Tetris Effect is one of the best VR titles on the market, so without the feature Connected feels, well, disconnected. But Warriors games have always been there to scratch a very particular itch, and Age of Calamity still manages to deliver on that front, while also letting Legend of Zelda fans spend some quality time with some familiar faces. Conversely, Beginner gives the player significantly fewer button prompts and frustratingly little to do, as playing the game this way doesn’t allow one to really maintain any sort of rhythm or even enjoy the music. These games were reviewed using retail copies purchased by the reviewer. A scene from Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered. The various missions that involve actual gameplay are far more rewarding of the player’s time and efforts. But the game’s lack of variety is only part of its problem. It does, though, take a few hours—after an introductory sandbox in Norway provides a bleak and uninspiring bit of setup—for the game to get to that point. Being a somewhat open-world adventure, Death can call upon Despair in most areas to help him traverse the larger expanses of the world quickly. The game’s aesthetic enhances the horror, with your crew’s flashlights rarely being much of a match for the overwhelming fog and darkness, and the monsters reflecting the full ugliness of witchcraft murder techniques like drowning, burning, and pressing. Though some characters specify how Albion often specifically targets immigrants, Legion broadens the question of oppression to a point that becomes meaningless. You play as Eivor, a Viking who finds themselves tagging along on the first exodus out of Norway with their hot-blooded brother, Sigurd, when their father bends the knee to a new king without consulting the rest of his family. Age of Calamity, a pseudo-prequel to Breath of the Wild, shows us the last optimistic days of the Hyrule that was. That familiarity suggests an intent to transcend the thick muck of video game cliché in which The Pathless stands, and what’s most disappointing is that the game almost manages to do so. thenerdstash.com is using a security service for protection against online attacks. As long as the edges match up—forest to forest, grassland to grassland—the beautiful, storybook-esque world of the game is totally within Carto’s power. And not long after you does this for the first time, the player meets a Grumpus who’s morally opposed to the idea of eating Bugsnax in the first place, preferring to keep them as pets on a ranch that other Grumpuses view more as an auxiliary food source. And while the game simulates what your operatives are doing when you’re not playing them, the fast-travel system and ability to swap out characters with no consequence mean there’s no incentive to just use who you have; even if you want to try and exclusively hop between nearby characters, the cumbersome process to display individual operatives on the map seems to discourage it. Tetris Effect is one of the best VR titles on the market, so without the feature Connected feels, well, disconnected. The latter option is the better, faster mode that best emulates a horror movie—or, at least, it is if you’ve got some way to hastily talk things through with your partner, sharing your nuggets of the plot with theirs. Early on, the game presents a list of random, regular Joes, asking you to choose one to restart hacktivist group DedSec. DedSec’s goal is to restore a largely unexamined status quo, as characters do things like deride Albion for plastering holographic propaganda over, horror of horrors, Buckingham Palace. The game noticeably stumbles as it attempts to more overtly address the darkness beneath its concept. As Death explores each area, he is met with countless foes that challenge him at every turn. You get the sense that you’re not supposed to think about the implications of your actions, that you’re supposed to kill and pillage at your leisure, which doesn’t make the game much different from most others, except that it makes such a point of bringing frightened terrorized bystanders into the mix. Aside from the rock-solid frame rate, if there’s anything that truly shows off the power of the next-gen consoles, it’s the way these battles, such beautiful displays of chaos, never skip a single frame—something that can’t be said about the stuttery previous gen port. You’ll get the timing of your combos down to an art and just flow from encounter to encounter without skipping a beat or taking any damage whatsoever. You can douse the fire in water or blood, or you can feed it with oil or alcohol and watch from a distance as it consumes the monsters in your way. In addition, Darksiders II introduces a new loot system, which allows the Horseman to equip various weapons and pieces of armor to improve his offense and defense. But there’s a cost, as the force of colonialism is front and center here in ways it never has been before in an Assassin’s Creed game: You’re meant to take anything that’s not freely given in England, and not nearly enough nuance has been baked into the story to say that your enemies deserve what your Vikings have come to bring.