The simplicity of Super Rocket Shootout cannot be understated. It’s a good ‘ol jump in and have fun sort of situation with the gameplay. It tosses in some goodies here and there for variety, but ultimately it just wants you to have quick bouts of fun. That’s a concept I grew up with in the arcade days of gaming and this is a concept that works for me with Super Rocket Shootout. That doesn’t mean that I don’t believe it can’t be more, and it should, but as it stands it’s fun.

While Dragon's Crown remains the most refined and candid of Vanillaware's neo brawlers, it's absent of the range of improvements and adjustments that marked Odin Sphere Leifthrasir's transition to modern hardware. Dragon's Crown Pro is Dragon's Crown on the PlayStation 4 and it has no interest in being anything else.

Killing Floor: Incursion, while visually accomplished and very pretty, doesn’t have anything on its mind. We’re two years into commercial virtual reality and Killing Floor: Incursion is as plain as it is tired.

The game is a spectacular experience. It is masterfully crafted with the right amount of South Park driving it. It certainly has a few minor faults here and there, but it is built to entertain and it doesn’t falter in that area. It’s a big game with a properly built turn-based personality and it all works beautifully within its humorous South Park wrapper.

Virtual Rick-ality celebrates the existential comedy and breathless sociopathy of Rick and Morty. Like Job Simulator, it excels at creating natural space and filling it eccentric objectives and impulsive mischief. As a Rick and Morty product and a true second-generation VR title, Virtual Rick-ality is a comfortable calamity.

The core idea sounds fun and with a bit more polish and deepening of the Campaign Extinction could’ve been a pretty decent action-adventure hack-and-slash. As it is, it’s a poorly executed homage of far better games which, in all honesty, are far more worthy of your time.

I couldn’t help but think of how Santa Monica took the best of GoW as a franchise and melded it beautifully with the most distinguishable designs of other modern games to create something with an immensely potent synergy.

Bottom line is, Vandals is a fun game to have on your phone when you are trying to pass the time. Not a game where I am dying to play at any moment.

Fortnite: Battle Royale is now on mobile and it is not what we need. The subpar graphics, eh gameplay and the fact that you should play it on computer or console totally ruin the experience. Fortnite is the HOTTEST game in the world right now, moving it to iOS and soon Android is not going to make it any better.

Clusterpuck 99 is a good deal if you are playing with a large group of people. It’s simple enough that anyone can pick up on it. There are a variety of maps to play from. The game seems very polished and is obvious that thought was put into it. The A.I. could be adjusted a little bit to resemble a actual human opponent more. I would not recommend this game if you are playing alone due to this.

Island Time VR is a survival game deprived of effective resources. Elements that should be in great supply—variability, actionable materials, and available real estate—are reduced to a minimum, instead depending on the novelty of virtual reality for sustenance. With PlayStation VR's incapacity for a proper room-scale experience, Island Time VR is left out to starve.

Overall, the anime-inspired graphics, fantasy storyline, polished visuals, and various features could allow Chain Strike to become a go-to escape for gamers on the go. However, the expensive micro-transactions, long tutorial, and grindy nature of the game might put off some gamers as well.

MLB The Show 18 is another notch in the successful belt of the MLB series from San Diego Studio. It has better mechanics, more meaningful modes, a gorgeous presentation style and it just feels like what you would imagine a baseball game should feel like.

Far Cry 5 offers plenty for fans of the series, with a few new fun additions. The mission design is a little underwhelming, but it's a lot of bombastic fun. Eden's Gate and Joseph Seed are the best villains in the series to date.

Overall, Indygo, while certainly nothing groundbreaking with mechanics, is a frightfully accurate portrayal of what happens in the mind of someone suffering from depression. The narrative is clearly more important than the game’s mechanics, and that shows at times, but the combination of mechanics, dialogue choice and acting help to push the message about how devastating depression can be for an individual suffering from it. Go and get this, folks. It’s a helluva experience.

Sea of Thieves’ concept is beautifully drawn up. It has exploration, intense PvP and one of the most beautiful sea adventures to ever grace gaming, but it is lacking in content and it needs more reason to keep players moving and exploring. It has plenty of space on its plate for that, but in its vanilla form there’s nothing really to fill that space. I suspect that won’t be the case for long, if Rare has anything to say, but that is the current case now.

A wonderful story mixed in with entertaining and truly original co-op experience. It was such thrilling time to be playing a game that required teamwork. The main story is good, but then a major twist that pushes the story even deeper makes the game even better. Leo and Vincent's polar opposite personalities come together and offer for fun dialogue. A Way Out's beautiful design and thrilling gameplay bring back the fun times of binge playing a game on the couch with your best friend.

Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom is a triumph that successfully blends JRPG with components of kingdom building, third person action, and real-time strategy. It tells an interesting story with intriguing characters and the presentation quality from the in-game visuals, cutscenes, soundtrack, even the menus, are masterfully done. Whether you played the original NNK or not, Revenant Kingdom is highly recommended.

The American Dream presents a slice of Americana in which guns are fetishized to their idiotic maximum; guns for cooking, guns for dancing, guns for marrying, and guns for childbirth. While The American Dream’s action is adjacent to conventional VR shooting galleries, its vicious political commentary satirizes gun culture and leaves no survivors. The obliteration of reality appears to be a natural side effect of defending the indefensible.

Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition brings a nice set of content to a two-year old experience, which includes an extended map, a new/awesome action in Armiger Unleashed, new vehicles to work with and a more open world feel to it all.

Yakuza 6 applies themes of fatherhood and masculinity as coping mechanisms for intense interpersonal drama. While it surrenders the sweeping ambition that defined Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 5, it feels sharper, more focused, and more honest about its intentions.

Candleman: The Complete Journey is a very nicely developed 3D platformer that has a great hook or gimmick that it introduces immediately and utilizes throughout. For $15, it presents a good value for anyone that is seeking a clever, charming, accessible, and fun platformer.

Battlezone: Combat Commander is a Wing Commander-like experience in a tank. It features a neat story, updated graphics, and some gameplay that might not quite achieve the longevity of entertainment that it desires. It does contain some interesting features to try and keep the gamer engaged, but depending on expectations of the gamer will equal out to whether that engagement holds up.

Frantics is a fun four-player party game that does its beset imitation of being a Mario Party lite. It’s engaging, fun, at times frustrating, but nonetheless a good addition to the PlayLink game family.

Subsurface Circular is worth your attention. It’s well-priced, and offers a unique and compelling experience from start to finish which you can very reasonably achieve in a single sitting. The game is concise, but leaves little to be desired, making it a solid value.

All in all, this Secret of Mana HD remake is a mixed offering. Opportunities to take an aged classic and keep the best parts and refine the not-so-great parts were largely left undone. The result is a game that still carries a lot of merit, but has enough flaws and setbacks that hold it back from realizing it’s full potential, and it makes it a frustrating choice for consumers. Perhaps if the budget and desire are there — and I’m not sure they are — some patching could go a long way to making this remake more robust.

Overall, the Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 Plus release for the Nintendo Switch is a one-up on all the other releases of the game previously. It has the original game very much intact and this new ‘plus’ game that turns the established gameplay design on its head (in a good way). Two beautiful forms of frustrating entertainment in one must-have package for the Nintendo Switch.

Jettomero: Hero of the Universe­ offsets despair with panicky optimism and traps the ensuing fallout inside of a dizzy planet-obliterating robot. It's an alien venue for exploring the range and control of depression, but also one that expresses comfort and warmth along its journey. Resolution, through either perception or reality, casts Jettomero as a sympathetic hero negotiating inescapable desolation.