IGN

• SWITCH
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

Mario & Luigi: Brothership is an incredibly disappointing return for an RPG series I’ve always loved. Apart from the combat, it fundamentally misunderstands its own past success, and completely fumbles Luigi’s role in puzzle-solving and exploration by making him more of a pain than a partner. The story is simplistic and unoriginal, its attempts at humor fall flat, and the overly chatty writing holds your hand to a ridiculous degree. It’s not a total disaster, as the excellent, flashy turn-based battles are some of the best this series has ever had – but even those somehow manage to wear thin as the repetitive final act crawls across the finish line of this roughly 34-hour campaign, which suffers from surprisingly bad performance issues nearly the entire time. The Switch has been home to many triumphant revivals for Nintendo, but the Mario & Luigi series has sadly missed the boat.

• PS5
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

Slitterhead features some interesting body-swapping exploration and a unique blood-based battle system, but it never fully capitalises on either of them due to its small handful of repeated level settings and largely indistinguishable enemy encounters. Its story is disappointingly primitive in its presentation, and its time-looping structure only really serves as a feeble attempt to mask the fact that it takes about one hour’s worth of story mission ideas and repeats them incessantly across its 13-hour duration. Like a bloody blade worn down by a few too many battles, Slitterhead grows increasingly dull over time and ultimately just doesn’t cut it.

• PC
• XSX/S
• PS5
• 3 / 10
• États-Unis

While Empire of the Ants’s nearly photo-realistic world looks incredible at first glance, its boring and annoying real-time strategy campaign is the ant-ithesis of that. Combat missions are mostly trivially easy because the AI doesn’t seem to understand crucial mechanics, and those that aren’t are obnoxious because you can’t save mid-mission to replay the tough parts without trudging through the easy setup; Meanwhile, all of the non-combat missions are tedious searches for needles in haystacks and the story fails to make ant politics intriguing. It’s easily the worst single-player campaign I’ve played in years.

• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Planet Coaster 2 is even better at all of the things its predecessor was good at. It's a detailer's dream, with a colossal variety of rides, scenery, terrain tools, and sometimes terrifyingly vast options for customization. It's also bad at more or less all of the things the last one was bad at, though, as it still fails to make the financial side of running a park, or even staff management, challenging or enjoyable. But the addition of water attractions alone is enough reason to dive in even if you have hundreds of hours sunk into the first Planet Coaster. All told, it's the best sim of its type your money can buy.

• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

From its lively, cartoonish sprites to its energetic soundtrack, Metal Slug Tactics is a meticulously crafted ode to the arcade classic that never gets lost blindly chasing its adoration for the series without understanding what makes Metal Slug great. Instead, it introduces a handful of distinct innovations to the tactics genre that masterfully meld Metal Slug’s action-packed platforming and shooting onto a tactics grid. Even though it’s hampered by some frustrating bugs, I’m still having plenty of fun with each run as I experiment with new strategies and team compositions.

• PC
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

Dragon Age: The Veilguard refreshes and reinvigorates a storied series that stumbled through its middle years, and leaves no doubt that it deserves its place in the RPG pantheon. The next Mass Effect is going to have a very tough act to follow, which is not something I ever imagined I'd be saying before I got swept away on this adventure. Enjoyable action combat, a fantastic cast of allies with sweeping story arcs all their own, top-notch cinematics, and moving, nuanced character writing are the wings on which this triumphant dragon soars, pulling out all the stops in a whirlwind tour of Northern Thedas and capping it with a terrific finale that’s built on memorably tough choices and consequences. If we never get another Dragon Age, at least it got to go out on a high note.

• PC
• XSX/S
• PS5
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

After several attempts to recapture what made the original Life is Strange so enduring, developer Deck Nine Games really knocked it out of the park with Life is Strange: Double Exposure. This is a worthy sequel to a game that captured the hearts and minds of millions of people way back in 2015, myself included. The writing is great, the music is excellent, the cinematography and acting are top-notch, and Max’s new powers are a fun and intuitive fit for its murder mystery structure.

