Those diehards mentioned in the opener above will be happy to know that the level grading system is back, and locked to the higher difficulty setting, which ties into those that want to learn the intricate and subtly deep nature of things. For everyone else who’ll still be scratching their heads at the ludicrousness of it all, from go to whoa, at least you can rest easy on the idea that it’s okay to mash your way through here, and that for Bayonetta, this is all pretty standard stuff -- OTT served with a side of sass, sexuality and style.

Gravity-defying loops and curves sit alongside integration with real-world sections and plenty of room for breaking race lines, if you’re the overzealous type. And the deeper you go into the game as it’s meant to be played, with fully upgraded cars, the more a hidden level of depth emerges and a truly challenging racing game materialises. It’s just a shame it’s largely hidden from the outset.

This isn't the kind of game that you'll return to once completed, but as something a little different to the usual shooter formula it offers surprising satisfaction.

The themed levels are fine, but leaning into more SEGA history would have definitely added to the celebratory feel of Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. A fine return to monkey-in-ball form, by the way of past glory and frustration.

When viewed through a cinematic lens, White Shadows becomes an easy experience to recommend. The wonderful art direction, cinematography, animation (for the most part) and other elements do come together to create a cohesive and visually surprising journey. There’s variety here, quite a bit of it considering the very short runtime. So even though it doesn’t quite emerge, fully formed, from the shadows of Limbo, Abe’s Odyssey, or Another World, White Shadows certainly makes its mark. However fleeting that might be.

Although Armageddon excels in the destruction stakes, combining it with some adrenaline-pumping action and cool special abilities, it leaves you feeling empty with its less-than-enthralling story – well less-than-interesting really – and level after level of tedious objectives.

So much of Terminal Reality's love shines through, even though this isn't a mind-blowing remastered effort. Don't eye this in the store and zip into your Ghostbusters overalls expecting a super sexy visual transformation – like bookish Dana Barrett to the siren-like Gatekeeper. You instead should power on your pack with the knowledge that this game is just oozing authenticity like an open New York City sewer does “bad mood slime”.

Under the surface, not enough has changed to the formula that separates The Elder Scrolls Online from existing free or established properties, and I would find it genuinely hard to recommend to anyone seeking an experience outside of a cosy, well presented, box.

Mad Max is obviously a license close to my heart, and The Road Warrior is my favourite tale in the franchise, so it could be considered unfair to have judged the game how I have, but there are definitely some glaring issues here that make the product schizophrenic in its license representation. When applying played-out tropes, however, it actually works through the game’s size and goals, and is easy to enjoy -- just as long as you forget the past and embrace the present.

Even if some of it feels a little extraneous, like trying to keep investors and executives happy with god knows how many future toys and bits of entertainment, Anno 2205 is still absorbing.

In some ways, the whole Lovecraft angle plays out here -- too big to conjure, fathom or even understand, Returnal is difficult to want to wrap your head around, and that’s largely because it hangs its space hat on that death loop (again, different game, same platform). If you’re a glutton for punishment, don’t mind a grind and will happily deal with unfathomable RNG forces at cosmic play, you will absolutely get something out of Returnal, but if like me, every time you die, a little piece of the part of you that wants to play more, dies too, then you might find yourself not return(al)ing to this in a hurry.

Through excellent world building, great characters, and a branching story, you’ve got a great slice of locally-grown sci-fi well worth digging into. Or, pointing and clicking through. And even though it’s held back a bit by its not-that-great inventory system, and a few cumbersome puzzles, the story is where it shines.

War in the North is also quite a lengthy game, which although sounds great on paper does work against the overall experience.

As an action-adventure, an RPG, a narrative, and open-world sandbox, and a way to simply spend time exploring a breathtaking world – it falls short. Engaging at times, thrilling too, but also disjointed, clunky, and unfocused in ways we didn’t expect.

