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Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising review

By Arthur Gies on May 20, 2016 05.20.16

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is one of those "sequels that are better than the original" films, and I'll admit to being pretty surprised by that. The first Neighbors was a pretty funny movie that relied on a lot of sharp joke writing and sight gags to get laughs, and it was underpinned by a few human moments that made things feel more real. It was enough to mask a story that was less narrative and more escalation for progressively more extreme punchlines. And when the credits rolled, the last thing I imagined was that it had anywhere else to go. It was a concept that felt well-mined. As Neighbors 2 opens, it feels like more of the same. Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) are looking to sell their house as their family grows, and they find a buyer, with a catch — the house will...

7.5

Stellaris review

By Charlie Hall on May 20, 2016 05.20.16

When Paradox first announced Stellaris last year, I found myself asking if, in an already crowded category, we really needed another space strategy game. Now, after spending more than a week with the final product I have my answer. No, we don’t need another space strategy game. Not now, at least. What we need is a slightly better Stellaris. It’s a fantastic platform, a capable, flexible sandbox that's customizable inside and out. But as technically competent as it is, some of its key systems are frustratingly incomplete, and the game is lacking in personality. What we need is a slightly better Stellaris Stellaris is a grand strategy title from the leading developer in the genre. Set in a single, two-dimensional galaxy that’s randomly generated at the beginning of...

8.5

Doom review

By Arthur Gies on May 18, 2016 05.18.16

Doom (2016) is an attempt at translation. It's been demonstrated before that taking the original 1993 release of Doom and repurposing it for a modern audience is hard. Doom released at the tail end of an era of pixelated abstraction in games, a time when your brain had to do a lot more heavy lifting to fill in the gaps between those big squares of color to see a bright pink demon explode into a intestine-strewn mess, where those bright red blobs were blood, where, as the now-infamous Edge review lamented, there was no talking to the monsters. There was only moving very fast, and shooting demons. Id's previous attempt at modernizing the most influential shooter of all time was 2004's Doom 3, a great game that nonetheless proved divisive. It was a translation of what the developers...

6.0

Homefront: The Revolution review

By Russ Frushtick on May 17, 2016 05.17.16

Homefront: The Revolution lacks the one thing required for a successful uprising: passion. The out-gunned, outnumbered insurgency trope is a shooter staple. Most recently, the Far Cry franchise has repopularized it, toppling militaristic dictatorships in foreign lands. But what about taking back America from an oppressive invader? Beginning with the first game in 2011, the Homefront franchise has attempted to capture the spirit of '80s movie Red Dawn — even going so far as to work with that film's director and co-writer John Milius as a "story consultant" — with mixed results. The second game in the series, Homefront: The Revolution, continues this trend of subversive mediocrity. Once the action starts, Homefront: The Revolution settles into dull missions and gameplay I...

3.0

Shadow of the Beast review

By Justin McElroy on May 16, 2016 05.16.16

Do you have fond memories of Shadow of the Beast? No, not Altered Beast, that retro grave was already desecrated in Europe and Japan in 2005. We're talking about Shadow of the Beast. Let's say you do, in fact, have a soft spot for the 1989 cult classic from Reflections and Psygnosis. Despite the lengthy development time (the remake was announced way back in 2013) you're eagerly waiting to see how demonic warrior Aarbron has made the leap to modern platforms. If that describes you, then you ... you had better sit down. There is much wrong with Shadow of the Beast Shadow of the Beast was a standout when it was originally released on Amiga computers, largely for the parallax scrolling graphics that put so many of its contemporaries to shame. It also had one heck of a cool score. T...

Doom: Impressions on the first half of the campaign

By Arthur Gies on May 13, 2016 05.13.16

It's not a guarantee that a game will be bad when reviewers don't get it early — Blizzard notoriously doesn't send out review copies of its games in advance, for example — but it's usually a bad sign. With that in mind, I'm just going to say it: I don't know why Bethesda didn't want reviewers playing the new Doom early, because about halfway through, it's really not bad at all. In fact, it's occasionally pretty good, at least so far. Doom is very violent, in case you weren't aware. It's all kinetic shooting with very graphic kills that have blessedly been toned down somewhat from their original gruesome debut at last year's E3. The so-called "Glory Kills" — a fancy name for melee executions available when an enemy takes enough damage — are no longer quite so drawn-out and torturous....

