with me long, but I’m not sure it was meant to. With Dead Island 2, Dambuster Studios asks little of the player – only that you enjoy a good excuse to kill zombies in increasingly gory ways for a weekend or two – and in doing so, it delivers on the promise of what this series is all about.
Score:
7.75
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