IGNsus

Whenever an EA game has no reviews at launch, it's already a bad sign. Consider the fact that EA is milking players with early access garbage and you KNOW it's a cash grab. This game is rushed to the market right before the next Star Wars movie comes out. Star Wars Battlefront sullies the name of another classic game. I wish EA would stop "reviving" classics. Please.

This is the worst game I have ever played. This series is the worst franchise in video game history. No amount of advertising, shilling, paid reviews, or metacritic spamming will ever change those two facts.

"It just works." Yes, releasing a linear "RPG" on a 10 year old engine, with uncountable bugs, while your company and you rake in millions in profit. It sure as hell does work. For you.

Hmmm this seems like another flop by Ubisoft. After the colossal disappointments in Unity, Rogue, Watch Dogs, and more, I think they should probably refocus on making games better and dial back on the marketing (looking at you Dan's gaming). Or maybe stick to churning out 5 Tom Clancy games per year. Whatever works I guess. As for me, I'll just stick to GT and Forza, thanks.

Excellent game. Excellent port. Excellent price. Good job, Sega. To those who haven't played Valkyria Chronicles because of gamepad aversion: Buy it. This game is definitely worth the money.

"PS. It's ridiculous to see a 50$ DLC on day one. I've NEVER seen a 50$ DLC in any game.." That's a blatant lie. This game has no DLC content. The DLC thing is a gag. And if this reviewer had spent more than 5 seconds playing the game, he would realize that.

For a game that's been in development for more than 5 years, Watch Dogs is an unacceptable end result. There are a plethora of problems with Watch Dogs. Let me list a few: On the 360, the game looks like GTA: Vice City. It doesn't feature coast guards. Major physics problems/bugs. Too much like GTA. Looks nothing like the E3 2012 demo.

So now that the dust has settled, we are seeing what people actually think about this game. As I'd suspected, the game does not have any lasting appeal. People have already moved on.

Final Fantasy XII is a rather innovative title in the long-running series, but not a very good game. There is less user involvement in battles, and the game has questionable design decisions, such as not being able to obtain the strongest weapon due to your looting random chests earlier in the game. The biggest problem with FF XII is the inconsistent pacing. At times the story moves far too quickly, at times it moves like molasses. Worst, the dialogue has no depth. We're told and shown how unfortunate the characters are, but we don't really feel for any of them. Further, there are also two completely unnecessary characters on the roster, and those characters take up way too much of the story. Commendable for changing the stale FF formula; it's a shame the game is awful.

I am at a loss why Creative Assembly wanted to ruin their reputation with this pile of trash. It's also inexplicable how Total War: Rome II is made by the same studio that made Shogun II, an excellent successor to the original Shogun. The game betrays every single Total War fan. It is so casualized I felt like I was playing a tablet game. Some lamentable design decisions include no family tree, no attrition, no AI aggression, and my personal favorite: fire torches for gates. Then of course you get the expected technical issues of a CA game. But wait. This isn't your typical CA technical mess. It's much, much worse. On a nice computer you would be lucky to get more than 30 FPS on the campaign map. Do you like to wait 5 minutes at end turn? This game offers that. The biggest joke of this joke is unit AI, where units clump up together like a mosh pit and run randomly in all directions. Heh, I actually told people how great this game was going to be. Good job using misleading footage, CA. P.S. When your game is absolute trash, you might not want to anger your fans by releasing DLC.

I'm not sure how each iteration of COD is worse than its immediate predecessor. It's actually amazing how incompetent Activision is unless their goal is self-sabotage. In that case I would say they are the best. Over-saturation. I wonder how many more milking attempts this terrible franchise has left before it is discarded by those suits up top?

Great game, great series. If you like Awakening, Path of Radiance offers a richer, deeper experience. The map design is far superior to Awakening, and the story is a lot less contrived. Give it a chance.

Wow? From whence do I begin? Let's start by examining the critic score vs. user score. Never have I seen a more blatant example of EA exerting its advertising muscles and coercing good reviews. Is there actually anything good about this game? EA flat out lied about the game needing an Internet connection to play. Joke's on them, as usual. By enforcing a connection, they over-flooded their servers so no one could play at launch. Nice job. You guys know about the horrendous routes Sims take to work already. You guys have all seen the hilarious terrain bugs, too. Ultimately, this game does not even deserve a 1 for the design decision of having a single city block constitute a "city". I hope EA lost millions on this game; that, however, is probably wishful thinking. Judging by the quality of this product, I doubt EA even spent a million on it. They just spent most of the budget advertising and callously deceiving die-hard Simcity hopefuls. I bought Battlefield 4, but I guarantee you it'll be the last EA game I am ever, ever going to buy.

Criminally underrated game in the venerable Suikoden series. I chortle at Suikoden V's critic score being lower than the laborious Suikoden III. Trust me when I say that V is a lot better than III. In fact, V is my favorite after II. P.S. Unskippable cutscenes ****.

Banished has potential to be a lot better than it currently is. This review is not a knock on the game, despite my score. I really think the game is a great achievement, especially if you consider that one man made it. Right now, in its current state, Banished offers a respite from "AAA games cloning syndrome", but not much more than that. Certainly it is charming and entertaining. But the problem is that there's very little to do once your community becomes stable. Simply, Banished needs more progression. The end game right now is unrewarding, and players have little incentive (besides their sense of creativity) to expand across the map. Hopefully the modding tool can realize the game's enormous potential.

