In the simplest terms, playing The Witcher 2 is a lot like attending an archaeological dig with nothing but your bare hands: you're sure to come up with something amazing, but you'll suffer a lot of unnecessary punishment and stress to attain it.

There’s a good game in Pokemon X, and fans looking for another game near-identical to the ones before it likely won’t find issue with a lot of the dusty trimmings and transparent battle system. If you want to get into into the new stat rebuilding features and grind out tons of easy battles to prep for high-level online multiplayer, it’s never been easier to do so. But for all else, the game’s excellent visuals belie the frustratingly old-fashioned design. RPG folk can find better times on their 3DS.

Just an average stealth game on the PS2. It suffers from frame rate problems and just doesn't offer as much as we all would have hoped.

Perhaps with time Heroes of the Storm can age into something great, for now it’s worth checking out if you want to experience a different take on a popular genre.

It definitely overstays its welcome, and it's far from the best in the series, it's been so long since there was a Metroid game that it's nice to see it back here on the 3DS. I feel like they've built strong mechanics, which can hopefully serve a more varied and interesting quest in a future entry to the series, maybe one that DOESN'T involve doing the same fights over and over the entire game. Samus Returns is definitely a step up from the original Metroid 2, but it is unable to touch the heights of both the series and the genre.

MLB The Show 17 is still a great game of baseball but one that with each season seems less and less impressive compared to other sports games available. With a lack of competition, it's hard to not recommend. But with each year I'm still wanting to see the team at Sony San Diego push the envelope even if there isn't any competition to force their hand.

Ikaruga is a game that takes the old and combines it with the new, and does a good job of it.

Tangle Tower is still worth exploring despite its issues, especially for those with access to Apple Arcade. At it's piecemeal $20 price tag, though, the game's flaws are less forgivable. If anything, Tangle Tower makes a compelling case for a long-running franchise starring Detective Grimoire and Sally. The foundation is there: sharp writing, beautiful presentation, phenomenal voice work, stellar music. With just a little more time in the oven, SFB's next game could be something truly special. For now, we'll just have to settle for "good."

MLB The Show 16 is yet another great game of baseball, but for the first time I felt like the franchise is starting to wane in its greatness.

A wonderful novelty, Sorcery! exists to serve a niche group of users and will struggle to find a captivated mainstream audience.

PlanetSide 2 is a hard game to sum up. It's a beautiful, solidly built shooter that presents large-scale conflict like nobody else in the business. The rest of the game's enjoyment, however, is entirely up to you. If you can dedicate the time to learning the systems, decoding the cumbersome UI, and finding a group of people that you like playing with, PlanetSide 2 will be a blast.

Capcom has put out a partially broken full retial game. I had fun with it despite its flaws, but $60 is too much to ask for what this game is.

Zen Pinball’s South Park offering isn’t perfect but it will serve as a lovely addition to its already robust catalog of tables.

Each episode so far has had its good parts and bad parts- but each time, it's something different. It's been inconsistent, and I don't think it can keep my interest if it doesn't settle down and find a groove for itself. The lack of focus on Lee/Clementine is only forgiven because of the extra focus on a good story twist at the end- but I really hope they find a balance in the future, which would truly make the game compelling on a level that Telltale hasn't done before. As of now, it still feels like a work in progress.

The latest Need for Speed release has its share of slip-ups, but it's mostly able to sideline them and deliver a fast, fun open world racing game very much like Criterion's classic Burnout Paradise.

Unless you’re a chronic stat-cruncher and menu enthusiast, though, I can’t imagine that this incremental and grind-heavy sequel will resonate with you.

The developers went back to the core ideals of the franchise, and came out with what made it fun, and fully customized to really shine on the DS.

Resogun is great for spontaneous, quick play. Anything longer than that starts to give me a headache.

F1 2019 is a great game with solid presentation, smooth technical performance and tons of things to tinker with and drive through. However, it’s severely hurt by its moronic AI. Marrying more traditional video games sentiments to a simulation is always problematic. The thing is, Codemasters has no competition in the genre so there’s no outside pressure to improve on what they have been doing in the past. Emulating clean driving, especially from the AI’s side, isn’t impossible as Gran Turismo Sport did it in a very classy way. Maybe that’s something Codemasters should look into before rolling out F1 2020.

It is great that Xbox 360 and PS3 owners can now experience Resident Evil 4 but it is a shame that more effort was not put into it to make it stand out. As it is, there is really no reason for this version to exist as it does not bring anything new to the package.

