GameSpot Reviews

With This War of Mine and Frostpunk, developer 11 Bit Studios has garnered a reputation for making games that force you to make challenging decisions. The Alters is a continuation of this pattern, melding a straightforward survival game with management systems designed around making tough calls. But this time, it's not other people who will face the consequences of your decisions. Instead, The Alters forces you to confront other versions of yourself as you grapple with staying alive and keeping a small population of your clones happy. It's an intriguing premise that delivers on the studio's signature style, even if...

If there are two things that have been missing from the modern slate of racing games, it's a focus on drifting and Japanese settings. Yes, arcade racers like Forza Horizon have travelled across the world, from Australia to Mexico and everything in between, but have yet to visit the bustling streets of Tokyo or the rich countryside across Kyoto. That series also doesn't dabble in the kind of street-racing culture popularised by games like Need for Speed or films such as the earlier Fast and the Furious entries, sticking closely to flashy but strictly stock configurations of popular cars. With...

Nintendo seemed slow to react to the evergreen status of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a humble Switch port of a Wii U game that surpassed all expectations by becoming the top-selling game on one of its most successful platforms. Mario Kart World, the banner game for the launch of the Switch 2, carries with it the expectation that of course this will be one of the games most associated with the system for its entire lifespan. The challenge was crafting a new game that felt sufficiently suited to carry those expectations. Due to its blend of skillful mechanical tweaks, lovely...

As the name implies, Lies of P: Overture is a prequel to the original 2023 souls-like, shedding light on the events that led to the Puppet Frenzy massacre and subsequent collapse of the city of Krat. At its beating, mechanical heart, however, Lies of P's first DLC expansion is a tale of personal tragedy and vengeance. While developer Neowiz hasn't implemented any drastic changes to the game's underlying mechanics in Overture, its storytelling has improved, further building on the atmospheric Belle Epoque-infused world it created as a much darker and more twisted spin on Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio....

It's a universal truth that crosses cultural boundaries: Middle school is hard. The awkward early teenage years makes everyone feel self-conscious, like an outsider, whether it's an embarrassing pimple or your arms being permanently locked in a stiff T-pose. To A T, a narrative adventure from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, is a sweet-natured fable about growing up and accepting yourself. But while the narrative and world you occupy are cute and quirky, the act of playing never feels as playful as it should.You play as a created character accompanied by your faithful canine companion, both of whom you grant...

The Roundtable Hold has seen better days. There are weeds breaking through cracks in its rotting floorboards, the room in the east wing that Gideon Ofnir once used as an office is now an abandoned mess of dust and clutter, and sunlight is bleeding through a gaping hole in the stone wall where the giant pair of fingers previously resided. It's a familiar space, but one that's also noteworthy for its differences, which feels reflective of Elden Ring Nightreign as a whole. Anyone who's played Elden Ring will recognize Roundtable Hold and enemies like the Bell Bearing Hunter and Ancient...

There can be a hypnotic nature to repetitive tasks, and plenty of games have leaned into that to give otherwise humdrum jobs a surprising allure. Deliver At All Costs goes in the opposite direction and transforms the unforgiving tedium and thankless nature of a courier job into an explosive, slapstick adventure. This makes for some fun and brief thrills, but too often Deliver At All Costs falls into repetitive monotony with an overly cyclical format, a dragging story, and unexciting in-game upgrades.Narratively, Deliver At All Costs has a fantastically intriguing opening. You play as Winston, an extremely gifted engineer who's...

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are in the midst of, pardon the pun, a video game renaissance. In the last few years alone we've received the excellent retro compilation Cowabunga Collection, the retro-style brawler Shredder's Revenge, and the Hades-inspired roguelike Splintered Fate. Not since their breakout success on Saturday morning cartoons have the turtles been so ubiquitous in games, but this time around, developers are more emboldened to experiment with different game styles. Enter TMNT: Tactical Takedown, a grid-based tactics game that feels both authentically nostalgic and like creative new ground for the heroes. While it suffers slightly from a...

Back in September, Capcom fighting game fans had a major wish granted with Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, which bundled the entire collection of 2D Marvel-centric fighting games--and a side-scrolling beat-'em-up to boot--in an all-in-one package. It was what fans of Marvel Vs. Capcom had wanted for years, particularly with Marvel Vs. Capcom 2's inclusion, and it made multiple fighting games seemingly lost to time reappear on the scene in an instant.Now, Capcom has the unenviable task of following it up with Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the true sequel to the first classic fighting compendium from 2022. This...