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When the credits roll at the end of Mortal Kombat 11 's excellent story mode, the slate has been wiped clean. After a variety of entertaining time-travelling hijinks, everyone's second-favourite Shaolin monk, Liu Kang, has ascended into godhood and is ready to begin writing an all-new chapter in Mortal Kombat history. It's as close to a perfect ending as you can get to the almost 30 years of convoluted lore this series has. But now, there's Aftermath, Mortal Kombat 11's optional expansion that tacks on a handful of new chapters to that narrative. And while the idea of a story-focussed add-on to this fighting game is an exciting prospect--and it certainly has its high moments--when the credits roll for the second time there isn't that same sense of gratification. At the beginning of Aftermath, which immediately follows the end of Mortal Kombat 11, Liu Kang is interrupted by the nefarious sorcerer Shang Tsung. Along with the righteous wind god Fujin and badass in...

It's easy to recognize Crucible 's many design influences. The Amazon-published third-person multiplayer game features hero-style characters with abilities similar to those found in Overwatch. Its one MOBA-centric game mode should feel familiar to you if you've played Smite or the now-defunct Paragon. And even its light progression system echoes the one found in Gearbox's Battleborn. Crucible attempts to remix a lot of existing ideas and cohesively tie them together into something more successful, but as a result, it fails to create an identity for itself. Crucible takes place on an alien planet primed for off-world mining, which plays host to three game modes on its single map. Heart of the Hive is as close to a MOBA as Crucible gets, with a focus on PvP and PvE play as two teams fight to secure the hearts of dangerous hives. Alpha Hunters is a spin on battle royale, with teams of two skirmishing in short matches. Lastly, Harvester Command combines traits of team deat...

Resolutiion constantly implies there’s more going on than you realize. Its strong anti-imperialist messaging pushes you to question the nature of your mission. Its mechanics, including the fact that most enemies fall incapacitated before you kill them, suggests that maybe you should show mercy when given the choice. The concept of scholars studying the world in VR, seeking to understand things without seeing what's in front of them, challenges you to question when knowledge is useful. Walls and signs adorned with intricate symbols and filled with cryptic, interactive elements forces you to consider the possibility that you’ll need to be extremely clever and dig really deep to find the truth. That truth is extremely hard to come by, though. Even after combing the world and finding out how many of the pieces fit, I walked away feeling that Resolutiion’s big philosophical questions stirred my mind. However, its obtuse attempts to manifest them as a deep, mysterious puzzle beneath th...

Horror is often bulging with contradictions and illogical deaths. Take, for example, the hapless victim who runs into a dead end when hounded by a machete-wielding murderer, or deeper into the unsettling darkness of the woods where unknown terrors lie in wait. On the other hand there's Edward, the everyday man you're embodying in Those Who Remain , the type of horror protagonist who is decidedly more aware of the dire situation he finds himself in. Despite being unwittingly caught up in the spooky affairs within the sleepy town of Dormont, he seems to regard the scenes of terror and panic unfolding around him with the detachment and fatigue of a man who desperately wants everything to blow over. Scenes of sheer exasperation in the game are absurdly common; Edward routinely shouts variations of “Not you again!” as he scrambles from yet another blood-thirsty demon that's frantically clambering towards him. It's not difficult to empathize with Edward's circumstances--...

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is just as vast and fantastical as it was in 2010. While not every aspect has aged gracefully, Monolith Soft's lengthy role-playing game has withstood the test of time and further cements itself as one of the most memorable JRPGs in the last decade. Although Xenoblade Chronicles' opening hours may seem standard fare for JRPGs story-wise, what sets it apart right from the get-go is its setting. Years before the events of the game, two massive titans, Bionis and Mechonis, were locked in a devastating battle of unfathomable proportions. One day, the titans froze, and life started to pop up on the backs of these enormous figures. To put things into perspective, Colony 9--where protagonist Shulk lives--and the sprawling plains and lake surrounding it are located near the Bionis' ankle. Despite Xenoblade Chronicles's age, its sense of scale is still impressive. Throughout your journey you explore wide-open plains, dense forests, sno...