For all its faults and this remaster’s bare-minimum approach to presentation – Shenmue is still worth playing. And hey, any game that can be described as Virtua Fighter meets The Sims, set in Japan during the 1980s, always will.

In the end though after, say, 15 or stages or varying length, the action does begin to feel a little repetitive with design that feels decidedly old-school thanks to the complete absence of environmental interaction and movement that is as floaty as watching synchronised figure skating with hundreds of skaters instead of two. But yeah, Warriors Orochi 4 is still a lot of fun to play. A blast even.

Despite its devotion to performing the necessary post-introduction busywork, and needing to tread water in preparation for future episodes, The Lost Lords remains entertaining.

It is fun. A hell of a lot of fun, actually. But the inverse is, unfortunately, true when your team isn’t work together, or you’re being dominated by an opposing team that has its shit together.

What we’re presented with throughout the campaign and as a whole though is as they say, rough around the edges. A scrappy mech with inconsistent and sometimes unpredictable movement. Perhaps the machine of choice for a squad of Polanian fighters looking to take back a village or two from the overwhelming size of the Rusviet army but not something you’d want for a full-scale invasion.

Describing the game as chaotic in action is definitely apt, and for sheer speed this is one of the fastest ‘Mario Sports’ games to date. In a way, that goes against what you kind of expect to see from Nintendo, but in execution Mario Strikers goes all in on the fast and dirty game of Mushroom Kingdom soccer.

It’s just very easy and bite-sized in the grand scheme of it all. None of the cool ideas are ever fully fleshed out and it tends to feel one-note after a while. I get it if you’re a crazed brick collector, as that’s what these games are designed around, but as a gaming experience outside of co-op, I found it, as Vader would say: “all too easy”.

BattleTech’s ambitions may exceed its grasp, but there is a lot to love about the entire package. From the tactical combat to the great story and characterisation. Marred by mostly technical issues, it’s a title that should theoretically improve over time. In the meantime, even in a scrappy state, the MechWarrior meets XCOM promise mostly delivers.

Don’t Starve’s singular focus, wrapped up in a deadly dance between threat and empowerment, is also its biggest flaw. There is no horizon to strive for. The attrition-based gameplay is initially interesting and temporarily engaging, but lacks any lasting impact on the world.

The closest thing to Beyond Blue currently out in the wild is the brilliant Subnautica, but where they differ is that one is an absolutely open, alien sci-fi fantasy and the other one is Subnautica.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure is beautiful and the added power of the PlayStation 5 hardware has led to the materials found throughout the arts-and-craft world to look and often behave like the real thing. The blend of fantasy with everyday objects gels wonderfully with the soundtrack too, giving the experience a feel that is more than a simple riff on classic 3D platforming.

It is an absolutely stunning game with a great story and an excellent presentation (as well as beautiful audio), but it didn’t quite reach the top of the mountain it set out to climb.

In the end New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe is a welcome addition to the Nintendo Switch library, a fun and entertaining platformer with charm and every now and then – that classic Nintendo feel. But due to the success of the platform, it also finds itself competing with many stellar indie platformers in a way that Super Mario Odyssey never did.

Smoke and Mirrors establishes that The Wolf Among Us will likely be worth seeing through, although whether it’s worth doing so now or waiting for the season’s end is a more open question than one might have anticipated at the end of the first episode.

SSX from EA Sports is back, edging slightly closer to a realistic feel of where snowboarding is and may be heading, while still maintaining the huge and impossible we've come to love from previous SSX releases.

In a sense Mafia II is more like an interactive version of Goodfellas than an open-world mob experience that could only exist as a videogame. Vito’s rise is full of twists and turns that are always interesting even when they dip into stereotype and a facsimile of the classic cinematic mob epic. The expansions do flesh out the open-world setting of Empire Bay in interesting and meaningful ways, but in the end Mafia II: Definitive Edition remains an experience where the engaging story towers above all – sitting alongside the skyline of the impressive but only skin-deep Empire Bay.

