Journey To The Savage Planet is a short, sweet and near perfectly crafted puzzle platformer with a refreshing and satisfying take on co-op progression. Those who love to explore, climb into, under and on top of everything to find hidden areas in the games they play are in for a treat with this one.
Ultimately, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is an entertaining, albeit often simple, game full of sporting events that'll get friends and family set for some multiplayer fun. It's not as comprehensive as it perhaps could be in the way it allows players to set up their multiplayer sessions, but the variety and charm when it comes to the way everything is presented helps lift the whole package up.
Studio ZA/UM's first foray into video games is a fantastically adult piece that takes the established and perhaps tired tropes of moral choice and player agency in RPGs and turns them on their heads, twists them into unexpected new shapes, surprising and delighting as it does. Its mixture of melancholy, mystery, fantastical mundanity and internalised musing make for a unique and thought provoking experience.
A lack of visual flair or narrative complexity leave Anamorphine feeling dull and long winded, the cursory way it touches upon difficult emotional issues born out of interpersonal problems and substance abuse comes off poorly as a result.
With so little gameplay and almost no visual flair, the combination of broadly described ideas and impetus on the player to find their own story just don't come together. It's like the bare bones of a game without any of the meat.
Project Laika's low price point is just about low enough to justify a DLC package with such little impact on gameplay. If you're the sort to coo over digital animals then it's going to hit the spot, but it's not likely to justify it's cost to the rest.
Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey has all the hallmarks of a well acted and mysterious adventure game but is held back terribly by a lack of polished design and a glut of technical shortcomings. Giving no hint of what can be interacted with until you've moved your painfully slow avatar close by leads to a lot of slow wandering around, while attempts at combat gameplay fall flat and take time and momentum from the building narrative.
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain sacrifices the franchise standards of city scale battlefields and hundreds of enemies for the sake of flashier graphics, but in doing so loses some of the unique charm the series offers. The grind required to unlock exciting weapons undermines the fun potential, unless you're looking to spend a lot of time with the game.
Proven design principles make Aces of the Luftwaffe: Squadron easy to pick up for first timers and friends roped into multiplayer, but those experienced with scrolling shooters wont find anything new to hold their attention.
RAD's mix of randomized abilities, enemy variation and busy landscapes make for a middling rogue-like. These elements combined with difficulty that's too often mitigated with ranged attacks keep RAD from being truly radical, but there's definitely fun to be had.
Anthem's technical shortcomings, dull combat and pretty but messy environments combine poorly with a narrative that uses pointless binary conversation choices, a thoroughly typical, snarky protagonist and worn out tropes to fuel it's characterization and plot. These elements come together to make Anthem a chore of a game that's highly unlikely to satisfy anyone but the most desperate groups of loot motivated gamers in it's current state.
Battletech: Flashpoint adds some much needed mission variety alongside meaningful conversation choices outside the battlefield, but the limited number of new mechs and single new biome aren't going to justify the price for all but the most dedicated Battletech fans.
A lack of balanced difficulty and explanation of core concepts set alongside too many time consuming, anachronistic design choices distract from Pathfinder: Kingmaker's nuanced story telling, moral dilemmas and enjoyable decision making.
Grimmwood combines punishing, rogue-like gameplay with elements of an MMO to create something unique, if a little slow for some people's taste. With player action limited by time, those looking for a game to dip in and out of regularly will find the fun while those looking to progress fast in a single sitting will likely find frustration.
State of Mind's aspiration of telling a recognisably human story set in a believable near future full of society-altering technology is so close to being great, but limited animation, outdated gameplay and occasionally stilted voice acting hold it back.
Inked offers up a selection of well constructed logic puzzles set alongside a well made, though potentially familiar feeling plot.
Earth Atlantis is a solidly built 2D shooter with a refined visual style and a relatively friendly learning curve, but a lack of colour and variety hold it back from being truly memorable.
Beyond Two Souls is a mixed game, with many elements of the story amounting to binary choices, some aspects of the narrative being poorly fleshed out and gameplay regularly amounting to choosing whether to be terrible or not. At the same time though, there are enough satisfying moments that provoke empathy for Paige's character and moral quandary to intrigue and entertain those drawn to coming of age stories and tales of the supernatural.
Borderlands 3 is a safe step forward for the franchise, but rough optimization, a leaning toward old jokes and a pair of underwhelming antagonists take some of the shine from this otherwise thoroughly enjoyable and beautifully rendered sequel.
Persona Q2's gameplay is a clever offshoot from Persona 5's highly refined battle system and is a consistently fun challenge. It's story isn't quite the serious social commentary of it's console sibling, but the fun and fan service on offer is fantastic.