IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

There are few things quite as satisfying as the feeling of popping a ratman’s head like a grape with a giant war hammer. Or cutting that head clean off with an ax, or possibly unloading a full revolver clip into it, or just burning the whole thing to a crisp. The truth is, just about every one of the multitude of ways Warhammer Vermintide 2 gives you and your co-op team to kill your enemies is punchy, powerful, and a whole lot of fun.

When I think about Fable, I think about choosing between good and evil in a whimsical world full of base but charming humour. I think about combat with Hobbes, Hollow Men, Bandits, Balverines and sometimes well-intentioned guards. I think about faithful dog companions. I also think about games that were rough around the edges, that sometimes delivered and that sometimes fell disappointingly short.

Most turn-based tactical RPGs give me the sense that I’m guiding a crack squad of elite soldiers through deadly engagements with quick thinking and military precision. Pit People, on the other hand, feels more like herding a gaggle of semi-competent maniacs to an improbable victory over equally ridiculous foes. And when I came to terms with that, it actually ended up being a lot of fun.

The Sword Art Online anime poses the question of what happens when virtual games have life-or-death consequences? Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet is a game that poses the question of “what happens if you turn an anime about a roleplaying game into an uninspired action-RPG?” While it’s a nice change of pace from the faux-MMORPG adaptations we’ve seen from this series, it still doesn’t quite hit the target.

Moss won me over instantly thanks to its adorably cute and to-scale mouse heroine, DualShock-fueled precision controls, and charming world design that lets you exist as a human-sized guiding hand inside a rodent-sized world. And outside of minor technical annoyances with PSVR itself, it never erased that initial joy when its literal storybook ending came four hours later.

Past Cure is a classic case of unfocused game design, and it’s easy to imagine that it ended up this way as a result of the developers wanting to do too much. One moment it’s a generic third-person shooter, the next it dives into psychological horror but forgets to build the stakes first. At one point you’re sneaking through a decent stealth mission and then, abruptly, you’re dipping into some simplistic puzzles and riddles.

Battlefield 1: Apocalypse should be thought of mostly as a map pack, with two especially strong and great-looking ground battles leading the charge back into the fray. The pair of simple air battles, on the other hand, aren’t much more than a distraction from the real war. Apocalypse’s River Somme, Caporetto, and Passchendaele are standard Battlefield maps meant to be played in modes like Conquest.

Metal Gear Survive is a weird game. In its sometimes clumsy efforts to merge stealth action, base-building, survival sim, and horror by stitching together pieces from past Metal Gear games, it’s effectively scrubbed those elements of the series’ signature humor and personality.

A lot of tactical depth can happen on a simple eight-by-eight grid. Into The Breach, the follow-up to the legendary FTL: Faster Than Light from Subset Games, creates a fantastic variety of turn-based tactical battles between your team of three mechs and giant, city-destroying kaiju monsters. On a regular basis, Into The Breach makes me scratch my head and wonder how I’m going to get out of this mess alive. And on a few of those occasions, it’s a thrill when I actually do.

Rust is a griefer’s paradise. There’s nothing quite like finding a guy sleeping in a forest and looting him before he wakes up, or camping outside another player’s fort and killing her when she opens the door. For those who enjoy deadly games of cat and mouse, Rust might just be the best survival game out there. But anybody more interested in building and exploration, or isn’t able to devote themselves to one game, may have a rough time.

When we first reviewed Payday 2 in 2013, we gave it an 8.0, for great. Here’s what we said about it then: “Played as intended with a group of friends, PayDay 2 is much like one of its heists: things can get a little sloppy, but the potential payoff is big. Parts of its presentation are lacking, and the state of its single-player is criminal, but overall, it's a deep, addictive co-op shooter that tickled my inner burglar.” Read the original Payday 2 review.

Netherrealm has built a reputation for including some wild guest characters in its fighting games, but perhaps none has been as unexpected as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crashing the party in Injustice 2.

You know what this Secret of Mana HD remaster makes me want most? A full Secret of Mana remake. While I love how this remaster has all the heart and joy of the SNES original from 1993, it misses an opportunity to elevate this classic RPG by bringing it up to modern standards in areas like AI, combat balancing, and even graphics. The result is a charming but clumsy 20ish-hour adventure that both frustrates and delights.

Within my first hour of playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I was beaten up by the town drunk. By the end of the almost 70 hours I spent with it, I was sizing up a trio of bandits with a smirk on my real-life face, knowing even together they were no match for my steel and the extensive training I’d received under some of the toughest knights in this beautifully recreated medieval land. This wasn’t merely a change in stats and equipment.

The Analogue NT does one thing really well: It allows you to play actual Super Nintendo games – not ROMS – on a modern television. Sure, with the right adapters you could probably hook up your beloved, beat-up SNES to your current HDTV, but colors wash out, strange bars appear at the edges, ugly lines mess up the picture, and games just don't look how you remember them. The Super Nt doesn't make games look exactly like you remember them either.