With an emphasis on player choice, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has leapt to new heights, truly becoming a full open-world RPG. The fluid parkour and engaging stealth mechanics are still here, joined by enhanced combat and progression systems established by its recent predecessors. With a beautiful recreation of ancient Greece, a compelling story of intriguing mysteries and intrepid characters, and genuinely exciting moments, this odyssey remains engaging throughout. It’s easy to recommend this epic journey to veterans and newcomers alike, but of course, the choice is yours.

Even with small small gripes, I found the overall package of The Golf Club 2019 to be a huge step in the right direction. I dug far deeper into this year’s outing than any other in this series. HB Studios has really tightened up the core mechanics, and now with the PGA license and an amazing suite of customizable tools, the series has nothing but upside. If you’re like me and have been craving to hit the digital links again, I highly recommend giving The Golf Club 2019 a look.

Though lacking in polish in some areas and simply outclassed by the NBA 2K series in others, NBA Live 19 seems to have finally carved the series a niche in the basketball game market. It’s less of an NBA game and more of a street basketball one, but if the modes that come out of this transition are this fun, what’s the problem?

Directors Raoul Barbet and Michel Koch have gone the extra mile to create better realized characters, a more believable setting, and continue to tackle sensitive topics - elements that once again separate Life Is Strange from other games in this genre. Roads delivers a strong first impression and bringing the DONTNOD band back together for another run has gone a long way to make this episode feel as special as the first season. Life Is Strange is back and it’s off to a great start.

The repetitiveness of the obstacles, the cheap deaths, the annoyance of later platforming sequences set in low gravity, frequent trial and error, and the time it takes to pass through elongated hallways that connect puzzle rooms and platform set pieces all contribute to making the whole thing a bit too tedious and empty for my liking. Now that I think about it, if Planet Alpha were an animated short, I think I’d like it a lot more because the visual storytelling is far more interesting than anything else.

Transference is equipped with a fascinating premise that suffers from a substantial disconnect because there’s no apparent connection between the Hayes and you, the player. Who are you supposed to be? How did you stumble onto this simulation? Is this supposed to be some new twist on the “found footage” genre? Tying the player into the narrative to some degree would have gone a long way to make me feel more attached, involved, and invested in these people’s lives and why they matter outside of the empathy you develop in seeing them suffer from Raymond’s apparent physical and mental abuse.

All things considered, I had a great time with Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna – The Golden Country. However, it’s not necessarily because of what changed. While I liked the streamlined and more fluid combat, that’s balanced out by the Community system’s atrocious padding. I simply enjoy the expansion because it offers more from a game world that I loved, just on a a smaller scale. It also introduces a likable mature cast of characters with a truly dramatic narrative. The Torna expansion doesn’t just offer a novel chapter to the Xenoblade Chronicles mythos, it presents an easy, digestible way for both newcomers and veterans to enter an engaging fantasy.

Playground Games continues to set the standard in the genre and Forza Horizon 4 is no different. This is open world driving at its absolute finest. The spectacular visuals and stellar roster of cars are great, but the shared world and new weather system is really what makes this one of the best open world racing games this decade.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a great fit on the Nintendo Switch. The portable nature of the game makes it easy to use at a party or game night, while the game's tense nature and challenging, randomized puzzles offers plenty of exciting fun for those willing to learn the game's ins and outs. At 15 bucks, there aren't much better party games you can get than Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Despite some of my gripes, the sum on the whole is a positively bloody good time.

It successfully evokes the feel of playing a classic table-top RPG like no other game before. It encourages you to be imaginative, and rewards your curiosity with appropriate depths and details. This game is a masterpiece you shouldn’t miss.

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent’s Curse doesn’t revolutionize adventure games, nor will it particularly appeal to players who aren’t used to slower point-and-click gameplay. However, it succeeds in following the developer’s vision for the series: a modern update in the style of the original. The puzzles may have logic jumps, and the story’s action ebbs and flows. But the witty characters, perplexing mysteries, and traditional problem-solving are enough to win over fans of the genre.

Mini Metro is a really good game for unwinding, even with the more challenging modes and moments of high stress that pop when a poorly placed station suddenly appears. In a way, it’s a sim-without-the-sim, and a management game about managing very little. The UI is crisp and clean, the gameplay satisfying, and while the game doesn’t really do much to motivate you to keep playing aside from going “hey, beat your high score!”, it’s fun enough that you’re going to fire it up to try and make a longer lasting and more efficient metro line anyways.

Fans of the genre and science fiction in general should check out Elea. After all, there are never too many mind-tickling sci-fi games out there.

If you’re expecting The Bard’s Tale IV to be an action-RPG on par with some recent blockbusters, you may be disappointed. This is not a cinematic experience with bleeding edge graphics and breathless action and combat. However, if you approach the game as a super-enhanced, classic dungeon crawler that both fits into the legacy and moves the needle on a well-respected, beloved franchise, then you will be pleased by its story, puzzles, nuanced combat, excellent music and varied environments.

