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Before you're even 100% certain of what you're doing or who you are in Project Warlock , you're put in a room with a magical throwing knife, a staff that shoots lightning, and a couple of pissed-off spiders who aren't there to thank you for playing their game. Within 10 seconds of starting, I'm back in high school, in 1998, installing any old creaky Doom WAD a friend tells me about over AIM for the hell of it, without a single blessed clue what needs doing except that anything that isn't me must die. That's really the main draw of Project Warlock, a game that wears its '90s FPS inspirations loudly and proudly. Despite a few interstitial cards between areas, there's no deep story or motivation or pageantry to be found here. It's just you and your arsenal of magical and military weaponry vs the supernatural hordes. At any given moment, it's paying deep homage to Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Heretic, Quake, Duke Nukem--the list goes on. The question, ...

Critics and fans throw around the term "tactical shooter" to represent any kind of game that somehow mandates that you think about how you shoot. Disintegration is one of the few that literally blends core real-time tactics mechanics and first-person shooting. It isn't a unique mix, though the balance of the two styles feels different from what we've seen over the years. The strategy is rich and demanding, even when the AI can't quite live up to its responsibilities. The shooting evokes all the good things about turret sequences--mainly the feeling that you're a really big gun and that there's always more stuff to shoot--without the restrictive boredom that comes from being on-rails. The strength of those parts, and the ways you constantly switch between them, build up an intense field-commander fantasy. In the single-player campaign, you control Romer Shoal, the gravcycle-flying commander of a robot special forces squad. As "pilot," you are th...

You're hunkered down behind a beaten-up truck, bleeding from a chest wound. You can hear the labored breathing of one of your squadmates over the comms. Nightmare, as the team knows her, is unconscious at your feet, but you can't think about that right now as a horde of zombies comes skittering around the corner. You take aim, the first of your targets weaving erratically in your field of vision before you blow its brains out. You repeat this twice more and as the horde advances yet again, you hear a shot ring out and a bullet zips past your ear, splintering the helmet of an ADVENT soldier who had a flamethrower at the ready. The sniper, Rat King, holds up five fingers--minutes until evac arrives. Another member of your squad, Outrider, drops cloaking and picks Nightmare up to take her to safety as the sounds of more Lost ring out in the distance. It takes seconds, in the end. With the Commander's voice in your ear, you pull the pin on the frag grenade and chuck it, close ...

Editor's note: This review is currently in progress to allow more time to experience more of Valorant in a post-launch environment. We'll update and finalize the review as the author digs deeper and plays more of the game. Think Counter-Strike with hero elements. That's the elevator pitch for Valorant , Riot Games' first foray into competitive first-person shooters. I say that not to disparage Valorant, though. In fact, that's what I love most about it, especially since it executes on the formula extremely well. Valorant thrives because of tight, tactical gameplay and a mix of character-based abilities that provide a necessary strategic layer. Although it's a slim package with limited features and barren presentation, Valorant has the potential to be great. The core mode of Valorant revolves around five-on-five matches where one team (defenders) defends bomb sites while the other (attackers) tries to plant at bomb sites, switching sides about halfway through ...

In my original review of The Outer Worlds , one of my takeaways was that it had strong worldbuilding which was enhanced by its audiovisual direction. That was based on dozens of hours with the PC version of the game. The game now has a port on Nintendo Switch, and being able to play a title as expansive as The Outer Worlds on the system is impressive. But naturally, the big compromise that it makes in order to run on the relatively less powerful console is in the visual splendour of its world. As I've come to expect in Switch ports of graphically-intensive games, the concessions most noticeably come in the form of a very low level of detail, significantly reduced environmental objects, and the absence of many ambient and post-processing visual effects, among other things. The result is a fuzzy, watercolour-like image of a barren world, and you certainly lose a lot of the awe that comes with seeing the game's large, lush open areas and intricately detailed cities. But more impo...

It's 3 AM. Your two-person ship, a modest sloop, is anchored at Golden Sands Outpost while you sell off the loot from a five-hour voyage. You've been sailing as an emissary of the Gold Hoarders, and through questing for a lengthy stretch without your ship sinking, you managed to make it to rank 5. Now, every chest, trinket, and gem you sell is worth two and a half times its normal value, but there's a catch: Sailing with an emissary flag, particularly a high-level one, etches a giant red "X" on your back. Any player that sinks your ship and steals your emissary flag will get their own big payday, and pirates sworn to the new Reaper's Bones faction can even see you on their ship's navigation map if they rank up their own emissary flag high enough. In an instant, your triumphant loot turn-in transforms into a disaster. Another duo's sloop rounds the corner behind your boat, positioning their cannons to lay waste to all your hard work. Adrenaline washes ...

Surveillance is out of control, technology is numbing the minds of the masses, and the government (or corporations, or some combination thereof) has become fascist and corrupt, stripping freedoms and assassinating dissidents in the name of security. That familiar premise has been utilized again and again in works ranging from 1984 to Westworld, and it's also the state of the world in Liberated , a cyberpunk-ish side-scrolling action game that's as much comic book as video game. The tech dystopia is well-worn territory in movies, books, comics, and video games, and Liberated offers little that hasn't been done better elsewhere. Liberated's story is pretty much a carbon copy of its more interesting inspirations. The same is true with its frustrating side-scroller gameplay, which is both overly simplistic and often frustrating. It's unfortunate that the playable parts and the story that are meant to drive the game can't match up to its gorgeous, comics-inspired ar...