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In 2018, Tetris Effect's mesmerizing sounds and sights heightened the classic game's aesthetically pleasing properties and its ability to consume our attention to almost therapeutic levels, reinvigorating our appreciation for one of gaming's oldest obsessions. But even as former GameSpot editor Peter Brown proclaimed Tetris " better than ever " in Tetris Effect, he noted it "sadly" did not apply its wondrous approach to multiplayer. Two years later, Tetris Effect: Connected --an updated re-release for Xbox consoles and PC--fills that gap. Just as the original did for the classic version of the game, Connected reimagines Tetris multiplayer with flair and vision. It also loses a major component, VR support, which delivers the most intense version of the experience. While I'm of two minds on that tradeoff, the soothing intensity of Tetris Effect hasn't lost any potency. On the contrary, it feels more vital than ever in 2020. Though it adds and remo...

Immortals Fenyx Rising knows perfect is the enemy of good. Typhon, its big bad, is obsessed with perfection; as he overthrows the gods of Mount Olympus and strands them on the Golden Isle, he strips them of their essences, and with those essences, the flaws that made them legend. Aphrodite loses her passion, pettiness, and jealousy; Ares his rage; Hephaistos his suffering; Athena her self-righteousness. In their quest to reclaim those essences, Fenyx, a lowly soldier in search of their brother Ligryon, argues those flaws should be celebrated, not forgotten. Their tale doesn't always impart that lesson, but it's able to deftly take its own flaws in stride and, while not reaching the highs of the gods it worships, earn its own praise. Fenyx Rising sets the bar high for itself by borrowing heavily from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You can climb your way up just about any solid surface if you have enough stamina; one of your four major abilities lets you magically flo...

My six-player Destiny 2 fireteam fired away as the Deep Stone Crypt raid boss, the toughest enemy of the Beyond Light expansion, teleported around the arena and roared with rage. We threw everything we had left at the flying monster in a desperate attempt to stave off defeat. Bullets and grenades filled the air as chunks of orbital debris slammed down onto the landscape, threatening to crush us as we scrambled for cover. It was now or never--if we didn't manage to kill this thing immediately, it would kill us, and we'd be back to the start of the lengthy fight. And we'd sunk more than 12 hours into the raid over the past two days already. But then: an explosion. The boss twisted in pain and a cheer went up from our crew. Finally, we'd bested the greatest challenge of the new expansion, after hours of struggling to work out the mechanics and suffering death after death to its powerful enemies. It's moments like this one that keep me coming back to Destiny 2. There...

Editor's note: In November 2020, NetherRealm patched Mortal Kombat 11, adding next-gen optimized technical upgrades for the Xbox Series X, Series S, and PlayStation 5. Below are our impressions of how the game runs on Series X and PlayStation 5, written by Mike Epstein. Continue after the break for the original Mortal Kombat 11 review. Mortal Kombat 11 is a snappier, sharper-looking game on next-gen consoles. On both Xbox Series X and PS5, the incredibly (and sometimes disturbingly) detailed fighter has received a minor technical facelift and one or two new features that will ultimately make the game better for everyone. Though NetherRealm released a new version of the game, Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate, to coincide with the next-gen launches, all MK11 players receive access to the next-gen versions of the game and their benefits. On Xbox Series X/S, you simply need to download the game. On PS5, you will need to download the separate PS5 version of MK11, which you can grab free of c...

I've never really been a musician. When I was in middle school, I took the trumpet. In high school, I took guitar lessons. But I was never dedicated enough to the craft and I dropped both after a couple of years. Making music, even just for fun, was a prospect I left behind a long time ago. So I'm surprised by how inspired I was by Fuser , Harmonix' new musical mash-up making game. While it has a score-based story mode similar to the studio's past games, Fuser actually empowers you to be creative and make music from parts of songs you may already know. The core mechanic, switching tracks in and out to make music, is easy to use and wonderful to play with. The game Harmonix built on top of that core idea, however, doesn't always take advantage of it effectively. As a result, Fuser is better at spurring you to be creative than it is at challenging you. That may sound like a daunting, niche experience, but no game's made it easier to feel good about getting creativ...

