Destructoid

When I was a kid, the Persona series was on the fringe of a niche. I had to be introduced to it on the original PlayStation by way of my cousin, who subsequently went on to show me Wild Arms and a few other classics. But after the resounding success of Persona 3, Atlus almost scrambled to meet demand with re-releases and alternate takes, culminating in an all-time high with Persona 4 Golden, one of the several “must haves” on the Vita.

You don’t hear many people talk about the Drakengard or NieR series. It’s pretty well-known in some circles, but others are mostly just aware of it through silly boar riding and fishing .gifs.

For many years, Nintendo simply didn’t know what people wanted out of a Zelda game. Originally Wind Waker was going to feature a traditional “realistic” art style, but the creators got worried that in the increasingly competitive market they wouldn’t stand out — so Toon Link was born.

Horizon Zero Dawn came out of nothingness and delighted thousands. Born on a lark as the “most risky” concept from a Guerilla Games pitch session, the aesthetic of meshing tribal warfare with high-tech creatures is intriguing all on its own before one even picks up a DualShock remote.

Resident Evil‘s been a roller coaster of quality for twenty years now. The first handful of games terrified players by making them exceedingly vulnerable in a world where a biological weapon turned living beings into various nasties that wanted nothing more than to kill you in horrendous ways. Stagnancy raised its head eventually, and Capcom knew that it needed to inject the series’ ol’ corpse with some much-needed life, and we received Resident Evil 4. Depending on your perspective, that game w

The fact that Final Fantasy XV starts with a broken down car is the perfect analogy to its development cycle. Some of us have been waiting 10 years for this game. Others couldn’t care less. Square Enix has been allocating so many resources to this world that was once part of the XIII universe, and now, before the eve of its launch, it’s even surpassed it in fanfare and white noise. We have a feature film with Hollywood actors, multiple spinoffs, DLC in droves, and if you reside in Japan, four de

Not much has changed since my first few hours in the world of Dishonored 2, and that’s mostly a good thing.

Since releasing in 2014, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs has meant something different to almost everyone who played it. Though the open-world hack-a-thon is often critiqued for lacking personality and the graphical downgrade debacle, it still sits pretty at an 80 on Metacritic (whether or not this means anything to you is highly subjective). As oft-maligned as it seems to be, reviewers and players clearly saw potential.

Call me crazy, but I mixed up the titles for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided so many times during this review process, it’s unfathomable. I mean, they’re very similar games, both have very similar artwork and generic names, and they’re littered with promotional materials featuring the same protagonist. They even have the same goldenrod (or is it puce?) title screens.

The last time we checked in with No Man’s Sky, I successfully repaired my ship, struggled with the inventory system, started to feel some fatigue from repeated elements of the random-generation algorithms, and was generally having a chill time exploring.

Normally, it’d feel disingenuous to directly compare games during a review; this is a unique case where I think it may be impossible not to.

In my review-in-progress for Doom, I mentioned that “if what I’ve played so far is indicative of the rest of the campaign, the late embargo is absolutely nothing to be worried about.” That was based on four hours of ripping the heads off of demons, finding secrets, grabbing keycards, and smashing monitors.

Nathan Drake has a brother. That is the plot device that sets Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End into motion. The once orphaned and alone boy Drake who sought a father figure in Victor Sullivan and, after three adventures, settled into a life of domesticity with Elena Fisher, has more family than we knew. And more than he knew, as Sam Drake, a ghost of Nate’s past, comes back into his life after 15 years of absence.

It’s safe to say that some people have been experiencing Souls fatigue. I mean, in the last two years, if you count a remake, there have been three retail Souls games (Dark Souls II, Scholar, and Bloodborne), on top of four DLC packs, and a mobile cash-in.

Please, send help. I can’t stop playing Stardew Valley. In fact, it’s running in the background right now. Which reminds me, I need to catch an Albacore real quick for Elliot…

The drunk, nude teens bathing in the lake at sunset summed up Firewatch neatly: “you’re just some sad man out in the woods.” Kids always know just where to cut. If you could translate the insult quadrant of their brains you’d have the most precise web algorithms in the world and only ever see cute animal gifs and Missy Elliot songs.

I sometimes forget that Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981. Its breezy pulp adventure quality carries only obvious signifiers of its era (like, Nazis), and the repetition of these tropes act as enough hand waving to the point where Uncharted‘s modern day setting can be taken for granted, though mostly because the series tends to exist outside what we see as modern society (save maybe for Elena’s camcorder) and instead provide the same fantastical distance that 19th century adventure novels

My first introduction to the Fallout series was in 1997, with Interplay’s wonderfully open and unique strategy RPG titles. So when Fallout 3 first dropped from Bethesda years later, I was taken aback by a lot of the concessions that were made to transfer the experience to a fully realized 3D world.

Perched atop some large edifice in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate‘s London, I hesitated. Many slickly-presented columns of light reached toward the sky in all directions — each one indicating yet another thing to do in an effort to satisfy the game’s calling for you to do everything. I was frozen less from indecision and more from just simply being overwhelmed. There’s so much to do. So much.

Every once in a while, a game comes along that takes you completely by surprise. I noticed a lot of people talking about Undertale recently, and how great it was. The screenshots looked a little underwhelming, but I decided to give it a whirl anyway. I was definitely not prepared for just how much I was going to fall in love with this game.