Persona 5 Royal takes an all-time great JRPG and makes it even greater. Going above and beyond a re-release or a remaster, almost everything has been expanded and improved with an entire game's worth of new content and improvements.
Crusader King 3 takes the throne as the new king of historical strategy by expanding on and deepening the best parts of what made its predecessor memorable and unique.
From the art to the music to the story to the tactical gameplay, and even to how they're all woven together so artfully, Pyre is an adventure that excels in every area of its design other than limiting its multiplayer to local only. It's an epic journey that made me feel thrilled, devastated, and awed, and its tense moments had me tugging my collar both in and out of its fast-paced mystical sports arenas. With an emotionally charged ending that saw so much I'd striven for come to fruition, but was still tinged with tragedy and melancholy even when I did almost everything right, I won't be able to get Pyre out of my head for a long time. This is Supergiant's best work to date, and that's saying something.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is one of the best-written RPGs in years, with exciting card battles that are kept cleverly fresh throughout.
Sight, sound, and systems harmonize to make Civilization 6 the liveliest, most engrossing, most rewarding, most challenging 4X in any corner of the earth.
Total War: Three Kingdoms uses excellent pacing and strong character mechanics to create a consistently exciting and challenging historical strategy campaign.
Starbound excels as a crafting and exploration game, as a 2D platformer with varied and engaging combat, and as a Zelda-esque story RPG with a detailed world and memorable alien cultures to interact with. The sheer volume of different kinds of locations to discover, items to craft and build great structures with, and flashy ways to vanquish aliens prevent any part of the experience from getting boring quickly.
I feel like a broken record saying this is the best Total War game so far, since I've felt that way about each major release since Attila. But it really is true: Creative Assembly's designers are honing their campaign and faction design consistently from game to game, and that progression is clearly on display in Total War Warhammer 2.
Subnautica is a template for what open-world survival games should strive to be. It’s fantastical, fresh, and frightening from surface to seabed, with a story that kept on surprising me and a cast of sea monsters that quite literally haunted my dreams.
Hearts of Iron 4 wields complexity like a swift armor division during the blitzkrieg, allowing it to serve the idea of layered, cerebral, strategic warfare instead of letting it needlessly bog down the experience.
StarCraft remains a titan of the genre for a reason. Though its interface lacks some contemporary conveniences, Blizzard has still, to this day, failed to outdo itself in terms of the elegant balance between three highly asymmetrical factions that was achieved in Brood War. Whether you want to revisit the glory days or see a piece of gaming history for the first time, StarCraft Remastered is a trip well worth taking.
Deep Rock Galactic is the best kind of four-player co-op game. Exciting combat, great missions, and lots of upgrades make this one a winner.
Othercide is a tactical roguelike with a flair for the dramatic, full of satisfying combat, careful planning, and sometimes heart-rending decisions.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a deep, exciting, varied RTS with all the right tools.
Paradox’s biggest expansion yet brings Stellaris closer to its original promise with a stellar rework of internal politics and new endgame goals.
Warhammer: Chaosbane can stand proudly alongside some of the best games that have used the foreboding, Gothic Old World as a setting.
Deep hero progression and a well-executed Chaos invasion round out a campaign that, while it has some flaws in set-up and pacing, fulfilled all of my deepest fantasies of seeing giant, impossible armies clashing amidst the shrieking of griffins and the glow of flaming meteors summoned from the sky. It's just a damn good time.
The fact that it pulls very few emotional punches left me feeling a bit worn out, but also with a glowing sense of anticipation for the sprint to the finish and tying it all together.
While it may not be an amazing capitalism simulator, Planet Coaster is a fantastic theme park-building sandbox that rarely ever took an idea I had and told me, "No, you can't do that."
Guardians of the Galaxy is definitely starting off on the right foot, with a great script, great actors, and a universe packed with personality (and backed by catchy tunes) to explore. If it can continue to deliver the quality of dialogue and panel-perfect action over the course of the rest of the season, it may find itself seated in the upper echelons of Telltale's catalog. I just hope that now the series has introduced itself, the series gives its environments and characters just a bit more time to breathe in between speeding the plot along.