Now I wasn’t expecting Payday 3 to match its predecessor in terms of quality right off the bat (and let’s be fair, Payday 2 is a much different animal today than when it launched), but even with my expectations lowered a bit, I was still pretty disappointed with what we got.

A lot of Silent Hope’s problems stem from under the hood tuning, and I can see another swing at this idea landing a much cleaner hit.

At the end of the day, Rune Factory 3 Special is a fine game, and its only crime is how closely it sits to games that use it as a stepping stone. If you love the “cozy” genre and are looking for some farming action, but only have the budget for one game, it’s hard to recommend this. But if you’re more of a fan of Story of Seasons and/or Rune Factory as a series, there’s absolutely room for Rune Factory 3 Special on the shelf.

So, even though the gameplay loop can be a lot of fun, I worry about the longevity of this game's lifespan. With only three maps (that are all kind of similar) and the possibility of not getting much new content due to licensing issues between all of the other films in the franchise, the game might not be around for a long time. Let’s hope that isn’t the case.

There’s no doubt that some Jet Set Radio fans hungry for more will enjoy Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. I’ve been waiting for this series’ return in spirit along with the rest of them, but in the end, it did little more than inspire nostalgia for the original, gorgeous though it may be.

WrestleQuest is something wrestling fans will truly enjoy from a sentimental perspective. The story overstays its welcome a bit, but I loved the nostalgia in the storyline. You can clearly see the love of wrestling the development team had and their care with the different legends like Macho Man Randy Savage, Ric Flair, Sgt. Slaughter, and more.

Little Nightmares II is just a worse game than the original. Everything they added to the system feels clunky at best and unfair at worst. It’s a shame because this same story, with its same environments, same levels, same enemies, and same music and sound would have been infinitely better if they kept the mechanics from the original.

In a world where you can pick up The Last of Us Remastered for a song, there’s no reason to waste your time on Earthblood. Paradox Interactive is no stranger to game development. I wonder which team lead is asleep at the wheel such that Earthblood was allowed to go out the door in its current state.

You’ll likely have a really good time with Gods Will Fall. Straight up, it’s a good game. A lack of polish keeps it from being a great game, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had here.

Redout: Space Assault is a reminder that I should fire up Star Wars: Squadrons again. While it’s visually appealing given its discount price, it fails to deliver fun and engaging mechanics. If you want an indie and don’t dig on Star Wars, there’s House of the Dying Sun, an excellent indie that’s over four years old and retails for $20. Even in a genre as niche as the space shooter, there are better options available.

Super Meat Boy Forever is a fun little distraction. Though it fails to live up to the legacy of its predecessor, it’s entertaining for a few playthroughs. If you loved Super Meat Boy, you might just get a kick out of Forever… or you may not.

The Pathless is a gorgeous, exhilarating and frenetic game which unfortunately often stumbles in its own tracks.

Godfall could scratch that action game itch if you don’t mind how lackluster it is in other areas. A paid expansion is coming out in 2021, so I’m curious to see if that’ll address any of my concerns about the campaign.

Twin Mirror is the inferior Dontnod offering of 2020, and probably one of their most disappointing games yet. It is mediocre in every sense, failing to live up to the potential of its concept and the reputation of its developer.

If you are a die-hard Kingdom Hearts fan that loves the music and needs to play every game, then yeah, this game is for you. However, it just feels sloppy for a full-priced game. There are better rhythm games out there, and better Kingdom Hearts games out there, so unless you really need a combination of the two, you can safely pass this one up.

Longtime players won’t find much to enjoy in this barely changed version of last year’s entry.

Windbound is a game that sounds good on paper but in practice, it falls apart. It’s a very interesting case study in design that takes inspiration from certain games yet doesn’t quite understand what made them fun in the first place.

Project Cars 3 would’ve been more successful if it was called something else. It leaves far too many important features on the table for hardcore racers, with an AI that’s too buggy and weird for new players. It feels rushed and could use some serious patches.

