Incredibly personal environments and storytelling more than make up for some slightly outdated mechanics to make Rendezvous a thoroughly enjoyable and unique cyberpunk experience.

With the source material being so well known for its quality, it’s a shame Bluey: The Videogame is nowhere near as good in writing, gameplay, animation, or anything for that matter. Even with the target audience being young gamers or parents wanting their kids to try something they are familiar with, it’s hard to see many people finding joy here.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III recycles old ideas in a stale package that is a downright slog for most of the experience. It commits the ultimate sin of being boring, and it does not bode well for the future of a franchise that, for the last 20 years, has been the pinnacle of popular FPS games.

Necromunda: Hired Gun comes this close to being a good game. It takes heavy inspiration from one of the best FPS games on the market, but with an uninteresting narrative, clunky graphics, uneven performance, and a litany of undercooked ideas. Necromunda: Hired Gun is hard to recommend, even at its budget price tag. You might find yourself having fun from time to time with it, but those moments are simply too short to recommend putting up with the rest of the game.

HUNTER x HUNTER NEN x IMPACT struggles to find the fun. While its core gameplay concepts feel like a great framework for intense battles, the lack of balancing sucks the joy out of its 3v3 fights.

Redfall never manages to be anything more than fine. My time playing through its single-player campaign it rarely wowed me once the skillful crafting of the world itself wore off.

It is a shame that Serious Sam 4 is not able to live up to the series’ legacy. While the franchise has never been associated with particularly groundbreaking or polished titles it has previously been able to offer enjoyable experiences with its own identity and fun gameplay. Serious Sam 4 is too bogged down by questionable design and poor presentation to manage that, and instead feels like a title quickly thrown together with an overnight script than a cohesive product.

With the launch of the “Odyssey” expansion, Elite Dangerous has taken on a new life as a next-generation space sim. It now feels truly unprecedented in scope, scale, and fidelity. Over the seven years since the game’s release Elite Dangerous has impressively continued to grow. The best part of it all is that “Odyssey” is just another step in the game’s ongoing evolution. It all comes together to make a space MMO that is a must-play for any fans of the genre. There is something to do for every type of player, whether they want just to build deadly ships, participate in dogfights, maximize a profitable trade route, team up with friends to explore the unknown galaxy, or whatever else.

While Dolmen offers fun, challenging, and rewarding gameplay and a rich crafting system, its other features are a bit of a hit-and-miss.

The Settlers: New Allies is a solid starting point to reboot the RTS franchise. While its campaign is dull enough to be ignored, the game’s bones are strong enough to support solidly entertaining online play. Despite its issues it has the potential to breathe new life into The Settlers as a franchise, which would be great for all RTS fans.

Player enjoyment from The Last Oricru relies heavily on what matters to them. If they are looking for a fun co-op romp with interesting build possibilities to toy around with, the game is likely worth picking up on sale. However, it does not have much to offer for players who care more about a difficult journey across a well-realized world with lore and secrets to piece together.

I commend the game for trying something totally new in the realm of puzzle games. In a sea of match-three and click-and-find puzzle games, Trenga Unlimited does something I have never seen before. And it’s not that it fails, by any means. On the contrary, the puzzle concept itself is excellent. It’s just an unpolished and unbalanced game. I can’t keep incentivized to play it because the story mode has no incentives, and the survival mode is far too difficult. A game using this same concept but with some polish and apt difficulty curve could be great.

Despite the confusing narrative, In Nightmare is still fun. The puzzles are varied and delightful to work through. And while not the scariest game I’ve played, there’s plenty of anxiety to be had sneaking around enemies and solving puzzles under duress.

Space Jam: A New Legacy – The Game is free, but it still does very little to justify players spending any time with it at all…For fans of beat-em-ups, there are plenty of better options available that are not much more expensive, especially if players have Xbox Game Pass already. For Space Jam fans, there is so little of the characters or personality of the movie in the game that it does not seem as though it would justify the time investment.

The bursts of fun are weighed down by a small pool of visually bland and overly similar maps, a lack of any meaningful progression, clunky gunplay, and some serious balancing issues. For fans looking for a new game to blend FPS and RTS gameplay, Eximius: Seize the Frontline has some fun to offer. But for fans of just one of those genres, the mix will likely detract too much to be enjoyable.

TMNT Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants has its moments of fun but needs to have more variety to be truly great. It is worth the price of entry if you just want to mindlessly kill some TMNT-themed enemies, but don't expect anything revolutionary.

Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash isn’t bad, per se, but it is lacking. Maybe it’s hindered by the expectations associated with the IP, or maybe it’s just too much like every other arena fighter we’ve gotten. Either way, the lackluster take on the genre has a lot of jujutsu sorcery to learn.

I wanted to like Captain Blood. A throwback title without the modern faff that comes with so many newer releases was refreshing…Still, Captain Blood’s lacking design and poor tuning make it an absolute chore to play through. It quickly wears through any goodwill or nostalgia it might have benefited from and ultimately has very little going for it.

Music Racer Ultimate is all flash and no fun. For a music game, the music is okay, but the game itself is not satisfying to play. The rewards aren’t rewarding, the levels are aggravating, and the menus and layout are confusing. This port needed way more time in the oven to ensure that its trip to Xbox would actually feel right at home, not a mobile game that feels like it’s just on a bigger screen.

While Loop8: Summer of Gods is a JRPG that has an interesting concept and some genuinely good features, the game is unfortunately bogged down with poor optimizations, questionable gameplay decisions, and a very painful combat system.

Gargoyles Remastered isn’t really worth the time unless you’re a hardcore fan of old platformers or a veteran of the original game desiring to revisit a favorite.

Arkham Horror: Mother’s Embrace is an enjoyable title, especially for its modest price point. There is enough that it does right to make it well worth a playthrough, but the linear nature of the story and levels makes playing through the game again unappealing, even with the choice of multiple starting investigators. It does a lot of elegant translation of the mechanics from the board game into a video game, but there is a lack of cohesion and spice that make the ideas and mechanics not mesh well together.

For those hoping several patches could make MindsEye into a possibly well-executed game, there’s no salvaging the mess left behind in Redrock.

The most disappointing part of La Quimera is how it struggles to bring its good ideas together, leaving them buried in lesser ideas and poor execution. In the end, those interesting ideas are buried in a lack of content and poor execution that makes it all unfun to engage with on any level. [Early Access Score = 30]

With a price tag of even just $10, I can’t say that Krut: The Mythic Wings is worth it. Even the time investment of playing the game is a deterrent, as it will only remind you that there are better titles you could be playing instead.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is a love letter to a flawed character that shares some flaws of its own. The care and love of Tolkien lore are quite obvious, but it doesn’t always mesh well with the disappointing mechanics and less-than-stellar gameplay.

While Outriders doesn’t invent any new mechanics, the story is enjoyable, and the interesting classes, gear system, and world tiers make for some very challenging but fun gameplay. There were definitely a few hiccups on release day, and there are some easy alterations that can be made to make Outriders more accessible. But I would definitely recommend picking up this title.

The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos is a marvelous farewell to the memorable cast and locales that this game has delivered to players. If you have enjoyed the quirky adventures of the Unreliable’s “heroic” crew, you owe it to yourself to experience this last hurrah in Halcyon.