IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

Even eight years after its initial release, there’s still nothing quite like the fever dream that is Catherine. It remains an excellent fusion of thrilling block pushing puzzle mechanics and an exciting love story about the deathly consequences of infidelity.

Every once in a while, one of those horror games comes along that gets mythologized as a harrowing experience best left alone by anyone without a taste for relentless, oppressive fear.

I like my decisions to come with consequences, and The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan presents some strong ones, including one that determines whether or not I get to see Shawn Ashmore speared through the chest with a rusty spike. Unlike developer Supermassive Games’ greatest horror hit to date, the cheesy Until Dawn, Man of Medan is a serious and brooding horror game that starts off too slow but maintains a welcome sense of dread in its latter half.

When our distant ape ancestors got together and decided one day, roughly 10 million years ago, that they should evolve into humans, did they have an instruction manual that told them which two things to rub together to get there? No! They had to put pretty much everything they encountered into their mouths, one at a time, to figure out which was tasty and which was deadly poison. There was a lot of hard work, repetition, and death that turned out to be completely unnecessary in hindsight.

There’s an old Wile E. Coyote cartoon where he gets in a racecar to chase after the Road Runner, and as he’s speeding along the car begins to fall apart piece by piece until he’s left holding nothing but a busted steering wheel. That’s what it feels like to play Decay of Logos, an open-world action-adventure RPG that strongly invokes The Legend of Zelda but becomes increasingly unstable the longer you play, until you’re just thankful to see the credits roll.

Remnant: From The Ashes demands a lot from you while offering very little in return. Its excellent combat and high-stakes, randomized progression system gives it moments of pure blissful excitement, especially in co-op. But its frequent difficulty spikes and underwhelming gear system rob it of the consistently “tough but fair” feeling that gives Souls games their infamous appeal. Visually, Remnant’s environments are grotesquely stunning.

Going in, Nightwolf was honestly the character I was looking forward to the least out of the announced Kombat Pack 1 characters. The second DLC addition to Mortal Kombat 11’s roster doesn’t have Shang Tsung’s flashy ability to morph into other characters, the super-iconic moveset of Sindel, nor the sheer amount of fan excitement of the upcoming Spawn.

In honour of its main character, Shelly ‘Bombshell’ Harrison, Ion Fury was originally known as Ion Maiden - but that changed soon after the band Iron Maiden threatened legal action. But the aging band needn’t have bothered – this throwback first-person shooter isn’t anything like the classic British metal forged in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In spacefaring sci-fi shows and movies – eg Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica – there are two very different kinds of space combat: the slug-fests where battleships duke it out with massive broadsides, and the fast, twitchy dogfighting of fighters buzzing around them. 2015’s Rebel Galaxy is an excellent RPG built around the former, and now its prequel spin-off, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, is an action game that specializes in the latter.

It didn't take long for me to take a liking to Age of Wonders: Planetfall. From its six over-the-top sci-fi factions spewing lasers, acid bile, and personality all over the randomly generated planets to the way it manages to finely balance its pacing between a traditional 4X campaign and XCOM-style tactical battles, there is plenty to praise. A little more sense of tech progression and deeper base building wouldn't have hurt, though.

The Smash Bros. DLC train keeps rolling along with the introduction of Dragon Quest’s Hero, and while Persona 5’s Joker is a tough act to follow, Hero keeps the ride running smoothly. He’s the second of five currently planned characters that are part of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s Fighter Pass, all of which are available separately as well for $5.99 each. And while he may be called by the generic title of “Hero,” his RNG-heavy implementation in Smash Bros.

The story itself is one we’ve heard a lot lately: Thanos is hunting for the Infinity Stones and you have to find all six before he does. It’s a new telling of some extremely well-tread ground, but the writing and voice acting still manage to capture the funny, self-deprecating, and occasionally overdramatic attitude I love about big comic book stories.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to love a Minecraft-style block-building game based on a decades-old JRPG franchise as much as I did Dragon Quest Builders 2 I never played the first Dragon Quest Builders, and I didn’t feel like I needed to in order to get what was going on in this sequel.

In this beautiful, flooded world, humans turn into monsters when they become lonely - but that loneliness takes plenty of different forms. Sea of Solitude is all about navigating dangerous waters, both literally and metaphorically. It’s a story-driven adventure game with powerful and surprising moments. It reaches a narrative high point early, but unfortunately and can’t ride that wave for the entire story.

When it was revealed that Judgment – a spin-off from the 13-year-old Yakuza series – was going to cast the main character as a private investigator based in Tokyo’s red-light district, I had wondered if it would break with Yakuza tradition and focus more on actual detective work; an LA Noire to Yakuza's GTA, if you will.