A bombastically enjoyable action game with serious performance issues gets spread too thinly over a vast map.
A vast and frequently brilliant return to Bethesda's atomic sandbox, but constant technical issues are a frustration.
A thin and curiously paced stroll through horror cliche that manages a few good frights but not much else.
A thrilling twist on Left 4 Dead's co-operative action, but minor balancing issues can make it hard to warm to at first.
Bland at best, broken at worst, this shallow reinvention of the cult strategy puzzler is hell for both fans and newcomers.
A bombastically endearing tribute to classic action movie excess that is occasionally too chaotic for its own good.
A welcome revival for a much missed genre, Sublevel Zero's roguelike design can't quite sustain it in the long term.
Lego Dimensions is an inventive, delightful and hilarious take on "toys to life", but deep pockets are needed to appreciate it fully.
The makers of Amnesia ease back on the horror, ramp up the philosophy and strike a satisfying balance between narrative and gameplay.
Visual improvement is usually the only real reason to pick up remastered versions of old games, but Unfolded goes one better. The fact it looks better is merely an attractive bonus. Even if you've already played the original game through to completion, it's absolutely worth playing it again in this incarnation.
Weird, gory and surprisingly moving - Sony's long-delayed slasher tribute is a flawed but memorable step forwards for "interactive movies".
Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell bypasses the difficult second album hurdle with a simple, elegant and carefully paced stealth puzzler.
A ridiculously generous and thoughtfully presented compilation packed with bona fide classics and obscure gems.
Not being able to live up to such lofty rivals is no great shame, of course. Tembo is simply a very pretty, and pretty good, game, albeit one that never quite lives up to its early promise. That alone makes it the best platformer that Sega has released in years, and for that Game Freak deserves our thanks.
It gives me absolutely no pleasure to report any of this. Sitting at my PC, wearing a Godzilla t-shirt and surrounded by plastic models of the series' wonderful menagerie, I wanted so desperately for this to be the game to truly realise the character's potential in gaming. I wanted Crackdown with kaiju. Instead, I got...this. The only thing being crushed here is the dreams of every monster movie fan who ever picked up a joypad.
It feels weird to be saying this at a time when sequels are far too prevalent, but while Ronin has its moments of brilliance during its short campaign, it ultimately feels very much like a proof of concept for a more generous and balanced game yet to come.
All of which makes PlanetSide 2 a real outlier at a time when major console releases are either utterly broken or blandly efficient. This is a game with some fairly major problems, but the rewards are so unique, so thrilling and occasionally thought provoking that even dropped frames, obtuse direction and dumb players can't diminish it for long. This is a game that will not appeal to everyone. Many will fall by the wayside when it fails to play like a normal FPS in the long term. Others will drift away, wearied by the endless churn of battle. That's why the game's free-to-play status is a good thing - those players will have lost nothing for their trouble. For those who click with PlanetSide's cold relentless vision of mass warfare, it can easily become an ongoing obsession. The only way to find out is to sign up and see for yourself.
The gameplay is good, and very often great, but we knew that already. It's a known quantity. As a Batman story, this is something else. It dares to tackle not just the surface details of the character, but explores his psyche. It portrays him as, frankly, kind of a dick and also as a man of unflinching honour. The Batman of Arkham Knight is a complex, contradictory figure, a hero with real depth and dimension, and we get to wear the iconic cowl for one last mind-boggling night of mayhem. Miss out on that? You must be joking.
As a lifelong fan of Fortean mystery and atmospheric adventures, Kholat is a game I really wanted to love, but it left me out in the cold in more ways than one.
There have been more shocking and provocative things portrayed in the biggest blockbuster games than you'll see and do in Hatred. Maybe that's the point. Maybe this is all a garbled commentary on how normalised extreme violence has become in gaming. If so, it'll take something better than this tedious, glitchy shooter to ram the point home.