7.5

Battleborn review

By Brian Crecente and Jeff Ramos on May 13, 2016 05.13.16

Battleborn is one of developer Gearbox Software's biggest investments of time and money ever. Packed with heroes and powered by the mechanics of a first-person shooter, Battleborn is an amalgam of a number of different sorts of shooters pulled together with the art style and humor of a Borderlands game. In its campaign, which can be played alone or cooperatively with up to three friends, you play as one of 25 characters brought together to save the last star in the universe. I liken it to picking up a comic with a great cover, but totally different interior art More than anything, that campaign is just a chance to test out and level up the characters, earning gear upgrades as you go. The bulk of the game, though, is about taking that gear and those characters into three types of...

6.5

Kathy Rain review

By Justin McElroy on May 10, 2016 05.10.16

Kathy Rain is a throwback to adventure games in the LucasArts style. Thanks to the work of publisher-studios like Wadjet Eye, this has become something of a sub-genre itself. Pixelated graphics and an ever-expanding inventory may have been a revelation when games like the Blackwell series and Gemini Rue revived them a few years back, but now they're something more akin to a cottage industry. Without the novelty of that nostalgia, games like Kathy Rain stand on the merits of their storytelling. Luckily, Kathy's got a story that, despite some reservations, is worth hearing out. Kathy gets plenty of opportunity to grow and evolve Our titular heroine is a somewhat unconventional choice for a protagonist in a genre usually fronted by well-meaning buffoons or lantern-jawed everymen....

8.0

The Banner Saga 2 review

By Carli Velocci on May 06, 2016 05.06.16

The Banner Saga 2 is intense and unrelenting in its mission to make you feel like the worst leader alive. The game opens amidst the aftermath of a massive battle from the first game — The Banner Saga 2 literally begins at Chapter 8 and goes from there. In this game filled with fantastical creatures, there’s an apocalypse coming. People are dead, lives are upended and you have to move forward into the story without any time to catch your breath. Throughout the next 10 hours, as you lead a caravan of refugees to what is thought to be the last safe place in a world being swallowed by a Darkness, Banner Saga 2 weighed down on me more and more. And somehow, I welcomed it. As you negotiate through conflicts, a small slip of the tongue can result in the deaths of dozens, or even launch...

8.5

Push Me Pull You review

By Megan Farokhmanesh and Allegra Frank on May 05, 2016 05.05.16

Push Me Pull You is beholden to the strengths — and weaknesses — of all local multiplayer games. Developer House House defines Push Me Pull You as a game about friendship and wrestling. The two- to four-person game sees players facing off in sports challenges as a double-brained worm of a person. It requires strategy, but one that shifts with your partner; patience, but also a competitive sense of urgency. Push Me Pull You is built off a single, standard mode. Players direct their squirming Chinese finger trap of a human — either solo, or with a friend who's playing on their own controller or a shared one — to push and pull balls around a circular court. Along with total malleability, you have the ability to grow and shrink your body rapidly with a shoulder button tap. Each of...

9.0

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End review

By Griffin McElroy on May 05, 2016 05.05.16

By the time I reached the closing credits of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, I never wanted to set foot into an ancient tomb or long-lost treasure trove with Nathan Drake again. It's not that Uncharted 4 left me exasperated or unsatisfied. Quite the opposite, actually: A Thief's End presents a pitch-perfect conclusion to the Uncharted series, and should serve as a benchmark for other franchises approaching their twilight years. There are no threads left unresolved, no relationships left unexplored and no shirts left partially untucked. It's as cathartic an ending as you could hope for, and then some. But that catharsis is built around a game that's so much more intimate and — shockingly — quiet than the other Uncharted adventures. The memorable, exploding setpieces the series is known...