A little empathy goes a long way. Especially when it comes to those we seek unconditional love and support from, it can mean the difference between spiralling into a black hole of depression and having the comfort to simply exist free of judgment. It's one of the many themes If Found so vividly represents in sketchbook-style visual novel form. Through expressive minimalist illustrations, ethereal sound design, sharp writing, and thematic coherence, the chaos and serenity of young adulthood jumps out of its pages for a story that's heartbreaking, heartwarming, and wholly affecting. With a diary and eraser, we recollect and move past the memories of main character Kasio during a pivotal time in her life. It's December 1993 in County Mayo of Ireland, and having come back to her small hometown of Achill from Dublin for the holidays, she's kind of lost. With two higher-education degrees to her name and a lukewarm desire to pursue a Ph.D, she gets the "why don't yo...

Minecraft represented a massive paradigm shift in games, having served as a popular proto-example of both early access releases and unstructured, creation-based gameplay. More than a decade later, Minecraft Dungeons doesn't strive toward revolutionary, but it may just use the now-familiar trappings of its namesake to introduce a new generation of players to old-school tropes. The dungeon-crawler is a light, breezy introduction to the genre for newcomers and a friendly, low-impact callback for veterans. Those experienced with games like Diablo or Torchlight already know the basic gist. You venture from a hub area into various environments, battle enemy hordes, occasionally fell some larger-than-life boss monster, and then spend time laying out and sorting through your new loot like a kid who just opened a pack of baseball cards. Rinse, repeat. Within that framework there is some simplification in Minecraft Dungeons, which helps to make it more inviting. You only have six gear slo...

Toward the middle of my time with Maneater , my shark, now the size of a sedan and sporting glowing blue fins and whiskers to help it channel bioelectricity into the water around it, leaped out of a canal and onto the cobblestone dais filled with drunken revelers. As the folks enjoying the shoreline of Port Clovis screamed, my shark flopped after them, deterred by neither lack of limbs nor lack of oxygen as it chased down and chomped partier after partier unfortunate enough to think they could enjoy a gathering this close to Dead Horse Lake. As I gained bloody vengeance against the residents of Port Clovis for their abuse of the marine ecosystem, actor Chris Parnell's voice-over narration filled in some interesting details about the horse monument my prehistoric killing machine was defiling. One year, he explained, a Port Clovis-born horse placed 20th at the Kentucky Derby, creating a new holiday since the local population, known for public drunkenness and petty crime sprees, was ...

What the Golf , 2019's hilarious anti-golf golf game, is at its best on Switch. Everything that was good in the Apple Arcade and PC versions, which we reviewed last year , remains good here, but the additions and improvements that the Switch version brings make it the definitive What the Golf experience. The game arrives on Nintendo's hybrid console with a new two-player "Party Mode" that wasn't included in the PC or Apple Arcade releases. This mode, which sees you and another player each picking up a Joy-Con and facing off in a series of competitive levels, is an absolute hoot. Both players are made to compete across 11 random levels, each based on levels from the campaign, to see who can get to the hole first. There's a great diversity across Party Mode's levels, with some levels feeling more like puzzles, some purely based on skill, and others that could only work in multiplayer, like when you're both controlling separate items that are tethered to...

The phenomenon around Vocaloid-based music and the anime-inspired mascots that personify these synthetic voices is one that brings tremendous joy to many. It's not just because our beloved blue-haired virtual pop idol has been the face for a subsection of Japanese music that we hold so dear--through the Project DIVA rhythm games , Miku has represented our way of personally connecting with hundreds of songs composed by a number of incredibly talented artists. With Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA MegaMix , we have yet another great collection of genre-defying tunes and all-new bangers that bring the series to Nintendo Switch in familiar, but terrific form. MegaMix's rhythm gameplay system follows that of previous Project DIVA games; note patterns fly in from off-screen to form a continuous string of button prompts that sync to the beat of each song. When you choose to ramp up the difficulty, the face buttons or directional inputs (or any combination thereof) and shoulder button promp...

The Wonderful 101 is the latest in a long line of Wii U games to get a second chance at life on the Nintendo Switch. Platinum’s wacky Sentai superhero story was a true-blue made-for-Wii U experience: Using a combination of traditional buttons and hand-drawn symbols, you corral and control a mob of up to 100 characters who fight through beat-'em-up arenas, navigating reaction-based puzzle-platforming challenges and a litany of setpiece minigames. But something feels off about The Wonderful 101 Remastered. The seeds of Platinum’s best games are there--the snappy dodging and parrying, the clever writing and design, the demand that you hone the craft of controlling your characters--but it’s hard to appreciate them in a game that demands mastery over its complex mechanics without taking the time to properly explain how they work. Combined with new technical issues, The Wonderful 101 Remastered doesn’t just fail to make the generational jump, it forces us to question whether it warrante...

