IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

My experience with Outward essentially unfolded in two distinct acts. In the first, I spent the majority of my time in this open-world fantasy RPG getting killed by nearly every enemy I encountered, running between the only two cities I knew the way to (after getting locked out of a third) to find gear and salvage crafting materials and baubles so I could sell them.

Sometimes a game comes along that follows every tired convention you can imagine, but executes them so well that it still manages to make an impression. Ghost Giant, the painterly first crack at a virtual reality experience from Fe developer Zoink Games, ticks many of the cliche boxes established by previous story-driven sandbox and puzzle VR games. But Ghost Giant’s charming characters and thoughtful storytelling drew me in all the same for a short, but rewarding virtual trip.

I have this thing. I hate cucumber. I hate it so much. But no matter how much I explain why, most people don’t understand. I must just taste it differently than other people. It’s a fundamental, maybe even genetic difference. I get it, others don’t. I think D3 Publisher might have realised that there’s a similar problem at the heart of the Earth Defense Force series – one Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain only somewhat successfully attempts to fix. EDF is the anti-cucumber.

I never knew I wanted a pet bird, but Falcon Age made me care for its titular raptor like she were my own. Outerloop Games makes smart use of both gameplay and story to pull that off, despite running into some technical issues along the way. While this adventure is fully explorable on a good old-fashioned TV, it is absolutely more rewarding when experienced on PSVR thanks to a number of engaging interactions and control ideas.

Arcade racing games haven’t exactly been plentiful in recent years – nor has EA shown the slightest bit of interest in reviving the best of them all, Burnout (which saw its last new, proper entry in 2008 with Burnout Paradise). And so here comes Dangerous Driving – made by some of the original creators of Burnout, no less – to pick up the slack.

Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid is a great example of how far rock-solid mechanics and strong characters can take a fighting game, even when everything else is working against it.

Welcome, Battlefield fans! This review focuses solely on the newly released Firestorm battle royale mode. To see what we thought of thesingle-playerandmultiplayersides ofBattlefield V, check out those reviews. Better late than never, Battlefield V has patched in its take on the battle royale genre. Firestorm mode takes the large environments, realistic weapons, and vehicle warfare Battlefield players know and love and injects them into a beautiful map.

Clone console hardware has come a long way over the past 15 years. What used to be the domain of sketchy shopping mall kiosks offering off-brand NESes claiming to contain 1,000 games (990 of which were strangely named hacks of Super Mario Bros. and Contra, and none of which were legally licensed) has become a booming, legitimate business, thanks in part to the huge success off the NES Classic and Super NES Classic. Analogue Co.

With its distinctive hand-drawn cartoon art style, Borderlands is an odd candidate for a remaster because it’s look is frankly hard to improve upon. It looked great in 2009, and it still looks great nearly 10 years later as a slightly brighter experience with better, steadier framerate and a few minor tweaks. That’s both good and somewhat disappointing: On the one hand, it reconfirms that Borderlands still looks and plays the part a decade later.

There aren't a lot of city builders that let you roleplay a specific type of leader, so I immediately took a liking to the freedom Tropico 6 gives you to do just that. There's nothing stopping you from trying to build a communist paradise where everyone lives in haciendas and banana pickers make as much money as tech executives, or a brutal military dictatorship that only cares about how efficiently human lives can be turned into profitable exports.

Sony’s MLB The Show series has been coasting on its past success for a few years now, but the 2019 version has finally broken that slump by introducing some substantially improved modes on top of the usual fine-tuning and polish. Yes, the core gameplay is very familiar and Franchise Mode remains nearly identical to last year’s, but Road to the Show serves as the culmination of years of improvements and a new mode, March to October, is a novel way to experience the MLB season.

True to form, Yoshi’s Crafted World is exactly what I expected it to be. It’s a very enjoyable and delightfully charming Yoshi platformer that doesn’t really strive to be much more, like Breath of the Wild did for Zelda, nor does it hone the series’ ideas to a razor-sharp edge like Odyssey did for Mario.

A lot has happened to the Assassin’s Creed series in the seven years since Assassin's Creed 3 first came out. It was quickly overshadowed in 2013 by the follow-up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which remains one of my all-time favorites – but that’s in part because of how well AC4 built upon the naval combat concepts introduced by its Colonial predecessor.

Conceptually, Generation Zero has a lot of big ideas. Its setting, a 1980s alternate history where robots have taken over the Swedish countryside, is fresh and stylish in its specificity. Though it fits into a clear-cut niche – the co-op survival first-person shooter – it draws clear mechanical inspiration from a range of sources, from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to Horizon: Zero Dawn, as well as more directly comparable open-world shooters like Far Cry 5.

As a whole, The Walking Dead: The Final Season makes its farewell to Clementine by debating the thought-provoking idea of knowing when to break a cycle. For years, Clementine has been compelled to protect her young companion A.J. at any cost, exactly as Lee did for her in the first season. The cycle of survival, of carrying on the lessons imparted to her, is wired into every fiber of her being. It’s what has kept them alive.