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'The Crew': The Joystiq Review
In the course of the last console generation, Ubisoft has gone from "the French publisher behind the Tom Clancy games" to the world's leading creator of lucrative open-world sandbox franchises (by quantity, if not quality). This success hinges on a simple formula shared by all of Ubisoft's open-world games: Large, interesting worlds plus tons of things to see and do equals happy customers. Based on massive sales and a decade of largely positive critical response, this seems like a solid and, more crucially, reproducible formula. With The Crew, Ubisoft and developer Ivory Tower hope to apply those principles to the world of arcade-style racing games while also tacking on an omnipresent multiplayer component that supposedly makes the game's world -– an abridged take on the entire contiguous United States -– feel more alive, while also making it simple and fun to race around the country with your friends online. It's an idea that's undeniably ambitious and, if executed properly, could propel The Crew to the front of the racing game pack. Unfortunately, this racer is more Yugo than Porsche. Click here for the full review!
'Super Smash Bros. for Wii U': The Joystiq Review
"Who would win in a fight?" is the lighthearted crux of the Super Smash Bros. series, and it's impressive how extensive that conversation has become. Pitting beloved video game characters in unlikely rivalries seems as amusing as it did during the series' 1999 debut, especially when it involves a mix of iconic faces and left-field picks. With fresh contenders, several new competition types and a lite resemblance of Pokémon training in the form of Amiibos, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is a meaty talking point that proves the "Who's the best?" debate is still well worth having. Smash's bouts remain layered –- newcomers can focus on throwing basic attacks by combining button presses with tilts of the joystick, learning deep-cut mastery of evasions and timing in-air knockouts as they add matches to their career. Whatever nuances your play style adopts, everyone's victory involves launching opponents from shared platforms, heaping damage on them to make banishing them to the oblivion beyond the screen's edges more feasible. Click here for the full review!
'LittleBigPlanet 3': The Joystiq Review
There's a moment in LittleBigPlanet 3 where Hugh Laurie's villainous Newton, an effete British lightbulb with an egg timer built into his bowler hat, faces down his conscience, berating him with his greatest fear: that nothing he creates will ever be good enough, has never been good enough. It's a fear that LittleBigPlanet players will be familiar with, given the creative possibilities presented by the series. The feeling is more pronounced this time around, and the overwhelming diabolical genius at work in LittleBigPlanet 3 is almost a cause for alarm. The first and second games in the series felt like a toy box, with developer Media Molecule providing about 3 or 4 hours of examples of how it could be utilized. In contrast,LittleBigPlanet 3, now helmed by Sumo Digital, is the first to feel like the pre-formed game at its core is meant to be a showstopper, an abundant showcase of greatness, a dare to the player to push the envelope even further. Lucky for us, for those who decide to rise to the challenge, they have never made creation easier or more satisfying than it is now. Click here for the full review!
'Dragon Age: Inquisition': The Joystiq Review
Dragon Age: Inquisition is an immense fantasy epic, a sprawling adventure across the many landscapes of Thedas, unapologetically mature in its exploration of politics and brazen in its combat. Inquisition is also developer BioWare's redemption song. It's everything that a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins should have been, and time will slip by as players enjoy the hundred hours of escapades it delivers. The end of Inquisition's spectacular first act gave me chills. The last time I can recall that feeling is when the Normandy was reintroduced in Mass Effect 2. It's the chill of being at the beginning of a grand story and anticipation for what's to come. Click here for more
'Far Cry 4': The Joystiq Review
Far Cry 4 is about a man returning home to scatter his mother's final earthly form. Only he gets distracted, goes mountain climbing for a bit, helps dismantle a despotic regime, fights a tiger, runs in circles looking for an ancient scroll, lands a gyrocopter on someone's house and develops a caustic vendetta against nature's sweet-sounding fur demon, the honey badger. This doesn't make him an absent-minded son so much as the protagonist in an excellent open-world game. Like the vessel enshrining his mother's ashes, Ajay Ghale can't accomplish anything without a player to move him, lugging him up and down South Asian mountains in pursuit of peril and the next exotic vista. And like Ghale, you get in so deep after a while that it doesn't really matter what brought you there in the first place. Click here for more
'Halo: The Master Chief Collection': The Joystiq Review
Before Halo 2 launched in 2004, I must have watched the trailer a hundred times –- easily accessible from its permanent home on my college computer's desktop. Like many fans, my anticipation for the Xbox follow-up was ... let's say substantial. And, like many fans, I was a little disappointed by the campaign and its abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Thankfully, a genre-defining multiplayer suite did more than enough to salve any abrasions left behind by the rough campaign.