Madden NFL 21 is the clearest example yet of how unwieldy the series has become, so your en-joyment will vary depending on which modes best suit your play style. For me, that comes from seeing my virtual 49ers hoist the Vince Lombardi Trophy at the end of the season, so anything else on top of that is just a bonus.

Hyper Scape has promise, but it’s just so infuriating to play due to poor aiming controls. Some don’t seem to have a problem with it, as I see other PS4 players racking up kills all the time. Still, it’s better to wait and play something else until this gets fixed.

Rocket Arena shows that there’s more to multiplayer shooters than just military sims and battle royale games. Unfortunately, the unappealing progression rewards and lack of engaging content limit its potential.

Disintegration at least proves that, when properly tuned, the vehicle-based gameplay that’s normally presented as a one-off setpiece in most other FPS titles is capable of anchoring an entire game, especially when it’s paired off with a little RTS unit management. Unfortunately, in Disintegration’s case, that unique gameplay model isn’t strong enough to outshine the game’s lack of visual and functional polish.

Warface: Breakout is a nice attempt at a tactical FPS. It works really well, and it’s fun to play. There’s just not a lot there at this time. For $20, the game’s not expensive, but it’s still hard to recommend over established games in the genre like Rainbow Six Siege or CS:GO. Still, if the developers make good and release more content, it could be a worthwhile investment and ultimately catch up to the greats in the genre.

It’s easy to see what Camel 101 was going for as it constructed Those Who Remain’s dark and foreboding world, but while the intent was noble, the execution leaves much to be desired. The game’s low price point might appeal to someone who’s desperate for a new game to play, but any wayward souls who come across the exit for Dormont while cruising the horror game highway should just keep on driving.

Maneater is a game that could have been good but was too obsessed with forcing players to interact with its low points to make its high points shine.

Someday You’ll Return is an ambitious failure. It tries to cram together too many disparate game systems while failing to handle narrative and character in a way that could’ve made this game work. I wanted to like it; I went into it with great enthusiasm and quit it with an equally intense frustration.

Predator: Hunting Grounds has fun, stupid moments, and if this game was only $20, I would recommend it. At $40, it’s a harder sell unless you are a hardcore Predator fan. If you’re looking for a better 4v1 experience and you’re willing to tolerate slow matchmaking, Resident Evil Resistance offers a great multiplayer experience and a decent single player campaign, making it a much better buy, despite being $20 more.

This just isn’t the grand revival of the Sakura Wars franchise I was hoping for, and I’m sure that most other longtime fans will feel the same. As for newbies, there’s some enjoyment here, but it just doesn’t measure up to other major releases on the market right now.

If you are a fan of One Punch Man you’ll probably get a kick out of A Hero Nobody Knows but don’t expect it to keep you playing long. For every minute of brilliance there is an hour of grinding to go along with it, and that’s trying even for the most dedicated fans of the Caped Baldy.

Sorry Netflix, but this one needed another QA pass. I will be the first to admit that I didn’t finish Age of Resistance Tactics. All it did was make me want to watch the Netflix series again, and I did! Because it’s awesome! But I didn’t need a $20 game to remind me of that.

Mercenaries 5 needed six more months of testing and refinement before seeing the light of day. The game’s mech combat is great for enthusiasts of the genre, but the lack of polish may leave newcomers cold. I recommend it for hardcore fans, but casual players may want to wait for the bugs to be ironed out.

To put it politely, Shenmue III has the potential to charm existing fans of the Shenmue saga, if only in how much it painstakingly recreates the stilted beauty of its two predecessors. However, if judged on its merits alone and/or by a non-Shenmue fan, this game just feels like a whole bunch of wasted Kickstarter money. If there’s one thing that Shenmue III proves, it’s that bringing new fans into the fold was never Ys Net’s goal.