To this day I am simply dumbfounded by how impressive this game's open world is. Contrary to the "corridorization" of recent RPGs, Xenoblade Chronicles opts to immerse the player in a beautifully designed world. Oh, it also has one of the best soundtracks to ever grace this medium.

Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward is the best visual novel/puzzle game I have ever played. VLR is actually the second of three planned games from Kōtarō Uchikoshi, following the critically acclaimed Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It's a wonderful blend of puzzle solving and visual novel that requires the player to play through different routes in order to proceed and get to the true ending. VLR's primary strength is in its writing. The plot unfolds gradually, with the characters' intentions unclear through the greater part of the game. The subtlety of the clues, red herrings, and revelations ensures that players will keep playing once they begin. Then there's the good music, exceptional Japanese voice acting (good English VAs), and practical interface. It's a very well-designed game with excellent production values. The only gripe I have with VLR is the art: Hand-drawn illustrations of 999 are replaced with bland 3D models. That said, 3D is definitely the trend, and I guess Spike Chunsoft wanted to jump on board the 3D gimmick mode on the 3DS. With that said, there's really no reason not to buy this game at $29.99. It's an absolute shame that the game has not been commercially successful. But then again, quality doesn't exactly sell nowadays.

I love the Fire Emblem series. Unfortunately, I don't share the same enthusiasm for Awakening. Honestly, I wanted to love the game. I expected that I would love it. It was actually one of the reasons I got my 3DS. What ended up happening was I liked the game well enough, but it fell short of my expectations. There are a few glaring faults in Awakening. First, the infinite number of reclassing makes the game extremely easy, even on the hardest setting. Second, the story is cliched and has very little development. What you get is a plot that speeds along, but it lacks the political intrigue of the earlier FE games. Both of these problems I can overlook, but the map design I simply cannot ignore. Quite simply, the map design in Awakening is deplorable. The maps are boring and their layouts are not conducive to strategic gameplay. What I mean is that it's obvious how to place your units at first glance of the map. There are few maps where cowering in a corner does not lead to an easy rout. To compound this problem is that fact there are only two winning conditions in Awakening. Enemies will always dive head first into your units. Buy the game, but don't expect it to be as good as older Fire Emblem entries.

One of the most underrated games in the history of the universe. Strange Journey exudes style in every facet. From the classic dungeon crawling gameplay to the memorable musical score by Shōji Meguro, Strange Journey represents the pinnacle of the SMT series. Real SMT fans play Strange Journey. Moe fans play Persona.

Stop it. Stop releasing console FPS on the PC. We really, really don't want to play this garbage. Titanfall is a derivative of COD, with a giant gimmick of mechs, which unsurprisingly is poorly implemented. PC gamers have higher standards for their first person shooters. Hawken is a better game than Titanfall.

This game is poison. Unoriginal? Check. Cash grab? Check. Fan service? Check. Watered-down? Check. Say what you will about DOTA, but at least it's an original game with sophisticated game mechanics. League of Legends successfully cashes off another game, but it does so by reducing its original to a mind-numbing state fit for consumption for elementary and high school kids (its main player base).

People love the Thief series. However, it doesn't seem like the developers are. To the people who are giving this game positive reviews: The AI alone makes this game a 5. The game is basically a crappier version of Dishonored, which in itself is a crappier version of the original Thief games. The best thing about Thief is how poorly received it is; it goes to show that no matter how big your publisher is, how much you advertise on Gamespot, an inferior game does not (always) get rewarded. Do not buy.

Hearthstone is casual at first glance, second glance, third glance, fourth.... You get the idea. There is actually very little strategy involved in Hearthstone. You have RNG in Arena, RNG in what cards you draw, and RNG in what the cards do when you play them. I laugh at anyone who uses the word "depth" to describe Hearthstone without the phrase "a lack of" preceding it. An absolutely abysmal, shameless cash grab by an Activision owned developer.

The 85 (so far) positive scores are submitted by people who don't understand Diablo is a hardcore franchise. D3 was a disaster, and the expansion does not do enough to address that catastrophe. Once again we see Blizzard catering to a casual crowd; the end result is a garbled mess of a console game masquerading as a PC aRPG. There are way better aRPGs out there. Go play Path of Exile instead if you're not a casual gamer.

I enjoyed the game a lot. First off, I think the praise about how optimized Sleeping Dogs is for the PC is overstated: the menu system does not work with a mouse, the camera controls are unresponsive, and alt-tabbing forces the game to window mode. Despite the issues, I find the story to be the best I've ever seen in an open ended game. The same can be said with how much more I care about the characters. Because of how much I liked the protagonist and a few supporting characters, the story had a bigger impact on me than GTA IV, which never affected me on an emotional level. The real star of the game is the fighting system. I find myself using many of the unlockable techniques, and that's a testament to how well developed the system is. It's true that the game has many rough edges, and I cannot profess to see the charms of glaring errors such as running full speed into a wall on a motorcycle and somehow staying on the bike. However, the overall experience outweighs the significant negatives to the game. From the well-made (but not authentic) map of Hong Kong, superb voice acting, and the aforementioned story and melee combat, Sleeping Dogs is a game worth playing.