Sure, the game is tepid in some spots and the steep price and lack of any multiplayer options does sting a bit, but provided you haven't grown tired of this tried-and-true formula then Orcs Must Die can definitely provide some hours of silly, unrelenting fun.

The best advice I can give is to not come into Persona Q looking for another handheld version of the previous two games. The changes made to the formula may seem minor but they have a huge impact on the experience.

A decent enough addition for those collecting Zen Pinball 2: Portal tables though it is a slightly empty homage to Aperture Science.

The value of Lumines: Electronic Symphony is debatable. Players who gravitate toward long form puzzle challenges and high-score hunting will fall in love with its charms, as will fans of electronic music. It's unlike any other puzzler, and it's well worth every gamer's time to experience the symbiotic relationship that forms between player and game during a good run. Aside from that, however, this remains little more than a glossy refreshment of a game that appeared 7 years ago. It's a great design, to be sure, but in the end it's still just putting blocks together.

So should you take the dip into Destiny 2? If you are looking for something to sink your teeth into, have a ton of time on your hands, and like shooters, there’s a lot here to get behind. But if, even for an instant, the thought of grinding out slightly better pieces of equipment in a near endless loot to get just to see a number go up just a tiny bit, seems unappealing, you are going to have some issues with Bungie’s future shooter. In the end, I think it may be just a bit to close to the original for me.

As far as puzzle-platformers are concerned, Creaks doesn’t quite break the mold. It makes a fun first impression through a neat call to adventure but it wasn’t long before I developed a wandering eye. Throwing in new obstacles injects excitement when things get overly familiar but the trick eventually loses its luster. Creaks stands out by its beautiful art style, especially when it comes to the various paintings found throughout the mansion. Amanita Design has made a puzzle game that offers just enough accessible cerebral challenges. Though by no means a poorly constructed piece of software, Creaks’ minimalist approach to gameplay is entertaining in the moment but doesn’t quite leave much of a lasting impression.

While there are new additions that make Super Mega Baseball 3 a worthwhile sequel, I hoped for more features – especially given its much higher price point. Just as its predecessors delivered, it’s a great game, but feels somewhat schizophrenic when you stack up what features have been added versus what has been passed on. There is a major emphasis on some inclusions that feel like they’d be more at home in a realistic baseball simulator, yet some very fundamental inclusions for an arcade baseball game are still absent.

Limbo’s idea of a challenge is to lure you into false solutions until you happen upon the one that works, that is to say, if it works within the parameters of your limited movement. But the harsh truth is that trial and error is actually quite easy once you accept its inevitability. In fact, at that point it even manages to be minimally frustrating. The real issue is that it’s just so overwhelmingly dull, so mentally unstimulating, akin to floating in some kind of... limbo. Hm.

There’s something to be said for a stripped down to basics game experience, without too many complications or intricacies that get in the way of the fun. Pistol Whip is entertaining and another of the growing list of successful arguments for VR as a near-staple for gamers. As a music game, it doesn’t have the depth or addictive appeal of Beat Saber. It can be fun and is one of the better action/arcade games in the VR space, but given its limited playlist and mechanics, I suspect it doesn’t have the long-term appeal of other, more fully-featured games.

Black Ops 2, in thematic solidarity with the sacrifices of its protagonists, will likely not be remembered among the best of its brethren. And yet, the best Call of Duty installments yet to come will succeed because of the work that Treyarch has done here.

Owlboy is obviously a labor of love, and not some cold and calculated syndicate product. Altogether, it would have needed some outside help to do doctoring, especially to the latter half of the game. In the end, Owlboy is true to its inspiration: a retro-platformer both in good and in bad. It’s a shame that it couldn’t grow beyond that.

While it lacks the processing punch of a PC-tethered headset, the mobility and no-strings-attached freedom of the Oculus Quest has allowed me to dive deep into the headset as a fitness product, and Beat Saber, Box VR and a few other titles are in regular rotation. Synth Riders has the potential to challenge those products if it can expand the range of its playlist and offer a few more bells and whistles (like a campaign) to the generally solid foundation. Synth Riders’ approach is definitely influenced by Beat Saber but it has expanded the earlier game’s vocabulary and mechanics in several interesting ways.

Invisible Inc. is a game with a lot of hidden depth that is waiting to be explored and exploited; and while the story is severely lacking it’s still worth the $20 to checkout and run through a few times.