In the end Elsweyr unfortunately errs on the side of more of the same. Even with dragons, a fun new class in the Necromancer, and some great writing found in the side quests and the strange cat-people that make up the land. The main story is mostly a let-down, until it finally kicks into gear as you storm a castle. As a whole there’s not much surprise to be found, and in terms of what makes up a new place to explore in The Elder Scrolls Online it’s mostly cat and paste.

Tavern Master is a pretty simple and straightforward game at heart. There's not much in the way of frills, and it would likely benefit from some injections of personality. If I was playing backseat designer, I'd love to see the addition of conversations with regular patrons or some extra narrative dressing around the special events. At present, while on Tuesday you play host to a wine tasting and on Friday there's an executioner's meetup, the only real difference is for the former you have to put cheese on the menu. Still, with the sun rising over the castle walls, the stream gently gurgling in the background, and the birds chirping away in the nearby woods, it really is a lovely spot for an executioner's meetup.

It would be hard to imagine coming into this game uninitiated to hockey and the NHL, which is definitely the game's downfall. I'd much prefer to see such a great game for an incredible sport reach more people with every release.

If you like lateral thinking, great [branching] storytelling and excellent voice-acting, and can look past a drab, repetitive sheen that is less gameplay heavy and more set-dressing, you’ll still find a gem in this H.P. Lovecraft love letter to the sea, left in an old bottle to wash up on your shore.

To put it in Jurassic Park terms, although you start off as excited as Grant, Ellie, Tim, and Lex as you experience a world of true wonder – where dinosaurs roam – you soon become Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson’s character) dealing with yet another one of Nedry’s problems.

Visually the characters, animation, and cinematics benefit greatly from the use of performance capture, and it doesn’t take long for the physical ticks and mannerisms of the three main players to do that thing where they no longer feel like characters in the story - but, real characters. This is the best the franchise has looked from a purely cinematic level. In the end, New Tales From The Borderlands succeeds because it lives up to its namesake and presents the best Borderlands storytelling since the original Tales.

Mad Riders has the feel of something whipped up between bigger projects to keep the teams at Techland energised. That's not meant to be an insult, mind, as it feels like the sort of game that would have been fun to work on and design, which carries over into the experience of playing it.

This is a minor episode, as second episodes in episodic game series often tend to be, but there’s nothing here that hints that the rest of the season won’t be strong.

In the end Wolfenstein: Youngblood isn’t so much a misstep as it is a side-step, inessential but rewarding once you look past the confusion and simply take up arms and do that thing that this series does so well - kill and take-out entire squads of Nazi super soldiers in style. Now with an invitation that reads, plus one.

I think EA needs to go back to the drawing board on its interpretation of unpredictability's role in sports games, because while it might make the game look more realistic to watch, it makes it feel frustrating to play.

Skyward Sword holds dear to a lot of things we love about the series, but quite frankly just doesn't do enough to move things forward, leaving us with a merely good game that should have been great.

It's just a shame that Insomniac Games seemed so hell bent on pushing the dramatic angle that got in the way of a great example of a solid first-person shooter.

It’s a terrific little package brimming with options to replay, but it’s not a large play-space by any measure, and there’s not a huge amount of variation on scenery or tone. This one boils down to preference...Just hurry up with The Phantom Pain already, Hideo.

It’s safe to say that The Surge completely focuses on providing a souls-like experience from beginning to end, offering up deep combat mechanics with interesting and large-scale boss battles. The story, although engaging to a point, takes a back seat to this singular goal. It’s not without its flaws, and its appeal will primarily be limited to those looking so this one type of experience. But The Surge feels like a success, and one that we’ll probably end up dying several hundred more times in.

Star Wars Episode I: Racer is more re-release than remaster. A game that admittedly was rushed to market in 1999 to ensure it hit shelves in time for the film’s release. So, the almost-there career mode feels a little undercooked in 2020 and the lack of polish to the AI stands out. But, it’s simple premise – recreating the excitement and thrill of Star Wars Pod Racing is a winning one. For pure high-speed thrills in a galaxy far, far, away, they still don’t get much better than this. And, getting to hear Watto hum the Cantina Theme is probably worth the price of admission alone.

