Destructoid

I tend to prefer when Far Cry isn’t overly serious or forced, and from that perspective, I’m satisfied with Vaas: Insanity. The mystical story doesn’t get in the way of the action, and the action isn’t spread too thin across a gargantuan map. It’s all really reasonable.

It isn’t just the Nintendo 64 nostalgia talking here; this is a good collection of minigames, a smart board selection, a nice-looking game, and it’s got tons of settings, dials, and options to fiddle with for repeat play sessions. It might not be filled with new ideas, but Mario Party Superstars plays the hits, and plays them as well as it did the first time around.

To wrap things up, again, I think Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a much better game than its predecessor was at launch. That said, I can’t shake the feeling that much like the original, it’s only going to get better and more content-rich in the next coming year or so. It’s a beautiful trend from Frontier Developments that I think will make an already great game all the more excellent.

Bright Memory Infinite gets in its own way, and occasionally takes the focus off of its strongest quality: the core mechanics. I wish that Infinite was just a full extension of the action-packed prologue and was a little more polished, as it would be easier to recommend. If you can deal with that headache, you might like it.

Call of Duty: Vanguard is an incredibly enjoyable experience. If you were on the fence, it’s absolutely worth the price point in my opinion. I already feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth in the short time I’ve been playing.

It’s not a soulless game or one without a spark — there’s definitely a lot of love in the final product. It just seriously needed a few more sets of eyes on it to draw out its flaws. A lot of the things that vexed me most severely could be fixed with a few more passes of the floor buffer. Yet here we are, and Demon Turf doesn’t strike me as territory worth conquering.

It’s fine that this is a more passive experience than other location-tracking games, and I appreciate that it works with my routine rather than forcing me to carve time out of my schedule to fit it into my life. But if my only reward for keeping the app around is a nearly dead battery and a flat map covered in flat flowers, I’d rather just stick with seeing my step count in Google Fit.

It would be foolish of me to say that Forza Horizon 5 is the best game in the series given my very limited knowledge of its history. However, I can say with confidence this is the most fun I’ve had with a racing game that doesn’t involve a plumber and a princess. There is just so much to do and so much to see that I can easily lose hours of my day exploring all it has to offer.

The seemingly endless possibilities of Shin Megami Tensei V directly fueled my desire to play it from the moment I got my copy. It’s overwhelming, but compartmentalized. The world is technically finite, but feels limitless. It’s just what a lot of people want out of an RPG, and the strong personality-driven throughput helps propel it past a lot of its competition.

This is all speculation on my part, but Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water comes off like a game that had some incredible artists with cool ideas for this setting and the Wii U tablet, but they couldn’t quite figure out a cohesive story to tell. To make matters worse, I get the impression they also didn’t want to scare away newcomers on a new system and toned the scare factor right down.