A brilliant combination of rhythmic motions and a deep action-packed battle system make for a compelling adventure. Hi-Fi Rush is only let down by its writing and character development, or lack thereof.
Vile Monarch's post-apocalyptic city-builder puts its people first to great success but walks a fine line between providing too much or too little to do.
Floppy Knights, with its caring protagonist and welcoming style, is a really enjoyable tactical card game that offers more the longer you spend with it. It's a joy to experience.
Deflector is a pretty hectic early access action game that's got its risk to reward ratio a bit off balance. It's also pretty buggy right now.
Whether you're a newcomer or someone steeped in the history of the Neo Geo classic, Windjammers 2 is arcade action in simple and enthralling form, beckoning you in with a low skill barrier, dazzling art style, and an eclectic mix of characters.
Although the playable roster of The Hinokami Chronicles is feeling the lack of demons right now, there's a lot to enjoy from the characters who are there. This 3D fighter delivers on the promise of a power fantasy of Gotouge's manga epic.
Salt and Sacrifice is a riff on what came before, but not an entirely successful one. A tense, fraught combat system with gallons of customisation options carries Ska Studios’ sequel, and boss fights are entertaining if overly tough at times, but the storytelling and narrative designs of Salt and Sanctuary can’t hold up their end of the bargain.
Gwent: Rogue Mage is a great evolution of an already-satisfying foundation. The roguelike trappings of travelling across an ever-changing board full of shifting events and encounters meld wonderfully into the action of Gwent battles. Some redundant events and bothersome bugs aside, this is a real treat.
There are missteps and a few bumps along the way, but this soft reboot of a long-running series emerges a triumph.
Journey to the Savage Planet puts you in a brilliantly colorful world, and tasks you with exploring to your heart's content. The moment-to-moment exploration is enjoyable, but the act of combat offers very little in the way of a challenge. The score and insane FMV adverts give Journey to the Savage Planet a lot of personality, but the tiresome parody nature of the writing really lets it down.
Observation has no trouble grabbing you from the go, with gripping central mysteries and questions that demand answers. Painstaking progress through even the simplest commands and instructions counteract any sense of progress in Observation, and ultimately dilutes and cheapens the experience.
"There's simply not enough variation here to keep Exoprimal feeling fresh after a dozen or so hours"
Fire Emblem Engage is sadly a missed opportunity to tie together a new cast of characters with the heroes of old.
Bethesda's reimagining of the popular shooting game combines the best of Bioshock, Dead Space and Dishonored but does little extra with them
Shin Megami Tensei 5’s combat is great, punishing and rewarding in equal measure without ever tipping the scales too far in one direction. Mixing and matching your deck of demons makes for great fun as well, and spurs you to look to all corners of the ruined world for allies of all shapes and sizes. It’s everything outside of the battling and grungy soundtrack where Shin Megami Tensei 5 badly misses the mark, with one-note characters that you’re never given the chance to better know, and a paper-thin plot that feels dragged out over dozens of hours. Shin Megami Tensei 5 is a good RPG battler, but it’s not good at much else.
After a solid debut chapter, Tell Me Why: Chapter 2 doesn't keep the momentum going. There are pleasant individual character moments between twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan, who remain the undisputed highpoints of the game, but the rest of the cast suffers as a result. Tell Me Why wants to paint an emotional tale of struggle and growth, but Chapter 2's experience is stunted by overuse of the Bond mechanic and the decision-based icon sapping any tension.
Rocket Arena is an enjoyable up-tempo experience with genuinely fun traversal abilities to keep you on your toes and moving to the high and lows of the arena. It's largely undefined characters and lack of meaningful customization options, however, hold it back from being truly memorable. It's a fun arena shooter in the moment, but it'll fade quickly from memory after you've walked away.
Concrete Genie is certainly easy on the eyes and ears, with brilliant colors popping out of the screen and a light, airy score to coaxe life out of your paintings. It even successfully switches around the perspective of a strained parent-child relationship compared to what we've seen in other games. Unfortunately the monotonous nature of everything in between creating Genies, from dodging bullies to dousing Denska with Super Paint, drags it down.
A week or so removed from playing Gris, I don't know what I'll remember it for, if at all. Gris feels like it almost belongs in a museum, with crowds marvelling at its art and sound for a few minutes, before moving on to something else. There's moments of beautiful brilliance in Gris, all of which is dragged down by a decidedly average platforming game.
Vampyr unfortunately flounders after building some solid foundations in the opening hours. London feels like a city on a knife edge, and the citizens prove to be an inviting cast of creative characters. But Vampyr then lures you into sacrificing these characters, cutting out a key part of the game, all to have a hope of standing up to the horrors that await you in the shadows of London.