IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

Editor's note: IGN is ramping tech and hardware reviews back up, one product category at a time. We're kicking off with deep dives into some of the best-of-the best headsets, routers, GPUs, Mice, Monitors, and keyboards from the last few years. Even though Asus is primarily known for its motherboards and graphics cards, the company is also kind of a big deal in the networking world too.

Editor's note: IGN is ramping tech and hardware reviews back up, one product category at a time. We're kicking off with deep dives into some of the best-of-the best headsets, routers, GPUs, Mice, Monitors, and keyboards from the last few years. The D-Link Spaceship router (See it on Amazon), as I call it, is D-Link’s top-of-the-line wireless router, both in terms of pricing ($200) and features.

Trove is a massively multiplayer roleplaying game created with the same brightly colored voxels that define Minecraft, and it's an appropriate choice for what it is. Much like the buildings, landscapes, and even characters formed with these blocks, it lacks clear focus, especially when compared to its genre peers. Somehow it manages to exude a degree of flawed appeal even with these shortcomings, although I've found that its pleasures leave the best impressions in small doses.

Editor's note: IGN is ramping tech and hardware reviews back up, one product category at a time. We're kicking off with deep dives into some of the best-of-the best headsets, routers, GPUs, mice, monitors, and keyboards from the last few years. The router world is full of deceptive marketing, but the Linksys WRT3200ACM(See it on Amazon) is one of the worst offenders.

There’s a decent arena shooter hidden deep within the wrinkled, lined pages of Drawn to Death. But it’s not worth flipping through page upon page of wretched jokes, schoolyard insults, and lame attempts at edginess in order to find said decent game. Drawn to Death is simply a mess that can’t provide a single good reason to give it a deeper reading.

Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is an update of 2011’s Bulletstorm. Here’s what we said when we reviewed the original version back then: Bulletstorm demonstrates the value of "why" for action games. Taken out of the context of its fiction, People Can Fly would have something fun but forgettable on their hands, but the way Bulletstorm fits together results in something cool and memorable. Multiplayer failings notwithstanding, Bulletstorm shines as a single-player shooter.

You’d expect the finale of the Dark Souls trilogy to be a grand, apocalyptic affair, and as far as its haunting new settings and frightening boss fights go, The Ringed City certainly delivers. But for all the cool new gear, spells, and thrilling tests of skill and endurance it throws at you, this final DLC adventure for Dark Souls 3 has its strongest moments tucked away in the quieter corners of its carefully crafted world.

The simple act of moving through the vibrant, colorful world of Snake Pass is as mesmerizing to play as it is to watch. This physics-based puzzle platformer uses a simple, intuitive control scheme to maneuver a snake up onto objects in a way that made me think about how to approach each one. Even when the camera couldn’t keep up or the stingy checkpoint system tested my patience, Snake Pass still kept me coming back to master its controls and reach its many well-hidden collectibles.

Ignore the fact that you’re playing on a widescreen, flat-panel monitor and Thimbleweed Park actually could’ve come from 1987. The point-and-click adventure game throwback from Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert is as dedicated to its period-perfect presentation – in ways that go deeper than you can possibly imagine – as it is to its traditional item-based puzzle solving.

Telltale Games’ third season of The Walking Dead continues the trend of the two-part season premiere, exploring its themes of family through the strong lens of its new protagonist, Javi. And though A New Frontier continues to do right by its lead, the narrative problems of the two-part premiere persist in this good but not quite great mid-season episode.

“The one constant through all the years...has been baseball.” Or, to frame James Earl Jones’s Field of Dreams quote in another way, baseball is a game that stubbornly sticks to tradition. New rules like pitch clocks aren’t rushed into practice without years of deliberation. With the sport itself remaining relatively static, it’s hard to fault MLB The Show 17 for maintaining its deliberate march toward perfection.

FlatOut 4: Total Insanity didn’t have to do much to be better than its irredeemably dire predecessor. To be frank, that’s only because FlatOut 3 – released way back in 2011 after a franchise ownership and developer change – is one of the worst racing games ever released. Still, new studio Kylotonn has done a decent job here salvaging the comatose series, turning it back into a serviceable but repetitive smash ’em up-slash-stunt racer.

When we reviewed The Binding of Isaac Rebirth on PC and Playstation 4, we thought it was an amazing game and awarded it a score of 9.0. Here’s what we said then: “The time I’ve spent with Binding of Isaac: Rebirth has been non-stop fun and surprises, with just a tad too much frustration when I lose a rare item. But even when it slaps me down harder than I’d have liked, starting again is always a treat, because I’m likely to discover something new and darkly comedic.

So a warrior, a monk, and a rogue walk onto a battlefield and then... they die. A lot. And then they have to start all over. That's been the punchline of so many of my attempts with Has Been Heroes, and while I may have laughed a couple of times in my first few hours and enjoyed some of the good ideas put forth, my goodwill has become a has-been itself.

Editor's Note:IGN is going to be reviewing a lot more gaming hardware in 2017. We're kicking off our tech coverage with deep dives into some of 2016's staples; so hit the comment section to give us your feedback. We want it. Though G.Skill is primarily known for its overclocked memory modules, the company also has a burgeoning lineup of gaming peripherals as well.