God Eater 2: Rage Burst is a great mission based action experience. It’s the added narrative and characterisation that makes it more than just another Monster Hunter-like grindfest for better equipment to take on bigger monsters with. They even provide sunglasses, so you get to look cool while doing it all.

Sword Coast Legends offers up a solid version of Dungeons & Dragons, with a campaign and setting that were immediately appealing to me and plenty of user content already filling the community. This sort of content will be enormously valuable in giving Sword Coast Legends life beyond its campaign. However, limited tools hold this title back from greatness on the editing front, while its clear Diablo and Dragon Age influences may rub D&D purists the wrong way.

As some light fun and a very different kind of VR experience, Tethered is ridiculously charming, bright, happy stuff.

I love the JRPG genre, and while the turn-based and slightly grindy nature of the combat likely will not bring new fans to the series, I found it comfortable and accessible to play.

There’s a lot to admire in this game, and it only gets better once you’ve hit the end and are ready for the extra mode, where you’ll be able to really test out your mastery of the combat and ‘crawling. Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon is entertaining stuff. It's neither the perfect dungeon crawler nor the most stand-out visual novel, however, the blend of the two, coupled with the strong anime license leveraged with the greatest of competencies, still make this one a very solid time-filler.

I'm surprised Konami hasn't taken the opportunity to develop a free-to-play Yu-Gi-Oh! game, given how well suited the free-to-play model is for the genre, but as a very old-school approach to digital CCG, this is a decent effort that will appease Yu-Gi-Oh fans, and perhaps even convert one or two new ones.

If you've never played Puzzle Quest before, The Legend Returns will be a nice surprise. Sitting underneath that humble presentation is a game with an awful lot of content to it. Existing fans would do well to jump in and remind themselves why Puzzle Quest is such a great game, as this release on Switch suggests, to the very subtitle of the name, that it's an active franchise again, and we may well see a new one in the near future. However, it's clear that Puzzle Quest is aging with anything but grace, so The Legend Returns also shows that this next Puzzle Quest, should it come, will need to do things significantly differently to have the same impact.

Uurnog Uurnlimited is a Nifflas game through and through, but unless you’re a diehard fan of his puzzle design philosophy, this isn’t a game which will win you over.

Supporting a good, albeit simple narrative between the four protagonists, Croixleur Sigma provides a solid, fast-paced, three dimensional roguelike brawler experience.

Total War: Rome was the really big breakout moment for the series, and as a bona fide classic, the remaster makes sense - even if it is just for the sake of nostalgia. I don't think the strategy genre necessarily lends itself to modernisation when the thing that needs moderising the most would have taken Rome Remastered and turned it into Total War: Rome 3, but if you remember what it's like to enjoy older strategy games like Rome, the remaster is going to be quite the rush.

A chess champion won't be too challenged, but more casual fans of the game will be...It's just a pity that the online is so inefficient on the Wii U. As I said at the start; Pure Chess is the least version of a very, very fine game indeed.

Should sequels never see the light of day, One’s Justice is still excellent comfort food for fans of the series.

Princess Maker 3 is both funny and charming, and the core gameplay loop, limited as it is, is compelling if only because there are so many different endings to aim for that the game both encourages and rewards people that experiment with it. I'm often in the mood for simple but rewarding gameplay loops over stuff that is overly complex and exhausting, and I can see myself coming back to Princess Maker for quite some time to come.

At first glance, Polaris Sector does not look like anything terribly new or innovative. While it does not reinvent the proverbial strategy genre wheel, credit is due for some of the more innovative systems and balanced, clean UI.

Dawn of War III feels like a little bit of every other game that the franchise has churned out so far, but whether or not it will stand the test of time is uncertain; I’m already having trouble pinpointing anything particularly memorable about the campaign that doesn’t involve particular factions having really cool units. Being a fan, I probably hold this game a little closer to my heart than others will. Perhaps those keeping it at arm’s-length will be far enough away to not notice the imperfections.