The lombax and his robot pal are better suited to the PlayStation than the big screen

Ratchet & Clank film review: wrong platform

By Philip Kollar on Apr 29, 2016 04.29.16

it's hard to see this ho-hum film coming out on top How strange, then, that this adherence to its roots actually ends up being something more of a curse than a blessing. As in the game it's named after, Ratchet & Clank tells the story of a lombax (a sort of cat-fox-human hybrid) named Ratchet (voiced by James Arnold Taylor). Ratchet's boring life on a sleepy planet is interrupted when a robot named Clank (David Kaye) crash-lands nearby and warns Ratchet of an impending plot to take over the galaxy. Ratchet turns to his childhood hero and leader of the Galactic Rangers, Captain Qwark (Jim Ward) to save the day. If you've played the first Ratchet & Clank game back in 2002 or its recent PlayStation 4 reboot, then you know exactly where this tale is...

9.0

Severed review

By Justin McElroy on Apr 26, 2016 04.26.16

Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack was the first game I ever loved on PlayStation Vita. It was a charming, smart little game with a distinctive art style that looked dynamite on the new portable's expansive screen. It's fitting, then, that its creator, DrinkBox Studios, has returned with what I suspect may be the last Vita title I'll ever love: Severed. Following up on the stellar Guacamelee, DrinkBox has developed a game with a deceptive outer simplicity that hides miles of depth for those who slice below the surface. You are Sasha, a one-armed woman on a quest to rescue her family from what appears to be some sort of purgatory. Though the young warrior may be missing a hand, she's far from unarmed. She protects herself with a large blade controlled via swipes on the...

7.0

Bravely Second: End Layer review

By Janine Hawkins on Apr 25, 2016 04.25.16

Bravely Second: End Layer is a follow-up so deeply rooted in its predecessor that it could almost be an epilogue. Whether or not that's a bad thing depends on where you're sitting. Bravely Second offers the opportunity to experience how the world of Luxendarc has changed since players saw it in Bravely Default, peppering that journey with just enough new enemies, new activities and new classes to keep things from feeling stale. At the same time, the Bravely world may have changed, but the game itself absolutely hasn't. It revisits a lot of old enemies, old activities and old classes, meaning that if this is your introduction to the series (as it was mine) then you're going to have a lot of catching up to do. Two years have passed since the events of Bravely Default, and Luxendarc is...

7.0

Day of the Tentacle Remastered review

By Heather Alexandra on Apr 22, 2016 04.22.16

Day of the Tentacle Remastered seeks to travel back to a time when adventure games were at their height, and manages to hit that mark. Mostly. The purest entry in the growing catalog of LucasArts remasters, Day of the Tentacle has been updated by developer Double Fine with all of its charm and characteristic clever puzzles and liberal use of humor. Day of the Tentacle Remastered truly feels like a labor of love. Unfortunately, a new coat of paint provides some much-needed gloss, but can't quite hide some poor pacing and confusing puzzle design. the game is about a mutant, sludge-eating purple tentacle's dastardly plot to take over the world The sequel to the seminal adventure game Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle concerns itself with a mutant,...

Star Fox Zero channels everything bad about Wii U game design

By Arthur Gies on Apr 20, 2016 04.20.16

Star Fox Zero is something of a reimagining/reboot of the series, as it takes story elements from the original SNES game and mixes it with events and ideas from each subsequent title — including a few bits that seem directly borrowed from the unreleased Star Fox 2. It stars the titular pilot, Fox McCloud, and his animal friends as they battle the evil Andross and his efforts to take over the galaxy. There are things that I don't hate about Star Fox Zero. It's not a terrible-looking game, and it evokes the simplified, polygonal origins of the series in a way that makes sense. It's clear and easy to read, and the talking heads that have always featured prominently in previous games have been lovingly recreated in the most anachronistic way by new series stewards PlatinumGames — Platinum...

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