• PS5
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

Sonic X Shadow Generations takes an already excellent game and spring jumps it to new heights at a blistering pace by doubling up the campaign length with creative level design, fantastic bosses, plenty of collectibles, and an appreciable graphical upgrade. While the brand-new Shadow content isn't necessarily long on its own, it adds a nice change of pace to the collection of all-time great Sonic stages Generations already contained, and there’s an exciting new story that’s filled in as you explore the overworld for collectibles, activities, and challenges. This bulked-up remaster soars far and above previous enhanced versions we've gotten in the Sonic franchise, and hopefully will be the gold standard Sega holds itself to when it decides to bring back other Sonic games from the past.

• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

The Lake House DLC is another spectacular and spooky slice of Alan Wake II action. It introduces some fantastic new supporting characters to the Remedy Connected Universe, as well as a terrifying new enemy type to overcome and some wonderfully eerie environments to explore. The challenge of its puzzles may be light, but its combat is still chillingly dark even despite the fact it’s not hugely different from that of the main game, and scouring for the many notes, videos, and audio recordings littered throughout its fear-inducing facility made for a genuinely gripping investigation. Funny, frightening, and full of surprises, The Lake House DLC is a tightly paced slice of psychological horror that serves as an absorbing addendum to Alan Wake II.

• PC
• PS5
• XSX/S
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

Setting a Metroidvania-style platforming adventure against a backdrop of building-razing beasts is certainly an intriguing idea, but unlike its towering cast of kaiju cameos, Kong: Survivor Instinct itself simply doesn’t measure up. Its story and characters are underwritten, its ravaged urban playground is eye-catching but not particularly surprising to explore, and its combat fails to evolve enough to keep the fights interesting over the course of the journey. The occasional room-rocking escape sequences do literally shake things up, but they’re few and far between and only distract from the otherwise uncomplicated platforming for short bursts at a time. Kong and his kind may hail from an alternate world hidden deep inside the Earth’s core, but the actual gameplay of Kong: Survivor Instinct is strictly one-dimensional.

• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Batman: Arkham Shadow does an admirable job of adapting almost everything I love about the Arkham series to work in a full-fledged VR game, and it’s impressive looking for a game that’s exclusive to the standalone Meta Quest 3 headset. There are a few hitches and aggravating bugs that mean some parts don’t work quite as well as others, but its vigorous brawling, exploration, tricky puzzle solving, and stealth are all in full effect as you sneak and punch your way through Blackgate prison in a twisting undercover pursuit of a mysterious cult leader where just about everybody’s a suspect. It’s certainly smaller in scale than any full game since Arkham Asylum, but it’s far larger and more built-out than you might expect after Batman: Arkham VR, and a return to an enclosed prison setting makes it feel dense and intricate.

• PC
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

Unknown 9: Awakening is the kind of routine action-adventure game that probably wouldn't blow me away even if it was executed well – and the fact that it isn’t just makes the whole thing fall completely flat. Everything from the formulaic story to the shallow and dull combat and stealth are well below the standard set by genre peers, and the consistently disheveled performance and bugs don’t do Awakening any favors. There’s at least some fun to be had in its interesting reality-bending powers, especially the mind-controlling abilities that let you briefly play as your foes and sabotage the enemy in clever ways, but these bright spots run their course quickly, leaving us with a wholly underwhelming adventure.

• PC
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed certainly looks the part, coming admirably close to emulating the scrawled, asymmetrical look of the acclaimed 2023 animated film it functions as a sequel to. It also sounds the part thanks to some genuinely impressive voice acting (although shelling out for some of the ’90s hip hop that gave the movie its own aural edge clearly wasn’t within the budget). However, despite a visible effort to make Mutants Unleashed a lengthy and credible follow-up story to the film, its simple button bashing action quickly becomes boring thanks to its slim selection of enemies and its constantly reused levels. Trying to do too much with too little means it all just becomes rather… vanilla, and that’s a shell of a loaded word to use around the green machine, who rock the town without being seen.