It wouldn’t be totally fair to call Need for Speed Heat a bad game, but given the exciting high-speed material it’s defined by, it is a disappointingly boring one. Small blessings like the lack of over-aggressive microtransactions and an incredibly in-depth car customization suite can’t make up for gameplay and progression loops which, at best, feel routine and archaic, and at worst frustrating and obtuse. It’s understandable that publisher Electronic Arts would want to recapture the glory of Need for Speed’s heyday, but all Need for Speed Heat proves is that maybe the series just needs to rest for a while.

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare reboot is certainly not the first game that has disappointed me at launch, and hopefully it will join the list of games I was initially disappointed with but grew to love thanks to their respective developers’ continued devotion and care. I know it’s not the safest of bets given the Call of Duty franchise’s annualized rollout, but I honestly want to see Modern Warfare continue to flourish as much as I’m sure the folks at Infinity Ward do.

If you are going to buy Concrete Genie buy it for the novelty. You’ll probably enjoy painting the town with glorious neon landscapes, but there’s just not much more to it than that.

Borderlands 3 is more Borderlands and not much else. It doesn’t innovate. It doesn’t push the looter shooter genre forward. It doesn’t say anything profound with its plot. It plays it 100% safe by nearly copying its predecessors. That might be enough for some people, but it’s not enough to stand out against other contemporary looter shooters.

Oninaki feels hollow. It’s dark but has no message. It’s complex but has no need for that complexity. It builds an interesting world and never does much with it. It’s a game filled with great ideas that just go nowhere. Unfortunately, that is par for the course for Tokyo RPG Factory games.

A:THO ignores the mechanical DNA that make open world games and survival RPGs so much fun. There’s nothing revolutionary about depriving you of map functionality and an adequate tutorial. This isn’t an evolution so much as a freak mutation that will die off in the wild. There are other games that achieve what A:THO attempts; play them instead.

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is too light on content to make it worth the price, and what it does well is overshadowed by clunky locomotion and a lack of attention to detail in both level design and VR implementation. Ultimately, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot feels like a tech demo more than a full length VR experience.

Citizens of Space never really tries to shake up RPG genre conventions, but the game is clearly not out to do that. This is a game that, by all intents and purposes, is meant to provide a fun and laidback experience, and it does that very well.

Let me get something out of the way right now: The Sinking City is a noir detective game, not a psychological horror game or a survival horror game. The trailers give you serious Silent Hill / Eternal Darkness vibes, with a side of Resident Evil 4, and while this game visually refers to the horror game history of the last twenty years, it’s doing its own thing.

Days Gone seems like a classic case of a game that grew too big for its own good. The production values are excellent and it packs some tense gameplay and emotional stories, but the poor pacing, tedious open world, and padded length significantly drag it down overall.

Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission was a fun distraction that let me see what Gohan would look like if he could go Super Saiyan 4, but once the novelty wore off I went back to other, better looking, and better playing card games and Dragon Ball games.

The near perfect mechanics of Battle for the Grid aren’t enough to make this a game worth playing. You’ll have a few fun nights with your buddies partaking in some ranger on ranger violence, but you’ll quickly find yourself returning to other mainstream fighting games.

I’m not going to go so far as to call Generation Zero a straight cash grab, but charging $40 for a game that was clearly rushed out the door is a hard sin to ignore. I’m not entirely sure what Avalanche’s final vision for Generation Zero was, but it clearly wasn’t confident enough in that vision to give the game the proper care and resources that were required.

There’s a good game somewhere in Anthem. Somewhere behind the loading screens, asking for meaningful endgame content. Hopefully in the next few months, when BioWare starts launching its post-launch content and quality of life fixes, the game will become what it’s meant to be.

Crackdown 3 does its best to ride on an action-packed wave of nostalgia, but in the end all it succeeds in doing is face-planting straight into a morass of tedium and frustration. Even the most stalwart Crackdown fans will likely wonder if the long wait was worth the final result.

