Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers regarding the structure of the original Resident Evil 4, but no specific surprises from the remake are revealed. The word "remake" has meant many different things over the last couple of decades, from HD collections that enhance resolution and little else, to more robust offerings that tweak dated gameplay mechanics and add quality of life improvements. Ever since the 2002 update to the original Resident Evil, Capcom has been the standard-bearer when it comes to re-examining a classic. It featured more than enough new content for series veterans, but a ..read more

For the first couple hours of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, I anticipated a retread of my experience with the original game. “We gave Mario guns and put him in an XCOM” is a novel enough gimmick, but I found the battles and exploration in the first game too rote to keep my attention to the end. Look at this dumbass. Sparks of Hope doesn’t make a strong first impression, beginning with generic exposition about an alien force named Cursa that uses some goopy stuff called Darkmess to threaten the peace of this weird Mushroom Kingdom/Rabbid hellhole universe. And it doesn’t take long to introdu ..read more

If you grew up reading gaming magazines in the 90s, you might be familiar with full-page advertisements claiming that a game would cause any variety of extreme maladies. Eyelids being ripped off your face, thumbs and palms becoming bloodied, and, in the most severe cases, full cranial explosions. After one of my many late nights with Neon White, I finally felt like that dream of 90s game ads had become a reality. It actually felt like my eyeballs were vibrating enough to potentially pop and dribble down my face in a radical fashion. Designed by Ben Esposito of Donut County, Neon White takes th ..read more

What is Halo Infinite? I mean it, think about it, what is Halo Infinite? OK, fine, let's step through it together. Is it a traditional, mainline game in the Halo franchise? Sure, yes, in most of the ways you'd quantify that, the complete Halo Infinite package checks many of the boxes you'd expect to see in a Halo game. Campaign co-op, really, is the biggest outlier there, but let's not get hung up on that particular part just yet. Is it one product? Or is it two? The multiplayer is a free-to-play release that's being called a beta at the moment, though the money they will ask you to spend on a ..read more

Rez, originally released in 2001, was an immediate masterpiece, an astounding aesthetic achievement that was at least as much experience as it was game. It would also serve as one of the games that would send off the Dreamcast and help usher in Sega's still-new role as a third-party publisher by appearing on the PlayStation 2. It's something of an understatement to call this a tumultuous time for Sega, but at the same time the Sega of this era was having something of a creative peak, with inventive, if not outright amazing games landing in arcades or consoles on a somewhat regular basis. Ever ..read more

Get ready to shoot this guy's arms off, a lot.There are a few reasons it took me three weeks to finish Doom Eternal, and not all of them are related to Doom Eternal, but then some of them are. This followup to id Software’s no-nonsense 2016 revamp of that most seminal first-person shooter franchise takes a more-is-more approach to building on the brutal elegance of its predecessor. That means more mobility, more demons, more weapon mods and upgrades, more resource management… The list could go on and on, and frankly it's hard to think of a single aspect of Doom 2016 that hasn't been absolutely ..read more

Cere has an axe to grind with the Empire, and for good reason.Respawn's named-by-marketing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that impresses and frustrates in almost equal measure. Here's an ambitious third-person action game that tells an engaging and at times moving story set five years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, when the Jedi Order was purged and the Republic gave way to the Empire. Rather than merely emulating the linear cinematic action of an Uncharted but with droids and lightsabers, Fallen Order makes an earnest effort to blend the usual ledge-climbing and flashy set p ..read more

Qualitatively, the Call of Duty franchise has been on a bit of a roll lately. WWII felt like that first attempt at hitting the panic button with its back-to-basics approach. Black Ops 4 seemed like a different type of panic might have plagued its development, but the franchise's first foray into the battle royale genre was pretty good and the competitive multiplayer made good on the whole operators/abilities angle Treyarch started trying back in Black Ops 3. So where does that leave Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? Is it... back-to-back-to-basics, perhaps? Yes and no. Sure, yeah, it's a game tha ..read more

OK, let's talk about this up front: Gears 5 is on Microsoft's Game Pass service for both Xbox One and PC. That means you could potentially be playing this game for a fraction of the $60 you might expect to spend on a new, high-budget video game. Our general recommendation these days is that it'll depend on which games you specifically like to play, but the typical selection on Game Pass for Xbox One is worth the price of admission. Under that guidance, Gears 5 would cost you zero additional dollars to play, so... you should play it. Gears is good. It's always been good. Actually, scratch that ..read more

Control is a great game for a lot of reasons, both big and small. It tells an exciting and interesting story in an extremely fascinating setting. It weaves in the episodic framework of a television show without requiring you to put down the controller for long periods of time. The action weaves together traditional shooting and supernatural abilities in a way that feels very natural, letting you flow from one move to the next in a way that feels pretty cool. Control also trusts its players by creating a large, shifting space to explore without feeling the need to paint a ton of UI over the act ..read more