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity occasionally lets you take control of a Divine Beast. It's a moment that should carry some weight for Zelda fans. The Beasts are colossal machines crucial to the events of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and while they're cumbersome to control, the levels in which you play as them effectively communicate their destructive power. If you've played Breath of the Wild, these moments take on a portentous air; the power fantasy of using lasers, bursts of lightning, and volleys of magma to level mountains and rack up thousands of Bokoblin, Moblin, and Lizalfos kills is undercut when you remember how the people who're using them can't fully control them, and that these tools of destruction will turn on their masters when they're needed most and destroy them. That sense of impending doom is what I came to Age of Calamity for, but that's where it blunders hardest. It constantly encourages you to set aside that feeling of drea...

Eight months after its initial release, Ori and the Will of the Wisps received some impressive technical upgrades on the Xbox Series X and Series S. The optimized version of the game hits an ultra-smooth 60-120 frames per second on both next-gen consoles at varying resolutions. It's a huge comeback for a game that was initially subject to wonky technical issues. In the next generation, Ori sheds its graphical hangups and becomes more impressive for it. Both consoles have frame rate-prioritizing "performance" and visually minded "fidelity" modes, but neither one feels like a compromise. On the Series S, you get to choose between 1080p with HDR at 120fps, or an upscaled 4K at 60fps. On the Series X, you can choose to play the game in 4K with HDR at a performance-focused 120fps, or goose the graphics in a supersampled 6K resolution, running at 60fps with HDR. Regardless of your settings, Will of the Wisps also benefits from enhanced load times and improved audio ...

Godfall makes a good first impression. Even if you're playing on a moderately powerful PC, as I did, it's clear from the opening moments that developer Counterplay Games has endeavored to show off advancements in visual fidelity, no doubt in light of new hardware such as the PlayStation 5. From the way sparks fly to the myriad particles that coat every inch of its action and the reflectiveness of its gaudy gold and marble halls, Godfall wants you to know that next gen is here. Beyond the visual spectacle, however, lies a game that's immediately familiar and over-reliant on an amalgamation of loot-driven games from the past eight years or so. Godfall's mixture of loot progression and third-person melee combat has been described by Counterplay Games as a new type of genre: the looter-slasher. The name holds up insofar as you loot and slash things, but there's nothing about Godfall that feels intrinsically new. Diablo, Monster Hunter, and Warframe make up a portion o...

There's much to praise about the remake of Demon's Souls. It's a remarkable technical showpiece for the PlayStation 5; a gripping gameplay experience that oscillates between exhilarating, nerve-wracking, and downright heartbreaking; and a faithful recreation of the seminal title that birthed the Souls-like subgenre. But developer Bluepoint's greatest achievement is that it took something I'm intimately familiar with and made me feel like I was venturing into the unknown. Fundamentally, Demon's Souls for PS5 is what it has always been. Barring some small tweaks, the design of the game is identical to From Software's original. The core mechanics are unchanged, the enemies are placed in the same positions and behave in the same ways, the devious tricks and traps are still there, ready to catch the unfamiliar off-guard. And yet, while retreading a well-worn path through the kingdom of Boletaria, I find myself without the confidence I should have. I'm cauti...

Sackboy finally has a game to call his own. The smiley mascot for LittleBigPlanet and, occasionally, the PlayStation brand has always been treated as more of an icon than a character, a cutesy tabula rasa through which all video-game-related things are possible. In Sackboy: A Big Adventure , his purview is much more traditional. He's a jumpman, a platformer in the tradition of Mario, Sonic, Crash, and all the other mascots that came before him. Sackboy, both the character and the game, rises to succeed the mascot platformer mantle well in many respects. Though its aesthetic often feels bland, its solid platforming makes for a worthy challenge. Like many platformers, story is not Sackboy's strong suit. You’re jumping around Craftverse, the world of LittleBigPlanet, to save it from a villainous jester doll called Vex. Though you'll get a fairly steady stream of updates reminding you of Vex's evil presence, there's not much you need to know. You could say the story is...