Thanks to a sloppy handling model, it lacks the precision required of its predecessor, so sim racers will probably struggle with the controls. Meanwhile arcade racers will struggle with more advanced driving techniques such as counter steering and throttle feathering. If you can get your mind into the right headspace for the game, approaching it as an arcade game with complex controls, there's definitely fun to be had here. It's just not up there with the likes of games dedicated to arcade or sim, but not both, such as Hot Pursuit or Forza 4.

As a blend of intrigue, mystery, sci-fi, and horror – Close to the Sun may not be the turn of the century BioShock that pre-release media might have suggested, but there’s plenty of electricity and power to be found in the story it tells.

The first few hours of Agents of Mayhem are genuinely exciting and entertaining. And funny too. It’s the open-world of high-tech Seoul and the repetitive missions that fail to live up to the colourful Agents and the Saturday morning cartoon vibe. Which is unfortunate. The juvenile sense of humour won’t appeal to everyone, but the same could be said for just about every Volition-developed title of the past decade. And in that sense, the studio’s latest effort is worth considering if you’re a Saints Row fan. For everyone else, imagine a ludicrous ‘80s cartoon built around the profane and juvenile marines featured in James Cameron’s classic film Aliens. Where they’re globe-trotting government agents, and prone to enter fits of gravity defying carnage.

If you're a dedicated fan and want more of the series, you'll have fun despite being disappointed at the lack of exposition. As for the casual players, there are unfortunately very few reasons to check this out.

11-11: Memories Retold, however, is still a game worth more than a look-in, and at roughly five-to-six hours, you’ll gain a deep and respectful look at one of the world’s most jarring global conflicts, from the perspectives of the individual.

Silent Hill HD Collection features two very fine, albeit extremely unpleasant and not super accessible, games. It's nowhere near as polished as Konami's other recent compilation, the brilliant MGS HD collection.

There’s still a lot to like about The Pact, it continues this season’s trend of improved animation and performance for the series. And with origin stories and background out of the way, it means that new ideas can take the front seat – as realised in the depictions of newcomers Bain and Harley Quinn. It also ends on a cliff-hanger, which will no doubt make the wait for Episode Three feel that much longer. Overall, a good but not great episode.

Beyond the silliness of it all, repetition, precision and ogling at so many sets of twins while they pine about cats somehow makes Bus Simulator a joyous ride; a fareing good time. At least, something worth the ticket price.

Sons of Winter is fine, but it never feels like a standout episode.

For fans of Life is Strange it’s no doubt worth your time, and the way in which Chloe and Rachel’s relationship evolves over the course of the first episode is a pleasure to watch. No so well done though, is all the supernatural stuff. Which fails to reach the same heights of the original, and feels a little forced.

The game itself, if you follow the heavily developer-directed path laid before you, has roughly 20-25 hours in it, and there’s more content yet to come, so balances and new content could sharpen the experience, but out of the gate it’s simply a schizophrenic collection of two key genres that, in principle, should gel, but here they kind of get in each other’s way.

There is fun to be had here, but in light of what else is out in the racing/driving wild these days, leaves Heat eating proverbial dust. There’s no question Ghost is a technically proficient developer (outside of car physics), but too much emphasis on a ‘story’ over more robust driving and driver-agency makes the game feel half complete on one side, and half over done on the other.

There's definitely an audience for a game like this, a story-driven interactive experience that opts for bombastic action and spectacle as opposed to taking place in the real-world as a police or crime procedural, and for that reason, and that particular audience, Asura's Wrath comes highly recommended.

A sequel that plays things a bit safe when we really wanted it to dig deep and offer up something truly new. It’s still the old Donkey Kong Country that we’ve known and loved for so long though, and for many players that’s going to be enough. We just wish it felt more like a proper sequel and less like an expansion.

