IGN Game Reviews – Spoken Edition

"Reading," the Nigerian poet Ben Okri said once, "is an act of civilization." Torment: Tides of Numenera embraces this idea, pairing a whole fantasy novel’s worth of quality quest text with a design foundation that champions chatting with enemies rather than running them through with swords. It's a strange concept in the context of most roleplaying games, and Torment: Tides of Numenera delivers a satisfyingly strange world to complement it.

Night in the Woods is all about the little things. Late-night diner adventures with friends; spontaneous rooftop stargazing; chatting about ghosts with the crust punks who hang out on the outskirts of town. Moments like these come and go faster than you can swing a bat at a batch of discarded light bulbs out behind the local snack mart, but thanks to earnest, heartfelt writing and a good helping of dry humor, they also lingered in my mind long after they’d passed.

There’s something about being dropped into a brand new game world and finding it to be dense with deeply considered lore, terrifyingly aggressive creatures, and tantalizing questions that leaves an indelible mark on the memory. Horizon Zero Dawn is one of those games, and it carves out a unique identity within the popular action-roleplaying genre.

It is said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In that sense, Halo Wars 2 is the de facto king of real-time strategy games on consoles, where the venerable genre is underrepresented because of the challenges of managing a lot of units at once on a gamepad.

It is said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In that sense, Halo Wars 2 is the de facto king of real-time strategy games on consoles, where the venerable genre is underrepresented because of the challenges of managing a lot of units at once on a gamepad.

Watch the First Chapter from Berserk and the Band of the Hawk Watch the First Chapter from Berserk and the Band of the Hawk The First 15 Minutes of Berserk and the Band of the Hawk The First 15 Minutes of Berserk and the Band of the Hawk If there was ever an anime or manga that was ripe for a Dynasty Warriors game treatment, it’s Berserk.

For Honor’s combat is the kind of brutal melee I always wanted, but never thought I’d actually get to play. Its third-person action-game exterior hides a strategically complex fighting game, mixing team-based action with less interesting solo modes, all built on the most flexible and technically complete melee fighting system I’ve ever experienced.

You know those elaborate machines built to make simple tasks more complicated, like striking a match or springing a mousetrap? They’re called Rube Goldberg machines, and they now have a shooter equivalent in Sniper Elite 4. Rebellion’s stealth shooter shares the weaknesses and strengths of these contraptions. It’s long and complex, and taking your time to use all your gadgets can feel silly when blasting away at baddies often works fine.

While playing Fire Emblem games like Awakening and Birthright, I always thought it was cool that you could recruit heroes from the past to help out in combat. Because these characters came as DLC add-ons they rarely interacted with the story directly, but knowing my favorite Swordmaster or Pegasus Knight from yesteryear was there to back up a younger generation of heroes felt reassuring.

The awkwardly titled Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8: Final Chapter Prologue is meant to set the stage for the long-awaited Kingdom Hearts 3, but this collection will really only be of value to those who are already well versed in all things hearts and heartless. Without that background, dropping into this collection at this point would likely leave amateur keyblade wielders in a confusing place. Final Chapter Prologue is composed of three portions: 0.

Nioh owes a lot to Dark Souls. That’s a phrase you hear all the time these days, but in this case it’s more accurate than most. From its demanding but rewarding combat to its labyrinthine levels full of thrilling danger and secrets, the influence of FromSoftware’s action RPG series undeniably forms the foundation for Team Ninja’s latest endeavor.

Divide kicks off with a firefight—a chaotic squabble where sentry robots resembling metallic metroids snipe at two protagonists who fire back with guns that bark lightning. It's glorious and promising, if a little tough. But it's the followup moments I find more representative of my time with Divide, in which I roamed aimlessly through a sprawling train station with roomy passages that go nowhere with only an easily missed verbal clue from a past conversation for directions.

There’s a case to be made that Urban Empire is a perfect city sim for our times. Many traditional city sims grant us autocratic control, and the whims and wants of the populace largely remain abstractions and jumbles of figures. Urban Empire, though, focuses on the grim reality of the bickering, backstabbing, and befriending that goes on in a mayor’s relationship with multiple political parties before any proposal becomes a reality.

As wise people often say, you can learn a lot from the past. But ironically, despite being a retro-inspired sequel to the fondly remembered arcade and NES games, Double Dragon 4 patently ignores the lessons of history. It slavishly works to emulate, both in look and controls, a game that was quickly iterated on and left behind by a slew of other arcade beat ‘em ups. Even compared to the classics that immediately supplanted its predecessor, Double Dragon 4 feels shallow and dated.

When I reviewed Yoshi’s Woolly World on Wii U on June 22, 2015, I gave it a 7.4, which is the mark of a good game. Here’s what I said then: There’s a handful of really great levels in Yoshi’s Woolly World, which makes the most of its setting and choice of character. The world is exactly what I expected, thematically and in terms of structure: sand, snow, clouds, and fire, punctuated by bosses holed-up in themed fortresses.