Adam Wheeler
Adam Wheeler loves his computer, his cat, and his work-from-home lifestyle. When he feels the motivation to put on pants, he tells jokes on stage. With no real distractions in his life (friends, relationships, a reason to go outdoors, etc.), he is able to provide in-depth analysis of games and the culture that surrounds them. Adam almost never has anything better to do.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Review
Vicious Circle Review
Despite its quirky humor, Vicious Circle doesn’t provide enough variety in gameplay to hold your interest much longer than your average asymmetric multiplayer game.
Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review
If you’re into roguelikes, bullet-hell, or third-person shooter games, this is a can’t-miss title. Risk of Rain 2 has just as much style as it does mechanical polish.
Apex Legends Review
Battlerite Royale Early Access Review
For fans of MOBAs or battle royales, you owe it to yourself to give Battlerite Royale a try. Improvements do need to be made, but there’s no doubt you’ll have a ton of fun playing with a friend.
Escape from Tarkov: I Can't
I've been playing this game for weeks and I still haven’t actually escaped. Every character I’ve started has died a miserable death. What’s been surprising to even me over that last twenty or so hours of gameplay is that I’m still eager to learn and improve. We’ll have to see if that continues being the case, but at this point it feels safe to say that Battlestate Games has struck a dangerously satisfying balance that might be as fun as it is intimidating.
Hunt Showdown Early Access Review
Hunt: Showdown caters to those looking for deeper strategy and a slower pace than typical battle royale offerings provide.
Mantis Burn Racing Review
This is the kind of racing game that anyone can easily pick up and play, because it comes without all the frills and feature-bloating that AAA developers like to put into their racers. With tight controls and a fast-paced playstyle, Mantis is a throwback to when the only thing that mattered in a racing game was being the first to cross the finish line.
Secret of Mana Review
Secret of Mana (2018) makes for a nice jog down memory lane, even if there were some long-forgotten design flaws that years of nostalgic memories had blocked out over time. If you remember enjoying the SNES game, Secret of Mana holds onto many of what you liked about it back then. But if you’re looking for a polished, modernized version of the game, then you will be disappointed. For better or worse, not much has changed in Secret of Mana since its initial release in 1994.
Warframe Review
Play Warframe. Play it for more than a few hours, preferably with friends, and keep an open mind into doing some third-party research to straighten out some of these systems. Warframe takes so much of what makes ARPG’s addictive, and rounds it out with more polish and depth than anything else on the current games market.If the hooks aren’t deeply embedded by then, maybe something this in-depth isn’t for you.
Destiny 2 Review
All the elements are there: you’re gunning down massive hordes of baddies and you’re doing so with outstanding visual fidelity, a variety of weapons, and you’re able to cause this mayhem using big, explosive abilities. But, a bit too much of Destiny 2’s action is watered down by long cooldowns, the lazy sit-behind-cover until you’re full-health again, and the way enemies completely lose their ability to aim once your health hits the blinky-red portion of the on-screen health bar. The stakes always seem so low, the rewards so random and barely earned. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not one that lives up to the lofty expectations set by the way it’s marketed and talked about by its fans. Miles wide, but an inch deep: Destiny 2 is not the game it should be.
Raiders of the Broken Planet - Prologue Review
Raiders of the Broken Planet just isn’t there yet. While an alpha build of the title showed promise, the title has much development ground to cover yet. Raiders of the Broken Planet isn’t half-baked: it barely got into the oven before players were encouraged to start eating the dough.
Destiny 2 Beta Impressions
I never played Destiny. While it seemed to check so many of the boxes I wanted in a game, unfortunately, it could only be played on a platform that I didn’t own. A Borderlands-style loot system merged with a Halo-inspired combat experience sounded like a winning combination and, in many ways, it was.
The Long Dark Review
The Long Dark is imperfect, but it could be one of the best experiences in the survival genre. For the impatient, single-player gamer, The Long Dark holds little promise. However, if you relish the challenge of isolation and the feeling that you’re fighting against an environment that isn’t trying to kill you, but rather just doesn’t care about you, then you must try The Long Dark.
Black the Fall Interview
After decades of toil, an old machinist plots his escape from Communism, through manipulation and scheming. Along the road, he befriends the most unlikely creature, an abandoned robot. Could they solve the puzzles and flee this bleak world together?
The Bittersweet Rebuild
Why am I like this? Why did I let a few frame drops in Overwatch annoy me to the point of spending hundreds of dollars on new PC components that will just inevitably annoy me in the exact same way a few years from now?
Mirage: Arcane Warfare Beta Preview
If you thought Chivalry’s combat was too tedious or frustrating, Mirage is definitely worth keeping an eye on and checking out when it has an inevitable ‘free’ weekend on Steam. Torn Banner Studios has set the bar high for me, and for any fan of their previous release. Whether or not the new layer of complexity actually adds to the experience is yet to be seen, but after playing through the content currently available, I can say it’s a rewarding and admirable effort that deserves the attention and recognition it receives.
Star Wars Battlefront Review
Star Wars Battlefront feels hollow. Hollow to the point that I wonder if the upcoming DLC will be able to revitalize it, and hollow to the point that there may be no one out there playing the game to even enjoy the new content at all. For $60, this game is unacceptably short on content and replayability.
King's Quest Chapter 1: A Knight to Remember Review
If King's Quest sounds familiar to you, it's probably because you played it on your dad's computer at some point in the 80's. Or there's small chance that you're dad, and you've kept up with PC games as you march into your golden years.
Killing Floor 2 Early Access Review
If you want to get in on the Killing Floor 2 alpha, I'd be a fool to discourage you. At $30, you are not getting a tremendous amount of content at this particular time. What you do get is access to the framework of what I believe will one day be a fantastic co-op shooter; one that scratches an itch that's been untouched since I played the Left 4 Dead series. They've got a hefty amount of content to release before they can start entering L4D territory, but I just can't wait to see what they do with such a fun foundation.
Heroes of the Storm Beta Review
Heroes of the Storm does not try to be tremendously complex, nor does it want the player to feel that they've immediately figured out all the nuances of gameplay. Blizzard has a long history of taking a popular genre, finding the three to five most fun things about it, then creating a gameplay experience that fully envelops the player in those facets of the game. They did it with the MMO by making WoW, they did it with the action RPG in the Diablo series, and they're currently doing it with online card games in Hearthstone. So far, this is one hell of an effort to do the same thing to the MOBA genre.
Evolve Review
If you have to wait for a Steam sale, I really can't blame you, but Evolve is a game that offers some thrills that you can't find many other places, so I have trouble telling people not to buy it. I want this game to survive and build on the excellent gameplay framework they've set up, but we must wait and see if the developers at Turtle Rock Studios and 2K want to make something great or milk it till it's dry. Time will tell.
For Honor Review
For Honor is a good game. It’s taken me a while to get here, to a place where I can calmly say nice things about it, but I’m glad I made it. We’ll see how it progresses, but For Honor may have dug out a cool little space for itself in the multiplayer games market that we didn’t know was there.
Overwatch Review
I'm still crossing my fingers for a content update that provides a little more variety to the game modes, but what they launched with is a brilliant start to a title I know I'll be playing for , at the least, the next few years.