While the inclusion of a 9 person multiplayer is indeed intriguing, there just isn’t enough to Runbow to really make you along want to come back, let alone the 8 other people you can possibly finagle. It’s simplistic jumping on levels for time trials, or it’s overly-chaotic racing around the same platforming levels. It’s not like the WiiU is hurting for good 2D platformers that you can play instead.

It is hard to judge a game like The Talos Principle:Road to Gehenna , because there is nothing that it does conspicuously wrong. Its biggest sin is that its predecessor didn’t leave any room for improvement. Nor did it give Road to Gehenna a compelling reason to exist.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2 is a somewhat uneven sequel. On one hand, its new playable characters create some of the most ingenious stretches of retro platforming in recent memory. The myriad abilities at your disposal create an open-ended experience, and dismantling tricky challenges with your broad toolset is one of the game's greatest pleasures. But difficulty spikes and a few sequences that clash with the game's fixed trajectory jumps can make some stretches feel a little tedious. At its best, the game synthesizes the appeal of NES platformers with great boss fights and simple but nuanced systems. At its worst, it emulates the frustrating elements of games from this era with a little too much accuracy.

While Huntdown's cloying one-liners and disconcerting framing can occasionally come across as grating, its captivating gunplay successfully mixes the chaos of classic run and gun games with the methodical cadence of modern cover shooters. Dashing through murderous strikes while you slide under incoming bullets creates a sense of cool that the game's writing fails to deliver, inching it a little bit closer to the heights of its many points of inspiration. It may be somewhat short and fairly straightforward, but Huntdown's gameplay largely succeeds at emulating the type of testosterone-fueled bedlam perfected by its silver screen counterparts.

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is not a bad fighting game, but I would rather play almost any other fighting game that came out this year before it. I didn't find the fun that I was looking for, and considering that this is a $60 retail title, I find it hard to recommend over games like Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, Persona 4: Arena, or even the older Tekken 6.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a decent game that is certainly worth $15, I just don't think that people will continue to play it for long before they return to their preferred fighters.

Split/Second is one of those games that has a really solid concept and runs with it from start to finish. What ends up happening with this game though is that it looses that initial flare and ends up fizzling into a pretty standard arcade racing title.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a good overall package. Playing the campaign is like visiting with an awesome old friend that you haven't seen in a while. The multiplayer, though, is too barebones to feel like it's worth the $40 price tag. Couple that with the fact that the multiplayer doesn't quite emulate the feel of the original Halo and you're left with a game that is likely to disappoint many longtime fans.

If you have a computer that is capable enough to handle C&C 3 at, at least medium settings then there is really no reason to get the 360 version as the PC version is hands down the better package deal. However for those who are not blessed with such machines the Xbox 360 version is still a capable RTS that just suffers from lackluster controls.

For an adventure game, Ether One does some pretty interesting things that allow it to break free from the genre’s mold.

A dash of Terraria mixed with a pinch of Dig Dug, SteamWorld Dig is a colourful delight that is equal parts wit and charm.

For me, Madden NFL 18 is the first misstep for the series of this generation. The Longshot mode is technically well produced but its story is far from compelling. The rest of Madden NFL 18 feels like very small steps forward for a franchise that could use some big leaps.

Catherine is a very unique game that is set back by it's own repetitiveness and annoying puzzles. After the fifteen hours it took me to complete the game, I was glad that I got to experience the narrative, but I never want to touch the game again for the game play. It's hard for me to recommend a game that I kept playing just to get to the next cut scene.

It is not a bad experience, but it is probably not the one that should be at the top of your wish list.

Though its bewitching world and stimulating combat are brought down by some counterintuitive mechanics, it’s still a provocative tale about fate and the human condition that left me contemplating what it really means to be part of a family, and the sacrifices we make for the sake of those we love.

If Battlefield 4 were billed and priced as a multiplayer only affair, I’d give it a higher score. Unfortunately, the quality of the single player campaign really brings the overall experience down.

In the end, if you have enjoyed the wave of Kickstarter PC RPGs so far, then you will enjoy Torment: Tides of Numenera too. It will likely be a game that you want to finish, but it likely won’t be one that calls you back for a second or third journey.

The cause-and-effect puzzle elements are clever but require too much trial-and-error to be truly intuitive.

