IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

Starting up Marvel Powers United VR for the first time is like stepping into a childhood dream. As I played through the prologue, throwing Cap’s shield and listening to Deadpool and Wolverine bicker, I was filled with glee at how good everyone looked up close and personal. Unfortunately, after the starting excitement wore off this superhero-powered co-op horde mode game quickly became repetitive due to the very similar feel of the heroes, bosses, and maps.

With its latest update, called Next, No Man’s Sky has rounded off enough of its rough edges and piled in enough content that exploring its weird galaxy is usually rewarding. It’s definitely a treadmill, though, and while there are countless upgrades and ships to acquire, bases to build, and resources to mine, the process of earning them involves hours upon hours of mindless and repetitive work.

Stoic Games’ denouement to their beautifully animated, Viking-inspired epic contains, in heaping doses, more of everything that made the first two turn-based tactics games so strong. The Banner Saga 3 offers a bloody and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy with plenty of tough choices, challenging encounters, and vivid characters.

The excellent Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1 is a tough act to follow, but Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 doesn’t even come close. It contains X5 through X8, which range in quality from good all the way down to awful. At least Capcom put a lot of love into the port even if the games themselves don’t necessarily deserve much. Just like the first collection, there are a lot of fun little extras in this package.

The Halo: Fireteam Raven arcade cabinet is nothing if not imposing. The massive construction includes twin 65-inch 1080p TVs linked together – a 21st-century version of the classic X-Men arcade cabinet – forming a giant, ultra-widescreen play area. Four padded seats fill the pod, which is enclosed by glowing Halo rings; each chair is equipped with a heavyweight mounted gun turret controller that’s lavishly decked out with LED strips that change color when you pull the trigger.

The Mega Man X Legacy Collection is an absolutely fantastic compilation that contains the first four Mega Man X games. The first three alone are some of the best video games ever made for the Super NES and are still coveted by fans. Mega Man X4 was a bit more divisive when initially released, but I found myself enjoying it despite the surprising evolution in the art style. I’m incredibly happy to have this well executed compilation in my library of modern consoles and available on the go.

The Mega Man X Legacy Collection is an absolutely fantastic compilation that contains the first four Mega Man X games. The first three alone are some of the best video games ever made for the Super NES and are still coveted by fans. Mega Man X4 was a bit more divisive when initially released, but I found myself enjoying it despite the surprising evolution in the art style. I’m incredibly happy to have this well executed compilation in my library of modern consoles and available on the go.

The highway to the Danger Zone is, in fact, an actual highway this time. Danger Zone 2 is, in everything but name, a direct successor to the beloved Crash mode in Burnout Revenge, in the very best of ways. This colorful game of automotive destruction is what I’d hoped for when last year’s disappointing Danger Zone set its action in a joyless grey box of a warehouse.

Bazooka-toting good old boy Hurk is the funniest character in Far Cry 5, and the Lost On Mars expansion is basically a 10-hour comedy showcase for his hillbilly humor set to some forgettable alien blasting. While Far Cry is usually known for open worlds with a lot of gameplay systems that mix and swirl together to create spontaneous insanity, the barren wasteland of Mars doesn’t provide opportunity for much of anything interesting to happen.

The land of Ooo has flooded and out there be pirates. It’s up to Finn and Jake to find out how things got so whack and bust up a few dinguses while they’re at it. Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion attempts to mix the world and humor of the Cartoon Network series with a competent but simple turn-based RPG, but never manages to be all that great at either. The charm of the TV show is never fully realised and the action is a bit too basic to offer any real depth.

After the credits rolled on Octopath Traveler, I took a 15-minute break before I sat back down, grabbed my controller, and went back to my save file to play more. This, in spite of the fact I’d played 53 hours on my journey to complete the path of Therion, the thief whose story I’d chosen at the beginning. The more I played, the more I loved it. Going in, I’d expected little more than a charming but run-of-the-mill homage to the 16-bit RPGs I grew up playing.

It took three matches filled with endless running, picking up guns I wouldn’t end up shooting, and a whole lot of silence before I saw another living soul in The Culling 2. When I finally locked the scope of my SCAR rifle on another orange prison jumpsuit-clad contestant, I got my first kill. That is, after both of us flailed around unloading and reloading multiple clips at each other.

Within the confines of the battle royale genre’s defining rules, in which up to 100 players rush to find the best gear and fight to be the last one standing at the center of a shrinking circle, there is a ton of room for variation. Among others, PUBG offers a more realistic and hardcore interpretation while Fortnite cartoonishly lets you build structures instantly and H1Z1 innovated with an exhilarating car combat game mode.

In 2013, Super Mario 3D World’s ‘Adventures of Captain Toad’ challenges impressed Shigeru Miyamoto so much that he requested a full game be made out of them. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker was released for Wii U a year later, comprising 68 intricate levels based on the Japanese tradition of hakoniwa, or miniature gardening.

Last year’s Sonic Mania was a superb return to form for one of gaming’s most enduring icons, and Sega has now delivered even more Sonic in the form of Sonic Mania Plus, which you can get as either DLC or a bundle. But before you get fanatical over the prospect of more Sonic Mania, temper your expectations: the new content isn’t all up to the same standard. Sonic Mania plus has a couple major additions.