Kill Screen's Scores

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For 340 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 19% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 76% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Game review score: 67
Highest review score: 90 Bloodborne
Lowest review score: 7 Hatred
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 112 out of 340
  2. Mixed: 199 out of 340
  3. Negative: 29 out of 340
340 game reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Mafia III
    Mafia III is a game that’s held back by its conventional anchors. It wants to be game about the South but remains content to use its setting rarely as little more than a local color curiosity. It proposes a radical representation of race but falls prey to the conventional chores of open-world banality. Though it initially seems eager to “Tell about the South,” Mafia III does not have the patience or interest to do so. Its violence and exploitation-style racial politics, however, make the trip to New Bordeaux worth effort—as long as the person heading down South isn’t looking for anything more than a sightseeing tour.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    Ladykiller in a Bind
    For the most part, Ladykiller in a Bind dares to be unapologetically itself rather than a game made for any one set of people.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    The Curious Expedition
    It also places that desire for discovery within another person’s mind, just like Conrad, and keeps its player, like Conrad’s reader, at a critical remove. It lets you see a bigger picture than the grid of hexagons it depicts; it lets you see the mindset that creates the grid, and what that way of thinking inevitably ends up doing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    Masquerada: Songs and Shadows
    Masquerada declines as the plot slows down. The herky-jerky pace gets more grating, the mania for proper nouns more distracting. What looked like a scrappy little underdog RPG turns out to be a collection of worn-out ideas.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    THOTH
    Thoth isn’t here to make friends. It is decidedly ruthless and daunting, a challenge with matched aesthetics, but not a whole lot more than that.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 56 Critic Score
    Aragami
    A good game, like any good work of art, should make you wonder; it should give you a reason to care about what happens, just as it should give you reasons to enjoy what it asks you do. Aragami feels only half-invested in doing both of those things, so it does neither. By failing to follow through on its own best ideas, it leaves us with nothing but a shadow of the game that could have been.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Gears of War 4
    Gears 4 takes only half measures. It discards a lighthearted adventure premise for another fate-of-humanity monster invasion. It gives up on the anti-militarist bent of its early fight against the COG for another plot about soldiers trying to save humanity.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Beglitched
    You’d hope that, once you’ve figured out Beglitched’s puzzle system it would start to gain momentum. In fact, what happens is it starts to feel a little repetitive.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Destiny: Rise of Iron
    In a detail that I can only laugh at, my most enjoyable time spent with Rise of Iron was in fact spent climbing a mountain.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 54 Critic Score
    ReCore
    By the game’s end, I found I didn’t care about any of the characters. Instead, I was fed up, hunting down the rest of the prismatic cores in order to reach the end. The game had done a full 180. It’s a major disappointment, given the promise ReCore shows at its beginning, when it’s just Joule and Mack.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 51 Critic Score
    Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire
    A competently executed tactical RPG with a jejune script and stylized window dressing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 62 Critic Score
    Mother Russia Bleeds
    The most flattering description I can offer Mother Russia Bleeds is that of an enjoyably formulaic brawler, but the ferocity of its execution was refined enough to get lodged in my head. I can’t quite work it out: it exists like a ringing in my ears that has no obvious source. Or, rather, it’s a third-gen VHS copy of its influences, a quavery deja vu of a violent brawler both familiar and unsettling.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Moon Hunters
    While Moon Hunters may not be the perfect game, it nobly aims for the stars, and for that alone it is memorable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 72 Critic Score
    The Banner Saga 2
    It’s the decisions that bind the experience; enabling The Banner Saga 2 to transcend its videogame construct. You’re left with an experience that feels not only alive, but alive with the complexities of the real world.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grow Up
    Grow Home had a simple purity to it—you were a robot, it could climb, and so it did, all the way up to space. Grow Up repeats this journey but steadily turns BUD into Inspector Gadget as you complete its trials.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    Bound
    But, despite all its flaws, Bound is undoubtedly a celebration of the female form, both physically and spiritually. And, for that, it could be said to be a game better viewed as one to experience rather than to play, and the fact that it tries to encompass so many deep psychological metaphors in the videogame format is an ambition worth praising.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
    For being a cyberpunk ode to the potential promise of transhumanism, the missions around Mankind Divided‘s central narrative feel terribly familiar.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Death Road to Canada
    It doesn’t exactly crack open the full literary potential of randomly-generated story beats, but it does use it to an enjoyable-enough cutesy effect, which is pages more than most flarfy corpses have ever achieved.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 65 Critic Score
    Near Death
    Ultimately, though, Near Death has nothing to say beyond the struggle to navigate the harshest environment on Earth.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    I Am Setsuna
    I wish I Am Setsuna took me on another beautiful, multifaceted adventure like it wanted to, as the JRPGs that its creators admire once did. I wish the characters weren’t bland caricatures of familiar characters I’ve seen in the past. Instead, it feels like a cold attempt at harboring nostalgia, only managing to remind me of JRPGs of the golden age, and how so much better they were—and, critically, still are.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Anarcute
    Many games, largely, want to create mayhem where messages may also occur, while protests, largely, want to create messages where mayhem may also occur. Anarcute wants an adorable inferno. The joke is that the destruction is big but the perps are cutie wuties. But I don’t know if I have the planet to play it on.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
    The story can go any way imaginable—from everyone coming away completely unscathed to literally causing the apocalypse—more so than maybe anything else I’ve ever played.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 68 Critic Score
    Mirror's Edge Catalyst
    It has been suggested that Catalyst is a remake of Mirror’s Edge, or a reboot, but it is in reality a re-alignment of the first game with the recognizable features of a mainstream videogame, a reparation between the most original of its ideas and the most generic features of its medium.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 69 Critic Score
    Stellaris
    Like Mass Effect, Dune, Foundation, and countless other sci-fi universes, it builds its extraterrestrial world from the ground up. Stellaris only borrows from all of their palettes to paint its own picture of the night sky—and a game about aliens feels all the less foreign as a result.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bravely Second: End Layer
    By trying to optimize it, the brave/default system inadvertently lays bare the arbitrariness structuring the player’s relation to the game, the role one ostensibly plays becoming repeatable and, indeed, automatable in yet another striking parallel to the looming “new economy.”
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Slain!
    Slain! is a poser, well-dressed and intentioned but vacuous, contributing nothing to the scene. It has the spiked gauntlets, the long hair, the denim jacket; but the house lights are on and everything’s out of tune.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    OmniBus
    OmniBus would work better if it rolled with its own punches instead of creating a system that only exists to be fought with—the reward is smaller when randomness does so much of the grunt work. Just sit back and let the car drive you into the sun. Life just flies by so fast when you’re having fun.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shadwen
    With more time to flesh out the world and, most importantly, a more creative progression of challenges to match your skill, this could have been a special game. Instead, just as its titular character is trapped in time by default, Shadwen is a stealth game forever trapped in a state of adolescence.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 55 Critic Score
    Glitchspace
    A couple hours into Glitchspace, I hoped for a break in the progression and the chance to explore my newly acquired skills, but instead the complexity is continuously layered on top of itself until the game ends.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ace of Seafood
    Ace of Seafood is not a game about what it’s like to be a fish. But it does, in oddly literal ways, imagine what it would be like for a human to be a fish, albeit a marauding and cybernetic one. But perhaps that’s exactly the point.
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