Combat in Yakuza is deep and with RPG-like progression and various fighting styles on offer things improve as the game goes on. It’s a shame then that the more difficult encounters feel a little silly when you need to keep eating and drinking to restore health and slowly chip away at a boss figure’s health bar. For newcomers, and well, anyone really, playing on easy comes recommended. For a game that is about story first, and getting to explore Japan second, having to deal with fighting that can often devolve into frustrating bouts of dodging and toying with the limited mechanics isn’t worth it. And a frustration-free Yakuza Kiwami experience means more time spent at one of the many hostess bars.

Are wonderful visuals, brilliant sailing mechanics, and fun activities like playing music and throwing up on your crewmates after drinking too much grog enough? For a few hours sure, but probably not in the long term. What’s here is extremely polished and wonderful to look at. And if the simple joys of sailing through Sea of Thieves gorgeous world clicks with you as it did me, then however long you spend visiting outposts and islands and strange wrecks – will be time well spent.

No matter the art form, there’s always room for a good sci-fi story. The Station, from a team of veteran developers who worked on titles like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and BioShock Infinite, offers a great sci-fi ending. One that is both memorable and, in a way, fun. The only real issue is that outside of the narrative there really isn’t much to the puzzle solving and exploration. Reading emails, listening to audio recordings of conversations, and taking in a space bedroom or two. Stuff we’ve seen and handled more intuitively before.

There’s something about it that keeps you coming back, whether that’s the fun exploration or simply going on a quest to clear a few houses of infestations and then loot all the cupboards and drawers for goodies. But above all that it does nail the combat side, where headshots feel great as does getting up close with a machete. Gruesome and fun zombie-apocalypse survival, but also bug-ridden and poorly optimised.

In the case of Jettomero: Hero of the Universe, either the presentation strikes a chord hidden deep inside you or it doesn’t. If it’s the former then of course it’s an experience worth checking out. If it’s the latter then, well, it might feel as empty as the space between all the different planets Jettomero travels to.

Call of Duty: Ghosts is a mess of a game. That’s not to say that it’s nonfunctional or bad to play, rather, it loses sight of its core principles and eschews an amazing opportunity with the advent of our transition to next-gen, as well as being the first true IW CoD sans Zampella and West, through poorly constructed (and utilised) tech, half-assed delivery of modes and a single-player campaign that sets the series back more than a few years.

It has its pitfalls, and definitely serves up it’s fair share of frustration, but the point of the game is admirable, and with refinement in the control and camera departments, a beequel would be a very welcome addition to this hive.

Monster Truck Championship is fun and challenging, but frustration, a one-note near linear course masquerading as variety, and not nearly enough in terms of options and engagement leave this a bogged experience.

With everything above said, there’s an obvious draw here in it just being a Mario game, which alone will pull people to it. And there’s some fun to be had, and Nintendo gets a lot right with it, we just need the gimmicks and party favours turned down. Invincibility Star isn’t a number, so dialling the game up to that just isn’t something we can tune into on the reg. Especially given golf on its own merits is a game of strategy and patience, that can still be fast and fun without needing addressive rolling rocks impeding your path all the time.

You'll find moments of driving glory nestled among a lot of filler or arbitrary 'story', and it's these nuggets that make you wish for the series to return to its successful past. Or, if you're like me, you'll just look at the game as another entry in a respected series that perhaps takes too much unnecessary precedence over EA's better arcade racing franchise, Burnout.

Anarchy Reigns ultimately feels like a game that probably didn't quite feel right midway through development, which didn't have the same effort and attention lavished upon it as the developer's previous games. Still, when your very worst game ends up being this decent, you're clearly doing something right.

A bigger budget, more player-agency and a more expansive world are all that's holding this back from being groundbreaking. And a lot of learnings will be taken from this latest outing.