• SWITCH
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

Super Mario Party Jamboree is an amazing followup to Mario Party Superstars and easily one of the best games in the series. Not only does it faithfully return to the classic formula established in the Nintendo 64 entries, it confidently improves upon it with a fantastic set of boards that introduce unique and memorable mechanics. It’s also the most flexible Mario Party has ever been, with tons of ways to customize your game, including its brilliant new optional Pro Rules that reduce luck-based elements to a minimum and crank up the strategy for those who want it. The wonderful maps are supported by a great lineup of new and returning minigames and character-specific challenges that steal the show, even if I wish there were just a few more minigames in the rotation. The side offerings may not have much staying power, but when partying with friends and family locally or online, Super Mario Party Jamboree boldly completes the series’ redemption arc as its newest superstar.

• PC
• PS5
• XSX/S
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead does a commendable job of taking the uniquely silent scary movie series and spinning it into an interactive adventure, even if its methods for sustaining stress seem a bit too clearly contrived at times. I greatly appreciated the many handcrafted human touches that made its evacuated spaces so evocative, and the safety net of its consistent auto-save meant that my numerous instant deaths never became a source of frustration. However, although it may maintain a regularly tense atmosphere every shuffled step of the way, the absence of any significant story surprises or enough substantial changes to its simplistic stealth-based gameplay means that A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead doesn’t quite have enough twists and turns to make for an unmissable journey.

• PC
• XSX/S
• PS4
• PS5
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

There’s a certain familiarity in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but Atlus takes the principles of its already excellent RPGs and refines them in a way that effortlessly ushers you through its brutal, and sometimes beautiful, new fantasy world. The Archetype system and all the new wrinkles it added to the turn-based battles build upon a strong foundation, and the social elements are streamlined to better deliver the most important aspects of the stories they tell. The sense of adventure you get from traveling across the kingdom and the powerful sense of purpose you have to do so drive its memorable journey, distinguishing itself from those that came before it. When I finally closed the book on Metaphor after 80 hours, I felt a unique warmth in its message, because it’s driven by the ideals of a just society smartly contextualized in a unique metanarrative. Metaphor: ReFantazio is poetic, and at times, idealistic, but it also understands its complexities and that change requires action, and that even far-fetched fantasy stories can serve as inspiration to make our world a better place.

• PS5
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is a final flash from the past, sometimes to a fault, as demonstrated by its archaic menus and remedial training tools. Its Episode Battles have the kind of reaction-heavy difficulty that doesn’t really exist in most games these days, more than once crossing the line between challenging and frustrating. But the feeling of traveling back to a simpler time when games didn’t have to be balanced or competitive to be fun is a good one, especially when that action stays so true to that of the show it’s recreating. Reliving a story that was foundational to my youth, looking and sounding as great as I remember it, with the opportunity to alter it in sometimes dramatic new ways is clever, and the addition of tools to attempt to create our own stories could elevate the experiment even further if a community can figure out how to make the most of them.

• PS5
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Silent Hill 2 is a welcome modernisation of a survival horror masterpiece. It smoothly polishes down the rough edges of the original game’s combat while taking a piece of heavy grit sandpaper to scuff up every rust and mold-covered surface of its nightmarish environments, successfully making them appear far more abrasive and menacing to explore. Previously primitive boss battles have been transformed into substantially more intense encounters, and its intimidating audio design kept me acutely aware that every fog-cloaked street I walked down could quickly hurry me towards my own dead end. It does feel a little padded out in parts, and I do wish that Bloober Team had streamlined some of its more convoluted puzzle sections to prevent the story’s momentum from sagging on occasion. Still, intermittent pacing problems aside, Silent Hill 2 is a great way to visit – or revisit – one of the most dread-inducing destinations in the history of survival horror.