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 7.4 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sid Meier's Civilization VI
    The suburbanization, the cartoonish aesthetic, and the “one more turn” addictiveness are still recognizable parts of the core experience people keep coming back for. It is still a full, massive, joyous videogame, even if I have to squint to find the joy beneath mere wit—but the two extremes are now growing wider and wider apart. How long before the fabric of the game snaps under the strain?
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 84 Critic Score
    Owlboy
    Owlboy is itself as joyful and powerful an example of such art as I can recall. That it also happens to be an exceptionally well-crafted and tasteful videogame made by a very small group of people may not entirely be a coincidence.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 81 Critic Score
    Thumper
    There’s something to be said for the sensation of Thumper’s mid-game, where survival is the goal, ignorant of whatever score comes along with it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Pavilion
    I will likely return to Pavilion to get lost in its digital labyrinths, to discover how objects can be rearranged to play with the narrative of a faceless man in a suit. When I return to Pavilion’s twisty little passages in Chapter 2 next year, I hope recall that feeling of blissful disorientation I felt in the dizzying corridors of Borges’ prose.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pac-Man Championship Edition 2
    The creators of Pac-Man CE 2 had the difficult task of remixing a game that has already been expanded upon and reworked to the point of refinement, and they chose to pile on the complexity anyway. The result is a Frankenstein’s Pac-Man—a mess of features and modes that, despite all the power pellets and fruit and ghosts, still left me feeling hungry.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor
    By bridging the gap between our daily struggles and the daydreams that surround them, it suggests that the one space we truly own is our imagination. There is a certain beauty hidden in that sentiment; that it is the fantastic, the surreal, the strange, that might liberate us.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 45 Critic Score
    Wheels of Aurelia
    All in all, the game feels like a tourist trap rather than a destination.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Virginia
    Lord knows videogame characters could stand to be quieter, but Virginia can’t convey the necessary emotional depth to make its story stick. The ideas at play piqued my interest pre-release: two women of color as its leads, the promise of a new spin on enduring cop show tropes, surrealist touches. But Virginia is selling points all over, a mood board of ideas—some cool, some musty—that take the player’s interest as self-evident. Anyone who’s seen a movie before should probably just watch another.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tomorrow Children
    In the end, it’s kitsch. It’s a Soviet-themed Lego set that renders a monumental socio-political phenomenon into little else but a toy. And an exceptionally boring one at that.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 77 Critic Score
    Event[0]
    Don’t expect to find touchscreens, paper-thin televisions, or computers any smaller than a child here.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Girl and the Robot
    I won’t remember my time with The Girl and the Robot feeling like a magical fairytale. I’ll recall it being a poorly designed, stressful videogame. And that’s a shame, because that initial art sure was cute.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Obduction
    With Obduction, Cyan has created another game that’s an art of personal journaling. What you know, what you’ve gathered, will save you. The tools seem familiar but it is details that are your weapons. As the otherworldly overlaps the banal, you’re trapped in a labyrinth of places and things.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Starbound
    If Starbound has one major downside it’s that there is no pause button. A pithy consideration, I know, but it means if you’re exploring a cavern found deep within the recesses of a new planet, you cannot pause to take a much-needed bathroom break. And since enemies can spawn at any time, you can’t walk away from your computer in confidence, either. But the lack of a pause button almost feels apt: in Starbound, there can be no pause button, no way to suspend you from this childhood fantasy.
    • 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.
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