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OpinionImpressionsExit The Gungeon Is A Bite-Sized Good Time, If You Can Deal With The Randomness
Constantly changing weapons and tiny, chaotic arenas make Exit The Gungeon a thrilling arcadey follow-up to the excellent roguelike Enter The Gungeon When we entered the Gungeon in 2016, we did so via a top-down dungeon crawler in which exploration played a major role. Now that we’re ready to Exit The Gungeon, our method of…
By Ethan Gach Published March 19, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsGDC Is Cancelled, But This MMO Lets Everyone Attend A Bizarre Parody Of It
Like everything else, this year’s annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been postponed. But now it’s been resuscitated. Sort of. If you consider a really weird MMO to be an adequate substitute. Crows Developers Conference is a free game from development studio Crows Crows Crows, which previously made Accounting+ in conjunction with Rick…
By Nathan Grayson Published March 17, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsOverwatch‘s New Skins Are So Good They’ve Made Me Care About Skins
I need you to do something for me right now. I need you to look up. See that image? That’s Pharah, from Overwatch. She’s wearing aviators and a leather jacket. She looks like Stephanie Beatriz’s character from Brooklyn 99. And she is gonna fuck you up That’s just one of eight new skins added to…
By Nathan Grayson Published March 13, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThe Xbox One’s New Free-To-Play MMO Is Something To Do
Launched this week for the Xbox One, Bandai Namco’s Bless Unleashed is a free-to-play fantasy MMO that sprang from the ashes of canceled Neowiz PC game Bless Online. I don’t know why it was resurrected, renamed, and turned into an Xbox One exclusive, but it’s here, it’s free, and it’s kept me from thinking about…
By Mike Fahey Published March 13, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsRoundguard Is A Fantasy RPG Powered By Peggle
Launching on Steam, Switch, and Xbox One on Friday the 13th (and PS4 later), Roundguard is basically Peggle turned into a dungeon-crawling role-playing game. A ball-bouncing roguelike, if you will. In other words, it’s my jam. Seattle-based Wonderbelly Games combined the Pachinko-style gameplay of Peggle with randomized loot, character-specific skills, and RPG progression to create…
By Mike Fahey Published March 13, 2020 -
Opinion
A Note About The Work That Goes Into Our Game Reviews
We’ve informally done this for a while, but we recently officially committed to a plan at Kotaku to give staff who play a game after-hours for a deadline—usually for a game review—time off in exchange. If you’re a reader of our reviews, I hope you’ll appreciate us solidifying this approach. Playing a game for a…
By Stephen Totilo Published March 11, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsDestiny 2’s Latest Season Is Off To A Rough Start
I’ve spent around seven hours with Season of the Worthy. That’s not nearly enough time to pass judgment on the changes and new content that will be reverberating throughout Destiny 2 over the next few months. But I can say that those seven hours have been some of the most underwhelming I’ve spent getting to…
By Ethan Gach Published March 11, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsWarzone Feels More Like Call of Duty Than Blackout Ever Did
Call of Duty’s new free-to-play battle royale, called Warzone, arrived today. It’s a streamlined, fast-paced, no-fuss spin on the genre. Compared to Blackout, it feels much more like you’re still playing Call of Duty Available with cross-play on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, Warzone features 150-player matches. If you already own last year’s game…
By S.E. Doster Published March 10, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThe Remastered Ports Of Langrisser I & II Remind Me Why These Games Rule
Originally released in the early ’90s for the Sega Genesis, Langrisser I & II have now been ported to the PS4, Switch, and PC, bringing back classic turn-based strategy and lifting it up with updated graphics and a life-saving fast-forward button. I fell in love with the genre the first time I laid hands on…
By Ethan Gach Published March 10, 2020 -
OpinionIn Defense Of Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII is ten years old today, which means that 2019 is officially running out of ways to remind us of our mortality. It was a controversial entry in the Final Fantasy series, shifting the series’ usual approach to combat and ditching old traditions to tell a techno-thriller story starring deeply flawed heroes. To…
