Or you can even just do both, depending on your mood.
Minecraft lets you stroll wild and free through the untamed woods, or devise your own list of goals and pursue them hard.
Exploring, collecting and building remains an always enticing loop, making it almost as hard to quit a game of Minecraft as it is to walk away from Civilization. It’s also still endlessly fun, all these years later. Minecraft isn’t quite the phenomenon it once was, but it’s impossible to overstate its significance. Embark on this journey with confidence, but be prepared to lose a lot of your free time along the way.- Garrett Martin It still captures much of what makes these games special, though, from the historical setting, to the dynamic action, to one of the few stealth combat systems that isn’t too slow or frustrating to enjoy. As an Assassin’s Creed it turns Origins from an outlier into the start of the new status quo, sacrificing a bit of its identity in order to bring it more in line with Ubisoft’s other open world games. As a story it’s an intriguing personal journey with good ideas but lackluster storytelling set against the backdrop of war between Sparta and Athens, with a strong, charismatic pair of leads making up for a lot of dull dialogue and meandering conversations. As a game it has a strong core of enjoyable action built upon a reliable and slightly upgraded foundation. It’s a colorful strategy game that looks and feels like nothing else out there.- Garrett Martin If you like Final Fantasy Tactics and XCOM but wish you could move farther and faster across their grids, with multiple different ways to accomplish that, you should check out Mario + Rabbids. The Mario imagery and Rabbid humor is almost beside the point: this game works so well because it’s a smartly built and balanced tactical RPG that innovates on genre convention through its liberal approach to movement. What originally felt like an ungainly mash-up between two properties that share almost no common ground unexpectedly turned into one of the biggest gaming surprises of the year. If you want to see what it has to offer, renting is your best bet.- Garrett Martin And as usual, 19 features just enough upgrades and new wrinkles to make it worth playing, even if you’re keeping your franchise mode alive in one of the previous games.
That means it’s also an ideal rental some years-who wants to pay $60 for the newest version of the same game every single year? If this is an off-year for you-if you sprung for The Show in 2018 and aren’t in a rush to upgrade just yet-grabbing a copy of 19 through a place like Redbox makes a lot of sense. Sony’s best-in-class baseball game is an annual highlight.
And as far as I can tell, that’s the greatest power in videogames.- Cameron Kunzelman The power of Kingdom Hearts and all of its weirdness is contained in its implosive capability, its ability to be totally separated from all narrative responsibility. When comparisons between Kingdom Hearts and other franchises come up as a way of giving some cover to the keyblade game, I bristle. With some time, energy, and emotional investment it springs to life.- Cameron Kunzelman But like the octopus pretending to be a rock, Metro Exodus is a brilliant creature in the guise of a worse one. It is a great game that had to smear itself in a layer of whatever-nothing to convince you that it belonged in a certain genre.
It is messy, full of stock situations, and doesn’t quite work in all instances, but it is also experimental and willing to be a little unpolished if it creates a situation or a series of moments that are memorable and compelling. Metro Exodus gave me the same feeling that I had playing the first-person games of the early ‘00s.