Kotaku articles

The Unexpected Success of No Man's Sky

Sean Murray, lead developer of No Man's Sky, has seen the best and worst of it since the game's incredible first trailer was shown in 2013. But after a failed launch, No Man's Sky has flourished in recent years. While he won't release sales figures, Murray said that "last year we sold the kind of numbers a AAA game would be happy with at launch," using the industry jargon for big budget games.

Fortnite Battle Royale Review

It's hard to say how Fortnite is turning out because it keeps turning into something else. Skins and storylines come and go. Landmarks appear and disappear. Weapons are added and removed. Recently, a mysterious excavation site appeared, but it was dug up and abandoned by the time I got there the next day. There's never a perfect time to say what Fortnite is.

The State of PC Gaming in 2018

PC has never been a singular platform like, say, PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, it's a series of disparate landmasses sharing the same turbulent sea. PC gaming looks to become more fragmented than it's been in the past few years---for better and worse. More options means more chances for new ideas to flourish and, perhaps, for a new middle class of developers to emerge.

Hitman 2 Review

Hitman 2 takes what its predecessor did best and improves on it visually and mechanically. It's a cerebral game, a sandbox that can be bloodless or chaotic depending on who's pulling 47's strings.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a profound, glorious downer. It is the rare blockbuster video game that seeks to move players not through empowering gameplay and jubilant heroics, but by relentlessly forcing them to confront decay and despair. Rockstar Games' new open-world western opus is exhaustively detailed and exhaustingly beautiful, a mammoth construction of which every nook and cranny has been polished to an unnerving shimmer.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 Review

The fourth installment of Treyarch's Black Ops series might be the first Call of Duty to forgo single-player. But after a spate of less-than-fully-satisfying entries, putting full efforts behind multiplayer has paid off: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 finds the perfect middle ground between classic COD and the "jetpack" era, reviving the franchise's fun in many ways.

Mega Man 11 Review

Mega Man 11 is a fine game, and a worthy eleventh entry in a series that once set the bar for tricky platformers. It also feels oddly shallow, the latest iteration of a formula that has gone largely unchanged for decades. Mega Man 11 is great at being a Mega Man game. Maybe that's why it didn't do much for me.

FIFA 19 vs PES 2019: Which Is Better?

I started reviewing these two games together all the way back in 2012, but six years in, I feel like this double-review is in danger of settling into just the kind of repetitive drone it was designed to counter. Now, more than ever, each series' pros and cons are so established, so settled into routine that it's almost a waste of everyone's time to dredge them up once again.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Review

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft ventures from Mexico into the jungles of Peru. It's fun and beautiful and is a lengthy adventure full of enjoyable Tomb Raidery things. It's built on the sturdy traditions of the 22-year-old franchise and uses most of the same smart systems that were introduced in 2013's Tomb Raider reboot and refined in 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider.

The Best Sports Video Game of All Time

The latest sports games are not always the best. There's an obsession with incremental changes and bullet-point features, one which challenges fan's ability to take a step back and assess each game as its own title. It's something I try to do and I'm taking to its logical conclusion here in this Quixotic attempt to pluck one game out of hundreds and call it the "best."