God Wars is too Japanese in tone, aesthetic and design to ever have much of a hope of reaching a mainstream audience, but as a culturally relevant artifact, anyone who is interested in seeing how a game can explore ancient folk tales and spirituality in an interesting and engaging manner should not pass up this opportunity.

Martyr succeeds in giving players an action RPG experience that manages to combine the action of a 'Diablo clone' with the Warhammer 40K license. It has a great skills system that's tied to the equipment you use, rather than just the experience level, and that makes playing around with the copious amounts of loot that you'll be earning very enjoyable. If only the execution of the game were as consistent and reliable as the design, and if only the developers had have put more effort into the optimisation for console.

My Farm is so painfully bland and poorly structured that it doesn't work on any level, for any purpose.

Even if puzzle games aren't your thing, it's worth fighting through its obstacles and frustrations—or using a guide to carry you through, which I ended up resorting to—in order to experience Flood of Light's beautiful, melancholic yet hopeful vision of a post-climate change world.

It's a bloody brilliant game.

By drawing inspirations from Mexican culture respectfully, the development team have created a tight platformer that includes some very clever writing and satirical looks at other games in the genre, and it is quite possibly one of the best platformers of 2018.

It's a rare example of where the randomisation of the roguelike structure doesn't feel like a lazy excuse to ignore level design. Rather, it provides a canvas to allow some of the cleanest and engaging tactical action that we've seen in quite some time play out.

If nothing else, the simple reality that Shenmue is again a living franchise is, all by itself, something truly amazing.

If only the rest of the game could live up to those visuals. Crossing Souls works just fine as a vessel for rose-tinted '80s nostalgia, but shallow storytelling and gameplay that shifts from uninteresting to outright frustrating ensures that it never gets to be anything more than that.

There’s not much wrong with We Happy Few that can’t be fixed with some patches, and regardless of what happens there, the game has a narrative that is brave, intelligently crafted, and so incredibly poignant.

Phantom Doctrine did come out of nowhere to become a truly enjoyable and memorable experience. If you had have told me six months ago that it would be possible to take the pulp sci-fi, raw entertainment of XCOM and apply it to a Cold War espionage narrative, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s exactly what has been delivered here, though, and I hope it has the chance to surprise plenty of other people.

When everything's working smoothly, Titan Quest is a very enjoyable game. It doesn't push any boundaries (it's more than a decade old now, after all), but it runs the classic Diablo formula well, with plenty of depth for character builds and a stunning world to explore.

That mental barrier aside, however, The Amazing Shinsengumi really is an lovely little bit of storytelling.

Ōkami is truly one of the most incredible games ever crafted, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you look at it as a "Zelda clone". Look past that and look closely at the story it's telling, the symbology, and where the game got its ideas from. Ōkami is to video games what something like Spirited Away is to film; it's not only beautiful and powerful, but it speaks to the very core of the Japanese soul, and because of that it's hugely educational to anyone that has an interest in the country and its culture.

I came away from this year's version of the game convinced that the development team put its focus on the right area. That is to say, the gameplay. The results are obvious, and for those who decry the annual release cycle as nothing but a roster update, they are not giving enough credit to the locomotion improvements and continuing Longshot story.

For such a cheap little game I had plenty of fun with it, and blew through it well before I got bored with it.

Beyond that it's surprisingly slim pickings. In that context, SubaraCity is a genuinely worthwhile little game; it's enjoyable, relaxing, and for the most part well designed.

An amazingly done port. Graphics alone could be cause for some to leave the consoles behind in order to view this world the way that it really should be, but for others, it could be the start to the series that you’ve been waiting for as it makes itself easy to slide into and is now available on the PC.

Salt and Sanctuary is a solid homage to its blatant source of inspiration. It doesn't supplant its predecessors, but it does an admirable job nonetheless, and offers players a moody, intricate, and fundamentally enjoyable dark fantasy experience.

Whereas any other series would be derided for a sequel that was merely more of the same, Overcooked 2 demonstrates the series’ strong core mechanics and delivers another stellar experience to be had with friends. There is a very clear vision here, and it works on every front.

There's nothing inherently wrong with Crush Your Enemies. It's presented nicely, has some nice, clean mechanics and is cleverly designed to be playable in short bursts of time. But it's also a strategy game that struggles to encourage players to be strategic, and its best feature, the multiplayer, is dead on release. A complete misfire in making the humour relient on stereotypes that grew old a thousand comedic games ago also doesn't help in giving Crush Your Enemies anything but a brief moment of forgettable fun.

This is going to be a short review, because Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku is effectively unplayable.

It's pretty in a generic manner, and has enough content that it will satisfy people that don't much care for creativity. But there is a point where a homage becomes a flat-out copy, and sadly, Tanzia simply doesn't seem to care that it's so brazen in its "influences."

I’ll be committed to Train Sim World for quite some time, I suspect. Give me some DLC train routes through Asia (especially Japan), and I’ll be all the happier. Give me one or two routes of the Sydney network and I’ll buy them just to gloat to Sydney Trains that it is possible to deliver passengers to their stops without a three hour delay. I’m oddly proud of my virtual train driving skills.

Banner Saga 3 is the appropriate swan song of the trilogy; hopeful, mournful, and utterly breathtaking.

A nostalgic experience that is worth playing if you are a fan of the 16-bit JRPG era. The cast is full of wonderful characters, the plot interesting and the battle system engaging. The whole game is wrapped up in a ten-twelve hour experience which was the perfect length to see the story out.

Not only is it hugely enjoyable in its own right, focused as it is one one of the most dramatic moments in living memory, but it has also managed to completely upstage an Academy Award-winning film that looked at the same moment in history.

Thematic problems aside however, the plot is filled with enough twists and turns to stay interesting throughout the game’s expansive runtime, and while the individual visual-novel segments might start to grate, they do a good job of breaking down the dungeoneering.