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Battlefield REDSEC Review in ProgressHow does Battlefield's free-to-play, standalone battle royale stand up?

IGN PC ReviewsOct 29

Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD Remake Review - One For AllWhen I reviewed Dragon Quest III HD last year , I talked a fair bit about what an important game it was to JRPGs as a whole and why its reissue was a big deal. One thing I didn't mention is part of why it had such a big impact: It was a massive improvement in scope, gameplay, and storytelling over the two preceding Dragon Quest titles. With DQIII HD's sales success and its chronological position as the first part of a story trilogy, Square Enix releasing a similar HD-2D remake of the first two titles made perfect sense. And here we are now, with Dragon Quest I and II HD Remake--the other chapters in the Erdrick trilogy, now gussied up with Square Enix's lavish 2D-sprites-on-3D-backgrounds style of graphical presentation. Jumping into these games for the first time in well over two decades, I was surprised to see just how much effort went into "modernizing" them--not just in terms of mechanics, but also to build upon their basic "hero(es) take up arms against an evil force" narratives with more dialogue, setpieces, and story beats. Yet even with all of the enhancements, one game in this bundle clearly comes out as the superior adventure--but still not quite up to the heights of the previous release. If you're at all familiar with Dragon Quest, you know what to expect here: classic fantasy JRPG adventures, packed with random-encounter turn-based combat, dungeon exploration, fetch quests, and vanquishing the forces of darkness with the light of heroism. Dragon Quest I is a strictly solo journey--it's just your brave little hero, going mano-a-mano with the enemy hordes--while DQII uses the series' now-traditional party system. Though the two games play similarly, having a party makes a world of difference in combat: extra meatshields and actions allow for distinct strategies to take shape, making for more dynamic and enjoyable fights. Continue Reading at GameSpot

GameSpot - Game ReviewsOct 29

Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake ReviewA pair of remakes that recapture the retro magic of the originals while giving them a modern facelift.

IGN PC ReviewsOct 29

NASCAR 25 ReviewIf you’re after a deep multiplayer experience you may want to circle back to iRacing, but if you want some quality, single-player stock car racing against extremely solid AI, NASCAR 25 delivers.

IGN PC ReviewsOct 28

Escape The Backrooms Review - Haunting The Vibes MuseumIf you don't know what The Backrooms are, you probably don't have kids of a certain age. Born as a more specific branch of the liminal-space genre, The Backrooms is the all-encompassing name for a horror lore bible of sorts that's been handcrafted by communities online over several years. Each inhuman monster and each unnerving location becomes a chapter of a horror universe that the internet built together. It's grown so big that it's spawned dozens of related games, an upcoming horror movie from A24, and what feels like an endless stream of YouTube content to watch. But through it all, Escape The Backrooms has remained one of the most popular portrayals of the fictional world, and now plays like a labyrinthine museum to one of the internet's favorite scary stories. Escape The Backrooms is a first-person defenseless horror game for up to four players in co-op. It's been popular as a Steam Early Access title for a few years, but its 1.0 version has finally arrived. In Escape The Backrooms, you'll explore a great number of the internet-created pocket universes of the wider Backrooms lore. Each "room" of The Backrooms presents a different take on liminal horror. This includes the iconic yellow labyrinth that kicked off the entire subgenre, as well as other popular landing spots, like Level Fun, the Poolrooms, and the Grassrooms. One of the game's best feats is simply the number of locations it explores. By nature of being owned by, well, everyone in a sense, lore is played fast and loose. Escape The Backrooms does well in involving many of these different rooms, giving players a history lesson on its unsettling universe. Closely tied to analog horror, The Backrooms as a universe takes on many particular aesthetics. The gameplay loop is very simple. You'll explore each eerie, liminal space while seeking different means of exiting. Mechanically, you'll hardly do anything at all beyond waving a flashlight around and consuming found cartons of almond water to restore your ever-draining sanity meter. Sometimes, you'll need to solve environmental puzzles, like learning which playground slide you can safely head down (since most eject you in several bloody chunks). Occasionally, key items, including literal keys, must be found to progress, forcing you to repeatedly head off in search of semi-randomly placed quest items. In an early level, you'll need to rebuild a ladder to reach a key to the exit door, for example, while in another, you'll search for elevators in a darkened parking garage that would be totally empty if not for the roaming "skin-stealer" monster hidden in the shadows. Continue Reading at GameSpot

GameSpot - Game ReviewsOct 27

Full Metal Schoolgirl ReviewThe charming anime-style girls-with-guns veneer wears thin fast, and beneath it is a dull roguelike shooter that only hits its stride once you've already slogged through a lot of tedium.