By Heather Alexandra Published March 9, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThe Longing, Which Can Take Over A Year To Finish, Encourages You To Embrace Waiting
At the beginning of the PC game The Longing, your character, a skinny gollum called a Shade, is ordered to wake their giant stone king in 400 days. The game starts with the king going to sleep, after which point a real-time counter starts. The Shade then has to somehow pass 400 real-time days in…
By Riley MacLeod Published March 9, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThe Original Creators Of Burnout Are Making A New Open-World Racer
Dangerous Driving 2 is the fourth arcade racing game that veteran developer Alex Ward has worked on in as many years. He and just over half of Three Fields Entertainment’s seven-person staff flew out from the UK to show it off at PAX East ahead of its holiday 2020 release on Xbox One, PS4, PC,…
By Ethan Gach Published March 6, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsIn Afterparty, You Die As You Lived: Confused But Happy To Take A Beer
Afterparty, the latest from Oxenfree developer Night School Studio, is out October 29 (and rated M for Mature, like all the best night clubs). It’s a story-based adventure game written in the snarky spirit of its point-and-click predecessors, full to bursting both with witty one-liners and signs that the writers maybe got a smidge too…
By Natalie Degraffinried Published March 6, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThere’s Not A Lot Of One-Punch Man In The One-Punch Man Game’s Story Mode, Thank Goodness
One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows is not a video game about uber-powerful anime sensation One-Punch Man. It’s the story of a player-created character operating in One-Punch Man’s orbit. The single-player story mode battles last much longer that way. In One-Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows’ three-on-three competitive fighting mode, Saitama (AKA One-Punch Man) takes…
By Mike Fahey Published March 6, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsBeing The One Human In A World Of Pokémon Is Pretty Cool
In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, the enchanting remake of a pair of Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS games coming out this week for the Switch, the human player wakes up in a world populated by talking pocket monsters, reborn as one of their own. Living and working alongside Pokémon as an equal…
By Mike Fahey Published March 6, 2020 -
OpinionIf You Want To See Smash Bros.‘ Wildest Crossovers, Look To The Spirits
Just a few years ago, it would have been nonsense to think we’d see characters like Persona 5‘s protagonist Joker or Terry of Fatal Fury fame playable in Super Smash Bros. But Ultimate has far surpassed what we expect from Nintendo’s massively popular brawler. Look beyond the character select screen, though, and you’ll see that…
By Ian Walker Published March 5, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsBloodroots Is A Western Brawler Where Everything Is Your Weapon
I can’t remember the last time I hooted and/or hollered at a video game as much as I did during the first 15 minutes of Bloodroots It’s a fast, stylish brawler with one very cool hook: you don’t have a single weapon, you have everything. The game’s world is littered with swords, hammers and guns,…
By Luke Plunkett Published March 5, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsSludge Life Feels Like Playing Hooky From Late Capitalism
One of my favorite Onion articles of all time is titled “Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.” It was published five years ago, back when I still worked at an office job I hated where I frequently daydreamed of doing exactly as the Onion health experts advised. But where…
By Ethan Gach Published March 5, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsIt’s Literally Just Mowing (And Microtransactions, Ads, And Loot Boxes)
As soon as I heard about the game It’s Literally Just Mowing, I was like, “Hell yeah!” Unfortunately, the game is not literally just mowing. It’s Literally Just Mowing, which arrived on iOS and Google Play last week, has been promoted as being about mowing some lawns, and that’s it. But once I played it,…
By Ian Walker Published March 5, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsIf You Like Picross You’re A Good Person And Will Probably Enjoy Depixtion
Picross is a wonderful series of games in which players use logic to create dubious pixel art using numbers and grids. In Depixtion, recently released for the Nintendo Switch, each level is three Picross-style puzzles of varying colors and shades coming together to create dubious pixel art. It’s deep dish Picross with a twist. A…
By Mike Fahey Published March 5, 2020