All articles tagged with #game review
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve launches October 2, 2026, offering a compelling entry point for series newcomers despite its interconnected lore. Critics praise its cinematic storytelling and accessible controls, though hardware benchmarks reveal significant performance challenges in 4K.
EA Sports FC 27 launched on September 24, 2026, introducing 'The Grounds,' a new open-world social hub, alongside refined gameplay mechanics and Ultimate Team updates. While the game received a 7.25/10 from Game Informer, critics noted that familiar elements persist despite new features.
Control Resonant, the sequel to Control, launched on September 24, 2026, featuring a shift from gunplay to melee combat and a new protagonist, Dylan Faden. The game is noted for its high difficulty, but Remedy Entertainment included a flexible assist mode from launch to allow players to adjust difficulty settings in real-time. This feature, accessible via the pause menu, lets players tweak damage, dodge windows, and even enable immortality without reloading, helping to balance the game's challenging combat with its narrative and exploration elements.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave ambitiously expands the series into a three-act epic on Switch 2, weaving four lord-led campaigns with arena battles, overworld exploration, and dungeon-crawl segments. The scale, world-building, and standout Coliseum fights are highlights, and the story-rich cast shines, but lengthy dungeon sections and repetitive cycles slow progress, pushing playtime well into the 100+ hour range. The payoff is strong for fans craving a grand, story-driven strategy-RPG, though the ambitious scope demands a significant time commitment and tolerance for repetition.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword offers a deeply satisfying, high-skill action experience with a growing toolkit and near-perfection in its toughest fights, set in vividly realized Edo-period Kyoto and anchored by standout characters. Its tutorials are lengthy and the late-game rifts can feel repetitive, which slows pace at times, but the result is the most rewarding Onimusha game to date.
Wild Blue Skies attempts a Star Fox 64–style on-rails shooter, delivering bright visuals and decent voice acting but failing in execution: clunky controls, a finicky reticle, separate lock-on and fire inputs, short lock-on range, and punishing hits that send players back to the start. The levels feel derivative, visibility is sometimes poor, and while the game offers replay incentives, it doesn’t meaningfully improve on its inspiration or establish a strong identity, making it a nostalgic but underwhelming homage.
Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration on Nintendo Switch 2 is a strong, content-rich port that runs at 1080p/30fps and bundles all DLC, delivering rewarding tomb puzzles and dense hub exploration for portable play, but combat can feel stiff and gyro controls are limited to inventory, making it less than perfect yet a great value for Switch 2 owners.
Titanium Court fuses match-3 combat with roguelite RPG, deckbuilding, resource management, and visual-novel satire in a surreal faerie court, delivering a dense, genre-defying metacomedy that’s hard to explain but impossible to put down.
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin VR - Brutal Edition translates the classic boomer shooter into VR with gesture-based reloading, dual-wielding, blade combat, and VR-specific moves, delivering a robust retro campaign and strong level design, but pacing, aiming challenges, and some added flourishes can detract from the speed and flow fans expect from the genre.
Resident Evil: Requiem opens with tense, puzzle-driven sequences featuring Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy, delivering strong survival-horror momentum before leaning too heavily on nostalgia in the second half; the piece also reviews Space Lion (ambitious but fiddly), Oddland (dense, crunch-heavy puzzle), and Love Eternal (stylish but shallow, hampered by control issues).
The Chicago Bears lost 19-16 to the Detroit Lions in their regular-season finale, with mixed performances across the team. Caleb Williams struggled with consistency, but showed some late-game resilience. The tight ends, especially Cole Kmet and Colston Loveland, performed well, while the defense had moments of success but was hindered by penalties. The coaching staff faced criticism for the team's slow start, but the Bears secured the No. 2 seed in the NFC playoffs due to other results.
The 49ers suffered a humiliating 13-3 home loss to the Seahawks, marking their worst offensive performance under coach Kyle Shanahan, with poor play across all positions and questionable coaching decisions, leading to a need for improvement ahead of the playoffs.
Atari CEO Wade Rosen highlights the 2011 game Pushmo as his top game of 2025, praising its pure joy and non-dopamine loop gameplay, emphasizing the need for more games like it, despite its age and the closure of its original platforms.
The 49ers defeated the Colts 48-27, with Brock Purdy delivering an outstanding performance, and key players like Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle contributing significantly. The team showed strong offensive and defensive play, with notable coaching adjustments, highlighting a promising season and potential Super Bowl contention.
The Steelers secured a crucial 29-24 win against the Lions, with standout performances from Kenneth Gainwell and Jaylen Warren, and strong coaching, bringing them closer to the playoffs despite some defensive lapses late in the game.