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OpinionImpressionsMount & Blade II: Bannerlord Is Blowing Up On Steam And I Can’t Stop Playing It
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is an open world third-person strategy game that overwhelms you with options and choices and helps calm you back down by letting you rampage across giant medieval battlefields. Even though it’s a janky early access game, all I want to do right now is keep playing it. Clearly I’m not…
By Ethan Gach Published April 1, 2020 -
OpinionK.K. Slider Sold Out
Yesterday, after a couple weeks playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, K.K. Slider finally made an appearance on my island. But the traveling canine guitarist has apparently become hot shit over the last two decades, so much so that he wouldn’t deign to visit until I took painstaking steps to bring my island up to his…
By Ian Walker Published March 31, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsOh No I’m Playing All Of Persona 5 Again
Two weeks ago, I jumped into an early copy of Persona 5 Royal, expecting to maybe play a few hours to check out some of the new stuff. Now I’ve finished the game’s second dungeon and have begun to accept a new reality: I am, somehow, going to replay all of Persona 5 This piece…
By Jason Schreier Published March 31, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsIn Moons Of Madness, Outer Space Is Just As Scary As Alien Monsters
I’ve never had any grand aspirations of being an astronaut, even as a kid. But in playing Moons of Madness, the latest first-person adventure from Norwegian studio Rock Pocket Games, I was given definitive proof that I just couldn’t hack it in outer space, long before the eldritch abominations started showing up. Moons of Madness…
By Ian Walker Published March 30, 2020 -
OpinionThese Long, Slow Weeks
I usually check the news on my computer or my phone, but sometimes I’ll tap the New York Times app on my iPad, which is old and slow and prone to displaying headlines from several days ago. Those headlines linger for several confusing seconds before the ones for the current day materialize. This past Saturday,…
By Stephen Totilo Published March 30, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsThere’s A Superb New Room Game, If You’ve Got VR
Let’s call The Room series the Half-Life of puzzle games about locked boxes. It’s the best in its category, and its creators just released a sequel that’s only playable in virtual reality. The Room VR: A Dark Matter, the fifth game in The Room franchise, was released for PC and PlayStation virtual reality platforms last…
By Stephen Totilo Published March 30, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsI Spent An Afternoon Playing The New Xbox Game Bleeding Edge And Have Already Forgotten Everything About It
Last week Ninja Theory and Xbox Game Studios launched Bleeding Edge, an Overwatch-style online hero brawler for PC and Xbox One. It has 11 unique playable characters and two competitive game modes. It’s going to take more than that to hold my interest. In a world where Overwatch and Paladins exist and Battleborn has come…
By Mike Fahey Published March 30, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsIron Danger Is A Fantasy Role-Playing Game With Superhot-Style Time Dilation
In Iron Danger you can rewind time whenever you need to in order to save your life and land the killing blow. It’s a cool idea and works well enough in practice, but that fun premise doesn’t stop the rest of Iron Danger from being an otherwise pretty middling isometric role-playing game experience. Out on…
By Ethan Gach Published March 27, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsBorderlands 3’s Latest Expansion Gives The Series Its First Good Boss Fight
Guns, Love, and Tentacles, yesterday’s major update to Borderlands 3, revolves around a gay wedding on an alien planet. While that’s fantastic in its own right, the rest of the expansion is pretty great too, combining fresh aesthetics with a bevy of cool new guns and what is arguably the series’ only good boss fight…
By Ian Walker Published March 27, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsGood Job! Turns Office Nepotism Into Something More Fun
I haven’t been into the office in weeks. If your job can be done from home, and your employer isn’t a heartless monster, you probably haven’t either. Good Job!’s workplace carnage is a perfect substitute. I only wish every office was this much fun. Developed by Dutch game studio Paladin and published by Nintendo, Good…
By Ethan Gach Published March 26, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsUltimate Alliance 3’s Fantastic Four DLC Is An Epic Epilogue
The first two installments of downloadable content for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 added new multiplayer game modes and challenges. Fantastic Four: Shadow of Doom, the third and final bit of paid DLC, adds a playable epilogue to the game’s story starring Doctor Doom and his four best pals. After two helpings of relatively narrative-free additional…
By Mike Fahey Published March 26, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsControl’s First Story DLC Is Just As Good As The Main Game
Control’s new downloadable content, The Foundation, is neither a simple add-on nor an afterthought. Rather, it’s a fully-fleshed out expansion that pulls you deeper into the mysteries, paranormal combat, and sprawling exploration that made Control one of the best games of 2019. In fact, much of The Foundation measures up to the quality of the…
By Ethan Gach Published March 26, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsI’m So Happy There’s A Wheelchair In Animal Crossing: New Horizons
There is a wheelchair in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It’s nothing fancy. It doesn’t roll. The power wheelchair I use in real-life would crush it like a monster truck. But it is there, in the game, and it makes me very happy. I’ve been paralyzed from the chest down for two years. Half of my…
By Mike Fahey Published March 25, 2020 -
OpinionImpressionsHow Dare You, Animal Crossing: New Horizons
As Kotaku’s resident arachnophobe, I find Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ handling of tarantulas, vis-a-vis forcing me to handle a tarantula, completely unacceptable. I do not do well with spiders. People tell me that I am a very large person and spiders are very small, but that just means more of them can fit on my…
By Mike Fahey Published March 23, 2020 -
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