Jump Force excels at fanservice, at showing what battles between all these characters would look like. It does not excel as an actual fighting game however. Unbalanced mechanics and poorly designed UI make Jump Force a chore to play, despite the exciting visual trappings.

Vane is a unique, almost-therapeutic experience with a magical world to explore. Unfortunately, the controls are pretty awful. If you can deal with that major issue, though, you'll find a somewhat worthwhile adventure.

An open world game needs to be engaging and exciting for dozens of hours, and JC4 doesn’t manage that feat. It has amusing moments, but it isn’t $60 worth of fun unless you really love the series. If you’re interested in this game, I suggest you wait til it drops to $25 on sale. It’s a nice distraction, but not much more than that.

I desperately wanted to enjoy Artifact, but it currently stands as a monument to the flaws of early CCG design. It’s random, it’s expensive, and it does a horrible job of teaching players both basic gameplay and high-level strategy.

Darksiders III will go down as the black sheep of the franchise. While the core gameplay itself is fun and it does a good enough job streamlining things with a more interesting cast of characters, it all just comes across as a bit too by-the-numbers to turn heads and doesn’t push boundaries enough to really stand out. If it weren’t for the technical issues this could be more highly-recommended, but as it stands, only die-hard fans should consider checking this one out.

Pokémon Let’s Go has a lot of great innovations that would be welcome in other Pokémon games, but the experience is just too simplified to hold my interest. I’d wager that most long-time Pokémon fans will feel the same.

Pokémon Let’s Go has a lot of great innovations that would be welcome in other Pokémon games, but the experience is just too simplified to hold my interest. I’d wager that most long-time Pokémon fans will feel the same.

Overkill's The Walking Dead is pretty, but doesn’t do anything that we haven’t seen before in a number of other post-apocalyptic first- or third-person games.

Frozen Synapse 2's tactical core remains solid and fascinating, but the lack of a sufficiently detailed tutorial makes learning the new depths of the game a frustrating experience.

Is NBA Live 19 worth the money? Yes, indeed. There is a lot to do and no matter the skill level, there’s fun to be had. The upgrade to the WNBA and character creation is a giant step forward in widening EA’s audience and The One is strong enough to warrant its own title. With enough practice, anyone can be the baller they want.

Although Transference is an interesting narrative horror game, it struggles to carve out a space as a VR game and a traditional title. The story is undeniably something worth experiencing, but the gameplay is lackluster enough that more often than not it serves as a barrier to experiencing what Transference does best.

Pro Evolution Soccer 19 is a fun one to play. Unfortunately, I’m already thinking of ways Konami can improve it for next year’s version (I’ll still be playing PES 19 though!).

Bad North feels a lot like a mobile title in terms of its limited scope, tight focus, and simple controls, and that makes it a fantastic fit for the Switch in portable mode.

In a year filled with blockbuster fighting game titles, SNK Heroines just doesn’t do enough to appeal to the fighting game market. It’s a shallow game filled to the brim with fanservice, but there are deeper games with just as much fanservice out there.

The game is cute and looks great, but thanks to its control scheme, isn't very fun to play.

Galak-Z: Variant S is an interesting mobile 2D action space adventure that feels right at home on the Switch as a casual title for playing on the way to work or on the train. Unfortunately, although the art style and gameplay are well put together and fun to play, the microtransactions severely hinder the experience.

Phantom Doctrine has a lot of competition in the broader turn-based strategy genre and its unique Cold War-era setting isn’t quite enough to really set it apart when all the cards are down. While the setting is great and fresh, the generally lackluster gameplay and mismatch of mechanics hold it back from feeling as clean as it should. Its best moments seem to happen almost completely at random or by accident instead of by design.

I had a great deal of fun playing this game, and it saddens me that I can't give it a better score. However, I just cannot imagine justifying the $39.99 price tag of WarioWare Gold for the few hours of gameplay it has to offer. The story mode is about how Wario slaps together a bunch of games in the hopes to make a quick buck off the gaming industry, and I'm sorry to say this might be a case of art imitating life.