IGN PC ReviewsOct 25

Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted Review - Classic Strategy Rises From The DeadIt's surprising that Plants Vs. Zombies hasn't attracted more imitators. The charming and intuitive strategy game helped make a name for PopCap and spawned a massive franchise including merch, comic books, and interestingly, more competitive team shooters than strategy games. But while it lends itself to comparisons to tower-defense games, its key mechanics are still basically singular to PvZ itself. Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted brings a nicely modernized facelift to the original game, and while this remaster offers only a few new frills, the game itself is still one of a kind. For those new to the series, or who have only played the Garden Warfare spin-offs, the core idea of Plants Vs. Zombies is deceptively simple. You're the owner of a house beset by a zombie apocalypse, and your only defense is an army of living plants. You collect sunlight to power your seeds, which you plant across five horizontal rows as zombies approach from the right side. You can plant Sunflowers to generate extra sunlight, and you're constantly juggling priorities as zombies approach from the other lanes. If they reach your plants, they'll chomp down on them and you'll have to replant them, so it's best to keep them from reaching that far at all. As the game continues, it constantly adds new wrinkles, like nighttime levels where you have less access to sunlight and need to rely on fungi, or a pool where you need to plant lilypads for your other offensive plants to sit on. This is alongside a steady stream of new zombie types that demand different configurations of plant defenses. And the zombies themselves, in this case, are far from threatening. They're goofy and often even kind of cute, with cartoonish affectations like a propeller hat or a disco outfit to signify which type of zombie they are. A zombie with a cone or metal bucket on its head will take more hits before you can knock the cone off and finish it off, a football zombie has heavy defense and also charges more quickly at you, and so on. Continue Reading at GameSpot

GameSpot - Game ReviewsOct 24

Bounty Star ReviewThis combination of mech combat and farming is equal parts compelling and tranquil.

IGN PC ReviewsOct 23

Tormented Souls 2 ReviewA gorgeous, if occasionally frustrating, homage to horror games past.

IGN PC ReviewsOct 23

The Outer Worlds 2 Review - Just As Good The Second Time AroundThe Outer Worlds was Obsidian's gutsy attempt at a spiritual successor to its lauded work on Fallout, but the game couldn't completely hide the developer's roots. The spacefaring retro-future was recognizable as a continuation of Obsidian's earlier game, though it had enough of a distinct setting and its own gameplay systems to feel fresh. The Outer Worlds 2 builds on that sturdy foundation, and while it's largely more of the same, it is also a confident and expansive sequel that suggests a bright future for The Outer Worlds as an ongoing series. In Outer Worlds 2, you play as "the Commander." Whereas the first game had you play as a random colonist, this new role inherently imbues you with more authority as an Earth Directorate agent. In short, you're a fixer, dispatched to the Arcadia region that's being ripped apart by a factional war, corporate takeovers, and the emergence of rifts that have been cutting the colony off from communications with Earth. From the very beginning, you have your badge and gun, so to speak, along with your own fledgling crew and a spaceship base of operations called the Incognito. Of course, your very first mission goes terribly wrong (as these things tend to) and when you regain consciousness some time later, you set out to find the persons responsible for the botched mission, while also investigating the increasingly dire rift problem. Without getting into spoilers, it's a strong opening that propels the story forward with momentum and mystery. When you're creating your Commander, you can select a number of different backgrounds like a disgraced gambler, a disgraced professor, a disgraced freelancer, or an ex-convict. You get the sense that most people become agents in the space FBI for lack of other options, except for the Lawbringer background, which is pure and straightforward Lawful Good. I chose Roustabout, which is a friendly way of saying "disgraced idiot." Continue Reading at GameSpot

GameSpot - Game ReviewsOct 23