Overall, I think Trine remains a clever little side-scrolling puzzler, which, four iterations in, is a genuinely pleasant surprise for me. The puzzles remain fresh, and build kind of organically as the game progresses, so the difficulty curve is rather constant throughout. The multiplayer isn’t all that great unless you have a friend and a yen to really play it that way. I’m at about the 75% point in just four hours of play, so I think something like 5-7 hours is about what you’ll get out of it, multiplayer aside. I seem to recall in an earlier review that I said that Trine takes the side scroller about as far as it can go, and I think that remains true of Trine 4 as well.

Overall, GRID is a very good game – but one that fails to fully find its own voice. One thing that defined the series when it began was a unique team-based premise and a defined structure to its career mode. You had a sense of identity there that isn’t present now and it hurts the overall experience. Fortunately, the core racing action is still top-shelf and the nemesis system keeps you glued to the race and doing your best to either avoid contact or exploit it depending on your play style. This reboot isn’t my favorite in the franchise, but it is the best-playing on-track experience even if the rest of the game doesn’t quite match its greatness.

Yooka-Laylee: The Impossible Lair manages to outshine the franchise’s debut effort in every major way. The game’s design remains open to an extent, but greatly focuses in on what you need to do – cutting down on a lot of busy work. The fast-paced action feels perfect and manages to out-Donkey Kong Country the Returns series as a result of nailing the pacing that made the original DKC trilogy so addicting on the SNES. The action meshes perfectly with the lush graphics and robust soundtrack to create one of the finest side-scrolling platformers on the market today. The Impossible Lair is a must-buy for any platforming fan.

The game is very polished and smooth – I hit zero bugs while playing it, and didn’t have to download a 10GB patch the day after it was released, and Gearbox should be congratulated for that if nothing else. So if what you’re looking for is more Borderlands, this would be the place to find it.

Sea of Solitude tries to tackle some very serious topics about bullying, divorces and relationships depicting them quite nicely in its allegorical environment. What it’s missing though is any meaningful examination or resolutions in said issues. As it stands, it doesn’t offer anything more than acknowledging that these issues exist in our world without ever delving any deeper.

Certainly Bethesda can make great games (Fallout 76 aside), and Machinegames has been at it for years, and I like what I’ve seen from Arkane, but Wolfenstein: Youngblood just feels lazy, playing off my desire for yet more of that Wolfenstein Nazi killing action flavor. And when my editor offered Youngblood to me, I was excited to play it. Yet somewhere between that excitement and what it actually plays like leaves me feeling like I’ve done it all before (and I have) better (which it has been).

Overall, Samurai Shodown has some rough edges to it – but fewer than any entry has had in around 20 years. It’s the best-playing entry in the series since the legendary second installment, and stands out nicely even in today’s crowded field of fighters. Much like it did in the early ’90s, by being different than the pack with its feudal Japanese setting and story, it allows the core game to be different even if the framework is still a single-plane fighter. It’s a must-play for any lapsed fans of the series and will not only rekindle old memories, but forge new ones for all who play it.

Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled is just about perfect at what it’s trying to do. The redone adventure mode is a blast minus the grind required to get coins to unlock stuff, and the core gameplay has been refined. This results in the best-playing Crash racing game ever and yet another top-shelf kart racer. Right now, the genre is as big as it’s been in 20 years, with Sonic, Mario, and Crash all competing at stores and the best thing for players is that you can’t go wrong with any of them. Crash offers up a tremendous game overall and it’s definitely an experience I would put above Team Sonic Racing, but ever so slightly behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

I played almost all of last weekend, and just stopped playing an hour ago, and I have no specific memory of any of it. Some driving, some shooting. I can hardly recall the boss battles except the ones that stood out as awful. Come to think of it, beyond general feelings that I liked it, I have no memories of Rage 1 either. And that’s Rage 2 in a nutshell: good enough, not great, entirely forgettable.

Overall, Team Sonic Racing is hurt ever-so-slightly by not keeping the transformative aspects of the last Sonic racing game – but that is largely offset by the team-based nature of things. Unlike OnRush, the team-based side of things is pretty seamless and feels like a natural extension of the single character-centric style from before. The tracks are outstanding and feature a slew of new environments for a Sega-based racer, while the controls are great for the relative car class. The game plays like a dream, looks great, and sounds fantastic. No matter what platform you get it on, you’re in for a fun time.

Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with A Plague Tale: Innocence. It’s unique in premise and content, it looks and sounds good, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I probably would have liked it even better if it had stayed more stealthy than action-oriented, but I’m not going to complain. A Plague Take definitely isn’t for kids — violence and gruesome deaths abound, and there is also some (completely unnecessary) profanity — but for everyone else, it’s a worthwhile game to check out, just perhaps at a slightly cheaper price.

It’s a must-buy for anyone who has craved a new Burnout game and physical buyers of the console version get Danger Zone 2 as a freebie – essentially bringing back Crash mode and providing more value for the money.

It’s just below average in too many areas — writing, puzzles, and voice acting to name but a few — for me to recommend. But it’s different, and it’s available in a dozen languages and three operating systems, and so it might fill a need for some people. If you’re interested, just wait for it to go on sale. By a lot.