Earthfall is a valiant effort at trying to capture the lightning in a bottle once again that was Left 4 Dead. On paper it does a lot of things right, but in practice it lacks the soul and fire of what made Valve’s iconic zombie games so effective almost a decade ago.

Mothergunship might not have been made with my specific gaming tastes in mind. But when a game tries so hard to tell me how to play and, worse, punishes me so harshly when I fail, I just can’t for the life of me imagine that any sort of gamer could find long-term enjoyment out of what it offers.

Shining Resonance Refrain feels like a filler game. If you’ve been aching for a 3D action-RPG to sink some time into now that we’re entering the summer months that are often a lull in the game industry then this totally fits the bill, but it’ll do very little to surprise you.

Budget Cuts is a fun VR game that creates an interesting, engaging world that’s worth exploring, but only if Neat Corporations can iron out the bugs that mar an otherwise fun experience.

Antigraviator has a strong foundation for an fast-paced sci-fi racer, but lacks the content and unique footprint to really stand out. It’s hard to recommend it over the likes of RedOut and WipEout, which offer highly similar experiences in much stronger overall packages.

Mario Tennis Aces doesn’t quite excel in all of the ways that it could have, but the core mechanics and multiplayer action are so good, it’s still worth diving in for some quality Mario Tennis action.

Vampyr would’ve been far better as Jonathan Reid’s Point and Click Tale of Moral Adversity than what we got, which was essentially Jonathan Reid’s Mashy Exercise in Combat Frustration Sparsely Sprinkled With Plot. Games do not need combat sequences if those sequences do not serve the game’s themes and story.

There are few genres as universally appealing as the spy genre, and yet somehow Safe House manages to take that genre and suck virtually all the fun out of it. There are glimmers of a good game that occasionally flash by, but no matter how desperate you are for a new strategy/spy game to play, you should steer clear of Safe House unless the idea of hand cramps induced by endless mouse-clicking somehow sounds appealing to you.

Despite a strong connection between the choice-oriented gameplay and the script’s themes of free will and liberation, DBH’s exploration of these themes is ankle deep.

State of Decay 2 feels like it’s trying too hard to force the player to do too much. There’s no way for the player to really control the way they absorb the experience and more than a few of the mechanics break the careful relationship the rest of the game tries to foster. Overall, it’s the kind of game that you want to love, but that needs a lot of work.

Everything about Robocraft: Infinity is simple to learn, admire, and use giving gamers the ability to jump right into the fun. There’s enough in here to keep folks hooked for a while, especially for fans of UGC games. Unfortunately, there are only two battle modes. It’s a robot game that emphasizes the robot and robot creation at the expense of the rest of the game.

As it stands right now Psychonauts In The Rhombus of Ruin is a fun little VR game that offers a few hours of entertainment but doesn’t nearly live up to its potential. If you’re a fan of the franchise and already own a good VR headset it’s more than worth the $20, but for anyone looking for more will probably be disappointed.

As someone who was a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer template, I’m saddened to see that Murderous Pursuits basically functions as a stripped-down barebones version of that same concept. The game’s Victorian contest of cat and mouse where players are always both the cat *and* the mouse is certainly a unique find amid the usual competitive fare, there’s just not enough meat on its bones to keep more casual players invested over the long term.

Sea of Thieves has glimmers of promise and is gorgeous to look at, but single player play is virtually worthless, and the repetitive nature of the quests and empty world leave the game feeling incomplete and overpriced as of now.

Despite my frustrations with its shortcomings, I want to see where The Council leads me, and if it manages to deliver a narrative payoff in spite of itself.

The experience is heavily bogged down by a clunky overworld and purely disruptive gamification of an otherwise pleasant collection of stories.

You can squeeze a few hours of fun out of Scribblenauts Showdown, but frankly this isn’t the next-generation Scribblenauts game that fans of the original were hoping for. It has fewer puzzles, worse controls and less replay value than any other Scribblenauts title.