Downward Spiral: Horus Station is an atmospheric game that feels like the video game equivalent of Aram Khachaturian’s exceptionally melancholic Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite used during the Discovery montage from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I never knew exploring and interacting with derelict space vessel in VR was my jam - and it totally is now.

You owe it to yourself to give Hyper Light Drifter a go. It’s an incredible game with a wonderful look and feel to every part of it. It’s beautiful, looking great on the Switch’s screen, and can be surprisingly enveloping as an experience even as you take it to louder, crowded public areas. Every new area and experience was a delight to me, and I kept taking screenshots all the way through. It’s a challenge, but every moment was worth it.

Although the option to play a variety of starting puppets and see the story beats change nudges up the replayability factor, Shadows: Awakening does become repetitive. There are moments where characters feel unbalanced, and load times can border on egregious. Overall, though, Shadows: Awakening breaks the mold of the action RPG and reshapes it in some entertaining ways while still retaining enough of the genre to appeal to fans.

It would be legitimate to complain that Dragon Quest XI and the franchise as a whole has not evolved much, and less patient players may balk at the game’s grind-heavy, deliberate pace and missing features like save-anywhere systems, tactical positioning or even character models that don’t reflect worn armor. It’s important to note that while these design decisions are debatable, their implementation in Dragon Quest XI is deliberate, and the game’s overall polish and presentation is excellent. Taken on its own terms, the good-natured characters, interesting story, colorful visuals and exciting combat add up to a very specific, but immensely enjoyable, experience.

The superficial nature of the visual novel format is strange, considering this series would be perfect for the genre given the size of its character roster and the high stakes confrontations between the different good and evil shinobi schools. What we get instead is a half-assed story connected by a monotonous mini-game. A total bust (not that kind).

I can recognize that Salt and Sanctuary is a well-constructed game and that there’s a lot of depth and challenge here for those that crave such things from their entertainment. It just isn't for me and I don’t think it ever will be, as I'm not the target gamer here. From that perspective, I can't give this game any less than 4 stars. It delivers on everything a fan of the Souls series would crave, and does so with style. If that's your thing, dive right in there and go conquer some brutally tough fights.

There’s a lot of promise to Morphies Law, but there’s also a lot of frustration for the ways it fails to meet this promise. As you play it, you find yourself noticing more and more things that feel like they should be there to help you enjoy what the developer came up with, but it’s not there, so it winds up feeling empty, lifeless, and unclear as to what you’re doing. A cool idea will get you partway there, but without the right follow-through, it just winds up being a game you’re not interested in playing much longer.

Despite all my gripes with the game, I still can recommend Detective Gallo. It really starts to take flight as it goes on, and it has a greatly paced plot. The hard-boiled detective Gallo was a lot of fun to play as, and the surrounding cast and environments all blended well together. The typical difficulty of the genre does rear its head at times, but fairly linear progression makes it manageable. Detective Gallo is definitely a game that you’ll want in your lib-rooster-y.

The variety of puzzles and things you do helps break it up so you’re not just endlessly trying to combine items to win, and you never really feel lost about what your goal is, which is a big plus for an adventure game in my book. It’s in these more traditional parts that it’s a little too slow and simple, though. Unfortunately, this slower, simpler stuff is what takes up the bulk of the experience.

You could also argue that switching between two screens is only a gimmick but the game is completely built upon it. Without this to make it stand out, Dimension Drive would be just another shooter. Thankfully, the fight over indie players’ hearts demands developers to come up with new ideas to separate their games from the crowd. Dimension Drive succeeds at that and it’s gratifying to see the game grow during its course beyond its trick.

If Uncharted rose to fame with weapons it stole from washed-out Tomb Raider (before its reboot), Shadow of the Tomb Raider grabs them back, making it visually and gameplaywise the most essential action-adventure you can imagine. It not only builds upon the series legacy, it goes to its roots and successfully brings back the exploration that we were busy not to even notice was missing while tackling through many exciting action set pieces of the previous games. Doing so, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the most poignant entry in the long series since the very first game.

Whether as history lesson, exercise in nostalgia, or appetizer to the upcoming fourth entry to the series, The Bard's Tale Trilogy remains engaging. It requires a lot of patience and attention to detail and a special love of character micromanagement and, although the rerelease is more colorful than the original, the graphics and core gameplay are still rooted in the limitations of 1980s technology. Playing The Bard's Tale Trilogy is a reminder that while games have achieved cinematic production values that rival anything from Hollywood, they don't always fire the imagination the way that the less graphically accomplished adventures often did.

Blade Strangers may not be as flashy or intricate as more established fighting games, but it’s fully featured in game modes as opposed to most other recent titles (I’m looking at you, BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle!). It also serves both the newcomers and beat ‘em up enthusiasts alike with its elementary but flexible gameplay.