When you list all of the ways in which The Taken King improved the Destiny experience, it sounds like you’re just finding another way to make fun of the game.

That finally changed with the release of Destiny: The Taken King, an expansion that built on vanilla Destiny’s solid gameplay skeleton and fulfilled the promise of Bungie’s ambitious, galactic FPS-MMORPG. Telling people you liked to play Destiny used to feel a little like confessing you smoked cigarettes: it was an addictive habit, one you couldn’t really justify and were always trying to quit. It’s a game where you will die a lot - but that only makes your eventual victory all the more satisfying. Bloodborne forces you to learn how it works, and then tests your knowledge in the most brutal ways possible. The bosses are huge, grotesque monstrosities that will take every ounce of your skill to defeat, but even the standard enemies - the plague-inflicted inhabitants of Yharnam - can kill you. The spiritual successor to the Dark Souls series, it’s a game where every victory feels hard won. And then it kills you, over and over.īloodborne’s unforgiving nature is a large part of its appeal. Instead, it casts you as a regular person and throws you into a gothic world of violence and despair. It doesn’t put you in the role of a super-powered hero capable of taking down dangerous beasts with ease. It doesn’t ease you into the experience, slowly teaching you the rules and giving you time to understand its complex systems. Read next: Batman: Arkham Knight reviewīloodborne isn’t like most modern games. Arkham Knight’s treatment of that truth is heavy-handed, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Like its predecessors in Rocksteady’s Arkham series, Arkham Knight understands that Batman’s toughest battles are mental there’s no villain more dangerous than the darkness looming in Bruce Wayne’s mind. The combo-heavy combat system that birthed a dozen action-adventure knock-offs remains fluid and physical, and the deep bench full of various Batman villains helps to liven up what would otherwise be boilerplate beat ‘em up side quests.

If you hear a bunch of thugs wailing on a captive or daring to insult the Caped Crusader, you can swoop in and show them the cost of tempting fate. (Seriously, you’re going to be doing a lot of winching.) You can spend hours soaring above Gotham’s skyline, tuning into radio dispatches from friends and foes alike. The power fantasy at the heart of Batman: Arkham Knight remains one of the most seductive in all of gaming: spend enough time brawling, blasting, and winching, and you can liberate an entire metropolis with a single tool belt and tank.

Action video games 2016