Square Enix and HexaDrive sought to introduce fresh mechanics to set The 3rd Birthday apart from its peers, but they forgot to center a cohesive game around their collection of neat ideas. Much like its protagonist, too often The 3rd Birthday is caught with its pants down.

It brings a relaxing gameplay design that is geared more towards exploration, rather than sci-fi action. In addition to exploration, it has a healthy crafting system, an interesting monetary structure that adds extra motivation, and an endless amount of adventures and secrets to uncover along the way.

Sadly I didn’t put much time into “Beat Cop”. While the game is amazing in its detail and design, the game actually starts to feel like a job! I can attribute this mostly to my own taste and opinion. I can still appreciate some of the nuance this game offers. I think “Beat Cop” deserves an 8.5 for being strong enough to captivate anyone who craves good character development and witty dialogue.

Crossfire: Sierra Squad from Smilegate Entertainment is an arcade shooter that works in VR with its intense firefights and short stints of gameplay. While the gameplay is finite, especially with its linear backbone and restrictive areas of play, it still contains some charm that may remind VR owners that fun experiences are still out there.

A welcomed release on the PS4 that is a blast with friends for satisfying, short player sessions.

Fighting game fans should endeavor to at least try All-Star Battle before dismissing it on the grounds of not knowing anything about JoJo's universe. On the other hand, JoJo's fans have ample reason to support Namco and CyberConnect2 by picking this one up.

Ultimately while this theme of epic revenge may ring familiar, CyberConnect2 has done an excellent job with their specific story details and in how they present it. Asura's Wrath is maybe just a little bit too hands off for my tastes, but I had an absolute blast from start to finish.

For a game so persistently engrossed in outlandish destruction, it[s] accompanying structure is surprisingly sound.

NHL 24 is definitely a step back in the right direction. The advances in on-ice play make it worth your time no matter what happens. HUT and CHEL continue to evolve for the better and are a good way to grow online play. While there are still some negative spots for the game, this is still worth the price of a ticket to play in the NHL and makes me feel excited for the future.

As gameplay goes, Knowledge is Power is, for the most part, fun. I think the game moves just a little slow in between rounds, as I found myself trying to skip dialogue and get us into the next question quickly, but the animation and the way you can really screw with opponents is clever, as are the variety of questions given. The price tag isn’t bad either, as the game comes in at $19.99, certainly a price worth paying for some good trivia. I would play this game at home with the kids/wife, and I intend to do so during the holiday break, so it does have some longevity to it. All in all, though, and at least in my opinion, this game does a good job of bringing back memories of 3DO’s Twisted, which I consider the best trivia game to date. I know people want to crown You Don’t Know Jack, but Twisted for me.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of 'Cold, Cold Heart' rides solely on your level of fatigue with the core gameplay mechanics in the Arkham series.

If you have yet to play Deadly Premonition, the Director's Cut is the way to go. And go you should, as this is an excellent game that should not be missed.

Don’t Stop, Girlypop! from developer Funny Fintan Softworks is a jewel in the crown of fast-paced shooters. It brings good level design, excellent boss design, and throws in fantastic music that helps push the gameplay along. While not everything works with the game, it’s still quite fun to run-and-gun with this one.

With Red Faction: Armageddon I got the sense that Volition was really excited about creating a few segments and merely obliged their responsibility to fill in the gaps. There was nobility to be found in breaking the core design away from the success of Guerrilla, but the shift in dynamic ultimately irrelevant in the final product. Armageddon can be fun, but its linearity casts it alongside other (and better) games rather than a bold new direction for the series.

I’d recommend waiting to bite on this one for a few more months until things are really ironed out and tuned. It’s not like we don’t all have a ton of other things to play anyway — but the state of LOTF right now is just too technically unsound to give it a glowing thumbs up. There’s still a great game undernearth all the mess if you can survive the bugginess, but give it a little more time to ripen for now and I think you’ll be glad you did.

Crackdown 2 is as fun and addictive as the original. It may not be the sequel everyone was hoping for, but if you enjoyed the original you will find plenty to like here. Easily one of the best games of the summer, and one I will be playing for a long time to come.

Sonic Frontiers from Sonic Team has all the right moves with controls, level design, looks, feel, and structure. What it needs to work on is making the game more pointed in its narrative and flowing without interruption. This game has a great skeleton, now all it requires is some solid content to fill some of that narrative disconnect. It contains some great elements, but it’s far from perfect.

A solid entry to the 3DS' eShop, Fractured Soul offers plenty of challenging action platforming gameplay for a fair price.

LEGO Horizon Adventures from developer Studio Gobo and Guerrilla brings the lighter side of drama from the Horizon series to the LEGO universe. While it is a short and hilarious retelling of Aloy’s adventures, the overall gameplay is repetitive in its level structure but still is very much a LEGO adventure at its core. A younger gaming audience might appreciate this more than an older one.

oOo: Ascension is a great puzzle game that focuses less on huge, high-budget components to distract the gamer, and more on clever gameplay design that is entertaining as it is challenging. It squarely emphasizes great puzzle design to each level that brings something new from orb to orb, while encouraging the gamer to keep going from level to level as it becomes more difficult. That’s a good puzzle game, ladies, and gentlemen, and one you should check out.

Motorslice from developer Regular Studio is a huge game that has a thick layer of good world-building that will hook and engage players throughout the experience. It also has tricky parkour that is hindered by loose controls at times, and a shallow sense of direction once the player gets going.

Fight Crab is one of the funniest and entertaining fighting games I’ve ever played. Although it may seem like a simple idea, the game is very enjoyable especially when using gyro controls and moving your arms to fight your opponents!

This is a unique product because it has toys-to-life elements but refuses to push players down that path if they don’t want to. Though the gameplay loop can grow repetitive over a long play sessions, the fact that players have so many customization options and a beautiful world at their hands keeps most frustrations away. Ubisoft Toronto has a vision for this game and it’s apparent there are more stories to tell since each character of the Equinox brims with personality. Space is a vast expanse, full of new worlds to explore and toys to make.

The general clunkiness of the controls is honestly kind of disappointing to re-experience so many years later, but just as was the case all those years ago, DPO is still a heck of a fun time that out does itself in as far as the overall experience is better than the sum of the parts. That’s a cliche maybe, but it so fittingly applies here I can’t help but call upon it. Bottomline, if your only console option right now is a Switch, you can’t go wrong with DPO, just as long as you go in expecting a dated, but nonetheless very much worthwhile, experience. Otherwise, I’d highly recommend playing the Director’s Cut release from 2013 on the PS3.

The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition ultimately improves the game for the better, I imagine. Because I never interacted with the game prior to this experience, I can only sympathize with the frustrations other players went through and wonder if the updates will entice them to return. While key improvements seem to have been introduced to make core features better, fundamental quirks exist that detract from making it a top-tier Metroidvania. Snappier or not, combat is still quite slow and forgettable, leaving the puzzles and the universe the most appealing aspects of an otherwise intriguing game.

Dead Rising 3's inability to operate without consistently crashing wasn't a simple technical shortcoming, but rather a comprehensive failure that came to damage and define every aspect of its experience. Looking back on my time with Dead Rising 3, I'm not thinking of open-world mayhem under the stress of a cataclysmic time crunch, but rather the ugly and sudden halt of everything I found enjoyable in the intended game.

Maneater perfectly embodies the fantasy of being a super-powerful shark to great effect, even if there are some small technical issues and rough-around-the-edges gameplay decisions. It never overstays its welcome and is fun to devour a few hours here and there.

Papo & Yo should be commended and will be remembered for wearing its heart on its sleeve.