Unfortunately lacks the originality it so desperately needs to really stand out from the pack. Even though the art style is striking and bold, combined with an inventive cultural focus, the gameplay and overall design weigh it down to be little more than a passable action adventure title.

Whether you really wanted it this way or not, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is about as pure of a remaster as you’re ever going to find. The visuals and sound are all upgraded for a modern era without changing the heart of the game. However, with the vastly superior Age of Empires II HD already in existence with five years of community built up around it, there is little reason to recommend this game unless you’re just dying to play extremely early era civilizations.

Secret of Mana’s remake is fun because Secret of Mana was fun. However, Square could have done a lot better, especially with a beloved classic such as this.

Octogeddon doesn’t have the same charm or polish as Plants VS Zombies, but it’s a refreshing new take on the bullet hell genre. The concept is zany and feels like a thin veil laid over simplistic game mechanics in the vein of Divekick, but the excellent animated cutscenes bring coherence to it all. Ultimately, Octogeddon is a good time-waster, but not much more.

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT will appeal to longtime fans of the Final Fantasy series, but anyone looking for something more will be disappointed. Its bad user interface makes its good gameplay too hard to enjoy. Though it could have been more, Dissidia Final Fantasy NT ended up being nothing more than a fan-service franchise fighter, like all the rest.

Killing Floor: Incursion is a VR game that’s so close to being good that it’s upsetting how bad it actually is. There are moments when Incursion feels like the future of VR horror, but then you drop your gun for the 10th time while slowly moonwalking backwards away from a Fleshpounder and you want to scream in frustration and panic because the whole thing just feels like it doesn’t work. If you’re a die-hard fan of the Killing Floor franchise and happen to own an Oculus Rift, Incursion might be worth picking up for a steep discount, but if you’re on the HTC Vive we highly recommend you avoid this game until Tripwire gives it some TLC.

SpellForce 3 is an amazing effort that falls short of its goal due to crippling bugs and some questionable game design choices. However, the development team appears to be committed to their game and is resolving bugs and balancing issues almost every day. By the time you finish reading this review, SpellForce 3 may be the game I was expecting when I bought it. Despite that, I spent over 60 hours playing the campaign, and I can’t say that I didn’t have a good time.

As a long-time fan of the Xeno series, I found Xenoblade Chronicles 2 to be a disappointment. A little balance testing, some reduced system bloat, and a little more effort in presentation could have made it an RPG to remember. If you played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with a cheat device or walkthrough it would probably improve the experience, because you could bypass all the boring grinding and rough difficulty spikes. As it is now, the game is kind of a mess. An addicting mess, yes, but still a mess.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 combines two exciting properties into an uninspired package.

Star Wars Battlefront II has solid core gameplay and offers a wide variety of content to enjoy, but at the moment it's hard to look past the loot crate issues in order to appreciate what the game does well.

Need For Speed Payback is fun when you’re behind the wheel, but is constrained by questionable design decisions like an emphasis on a mediocre story and a wonky car upgrade system.

Sonic Forces is a disappointing rehash of everything that has been done wrong with the Sonic franchise in the past. There were some good ideas here, but none of them were executed in a way that was fun or enjoyable.

Brawlhalla is a fun game that everyone should try at least once. It’s just not necessarily a game that everyone will want invest a lot of time or money on.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar is a fine example of how to iterate and improve upon a tried-and-true game genre wth its take on a modernized turn-based RPG. It’s far from perfect, but the combat system alone is engaging enough to warrant a recommendation for any fan of old-school JRPG-style adventures.

ECHO tries new and interesting things, but doesn't always succeed. The gameplay and visuals wear thin over time, but some players will appreciate the game for its originality.

As a Danganronpa fan, I liked Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, but I hesitate to call it a must-play. It’s a great puzzle game to keep you busy while you wait for the next Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton, but you won’t walk away from this one happy. What did you expect from a series obsessed with despair?