IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

In something of a reversal of the usual result of games that use live-action cutscenes, Human Head’s ambitious attempt to tell a story from the perspective of a deaf protagonist gets a lot more right about its video half than its game half.

You may have played many versions of Tetris, but you’ve probably never played one like Tetris Effect. The latest iteration of the falling-block puzzler comes from Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Enhance Experience and combines music, sound, vibration, and visuals into something that becomes almost transcendent. It does have a late-game difficulty spike that’s worse for those that aren’t playing in VR, but this is still a masterfully presented new entry in a long-running series.

When I first reviewed Civilization VI back in 2016, here's what I had to say about it as I awarded it a score of 9.4 (for amazing) and nominated it for game of the year: "Civilization VI will go down in history as the most fully-featured launch version in the series. Many of those are smartly revamped versions of Civ classics, but it finds its own identity with great new ideas like spread-out cities, customizeable governments, research boosts, and leader agendas.

Overkill’s The Walking Dead is an earnest attempt to deliver a cooperative adventure set in the iconic Walking Dead universe, but that effort feels a bit like it’s all too little too late. While the creators of Payday 2 manage to deliver something better than Terminal Reality’s sorry attempt at a shooter in Robert Kirkman’s universe, it still fails to live up to the lofty expectations set by its lore. As a brand, The Walking Dead is enormous.

It's often with rose-colored glasses that I look back at Pokemon’s Kanto story, and I know I’m not the only one who feels a deep connection to the wooded region. It's where many long-time fans had their first Pokemon adventure, and it’s the region where I met one of my favorite characters of all time.

Toys for Bob just gets Spyro the Dragon. In the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, the Skylanders developer has rekindled the spark of the original PlayStation mascot’s first three adventures. With a gorgeous new coat of paint, a score that modernizes the iconic soundtrack, and quality of life improvements, this collection is a reminder of why these charming platformers were — and still are —so loved. Toys for Bob has nailed the feel of controlling Spyro.

Welcome, Battlefield fans! This year, we've broken up the review into its single-player and multiplayer components to give fans of each style of play a better idea of what's up. This review covers only the single-player mode, with our multiplayer review and overall Battlefield V review coming soon. All too often, the single-player campaign of a primarily multiplayer shooter is little more than a glorified tutorial.

Déracinéis haunting, and not just because you play as an invisible ghost-like figure wandering the halls of a boarding school. It’s thanks to a smart focus on character and place that come together to produce an eerie, surprisingly moving fairytale that, mostly, overcomes its pedestrian use of VR.

To keep your typical sequel expectations in check, it's probably best to think of Hitman 2 as season 2 of the 2016 revival; it doesn’t have many new features, but it does deliver all six of its clever murder sandboxes at once. The huge variety of options for pulling off stealthy kills makes playing and replaying them a majorly satisfying draw. Beyond that, though, Agent 47 barely gets any new toys to play with and the story around it is just embarrassing on multiple levels.

Whereas normally a review would try to get to the heart of what makes a game fun (or not), in the case of a compilation like the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection I’m judging the work that was put into curating, presenting, contextualizing, and enhancing the artifacts on display. These games are relics of another time, and in some cases not much fun to play today.

When something comes along that as thoroughly exceeds my expectations in so many areas as Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, it reminds me why I got into video games in the first place. Far, far from a mere single player afterthought slapped onto a multiplayer collectible card game, CD Projekt Red has given us a sweeping, complex, emotional story with memorable characters, excellent voice acting, and varied, exciting card battles all along the way. I was most blown away by the writing.

It doesn’t take long for Call of Cthulhu’s dark and intriguing detective story to rapidly spiral down the well of occult madness. Inspired by the legendary Chaosium RPG of the same name, it tells its Lovecraftian tale with writing so strong that I couldn’t help but get sucked into the immersive atmosphere it created.

Not every six-year-old game can feel fresh and modern on a new platform, especially after you take off the 'Ohmigosh it’s on Switch so I can take it anywhere!' goggles. This is my third trip through Diablo 3 since its original release on PC in 2012 and expansion pack-fueled debut on Xbox One in 2014, and I have to say: it still plays wonderfully. That’s not a huge surprise. What is an unexpected delight is how good Diablo 3 looks on Nintendo’s portable console.

Everyone who’s played enough of the Dark Souls series and its contemporaries has probably asked themselves at least once, “wouldn’t this be better if you could just skip the levels and fight the bosses?” Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, an indie “boss rush” Soulslike from developer Dark Star, explores that question, distilling the Soulslike experience into eight devilishly challenging duels.

The first post-game DLC episode for Marvel’s Spider-Man, The Heist, is like the main game in miniature form — fantastic character work, coupled with engaging story missions and side objectives occasionally hampered by repetition. The Heist clearly serves as the first chapter of a larger story waiting to be told across Spider-Man’s three-part DLC saga called The City That Never Sleeps, and so it feels a little light on its own.