There are some things you just shouldn’t rush. Fixing a car. Baking a cake. And, as is made painfully clear by the third-person, open world, action/adventure game ReCore (Xbox One, PC), making a video game. Because while ReCore could’ve been a gripping sci-fi shooting adventure, its considerable kinks, easily avoided problems, and seemingly unfinished bits make it feel like something that needed more time to, well, bake.
Since its release in 2014, the sci-fi first-person shooter Destiny has constantly evolved, adding new missions and multiplayer modes, and expanding its compelling story even further. With the fourth expansion, Rise Of Iron due out September 20th — both as a download (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) and as part of Destiny The Collection (PlayStation 4, Xbox One) with the rest of the game — I asked Bungie’s Community Manager Deej to give me the lowdown on what this add-on actually adds.
In many top-down, twin-stick arcade games, you either shoot your enemies or smack them, but you usually don’t get to do both. And if you do, it’s just a quick slap because you’ve run out of ammo, but just you wait, when I get more, I’m gonna shoot you so bad. But Livelock (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC) largely throws that unwritten rule out the window and the results are game so nice you’ll want to play it twice.
Given how important graphics are to video games, it’s odd how infrequent the colors of those graphics are used as a mechanic. With the exception of puzzles games, colors are usually just used as visual clues; red means “this thing explodes,” and so on. But that’s not the case for the creative and adorable 2D, side-scrolling, puzzling platformer Hue (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Vita, PC via Steam), in which you change the world you’re in by changing its colors.
By mixing elements of role-playing games, first-person shooters, and stealth action games within the framework of a cyberpunk story, 2011’s Deus Ex Human Revolution was basically the Ghost In The Shell game that fans of that anime had been waiting for since the movie’s 1995 debut, myself included. And though we’re still waiting for the Ghost people to get it right, we can at least enjoy the next best thing with Deus Ex Mankind Divided (Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC).
Last week, at their offices outside Los Angeles, the good people at Respawn held an event where, for the first time, they showed off footage from single-player campaign in their upcoming sci-fi shooter sequel, Titanfall 2, which will be available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on October 28th.
For more than a hundred and fifty years, it’s been illegal to judge a book by its cover, and similar snap judgements about other forms of entertainment are equally discouraged.
But while you wouldn’t be wrong to temper your expectations about the top-down, twin-stick shooter #KILLALLZOMBIES because it has an all-caps hashtag for a name, the game’s low-rent cheesiness is just one of this game’s many fundamental problems.
Some games are so bad that you don’t play them, you endure them. Which is how I feel after suffering through the combative, arcade-style racing game Carmageddon Max Damage (PlayStation 4, Xbox One), a game so infuriating and fundamentally flawed that it’s nearly unplayable.
It’s always frustrating when the core of a game is solid, but everything else about it is so flawed, sloppy, or extraneous that it ruins the whole thing. Such is the case with MXGP2 The Official Motocross Videogame (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC), which is fun when you hit the track, but draining when you’re trying to get there.