NHL 14 is a great game of hockey, and technically speaking its one of the best playing sports games on the market today. Sadly its foray into the new career mode, Live the Life, was extremely disappointing, and left me wanting more out of this year’s game. So if you’re looking for some great hockey this is a good choice, but there is still work to be done to improve the modes within it.

If you are a huge fan of this series, then you will no doubt get some enjoyment out of this title. You should keep your expectations in check, however, because it probably isn’t the type of compelling, lasting experience that will top your favorites list when all is said and done.

Teslagrad takes the single premise of magnetism and stretches it out through a good three to four hours of gameplay. The main character’s abilities to manipulate the environment pave the way for incredibly clever puzzles. Controlling the boy and moving objects aren’t always predictable or intuitive, making some challenges feel artificially difficult. Nevertheless, the title has made a positive jump over to the Nintendo Switch and is recommended for fans of 2D Metroidvania platformers.

Although not everyone will love its visual style, players looking for a decent baseball experience -- especially on the Xbox One -- should definitely give Super Mega Baseball 2 a few innings. It isn't without some issues, but overall it manages to capture the rhythm and fun of the sport in a pretty addictive way.

I enjoyed my time with Paradise Killer quite a bit as I do love the mystery/visual novel genre of games quite a bit. The game has a fresh look and a killer soundtrack, as well as a fairly good story with plenty to look into. As good as that might sound, I would still recommend any of the Danganronpa or Phoenix Wright titles over Paradise Killer, as the unpopulated world gets tiring to explore and back-loading all of the trials makes for some poor game pacing overall. Still, if you love the genre and are looking for your next fix, Paradise is waiting for you with open arms.

Downwell‘s a very slight game based around a great, fast-paced mechanic.

At the end of the day, Superflat Games have triumphed in creating an original title that both plays and looks as you expect. The way the story progresses is interesting, and there's enough gravity to player choices that it's worth a second play-through. If you've been longing for a survival horror experience that reminds you of the genre's glory days, you can't do any better for a budget price of $9.99. That is, if you're confident survival horror is just as immersive and fun to play as you remember it…

Overall, The Lion’s Song presents a poignant narrative adventure that aims to invoke strong emotions. While not every tale was fun to play, they each told fascinating character pieces focused on passionate creativity that actually drove me to introspection. Even for a point-and-click game, it is light on interaction and more akin to reading a book with dialogue choices. The drab presentation and dry plot may bore some, but those who appreciate good historical fiction will find there’s more to this game than its cover.

There are many gamers, I’m certain, who will not only enjoy Ghostrunner’s challenges but be perfectly happy with its demanding and repetitive mechanics. I enjoy challenge, too, but I also want to learn from my mistakes and maybe even succeed the first time around. Ghostrunner is a well-made game with a very specific intention, and there are players for whom this title will be Nirvana. Just not me.

Dream Team‘s bright and friendly world is an easy one to fall in love with, but by the time you reach the end, that love will have been tested repeatedly by uneven design and a lack of narrative follow-through. Many of its flaws could be reduced to its strict following of the series’ formula without expanding on what makes it endearing. Much like Luigi’s dreams, AlphaDream’s latest is a little pre-occupied with expectations of Big Bro.

The all too familiar Quick Time Event mechanic, featured prominently in “Catch A Ride,” is old and its age is made all the more noticeable because of the weak story. It’s also unfunny, hurt by technical issues, and fails to inject excitement in its own narrative, one that I still have no idea of where it’s planning to go.

My advice would be to rent Rage, it can be completed within a weekend and has a few great moments, just keep your expectations to a minimum.

The Jak and Daxter HD Collection is a nice little piece of history coded onto a disc.

Fans who just want more Far Cry 3 or have particular nostalgia for the 80′s could certainly find worse ways to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon, but you’ll have to hear some terrible jokes to get there.

The five new levels are excellent additions to the game’s collection of puzzle box dioramas, although they do nothing to change the formula. The remaining 13 challenges aren’t as worthwhile, and it wasn’t very fulfilling to trek back to remixed levels just to hunt Boos and collect crown shards. The inexpensive DLC is fairly priced, at least, even if you’re only interested in the novel areas. Just don’t go looking for a substantially game-changing experience, but rather a solid expansion of what made the original so great.

Soul Calibur V ultimately feels rushed. The modes are shadow of their normally robust nature, the character list has been reduced severely, and the net code is not as good as it should be. It seems like Namco was desperate to get in on the fighting game revival and rushed this out. I expect better from this series and with so many fantastic and cheaper fighting games out, such as King of Fighters XIII, Mortal Kombat 9, and even Soul Calibur IV, I cannot recommend the game to anyone but the most hardcore of Soul Calibur fans.