Unfortunately, the genuinely entertaining humour, strong cooperative play and a surprisingly great soundtrack of familiar tracks do more to make me wonder about what could have been than push Red River into 'must-buy' territory.

There’s value in narrative, if you don’t mind sloppy exposition, telegraphed characters and incentives as well as explosive quick time events that sit at odds with arbitrary quick time events, that sit even further at odds with ‘page-turner’ quick time events. When you get towards the game’s crescendo, which admittedly is handled excellently between the three main robot characters, and deal with ‘action’ sequences that take you out of your nanna or grandpa QTE slumber, the game feels interesting, but it’s smoke and mirrors. Acting, visuals and a relatively well-conceived future Detroit are the carrots on string here. The problem is our robot horse needs QTEs as well to get going and without enough blue blood, bled by actual gamers, it’s a hard task and road to Maple Syrup ahead.

It’s a shame there appears to be components of the Kinect-only version of Ryse in the final product, which would account for the design that bounces between overly easy and challenging.

There’s value here for the matriculant willing to put in the effort, but you’ve really gotta want it. And even as a Fire Emblem diehard I found it a bit of a slog. Repetitive and more often than not caked in superfluous activity, Three Hopes is a mash of ideas drawn out beyond its measure, and if you take into account the option to play through each House’s own campaign, the target audience thins to a specific tine, and you might be confronted with an intimidating wall, looming convolutedly large.

Downpour is a pretty solid horror game, if not an exceptionally original or nuanced one. If it weren't for the crappy combat and frustrating exploration it would be a bit easier to recommend, but Vatra has captured the Silent Hill aesthetic well.

And if it's racing with a story that you're after, The Crew and Need for Speed franchisers have you well covered with their mix of outlandish, goofy storytelling and arcade style racing. Perhaps if Legends cut the story entirely, pared down the overly long career mode, and simply focused on being a multidisciplinary arcade racing game, it might find that niche it once occupied on the shelf, back when it was simply known as TOCA.

Strange Brigade from developer Rebellion, the studio behind the Sniper Elite series, presents a bright, camp, and vivid swashbuckling Indiana Jones-inspired world come to life. In a third-person shooter where teaming up with friends to take on hordes of supernatural creatures encourages experimentation. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun too.

There are a handful of decent ideas here, but nothing within is original. And there's a serious lack of excitement; of tone and transition.

It would be remiss not to mention The Streak mode, where players attempt to thwart the longest running undefeated series in the history of professional wrestling. Much like the rest of WWE 2K14, the fanfare is better than the actual gameplay.

Unravel Two is a fun physics-based side-scrolling platformer. And the addition of the blue Yarny, as well as co-op through him, or her, is enjoyable, but the team barely capitalises on having to use both for pushing through the environment and when they do, it’s usually elementary. In fact, outside of the game’s Challenge puzzles, which I’ll get to in a minute, Unravel Two is a far less challenging experience overall, especially in comparison to the first game.

The series just needs a massive boost, and adding a new physics playtool in different types of weather just isn’t it. What you play a Just Cause game for will determine whether or not you grab this and how much you’ll actually invest in it from a time and gameplay perspective, but as a product that is more than just the fun, silly physics experiments part of itself, it’s difficult to glow at it beyond the “sickly” fun I mentioned in the intro. At the end of the day, what we need from Just Cause is, well, just cause; purpose to play beyond tethering baddies to boosters, each other and exploding barrels. As fun as that is.

Without a majority of the characters, the time between the major story beats would be particularly dull without anyone to talk to or side quests to complete. To take the evil path and embrace the vampire side of Jonathan, is to kill what life there is in Vampyr. Although it is important that there are consequences to your actions, some of which do have an immediate impact to the world, there isn’t enough to balance it out and make being evil fun or interesting.

At the end of the day, Resident Evil 6 is packed to the gills with features and absolutely looks the part, no one can deny that, but its lack of gameplay identity leaves it as empty and vacuous as the higher brain function of any one of its zombie inhabitants.

Even though My Friend Pedro falters when it strays the furthest from the action-movie ideal of its premise most of the time you’re still a stone-cold killer with a suite of guns and a knack for shooting at bad dudes whilst upside down spinning in mid-air.

Fending off waves of zombies and walking along linear pathways broken up by the odd surprise of seeing an undead tank. As in a tank tank, not a heavy zombie to take out. It’s a shame because this in turn will factor into the need or want to replay it all at a higher difficulty level or simply to level-up rankings to unlock skins, perks, and other elements. ‘Let’s do that again’ plays an important role in the perception and longevity of a co-op game, and on that front Zombie Army 4: Dead War falls short.

Like every The Sims game before it, The Sims 4's success will hinge on the DLC that accompanies it -- what you have here is simply a solid foundation. The Sims team needs to do some heavy duty work on the automation side of things, but otherwise they've created a good place to build from.

My Time in Portia has its moments though and getting through the early milestones hint at the larger picture and more player freedom. As it stands it’s is a ‘life sim’ that could do with a little more of the former.

Wreckateer is, surprisingly, the best of the first three 'Winter of Arcade' releases. It's not a particularly ambitious or exciting game, but it meets its own fairly modest goals with only a few hiccups, and shows that full body motion controls can be fun, even when they don't always work the way you'd like them to.

Technical issues aside, Moons of Madness is an experience that we felt compelled to stick with until the end credits rolled – on the strength of the mood alone. Something it has in spades. And it nails the pacing, striking the right balance between moments of quiet, tension, and revelation.

Days Gone is contextually broken, its gunplay is deplorable, its ‘open-world’ premise is a joke and its narrative consistently overrides that open-world ‘design’ goal. It’s pretty, in parts, but it’s broken across the board because it’s disparate in what it wants to be, and that’s because it fails to be Days Gone. Instead it just mimics, brokenly, games already gone.

If you're looking for some light-hearted swing and miss fun with your mates then this is certainly worth a look, particularly if you've got a couple of PlayStation Move controllers lying beside your couch, but if you're looking for the definitive tennis experience Grand Slam Tennis 2 is lacking compared to other more established offerings.

At any rate, what’s here is fun and it’s Nintendo and there’s co-op for families or friends, but it’s all just so incredibly lite-on. And I say this with full appreciation and love of the likes of Super Mario Odyssey and Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Yoshi’s Crafted World -- there’s no challenge outside of 100% collection of items and in beating Treasure Road times, the rest is simply a cakewalk, and unfortunately all the bad doggo Awoofys in the game can’t make me think otherwise.

The themes of nature, balance, and the connectiveness between all living things is strong and can be felt throughout. In the end Fe certainly looks the part but doesn’t quite have enough memorable moments or feeling of discovery to match its ambitious design.

Without any remastering or touching up done on the visuals, not including the best looking and best sounding versions of these games is baffling.

Death Road to Canada attempts to offset the normally dark themes of the zombie genre with zany characters, a charming pixel art style, and poppy music, but the lack of depth to its combat and randomly generated content will quickly leave you feeling frustrated and unsatisfied. There is some fun to be had here for sure, which is definitely best experienced with friends, but that doesn't make up for its issues and overall lacklustre action.

A niche will exist for this, and I seriously hope Jed and Jordan successfully infiltrate their bank accounts in the positive, but for all its worth, Speaking Simulator loses itself too early and pushing through the whole experience is as draining as an android’s solar battery during a an overcast day. I can’t fault an Indie duo doing new things, and as far as risky game design goes, this is right up there. Unfortunately the novelty wears off far too quickly and you’re left with a shame pile title likely to keep collecting dust, unless you’re really in to Katy from HR.

Shadows: Awakening feels different enough, thanks to integrating the idea of character and class swapping into the core design of both the mechanics and story. But even so the by-product of this is more micro-management and loot scrubbing duties placed on the player, that isn’t helped by an overall pace that feels too slow.