Above all, I’m surprised that even on the drawing board someone thought Anthem looked like a good game.

Trials Rising is a mixed bag of an experience that still manages to deliver a ton of thrills in spite of some flaws. The F2P mobile elements feel completely out of place, as does the awful attempt at world-building. The series CAN do plot right, as Blood Dragon showed, with over the top goofiness. This is a series of racing-related events alongside some tricks at times and the game as a whole is a physics showcase. It’s the best-playing entry in the series so far, with a lot of robust tracks, but the experience is marred. It’s a recommended purchase for veterans, but newcomers are better-served by getting one of the older and far less expensive entries to see if you like what the series has to offer.

A fantastic return to form for an underrated franchise.

The villains weren’t that intriguing in New Dawn, the heightened focus on resource gathering and crafting led to some grinding stretches of gameplay, and I’m not quite sure how to feel about bullet sponge and floating damage appearing in a Far Cry game. Luckily, combat is just as chaotic and explosive as ever, especially with a co-op buddy, and I would still recommend the game to Far Cry fans.

Crackdown 3 is technically the best entry in the series to date – but doesn’t feel like a 2019 reincarnation of the franchise. It feels like a soft reboot of the 2007 game with 2009-era gameplay and graphics that are impressive due to their lack of slowdown and crisp appearance, but little else.

Kingdom Hearts 3 ends the current era of the series wonderfully. It ties many once-confusing parts of the narrative together. The story still has a few cumbersome points, but a lot of effort has gone into making the obtuse narrative easier to follow. The end result is the finest entry in the series in many ways, with stunning graphics and whimsical sound design. Kingdom Hearts 3 takes many elements from the first game’s structure and is better for it, with a greater emphasis on the Disney side of things that has been seen in over a decade, and some nice gameplay improvements.

If you’re familiar with the original, you’ll find a peculiar blend of nostalgia and surprise here, along with a faithful update of the survival-horror mechanics that put the genre over the top; if you aren’t, this is a tense, suspenseful ride, with likeable characters and a surprisingly grounded plot. I’ve got more than a few nitpicks–Claire needs better guns–but if this turned out to be the pilot project for a new generation of survival horror, I’d be ecstatic.

I didn’t enjoy The Council particularly much. It has some good stuff to it — the premise is great, and it’s fun sparring with (sometimes fictional) historical characters — but for me there were too many design issues, there was too much potion hunting, and the twist at the midway point just ruined everything.

Overall, Just Cause 4 is a fairly big improvement as an experience compared to the third entry. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the second, which felt like the franchise’s peak at the time and has remained so to this day. This game lacks the thrill of “wow, the series is truly finding itself” – akin to Saints Row the Third doing that for the Saints Row games, and while it is better than the third entry, that’s a fairly low bar to fly over given how many issues plagued the console versions of the game. It performs a lot better, at the expense of the core graphics suffering a bit. The core gunplay and frantic action are better now than before though, but something still feels missing in the overall experience.

I wasn’t wild about Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don’t Dry. The puzzles work pretty well, and that’s the most important thing for an adventure, but the writing is sub-par, and the longer I played the game, the more I felt bad for Al Lowe, the franchise’s creator. Wet Dreams is definitely a game for adults — with a slew of references to penises, dildos, fleshlights, and more — but if you’re a part of that target demographic, and if you like adventures, then you might get enough out of the title for it to be a worthwhile purchase. Just wait for it to go on sale first.

Technically, BFV remains a really nicely constructed game for the most part. The weapons feel and sound great. The environments of snow and water and sand are stunning. The game is relatively bug free (other than AI shortcomings) and the servers are stable. The menu structures however are terrible, with a layout reminiscent of the windows tiles and a functionality that would best be described as counterintuitive. Sometimes I found myself just clicking on boxes almost randomly, curious where they would take me because I didn’t really know.

Ultimately the big change, and kind of the whole purpose for F76, is the multiplayer component, and how that plays out is going to depend a lot on the community, a quantity that I believe is still very much to be determined.

The Spyro Reignited Trilogy is a fantastic remake of some flawed games and with that comes a mixed bag of a recommendation. If you’re a series veteran and absolutely love collect-a-thons now as much as you did then, pick it up and you’ll have a lot of fun. If you’re new to the series and have access to the PS1 games via a PS1, PS2, or PS3 digitally, see if the formula is for you. As remakes go, this is a far more thorough one than even the Crash Bandicoot one and in that sense, it’s a better collection for PS1 classic fans – but the game themselves lack variety and feel a bit too similar to one another to recommend a full-price purchase right out of the gate.

The primary problem with 2018’s Call of Cthulhu is simply that it’s a Cthulhu game, done as straight as it possibly can be. In a game that’s mostly about its story, it’s a detriment that its story is thus extremely predictable.

Red Dead Redemption 2’s elusive, mysterious quality may be just that… it feels like every character in it has a soul. Considering the number of people across Rockstar’s entire studio roster that poured their blood, sweat and tears into this game it is no wonder that it actually feels alive.