Runeterra is the world of League of Legends, Riot’s MOBA that has arguably experienced a Golden Age of esports in the past few years. The MOBA has undergone various lore overhauls, but centralized all of its bits and pieces in 2016 to come up with a vision for Runeterra and its competing factions, as well as the backstories of the game’s champions. The latest step in fleshing out this world is Legends of Runeterra , Riot Games’ flagship contribution to the current online card game market--with DNA that’s a highly entertaining splice job between streamlined design sensibilities and touches that harken back to the original card game great, Magic: The Gathering. The realm of Runeterra feels fully realized here, and part of that is how the game revolves around the various in-universe factions that are currently playable: Piltover & Zaun, Bilgewater, Demacia, Freljord, Ionia, Noxus, and the Shadow Isles. You’re not playing for rounds of ale at a tavern; this feels like a conflict of a ...

Predator, the 1987 film, is defined by its cheesy dialogue, testosterone-filled cast, and tense cat-and-mouse action between its platoon of soldiers and a crafty alien hunter. Predator: Hunting Grounds seems to, at first, hit all of those notes. There are cringe-worthy one-liners that are initially worth a chuckle, a host of customization options to make your gun-toting hero as ridiculous as you like, and streamlined gameplay that lets you play both sides of the hunt with ease. The problem isn't with the initial impression Hunting Grounds makes, but rather how quickly it loses its appeal. Predator: Hunting Grounds is an asymmetrical multiplayer game, pitting a team of four human soldiers against a single roaming Predator across three almost indistinguishable maps set in dense jungle environments. When you're playing as part of the human fireteam, you have a string of objectives to complete before a timer expires, shuffling you from one AI enemy-filled camp to another. When yo...

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," begins Roy Batty's dying monologue in Blade Runner. In the nearly 40 years since Ridley Scott's film established a visual aesthetic for what would become known as cyberpunk, we've seen these things many times now. Cloudpunk is a complex and uneven narrative-heavy adventure game that trades heavily in cyberpunk cliche. Familiar tropes are rejuvenated with mostly smart writing and consistently striking art direction, but there are also opportunities missed thanks to undernourished, by-the-numbers design. Nivalis is the last city, or at least that's what people say. Towering neon spires thrust out of the climate-ravaged ocean and, eventually, emerge through the clouds; at the top live the privileged few, the self-dubbed CEOs secluded in their stratified penthouses, while underneath everybody else ekes out a living in the dense urban sprawl where every city block has a noodle stand, night is permanent and i...

Everybody has a favorite old game series that they'd like to see make a comeback, but modernizing a long-dormant franchise requires a deft touch. Not only do you have to please the old fans--who see their longtime favorites through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles--but you also have to find a way to make the game appealing to a newer audience. Fortunately for longtime Sega and beat-'em-up fans, Streets of Rage 4 adeptly walks the tightrope of classic and modern appeal while busting some heads in the process. Taking place a decade after the third game (which released 26 years ago), Streets of Rage 4 reunites Axel and Blaze to unmask an evil plot devised by the children of series uber-antagonist Mr. X. Joining them are two new fighters: Cherry, a hard-rockin' young woman with deft moves and (literal) killer guitar riffs, and Floyd, a cybernetically-enhanced hulk who might not have speed or high jumps, but definitely has a myriad of ways to get his giant metal fists up in someb...

In Rainbow Six Siege , small tactical choices always lead to big consequences. Every round is a new lesson in what you could have done better, with your mistakes acting as a stern teacher. Taking these lessons to heart and adjusting your team's strategy accordingly keeps each match feeling fresh and exciting, and a drip-feed of new operators, loadouts, and abilities constantly introduces new considerations. The thrill of seeing your plan succeed--whether that's a collection of traps that stops the enemy in their tracks, a well-placed breaching hole that sets the stage for an ambush, or two operators' abilities working together to pull the rug out from the opposing team--is what makes Siege not only a compelling shooter but one of the best examples of teamwork, tactics, and crack shooting out there. Despite its evolution over the past four years, Rainbow Six Siege has always been a battle between attackers and defenders over a single objective. There are five operators per ...