Recent reviews by Ace Dixon

Extremely clever. Consistently fresh and surprising. Legitimately funny.

This is the real deal. Strongly recommended if you enjoy mysteries or exploration. I was personally concerned that the vaporwave aesthetic was a cynical ploy to rope in fad-chasers, but couldn't have been more wrong. It's subversive and clever, but never ironic. Gameplay mechanics respect your time and intelligence. The narrative is tight, the length is perfect, and the lore is top-notch. I can't wait to see what this team does next.

I recommend going in with as little knowledge as possible, but I will say you end up with more crystals than you'll need. Treat yourself to some fast-travel once you know your way around.

Serious contender for "best writing," "best soundtrack" of 2020. If you enjoyed CSD 1-2, you'll enjoy this, even in early access. If you haven't played either of those yet, give them a shot first: All games in this series are as much videogame as they are perverse stress-load exercise where the only one holding you back is you. These games are arguably intense survival horror under a candy shell of upbeat jazz, but that candy shell turns it from Raw Adrenaline Activator into a fun self-improvement exercise. It's a two-minute paintball haunted house. It's Mavis Beacon meets masocore, it's Dark Souls tuned to be one of those ADHD treatment games that snake-oil salesmen have been promising for decades. David Galindo is a naturally brilliant behavioral psychologist and he's one CSD installation away from becoming the world's richest self-help coach.

I know someone who plays this game at a high level using only the mouse, and that concept terrifies and disgusts me.

This is easily the best Tropico game so far, but they haven't managed to buff out any of the burrs that make the series un-recommendable to the general public. You will play a mission where your Teamsters deliver planks to the export dock, bypassing the shipyard where they'd have been turned into valuable boats. You'll play a mission where you'll tag a "crime kingpin" for arrest, and it will take your police two years to bother rolling up to cuff them. The humor is weak tea and the fully-simulated citizens would rather build a shanty by a steel mill than cross the road. The economy self-stabilizes to the point that the only parable is "patience." The wait times on fundamental tasks is so opaque and frustrating that a newcomer will be searching the options for freemium boosts. And yet, if you're the right kind of psycho, you'll plow twelve hours per session into this time sink and come away humming the music.

This is easily the best Tropico game so far. Viva Tropico! Viva Tropico 6!

Lovely. Just a pleasant experience all-around.

"What if Tropico was a kick to the gut?"

A minimalist tile-based puzzle game that's more than worth the price. The animation, sound, and color scheme are all really quite good, and even though the mechanics are a bit cold the game itself feels like a joyful affair. The puzzles that include sliding blocks (booo) are the least-frustrating sliding block puzzles I've ever done in a video game (yaaay?). No brain-busters here, but an easy recommendation if you enjoy a relaxing puzzle.

A relaxing, minimalist puzzle collection that you can breeze through in about an hour (assuming more levels aren't added later). The puzzles get more complex as the game progresses, but as you work each board, you remove clutter from it. The possibilities are removed one by one, funneling you towards a clear screen, and each puzzle starts ponderous and ends at a mild clip. There's no timer, mind you, or any other sort of scoring. But I tended to speed up as I neared the end of each one, the last effortless retraction on each stage serving as a victory lap. A pleasant, contemplative game.

I bought this game for $25, Played with all pre-2016 patches. Hardware: GTX 970, 16GB RAM, i5-4670 running stock clock, installed on SSD. It is straight-up a *shame* that I need to preface my review with any of that.

As a game, this is a thoroughly fine sequel to Arkham City. If you enjoyed City, and you think your PC will run it, you ought to give it a try. The tank combat wasn't as bad as I'd been hearing. I experienced fewer than five crashes over 60+ hours (although they were all hard, "screen goes beige and sound buffer loops" crashes). The "filling the jail" mechanic is incredibly rewarding, until you realize the effort required to 100% Maximum Security. Oh, speaking of which, don't go into this thinking you'll see the "true" ending unless you're a masochist for Riddler gadget puzzles. And if you *are* a masochist for Riddler gadget puzzles, well, the plot just isn't as good as Asylum or City. But... probably better than Origins. Sorry, Origins.

Played with all GPU settings max'ed excepting antialiasing. V-sync ensured no screen tear. Graphics experience was far ahead of Fallout 4, quite a bit behind Witcher 3.

It's really unfortunate that the Arkham series has ended this way, because after I finished the game, I wanted nothing more than to be Batman for another hundred hours. Rockstar nailed it with Asylum and have been making incremental improvements ever since, but with this entry they flew too close to the sun.



If you're still reading this, still unsure, know that Mark Hamill's Joker gets a lot of really fun lines. That ought to tip your scale one way or the other.

I was worried that somewhere between Brutal Legend and managing an entire studio for Trenched, Tim Schafer had lost whatever "it" is necessary to write a clever, funny, adult adventure game. I was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fool, because Broken Age shows Schafer and the entire Double Fine team are in top form. The art is beautiful, the music is enchanting, and the dialogue is witty and well-crafted. VO work is handled by a group of voice acting stars who push you into not just feeling for your character, but acting in a way that shows you feel what they'd feel. I'm halfway through the scheduled two acts, and I can already tell that my sole regret will be that this game won't last longer -- no matter how long it ends up being. So maybe this review sounds overblown. But if you've ever enjoyed a LucasArts adventure game, this should not be missed.