There’s fun to be had if you look for it, but if it’s a matter of choosing one group of tables over another, its certainly something I would take into account.

Hand of Fate 2 has a perfect home on the Nintendo Switch, as it is the perfect game to play between classes or just before going to sleep. The portability the Switch offers for a game like this is phenomenal and I could not see myself playing on any other system. However, I've never felt both so frustrated and so satisfied by a game before. I simultaneously want to keep playing it and also to never touch it again. As a result, I have no idea how to rate this. I guess I will rate it right down the middle, with a few bonus points for the truly amazing voice talent.

I would say to EA specifically that you have a lot of great ideas, but smooth it all out, develop more on the PS3 and use its strengths and get that frame rate up and consistent.

Maldita Castilla EX: Cursed Castile is very much a love letter that will satisfy people who yearn for the good ol’ days of arcade games; however, it carries with it the same kind of content, blemishes and all. There are no bugs or crippling design choices that ruin the game, but there’s little incentive to play it more than once unless you’re truly enraptured by the initial experience.

I would recommend this content to any fans of pinball or Ant-Man.

The game lacks depth, and is just too short to be enjoyed.

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered is a prime example of how to do a remaster well. Improved graphics modernize the experience, and modifiers help alleviate the grind issues. That said, I’ve always felt FFVIII needed real gameplay changes. It won’t get that in a remaster, and as such, those who didn’t like the game before won’t like it now. If what you disliked in the original was the grind, put your eyes on this remaster. And if you loved FFVIII in the past or are a curious newcomer, this is the best version of the game by far.

Skul: The Hero Slayer has a lot going for it, but it is also muddled with design issues. For all of its creative skull designs, interesting build options, and cool and flashy attacks, I found the experience as a whole to be draining. It’s a case where the core gameplay loop is hindered by its overbearing rogue elements. A genre reliant on repetition has to accommodate for it by offsetting the recursive elements of the game, no matter how good the combat is. Skul: The Hero Slayer is certainly enjoyable on occasion, but its roguelite ingredients ultimately harm the title as a whole.

Odds are there are better overall table packs out there for FX3. While the DOOM table is pretty excellent, it's difficult for me to recommend the pack that heavily because the other two tables just don't particularly give you much to go with. If you own those other and better packs and are just looking for more, then give this a go. Otherwise, I recommend reading some of our other pinball table pack reviews to see which ones are more worth your time.

Before long, you will notice that the sweat you once poured trying to get through brawlers like Streets of Rage and Final Fight is absent here. Instead of hailing your co-op partner to keep the fight going, you’re more likely to ask for a break sometime soon. There’s only so much of the repetitive action, no matter how sugarcoated it is, you can endure in a one playing session. Still, Misako and Kyoko are lovely girls, if sometimes outright half-wits. Games featuring dual female protagonists are few and far between so River City Girls must be appreciated for that alone.

The addition of mini-games and online mode are welcome, but the absence of upgrades to the gameplay and the lack of a career mode are huge downsides to the game.

Assassin's Creed Revelations will satisfy those who are looking for more of the same but if you're expecting some major innovations, prepare to be disappointed. Revelations isn't a bad game, but the experience no longer feels fresh.

The game has too many instances where things will be going great and you will be enjoying it and then you will be stuck having to get enough hero points to complete the chapter. The other big downside to the game is the fact that the enemies are more of an annoyance then a challenge.

Pix the Cat is a fun action title that features some quick gameplay, catchy music, and a vivid art style.

Overall, if you like difficult dungeon crawlers with a sharp challenge, there's an amazing amount of content packed in Strange Journey Redux. Personally, I found it a bit too difficult and tedious to appreciate the gameplay, but I thought the story was amazing and surprisingly deep. Overall, my feelings of the game are very mixed. I can appreciate how well constructed it is and how deep its many layers go, but personally I didn't find it very fun to play.

While the actual story felt like it was trying to drive me away from the action, Guns, Gore and Cannoli 2 kept me in by being a really stellar side-scroller. The shooting felt great, the environments were well-designed and chock full of enemies to beat, and the arenas were challenging without being cheap. Certainly not as sweet as its namesake overall, but you’d be crazy to turn down this cannoli without giving it a chance.