After a few days with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War , I've played through the campaign twice to see both main endings, spent some time in multiplayer, and scratched the surface of Zombies. I still need to play more multiplayer (particularly on live servers) and delve much deeper into Zombies before this review is final, so keep in mind that details, including the score, are subject to change in the coming days. The key takeaway from Cold War thus far is that Call of Duty fares far better when it errs on the side of fantasy. This is true within Cold War's campaign, where the inclusion of Ronald Reagan is a bizarre fit for an otherwise larger-than-life story about espionage and brainwashing, and it's true when comparing its story to that of last year's overly serious Modern Warfare. Cold War plays up its far-fetched premise, and that extends to some of its more inventive and creative multiplayer maps, too. Campaign Like any Call of Duty campaign, Cold War is theatri...

There's a narrative reason for why this game is called The Pathless , but the name is also a reference to how it's supposed to be played. It's an open-world puzzle game with emphases on exploration and skilled traversal, and you are meant to wander and experience its world as you find it, rather than as a series of checklist objectives. The Pathless' vast, puzzle-filled nature creates a nice, quiet space for running through the woods, lining up some tricky shots with your bow, and losing yourself in the moment. In The Pathless, you are a woman simply known as the Hunter. You've come to liberate a ruined land, empty of all human life save for a masked villain called the Godslayer. The land's protector deities, known as The Tall Ones, have transformed into villainous beasts that roam the wilderness. With the help of your eagle, an avatar of the eldest god, you must free the spirits and save the land. The plot is limited--aside from a few sparring exchanges betwee...

Sometimes, the name is the game. Bugsnax , the new game from Octodad developer Young Horses, is all about catching bugs made of traditionally appetizing foods like pizza, strawberries, carrots, and lollipops, which turn your body parts into food when you eat them. They’re bugs, but made of snacks. Bug... snacks? Bugsnax. It's a wacky, whimsical conceit that, when paired with the game's cute and colorful art style, puts a smile on your face and pushes your imagination to run wild. The surprisingly powerful desire to discover more about this world and its weird, wonderful creatures fuels every aspect of the experience. Its clever, if somewhat temperamental, puzzles revolve around catching Bugsnax. The story sends you off to investigate the mysteries of their home, Snaktooth Island, and its colonists. And though that drive is purely superficial--your real motivation will be to see all the clever Snak names and designs--the game you experience along the way has a lot of substance...

Assassin's Creed Valhalla fully embraces the series' heritage. The 12th major Assassin's Creed game shows a keen awareness of the history and gameplay innovations of the saga, and it feels like a love letter to the franchise as a whole. This makes the game a far more rewarding experience for longtime fans, though newcomers can still enjoy Valhalla's combat, emphasis on exploration, and mystery-driven narrative without years of time spent in the Animus. In Valhalla, you once again play as present-day protagonist Layla Hassan, who's still a bit shaken up after the unfortunate events at the end of Assassin's Creed Odyssey 's second DLC, The Fate of Atlantis. Understandably ostracized from her old team, she's now partnered with fellow Assassins Shaun Hastings and Rebecca Crane. The trio find themselves facing the daunting task of needing to save the world, and their only clue as to how is a mysterious message of unknown origin that contains coordinates to ...

In its opening moments, Astro's Playroom literally describes itself as a tutorial. Specifically, it explains that the Playroom's light and lighthearted platforming levels are a means of showing off the special features of the PlayStation 5 's new DualSense controller. Some, like the adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, and built-in microphone, are new. Others, like the touchpad and the gyroscope, are not. But they all distinguish the DualSense from its Xbox- and Nintendo-based counterparts. While Astro's Playroom absolutely goes out of its way to offer clever proof of the PS5's potential--the DualSense's new tricks, the improved visuals, the quick load times--the disembodied text at the start of the game sells Astro short. Playroom is an incredibly charming jaunt through a PlayStation-inspired digital theme park, ensuring that your first hop, skip, and jump of the PS5 era is wholly, unequivocally joyful. Astro's world--the literal playroom--is a cartoon fan...

Editor's note: Spider-Man: Miles Morales is releasing on November 12 for both PS5 and PS4. For this review, Jordan played on a PS4 Pro. Other GameSpot staff tested the game on PS5 and found it to be a largely comparable experience , with the PS5 version benefiting from improved visual flourishes and load times . For a technical-focused discussion of the PS5, and how Miles Morales benefits, check out our PS5 review . Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales feels like the second half to The City That Never Sleeps, a three-part follow-up expansion to 2018's Marvel's Spider-Man --the game even begins with the option to watch a short recap of the first game and its DLC in order to bring you up to speed on Miles' origins, reinforcing the notion that this is an extension of what's come before. And, unfortunately, the gameplay in Spider-Man: Miles Morales (which I will hereafter refer to as SM:MM because I'll be damned if I try to write a full review that cleverly tr...

