R.B.I. Baseball 18 tries to be a fun arcade-style sports video game with some big features expected of so-called sim titles. And it winds up struggling with both goals. The third entry in an ongoing effort to revitalize a series best known for its glory on the Nintendo Entertainment System, RBI 18 doesn’t really enhance […]

Onrush is a racing game without traditional racing. You zip fast vehicles around tracks, but there’s no finish line, no reward for placing first. The title is a misnomer: Rushing is quite often the wrong approach. Leading the pack makes you a target to everyone behind you, while hanging back provides a vantage to strike […]

Jurassic World Evolution, a new game tied to the theatrical release of this month’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, is a park simulator similar to Planet Coaster from last year or Zoo Tycoon from years before that. Players loved those Frontier Developments games, and a park simulator based on the universe of the iconic Steven Spielberg […]

Post-apocalyptic life must be a dismal experience. The endurance of a joyless existence of survival, surrounded by the remnants of all that is absent? It’s not for everyone. I learned to accept this while playing a frustrating 20 hours or so of State of Decay 2’s single-player mode (we’ll cover co-op in a later article). […]

The Council is an episodic historical detective adventure in which I roam the corridors of a mansion, searching for clues. In the first episode (of five), I engage in dialogue challenges with suspects, the direction of which is partly driven by RPG-based ideas about skills and powers. In 1793, I play the part of Louis […]

Detroit: Become Human exemplifies the delicate, albeit not backhanded, praise of, “They mean well.” Perhaps director and lead writer David Cage, whose work at his studio Quantic Dream is best defined as “foreign-made, interactive interpretations of maudlin Hollywood drama,” focused on themes as heady as prejudice, discrimination, social inequality and domestic abuse in the hopes […]

Nintendo’s Labo kits do things with cardboard and electronics that feel like practical magic, but the construction process is the equivalent of overcoming a half-dozen small mountains. Building Labo Toy-Cons isn’t stressful or scary so much as it’s mysterious. You’ll spend a decent amount of time putting pieces together while wondering what they’ll do exactly, […]

Chuchel sets out to make us laugh — no easy task in a video game — and delivers in spades. Only the dourest soul could fail to crack a smile at its silly antics. The humor is a mix of anti-establishment surrealism, vaudeville slapstick, video game in-jokes and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and […]

Text adventures like Quarantine Circular, the latest from indie developer Mike Bithell, present a tantalizing future for video games. It presents dialogue as a genuine plaything, a tremendously exciting notion. Sure, we are still a long way from rendering the possibilities of speech in terms of believable simulation, and Quarantine Circular demonstrates the current limitations […]

Super Mega Baseball 2 looks a lot different from the original, but I’ve never played a sports video game whose sequel felt as familiar as its predecessor. That’s good. For a genre where year-to-year sameness is a kiss of death for the licensed big boys, Super Mega Baseball 2 has the liberty of celebrating its […]