Street Fighter V looks and plays exactly like how you'd expect any instalment in the series to, but there's something unfinished about it, something that makes you feel the series has taken a giant step backward.

There’s so much to like about Inescapable. The concept is solid and the developers seem to have had the right intentions. The vision is there. It’s also horny as anything and why the heck not? We don’t really have a Danganronpa-like that made the obvious observation that a bunch of super-hot young adults, trapped in a kind of “paradise,” are almost certainly going to get it on. It’s just unfortunate that this is a 15-hour game that takes about 10 hours to start getting to the point, and from start to finish it’s simply not written well enough to demand the player sit through that.

The core game is a lot of fun. I know I always end up saying this, but I prefer kicking back to play games on my lounge TV rather than at a PC. As a casual, streamlined take on the 4X genre, with a nice fantasy vibe to boot, I expect I’ll be keeping this on rotation for quite some time to come.

I think that perhaps it’s the trappings of the autorunner genre which holds Earthnight back from greatness. This is a game with wildly original ideas that kept me enthralled throughout, but I did keep wishing that it would slow down and give the player some time to breathe. Endless runners are fun and all, but they’re not the kind of game which encourages careful appreciation. For that reason, occasionally the artwork and gameplay clashed against each other (the detailed art doesn’t make for immediately readable game mechanics, the game mechanics detract from the detail of the art) and I felt that Earthnight was lesser than the sum of its parts.

Ultimately what sets Battle Cats apart from the many (many) similar games of similar depth and strategy is that hugely creative edge. This game gets to be the distinctive and memorable example of the genre because the artists had the sense to do something that makes no sense, but we end up looking forward to each new level just to see the insanity that it brings.

Long term the WWE series will probably have to consider updating or even replacing its engine. The game mechanics are solid, but fundamentally do not change a great deal and there are signs of rickety infrastructure in the audio, some of the modes and more. There is still a lot of fun to be had with the enjoyable action, and I loved the focus on narrative around MyCareer, but most of the other stuff feels largely the same.

Aside from a few annoyances and occasionally unfair difficulty, I found myself always coming back for more with FlatOut 4, and one hour would often turn into three-hour play sessions. It was just plain fun to play, and sometimes a game doesn't need to be more than that.

It’s fast, furious, and often frustrating. Slave Hero X is what it wants to be, and in principle, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s just that Slave Hero X also does little to stand out within its little niche. The original is a cult classic, and perhaps this will be too, especially among the collectors for the new physical edition. If I were a betting person, however, I’d be inclined to argue that it will be simply forgotten.

The Marvelous Miss Take is so good because it’s a rare thing in games - it's a unique twist on an established formula. You're forced to think far more cleverly if you want to see success in this game than most stealth games, and it's the better for it.

Another reason I believe in the game’s promise: the character interactions and voice cast are absolutely phenomenal.

What lets Uno down is the online infrastructure. There aren’t many players, for a start, and it hurts the appeal of playing online when it ends up being against one human player and two AI. You may as well just play the single player, especially considering how frequently drop outs happen. Conveniently this happens most frequently when the other human player is close to losing. There doesn’t seem to be a punishment in place for that. At least AI players have honour.

Sakura Dungeon is, ultimately, a fan service delivery mechanism. But it’s one that doesn’t overlook the need to also be an enjoyable game. Were you to remove the fan service, the no-frills approach to dungeon crawling would still be enjoyable. Not exceptional, no, but still enjoyable. The Switch version is inferior to the PC release from a half-decade ago because there isn’t the option for the adults-only version that some would prefer, but that aside, if you’re content with “all ages” fan service and a genuinely good dungeon crawl backing it up, then you can do far worse than this.

Forced is actually a really good game. The mechanics of it all work rather well, co-op is fun if more than one person is up for punishment. Beta Dwarf has done a good job of making simple mechanics and turning them into a complex game of hand-eye coordination, skill and a little bit of luck mixed in for good measure.