The Geo Mod engine provides mere window dressing to what is nothing more than your standard FPS, complete with big freaking guns and explosions.

Welcome to Elk is a fascinating experiment in game creation that succeeds on multiple levels, and players interested in storytelling, small-town life, or the intricacies of working with meta-elements would do well to check it out.

I won’t say that Umurangi Generation is the best game of 2020, but it’s almost certainly the most relevant, and not just for its most apropos parallels (like an abundance of face masks). This game is a sobering plea of the disaffected youth, and real-world events have given us countless reasons to lose faith in the idiots our parents put in charge. It’s only fitting that the teens at the core of this story never actually speak, because they were deprived a voice by the people who built this terrible future for them.

Overall, I was hooked by the atmosphere and easy-to-learn management of this summer road trip. In a time where games can be a wonderful escape from current world events, Keep Driving brought me back to a younger time when a car meant freedom and opportunity, and a reminder of those good times was more than welcome. As such, