I really enjoyed Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening. But a lot of that love has to do with the excellent presentation. The game struggles with some odd controls, and archaic level design. It’s not built as tightly as a lot of modern platformers. But it has lots of content, and a variety of gameplay in its main story. The game’s real strength is its anime presentation. Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening perfectly captures the visual and auditory aesthetic of its Space Cobra source material. If you’re a fan of Space Adventure Cobra, or looking for more 2D action platform games, then Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening is worth your time. Maybe just wait until it’s on sale.

Ultimately, I think your mileage will highly depend on how the stories land with you, and whether the act of walking is a delight or a burden. I do think Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is worth a gander, just don’t expect a swan song of a tale or gut punch metaphor about early America. Enjoy it for it what it immediately offers: a fun series of tiny vignettes and discoverable characters to unwind with. Forget the rest.

South of the Circle is a bold title that deals with mature themes. Its approach to storytelling is refreshing as it interweaves flashbacks to assemble a larger narrative. In addition to this, State of Play also respects its audience. They don’t oversimplify elements and allow you to interpret aspects. While the gameplay lacks substance and can cause some passive moments, the lovely design and spectacular score help make this a memorable experience.

AER Memories of Old knows its limits and doesn’t try to go beyond them, which causes it to fall short in places, leading to simple gameplay and environments. It makes the most of what it has, especially with its visuals, but AER still turns out to be a rather short, shallow game in the end.

Graveyard Keeper is an engaging and rewarding farming sim weighed down by pacing and performance issues. The GBA-style visuals compliment its contained open world, and influences from old-school Zelda games that shine through just as much as that of Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley. The PC and Xbox versions play almost exactly the same, which is unfortunate considering the game’s performance, but if you can look past all the spots and blotches, you’ll likely enjoy the challenging gathering-crafting grind, and the game’s macabre humor when it actually lands.

As a spiritual successor, the game adopts many traits that are similar to Dead Space. The HUD is implemented within the design, the limbs of your opponent can be blown away and the tight camera obscures your view. While comparisons are expected, The Callisto Protocol does differ. The melee-focused combat cranks up the intensity of encounters but ultimately stumbles when facing numerous enemies. Some may not like the linearity but I felt that this helped with the pacing of the game and the effectiveness of scares. Although it never reaches the heights of its predecessor’s first two outings, it still offers a trembling trek through a terrifying detention center.

Anyone hip to the source material is sure to find a lot to love about Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions. And if you’re tired of the same old song and dance that is Fifa and Pro Evo, RoNC might just be exactly what the doctor ordered. But I’d also love to see Tamsoft and Bandai Namco take another crack at this universe because most of what’s here could be made exceedingly better with a solid polishing. Until then, I’ll keep shoulder-checking and falcon-kicking my way to the championship.

When you’re used to all of that and know what to expect from each mission, Riftstar Raiders becomes an absolute blast to play. It just might take you a bit of time to get there.

Overall, Batora: Lost Haven is a fun game, albeit with a few shortcomings. The dialogue and the cartoonish visuals appeal to a younger audience. Meanwhile, the detailed statistics and complex controls make it feel more mature. Are you a fan of sci-fi action games or isometric action RPGs in general? Then Batora: Lost Haven could be a worthwhile game to sink your teeth into.

After a rocky start, Deliver Us the Moon ended up being an adventure game success, and Deliver Us Mars will not disappoint fans of the first game. It tells an interesting and sometimes surprising story and delivers an awe-inspiring Red Planet. Some unrefined mechanics and gamified puzzles carry over from its predecessor, but overall Deliver Us Mars is a genuine step forward for the franchise.

DESYNC requires a special blend of patience and precision. It’s a raw power buried way in your guts that this game just might awaken in you anew.

What Sports Champions 2 lacks in visuals, sound and originality is balanced for the most part by its accessibility; however the end result is an entirely average experience. The choice of sports is questionable with many events having been done before in other games, even for the PS Move.

While Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star is a solid experience during combat, the overly complex plot is paired with some juvenile and cringe-worthy dialogue that mars the experience.

At the end of the day if you are a fan of the Ninja Gaiden franchise and were let down with Ninja Gaiden 3 on Xbox 360 or PS3, give Team Ninja another chance, especially if you are looking for a fairly enjoyable action oriented launch title for your new Wii U.

Aside from its painfully short single player campaign and “sometimes good, sometimes bad” controls, Star Fox Zero is a very fun game.

Jurassic World Evolution seemingly casts a wide net. If the aim here is to appeal to a larger audience, rather than a niche one, then it’s a job well done.

There’s a timer that guarantees games will be less than 30 minutes, and could be much shorter. That’s a perfect amount of time for me. There’s very little Minimum does wrong.

For those who have yet to experience this highly addictive combination of tower defense, physics destruction and real time strategy, CastleStorm: Definitive Edition offers a unique game experience that is fun to play solo or with friends.

While Absolution is by no means a disaster it just feels lacking in comparison to the rest of the content we’ve been given for Infinite Warfare so far. Although Absolution does add new content, and the Attack of the Radioactive Thing! is both complicated and fun, the multiplayer maps just don’t fit very well within the constructs of Infinite Warfare.

What makes OK K.O.! Let’s Play Heroes so suitable for gamers of many ages is not just the ease of gameplay, but the delightful characters and storyline.

Transformers: Battlegrounds is a fun, inclusive, tactics game that may act as a gateway into the genre for younger gamers. If you can look past the mobile-esque aesthetic, the core gameplay is fun even though it doesn’t reach the heights of XCOM or Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.

There is a lot of content contained in this little game that makes it really hard to put down. You can have a quiet evening and gather items to make new outfits, fish at the lake to collect bubbles, or change your hairdo at Minnie’s salon. Or you can opt to have a productive evening by mining with the Seven Dwarves, warding off ghosts in Hawaii, or ensuring your cafe is fully stocked with food and beverages at all times. Regardless of your mood and what you want to achieve, Disney Magical World 2 was able to satiate my cravings for a good simulation game mixed with some ghost busting and a little bit of side hustling. It can take a while to get to the good and creative parts, but it is definitely worth the wait.

The initial weapon selection is refreshing, yes. I also love the color palette used throughout the game. But beyond that, this is a bog standard roguelite. Random assortments of enemies attack with increasing ferocity. The bosses require practice and experimentation to master. Your success is determined by repetition and fortuitous reward drops at the end of every stage. Honestly, the short runtime might be an upside, depending on what you’re looking for. Roguelite players may find Lone Ruin rather disappointing. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a short, arcade-style experience, maybe give this game a shot.

In the end, I think Harold Halibut ought to be experienced for its amazing technical achievement, if nothing else. While its gameplay doesn’t always engage, its narrative, characters, and themes are coherent in the manner of good speculative fiction. Both Harold the character and Harold Halibut the game are weird, wonderful, and quite unlike anything we’ve seen this year.

I really enjoyed Shuten Order. The narrative kept me excited to find out the identity of The Founder’s killer. I really enjoyed the structure of every investigation being a different style of visual novel. But the game suffers from many of the issues that plague the visual novel genre. The writing is long-winded, and can be lazy at times. There are lots of bad anime tropes that are going to turn away anyone who isn’t already a visual novel fan. But if you love the genre, Shuten Order is one of my favorite new visual novels in quite a while.

Sea of Solitude does an incredible and masterful job of expressing what it means to suffer from depression, so much so that should you be interested in jumping in and have your own mental health issues I would suggest playing only in short bursts and when you are feeling quite strong. Many of these segments are far too relatable and quite vivid in their depictions of mental distress. The changes made to the Director’s Cut offers subtle enhancements to the game with new voice work that makes it hit home a little harder for American audiences and a photo mode that – while enticing – feels more likely to break the immersion. This is every bit as powerful as it was in 2019, and if you are looking for an emotional story to be fully enveloped in, I can’t imagine something being more passionately and beautifully put together than this game.

If Knack’s track record has you worried, I’ll say this; Mark Cerny and company heard the complaints, and this is their response. Knack 2 is all fast-paced action and dramatic plot twists and tight, skillful platforming. It’s not perfect, but it makes a compelling case for the character platformer as a genre. In this era of first-person shooters and gritty action games, that’s a victory unto itself.

I would recommend Siege Survival: Gloria Victis to players who like difficult management games and muddy depressing fantasy. I know you guys are out there. I’m one of those people. And despite my many criticisms of the game, I intend to keep playing it after this review has gone live. That’s not necessarily always the case! But there is a spark of something at the core of Siege Survival: Gloria Victis. It’s a puzzle, and if I can just line all the pieces up, I know I’ll feel the satisfaction of solving a difficult gaming challenge. But I will not be able to help imagining the game this could have been; brighter, sleeker, and more imaginative.