Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Capes is a clever and challenging tactics game with a clear love of the superhero comics that inspired it. And no one actually wears a cape.
Homeworld 3's single-player campaign brings the series' epic space battles in for intense, close-quarters combat on visually diverse maps full of enormous obstacles to plan around. At the same time, it delivers an unexpectedly personal story that leans a little too heavily on the cliche of a new-generation protagonist seeking out the old.
Homeworld 3's multiplayer skirmish mode may be barebones, but it gives us all we need to wage visually impressive war with fleets of starships. The co-op War Games mode, on the other hand, gets an extra boost from its novel roguelite-style progression.
Arizona Sunshine 2 keeps the pressure on for a long campaign of zombie slaying full of satisfyingly gory head shots, entertaining humor, and the bond between a lonely man and his dog.
Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.
If Respawn makes a third game like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Fallen Order, it'll complete the best Star Wars trilogy in 30 years, hands down.
Marvel's Midnight Suns is an expansive tactical RPG that makes great use of card game mechanics to inject variety and unpredictability into its excellent combat.
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a major leap forward from atop the shoulders of its surprisingly smart and charming predecessor, bringing a wonderful amount of flexibility to its turn-based tactical battles.
Crypto's material has worn a bit thin. While Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed does a respectable job of making his second rampage look good, its small assortment of new weapons and enemies makes it feel like an unambitious expansion rather than a sequel.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker makes disassembling giant spacecraft piece by piece fun for a bit, but due to a lack of variety in its puzzle-like objectives it soon devolves into hard labor.
Weird West's five dark-fantasy adventures contain a wagonload of bizarre encounters, twists, and reveals, and its stealth and chaotic combat are challenging but come with the built-in safety nets of unlimited slow-motion and an old-school quickload system.
It may look extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors' clever one-stick shooter idea a chance to sink its teeth into you it might not let go for a while.
Chorus gives you fun and flashy superpowers that make its space dogfights stand out, along with its strong main characters and beautiful scenery.
Mass Effect 2's Legendary Edition upgrades the graphics to near-modern standards and lets us immerse ourselves in the best game in BioWare's epic RPG trilogy all over again.
The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos isn't a grand finale for Obsidian's RPG, but it gives us an intriguing whodunnit in a new location and a reason to return for another adventure with the crew of the Unreliable.
Do you like Slay The Spire? If so, you should absolutely try Monster Train's more tactical spin on the deck-building roguelike, which literally layers on new ideas and has every bit as much depth and variety.
Watch Dogs: Legion's bold use of roguelike mechanics in an open-world action game pay off in interesting ways, making this visit to near-future London feel more varied than the previous two games.
Serious Sam 4 still has the spectacle of hundreds of enemies bearing down on you, but its long stretches of run-and-gun shooting quickly become monotonous.
The Outer Worlds’ Peril on Gorgon DLC is mechanically unambitious in that it doesn’t introduce any new ideas to change up gameplay, but it does take the crew of the Unreliable to several new locations around the Hyperion system as it unveils a fairly lengthy and entertaining detective story.
The Destroy All Humans! remake recaptures the simple, campy joy of of rampaging through 1950s America as an angry gray alien.