Photographs is a beautiful adventure that isn’t afraid of tackling difficult themes, and it doesn’t come across melodramatic or disingenuous. It isn’t a happy game, but there’s a lot to love with how it introduces sympathetic characters, worlds that are ripe with detail, and puzzles that bring a satisfying challenge.

Thanks to new avenues of play and smart restructuring decisions, MLB 19 The Show is once again a contender that is worthy of your time both offline and on. Iteration has paid off for this series in a big way, and it’s nice to see Sony taking chances with new ideas again.

Battle for the Grid has a few things going for it, like some decent animation and visuals for its characters, but the package as a whole is every bit as underwhelming as the Power Ranger titles that have come before it.

Naturally, building and managing a city should take work, and Tropico 6’s work can be rewarding. Unfortunately, some accomplishments are bogged down by the slow pace of building and production and a repetitive campaign. You can build an idyllic getaway, but you can’t walk down these streets without tripping over a few potholes.

Seeing Clementine’s story end is bittersweet. For anyone who has cared about her fate, it’s worth seeing if she can survive the terrible odds or if she’s doomed to travel the same path as Lee, but just know that you are likely to come away with mixed feelings.

Frankly speaking, Generation Zero feels unfinished. A massive trail of narrative bread crumbs exists for players that might culminate in a great yarn about this robotic invasion, but the sheer dullness and technical issues makes this game not worth seeing to the halfway point, much less the end.

After a fun adventure through a world made of wool, Yoshi's transition to arts and crafts is a delight. With satisfying exploration, fun platforming, and a charming art style, Yoshi's Crafted World gives the Switch yet another strong platformer.

Baba is You makes you feel brilliant as you transform the properties of each puzzle to get the win in the early game – but then things get complicated.

It’s a challenging journey through a weird and wondrous world that forces you to learn and master its punishing combat to succeed. However, the sweet thrill of victory keeps you pushing forward despite myriad disheartening deaths. Sekiro is one of the most difficult games I have ever played, but for those seeking adventure, exploration, and a truly realized ninja fantasy, the trek is worth the high demands.

Story failings and technical hiccups aside, Ubisoft has a winner on its hands with The Division 2. The strong combat, interesting missions, and compelling loot loop kept me invested through the endgame, and I don’t plan to stop playing anytime soon. For a live-service game just getting out of the gate, that’s quite an achievement.

In terms of open-world game design, World Seeker isn’t an innovator, but it borrows and re-imagines familiar mechanics well (from the Batman: Arkham games, in particular) and proves why they are perfect for the One Piece universe.

The problems with the series have reached legacy status, and although it’s clear Major League Baseball tried to make a better game, the efforts were not enough. The focus should be shoring up the gameplay first and foremost, not making sure some of the star players shake the bat the right way. For six years we’ve been saying “maybe this is the year,” and the result is once again “maybe next year.”

For all of its pacing issues, Devil May Cry 5 is still a lot of fun to play. Combat is a blast, and the cutscenes are delightfully absurd; fans of Devil May Cry 3 and 4 should feel right at home here. Capcom goes back to the baseline action I’ve always enjoyed, and executes that with the series’ signature over-the-top style. However, this entry’s changes and additions to that core experience don’t enhance what the series does well; they feel more like roadblocks than steps forward.

Trials Rising feels like a pure incarnation of the series, and its significant structural and progression problems could be addressed over time as the live game evolves. But that revision (if it ever comes) is not the game currently on offer, and the current playthrough offers too much frustration in return for the moments of humor and skill mastery. I’m still an enthusiast for Trials, but when your gameplay is this established and staid, there’s no excuse for the surrounding trappings to be subpar.

Something special lies at the heart of The Occupation, but the gameplay and technical issues get in the way of its most interesting qualities. The storytelling happening beneath all the clunky stealth is great.

The Lego Movie 2 Videogame rarely pushes the player to do anything other than go into their building menu to select one object, and ends up being a shockingly bland experience in a series that has been mostly consistent in doing fun things with different properties.

Dead or Alive 6 sports a robust fighting system, but the framework around it doesn’t capitalize on that. While the tutorial and DOA Quest mode do a decent job of getting you up to speed on what makes combat tick, the awful story mode does it no favors, and the barebones online puts a damper on what could have been a second wind for the series.

All these years later, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from ToeJam & Earl beyond a blast of nostalgia. In some ways, the original was ahead of its time, and it only took a little tweaking to bring it up to contemporary expectations. Back in the Groove is a great gift, tucked inside an earnestly funky wrapper.

Ape Out gloriously celebrates its simple, splattery premise with creative gameplay that I can’t wait to return to in the near future.

Whenever the guns are pumping, it's a legitimately blast to play. That’s where the experience shines, and everything else around it holds it back from being truly engrossing. This is one of those games that frustrates because you can see the greatness within it, but it's always just out of reach.

Dirt Rally 2.0 doesn’t have every feature under the sun, but I trust it. I know I can put together a good team that’s going to help me win events, and the gameplay delivers, letting me skate that line between confidence and foolishness without knowing the difference.

Tetris 99 is a pleasant surprise, and is my favorite content offered by the Nintendo Switch Online service to date. The idea of playing Tetris against 98 other players at once seems ludicrous but is fun in practice and delivers intense moments just like when you’re among the final few in a battle royale game.

For all the harm the middling presentation does to Jump Force, the fighting does have satisfying explosive moments and the online versus mode does work well. There is depth to uncover in the combat, but it never truly sang to me or made me excited to tackle the next fight. Mostly I was just happy to not have to repeat a fight when I won, even if I was performing iconic attacks from some of my favorite anime.

Sumo and Elbow Rocket’s insistence on treating a game from 2007 like a sacred text is strange. The original Crackdown was fresh and exhilarating, and bounding across the city as a superhuman agent was a thrilling sensation. Since then, a lot has happened in the genre. Developers have found ways to incorporate destruction into the action as they weave interesting choices and competent world-building into their narratives. Crackdown 3 aims far lower, and manages to hit that disappointing target.

The core formula of this series holds up, but New Dawn struggles to make worthwhile contributions to it. Beyond the expedition missions, little about New Dawn actually feels new, and the only interesting narrative threads are the tie-ins to Far Cry 5. When all the best parts of a new game are the old parts, it’s hard to be excited about what comes next.

The Gathering Storm features a long checklist of other new additions, including 18 new units, 9 new world leaders, 9 new technologies, and 10 new civics. These are all nice little bonuses, but Gathering Storm’s world congress and natural-disaster system are robust enough to make Civilization feel fresh. The Gathering Storm adds new layers to Civilization VI’s incredibly deep strategy system, but taming the planet remains far from simple.

Metro Exodus largely succeeds in its ambitions. The freeform sandboxes give players more agency to play how they want to play, and the smart level design and well-tuned pacing keep the experience feeling fresh throughout the campaign. The story may suffer from weak acting and 4A’s decision to keep Artyom a silent protagonist, but these shortcomings don’t stop me from recommending the game to both newcomers and series fans.

Apex Legends is not Titanfall, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a special game packed with potential for greatness. I’ve put a lot of hours into Respawn’s latest, and haven’t had the desire to stop yet. The combination of character-driven powers, streamlined team features, and fantastic gunplay have elevated this unexpected spin-off into my go-to battle royale, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.