Dirt 5 is a very different game to the previous three entries in Codemasters' off-road racing series. Dirt Rally and its sequel spun the series off in a simulation-based direction, appealing to rally purists with its authentic approach, uncompromising difficulty, and steep learning curve. Dirt 4 followed suit with another smattering of point-to-point rally races, but crucially made the experience accessible for casual racing fans by introducing a more forgiving handling model. With a third Dirt Rally already in development, Codemasters is looking to diversify the series' mainline entries by returning to the arcade spectacle and histrionics of Dirt's early years with Dirt 5. This much is clear from the outset, as Dirt 5 latches onto the same jovial festival vibes that permeated throughout Dirt 2--complete with a customizable lanyard, vibrant colors, and an upbeat soundtrack. The career mode takes you on a globetrotting adventure that encompasses a variety of different raci...

After the conclusion of the series' previous anthology with Yakuza 6 , there were big Kiryu-sized shoes to fill. As our new protagonist Kasuga Ichiban steps into the spotlight for Yakuza: Like a Dragon , developer RGG Studio proves it can still capture its signature blend of gripping melodrama and absurdist humor while creating something genuinely fresh for the long-running franchise. The reinvention isn't just in the transition from action-brawler to turn-based combat, which is a great take on traditional RPG battles. It's that the party dynamic in Like a Dragon enables a new kind of storytelling that the series hasn't explored before, one that focuses on the power of embracing friendship and fighting together every step of the way. Like a Dragon starts anew, providing an entry point for those who have never played a Yakuza game before. But it wouldn't be a proper series entry without the core tenets that define Yakuza--things like captivating exposition-heavy cut...

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope gives me a little hope for the future of Supermassive Games’ horror series. Some smart gameplay tweaks ensure that Little Hope still highlights Supermassive's vital role in the modern adventure space, but it also highlights why the studio's future games need to be better than this for those smart changes to really shine. Little Hope, like its immediate predecessor Man of Medan, is a mashup of horror tropes and subgenres. It borrows iconography from The Blair Witch Project. It borrows its Puritan-era paranoia from The Witch (and Arthur Miller's non-horror play The Crucible). And its conceit, which finds a group of college students and their professor stranded in the woods after their bus crashes, hangs on a premise that will be familiar for fans of Stephen King's The Mist or John Carpenter's The Fog. As the game progressed, I became increasingly skeptical that those threads would come together in a satisfying way. In the end...

Baldur's Gate 3 is a bit of a mess, and for now, that's okay. Baldur's Gate 3 isn't done yet. As with developer Larian Studios' previous release, the acclaimed 2017 RPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 , Baldur's Gate 3 has been released into Early Access on Steam. It contains the first act of the game: a chunk of content encompassing around 25 hours of adventuring for players determined to seek out every last treasure chest or minor side quest. As a setup it shows promise, introducing you to a cast of half a dozen characters who hint at the potential to become interesting traveling companions. Already on the brink of civil war and now facing a terrifying alien threat, the world itself seems to offer rich pickings for these characters to indulge. And by building on the template forged by the Original Sin series, BG3 already has the foundation of a well-engineered RPG that rewards players willing to engage with its systemic creativity. Yet such promise is muted by not...

Control was among the best games of 2019 --and one of the most taxing in terms of graphical fidelity. Even on the powerful PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X, Control would sometimes hitch, drop frames, and struggle as protagonist Jesse Faden telekinetically hucked objects at Hiss enemies or smashed through the offices of the Federal Bureau of Control, flinging papers and wood splinters in all directions in her wake. The high graphical requirements seem like they would preclude Control from ever running on the Nintendo Switch, a less powerful game console than its Sony and Microsoft counterparts. But Nintendo and publisher 505 Games found a workaround: streaming. The release of Control: Ultimate Edition leverages cloud technology to make the game available on Nintendo's little hybrid console, and the results are surprisingly strong. With a stable internet connection (my Switch said I was getting around 30 mbps down and 8.2 mbps up over WiFi), Control plays very well on the Switch w...