Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-Tered Edition
2009 was the year games succeeded Crackdown’s open-world superhero boom. Prototype cast Alex Mercer as a mutated misanthropic violence junky on the streets of Manhattan. Infamous surged with electricity and fueled a dreary Cole MacGrath across yet another depiction of New York City. Red Faction: Guerrilla deposited Alec Mason on Mars and gave him a large hammer and explosives. All three of t...[Read More]
Vampyr
Jonathan Reid is a former medical doctor and newly-minted vampire. He’s torn between his fresh biological imperative to feed on blood and his crumbling oath to not murder human beings. You are the person playing Reid in Vampyr, an action role-playing game where blood is experience points and experience points enable marvelous action. Forcing Reid into unconscionable homicide births a warrior...[Read More]
Sega Genesis Classics
You can always count on Sega to spread their classic library across a new platform. Through the Sega Genesis Collection and the Sega Ages line on PlayStation 2, The Wii’s Virtual Console, Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, M2’s wonderful 3D conversions on 3DS, and the Sega Forever service on iOS and Android, the game space has rarely been without t...[Read More]
West of Loathing
Westerns are synonymous with gangs of outlaws, frontier towns, and railroads. West of Loathing has all of those things, but processes them through a black-and-white doodle filter. The ensuing melee, in between whiffs of meat and traces of necromancy, reveals a world of tightly attentive absurdism made visible through a lens of crudely animated doodles and stick figures. West of Loathing, through ...[Read More]
Detroit: Become Human
Detroit: Become Human lives inside of its moments and dies as quickly as they fade away. This trick is developer Quantic Dream’s specialty; applying extreme tension to broadly-relatable conflict and providing the player with options to sort it all out. It was proven in Indigo Prophecy’s coercive diner sequence, fleshed out with Heavy Rain’s commitment to “interactive drama,...[Read More]
SEGA Celebrating Release of SEGA Genesis Classics with Mixer Stream and Speedrunning Tournament
Hey, hi. Sega Genesis Classics Collection is releasing next week for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Because it contains Gunstar Heroes and ToeJam & Earl, it’s easily going to be one of the best pick-ups for either system. This is hyperbole but it also might be true! Hopefully we’ll have a review next week. In the mean time check out this press release highlighting a speed running tour...[Read More]
Dragon’s Crown Pro
While Dragon's Crown remains the most refined and candid of Vanillaware's neo brawlers, it's absent of the range of improvements and adjustments that marked Odin Sphere Leifthrasir's transition to modern hardware. Dragon's Crown Pro is Dragon's Crown on the PlayStation 4 and it has no interest in being anything else.
Killing Floor: Incursion
Killing Floor: Incursion is a shooting game for virtual reality. There are many shooting games for virtual reality. Pointing a gun and pulling a trigger is easy and intuitive, and performing that same action in virtual reality is a reliable thesis for a game. It’s so effective that Arizona Sunshine, The American Dream, Farpoint, Doom VFR, and Pixel Gear, just to name a few, have also used sh...[Read More]
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality
Rick and Morty is a show obsessed with mad science and flagrant, self-assured misconduct. Virtual reality is an unstable medium enabled by starry-eyed engineers and consumed by its search for validity. The bridge between these two is occupied by Owlchemy Labs, the studio best known for VR’s absurdist wunderkind, Job Simulator. Virtual Rick-ality seeks to combine the menacing hijinks of Rick ...[Read More]
Island Time VR
Sometimes there is nothing to do but sit and wait for death. I have knocked all of the coconuts off the palm tree and none will grow back in time. I can’t start a fire because I couldn’t reach the hunk of flint that washed up in the supply crate. I can’t push restart button because there is no in-game menu, and I can’t get up and find a controller because I am encased in a ...[Read More]
The American Dream
The United States of America loves guns. Guns are a measure of power and constitutionally protected right. Guns are also devices specifically designed to kill other human beings and an object of masturbatory fantasy enjoyed by an alarming number of Americans. The American Dream magnifies gun culture and applies it to an idyllic delusion of a postwar United States. The American Dream is constructed...[Read More]
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life
Yakuza 6 should feel tired. It’s the thirteenth title under the Yakuza banner, the ninth to make it to North American shores, and the third released in the last fifteen months. It is a quantity typically understood as too much, and stands in sharp contrast to industry leaders whom we only tolerate, at best, annually. This unspoken code, however, does not seem to stick to Yakuza 6. Through th...[Read More]