A passable entry in the long-running series, the latest Modern Warfare is polished but lacks creativity. It’s certainly more of the same as a return to a once-beloved sub-series. Sadly, it fails to invigorate and impress on the same level as the groundbreaking Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Still , the game has a dedicated fanbase and the developers undoubtedly cater to that crowd. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare lives up to the series as a whole, but ultimately fails to match up with the best of the sub-series it attempts reboot.

The single player is solid but doesn’t try a ton of new things, and the multiplayer is brand new but has plenty of room to grow. God of War: Ascension is a very well put together game and one made for fans of the series who want to get their Kratos fix in while we wait for the next true successor in the franchise.

Slain: Back from Hell was a master class example in teaching how to play well. Valfaris, on the other hand, doesn’t understand the same rewarding philosophy. Luck plays too big a part in beating all the hardship in Therion’s way, controls are unfortunately sloppy (again, it could be a console-specific issue) and the game even falls to punish players with its dubious risk/reward system. Valfaris looks great and at its best, can make your hands sweat when tackling its steep challenge but ultimately, for all that the game is, it more talks the talk than walks the walk.

It’s not a great option for those that already invested in MLB 14: The Show, in fact I probably wouldn’t recommend the upgrade. However if you’re new to the PS4 and want to enjoy a little of America’s past time this is one of the best sports games available on the PS4 today.

Still, if you loved Dishonored as much as I did, The Knife of Dunwall is worth your time; just be prepared for more of the same and less of the extraordinary. Except for Daud. Daud’s cool.

The narrative experiments are definitely awesome, but you can’t just put style over substance, especially when all the same problems return. Hitchy framerates, action sequences that hang too long and make you fail them at least once thanks to technical error, the fact that you want to say something but your character doesn’t give you the option.

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a reverent and imperfect resurrection of an icon. This furry oddball creature could have been left in the past, but I'm pleased that he was revived for a new generation. I say this in full awareness of the fact that Vicarious Visions could have done more in the technical and gameplay departments. Here we have two great games, and one that could have been great if given the update it truly needed. They look stunning, too, but resolution, framerates, and load times are all at an average standard when at least one of the three should be better. And yet, whether you find yourself zooming down a desert highway, running from a gigantic bear, or just bouncing over a bridge of crates, you can't help but smile and know that, at the end of the day, Crash is still a whole lot of fun.

It’s fairly obvious that a major reason for Samorost 3’s existence is to give its series some recognition as something other than a footnote to the rest of its developer’s work, and in that regard, it roundly succeeds. But after shaking off the “browser game” stigma, it merely continues its business as a temporarily enjoyable diversion.

If you’re a fan of SHMUPs or action games and platformers, I think the titles are here to be worth your time but for fans of other genres, it’s probably worth holding out to see what future events Capcom plans to hold in this stadium.

Combining some fascinating mechanics I've never seen in a card game with a lot of variety, there's plenty to recommend Faeria. Its held back however by poor tools to really learn the game and design decisions that just don't fit a portable console. Add in concerns for the future of the game and I'm nervous to invest too much more of myself into Faeria, but it may be too late for me to stop. It has that wonderful just one more game quality that will keep me firing it up. Just make sure you know what you're getting before you decide to follow me.

By the end it can be hard to care, even if the plot is far more interesting. Couple the mediocre story with the less than fulfilling gameplay, and you have an experience that drags to begin with in both story and gameplay, discouraging you from progressing, but once it picks up pace it is far more enjoyable and worth the trudge.

I wanted to love Reckoning. I really did. And don't get me wrong, it's a good game; I did enjoy it. But I also got really tired of playing it.

In terms of tactics and board games, and with the announcement of a bunch of other board game classics coming to the Switch, I can’t really think of a reason to pick up Armello in comparison. It’s alright, and a decent take on a fun way to represent an analog idea within video games, but the game itself doesn’t really have much to hold you beyond a couple of plays.

It builds a strong foundation on the gameplay front, offering up rewarding combat and simple skills, but doesn’t follow that with anything substantial, being content to let the standard end game grind and excellent-yet-stressful PVP try to cover all the questions its writing leaves you with.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a solid RPG with a strategic battle system and challenging dungeon-crawling, but it’s held back by its harsh reliance on grinding. Regardless, its slower playstyle can work in spurts thanks to the Nintendo Switch’s handheld mode, which works well aside from some lag. If you are a retro RPG fan who won’t mind the grind, the game’s worth checking out.