'Assassin's Creed Unity': The Joystiq Review
It was the best of Assassin's Creed, it was the worst of Assassin's Creed. So it goes with Assassin's Creed Unity, the newest game in Ubisoft's alternate-history series, where sci-fi tech allows you to relive the secret war between Assassins and Templars. Unity succeeds where it needs to, but it falls short of the metaphorical, fall-breaking haybale almost everywhere else, landing with a sickening thud on hard pavement. Unity is capable of inspiring loving adoration while simultaneously bringing you to boiling hatred. It aims high, fails more often than it triumphs, and is in dire need of a technical re-tweaking. At the same time, whenever the pieces align, it feels like coming home. Click here for more
'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare': The Joystiq Review
You get just a novel snippet of peace in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. In this shooter's future, technology has trumped terrorism, rooted out the last evil masterminds and flexed its bionic muscles in total defiance of lead-footed politicians who'd rather talk than get things done. "The world is running out of bad guys," your partner says, hopeful but tragically unaware that he's basically describing a video game glitch. Call of Duty never runs out of bad guys. This one gets points for honesty, though, in that there is no pretentious cover-up of why the good guys beat the bad guys (or why the plot finds them easily interchangeable). In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you win because you have better guns, stronger sights, super abilities and superior movement. Whether it's in the rich and varied multiplayer mode, or the frantic, thrill-a-minute single-player campaign, you're constantly relying on cool weapons and combat data to make taking lives easier. Advanced Warfare front-loads the benefits of power in a franchise that has always made technology the exalted, almost fetishized solution to every problem. And you know what? It's more fun when it admits as much. Click here for more
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth: The Joystiq Review
Viewed through the idea that it's a standalone expansion to Sid Meier's Civilization 5, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth streamlines gameplay in the long-running strategy series to enhance the pace of the historically-strapped franchise. As a spiritual successor to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, however, it's a cut-rate disappointment. Beyond Earth is best described as an epilogue to the events of Civilization 5. Humanity has ruined the planet and must commit itself to starting all over again on another rock and potentially making the same mistakes. And so, various nations make conglomerate factions and shoot for another spherical mass to explore, expand, exploit and exterminate (4X) on in the strategy game. Why I wish Firaxis had never mentioned Beyond Earth as a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri is that this game doesn't look like it was given the financial resources to kick off a new franchise. It feels like it had the budget of a Civ 5 expansion, where asset creation went into making a visually interesting game world, but not its overall presentation. The characters are painfully dull and inarticulate. The tech and wonder voiceovers are all done by one person, but in many cases are attributed to faction leaders within the game (who do have their own voices). The experience doesn't feel luxe. Firaxis has been the benchmark in accessible strategy games and it's owned by triple-A publisher Take-Two Interactive, but I've seen stronger production values from independent European competitors. Click here for more
Watch Dogs: The Joystiq Review
The advanced technology in Watch Dogs is not just indistinguishable from magic – it IS magic. The game would have you believe you're the world's most powerful hacker, bending surveillance cameras, traffic control and all manner of personal electronics to your one-touch whims. But in this paranoid vision of the future, in which every mundane device is grafted to the same computerized skeleton, the right software might as well be an all-powerful wand. Wouldn't you like to be the wizard? Click here for more
Infamous Second Son: The Joystiq Review
There's a stark duality at the heart of the Infamous series. The original Infamous was built on a solid foundation, putting players in the role of a modern-day superhero with a repertoire that expanded gameplay in satisfying, meaningful ways throughout its campaign. Its sequel boasted a number of improvements, but its mechanics weren't always explored to their fullest potential. Playing through InFamous 2 recently reminded me of the series' darker half. Though its upgradable superpowers were impressive and its parkour mechanics were fun, its story missions frequently came up short. Throughout the campaign, protagonist Cole MacGrath was too often saddled with repetitive arena fights and escort missions -- a poor fit for a man who can shoot lightning from his fingertips. Infamous: Second Son emphasizes the series' strengths in its debut appearance on the PlayStation 4, easily trumping previous Infamous games while showcasing the power of Sony's latest console. In the process, it drastically overhauls the series' defining elements, stripping away the weaker parts and focusing on what works best. If you found previous Infamous games more frustrating than fun, Second Son's gleefully destructive superheroics will win you over as a fan. Click here for more
Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes: The Joystiq Review
It's a pleasure being lost in the universe of Metal Gear. With every game, and with every return of director Hideo Kojima, the fascinating stealth series redraws the boundaries of its dense military fiction, pushing them back to include more and more characters and conspiracies. We feel like time-travelers in Metal Gear's byzantine blend of fact and fiction, leaping back and forth between the future and past of a legendary soldier named Snake. Now we enter 1975 in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, and bless its prequel heart – there's a spot in the statistics screen reserved for time paradoxes. Kojima's fiction may be impenetrable to the newcomer, but one man's convoluted is another man's complex, and it's your job to infiltrate the latter. Ground Zeroes effectively acts as the cold open for the upcoming and separately released Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, sending Snake through a massive rain-drenched encampment in Cuba. It's not quite the glorified demo your cynical self might suggest, but this tantalizing playground does show how Metal Gear Solid will change its crouching silhouette yet again. The mission to rescue Chico and the duplicitous Paz, two important figures from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, is just the first step in a new, freely explorable environment. It feels daunting at first, but clear goals keep you pointed in the right direction. Ground Zeroes is a confident game for the confident player – the one who sees the playground hiding beneath Metal Gear's tankers and army bases. This one's just a whole lot bigger. Click here for more
Titanfall: The Joystiq Review
Titanfall is strictly coiled around the player. You couldn't excise even one piece without slackening it like a ruined kidnapper's rope. The serpentine level design, the liberating sense of movement, the flawless controls and yes, the enormous bipedal tanks dropping from the sky, are equally indispensable in this arresting shooter. Given the studio's splintered status as a former Call of Duty custodian, Respawn Entertainment has made a multiplayer game fit for those who have spent years peering through the eyes of a speedy killing machine – a seasoned six against six in battles for land or a higher kill count. A history with rapid-fire aim and fleet-footed 3D movement is not essential here, but recommended. Click here for more
Joystiq review: Sam & Max - Situation: Comedy (PC)
We haven't recently visited the Telltale Games building, but it's relatively simple to imagine the state it's currently in. The lights are dimmed, a mysterious smoke wanders the hallways and all the doors are replaced by vividly colored, yet unmistakably tacky curtains. Game designers are predictably hunched over keyboards, only occasionally looking up to adjust top-heavy top hats and to twirl magic wands about. Somewhere, a woman is being sawn in half. Naturally, you've come to the conclusion that we're comparing the folks behind the latest Sam & Max game to magicians (it was either that, or some Wizard of Oz nonsense). Indeed, Episode 2: Situation: Comedy excels in every area the first episode did, most of all in the one you can't see -- illusion. This adventure game is about as traditional as they come, with a central crisis only seeing resolution once a series of smaller and somewhat related puzzles has been solved. Objects are collected, dialogue trees are traversed and your inventory is applied to the environment. Those are the mechanics of the actual game and described as such, they don't sound awfully entertaining. A great game will hide all of that though, making it disappear in a puff of smoke while you become entranced by the plot and characters. You'll be pleased to learn then, that Sam & Max is a great game. *cough*
Joystiq review: Assault Heroes (XBLA)
It really is quite unnerving how rapidly a game like Assault Heroes can expose a terrifying desire, possibly even an instinct, amongst every single gamer alive. Perhaps it's just common sense, but when something moves, we absolutely have to kill it. Whether it's a tank, an alien, a robot or just a poorly constructed mass of pixels meant to represent evil, taking a step towards us is rarely interpreted as a welcoming gesture. No, sir. That step was your last. That isn't to say we're a naturally violent lot. Some games simply slip into that easily accessible groove where things come rushing at you and your brain automatically makes sure that a bullet's gone out to greet them. Assault Heroes taps into this familiar area with some precision, much like a group of miners donning helmets and heading into a nostalgia mineshaft. They'll come back with the shiny things you adore, but it's not like you haven't seen any of it before. Maybe you've witnessed it in a necklace or ... let's just forget this metaphor. It's crap.
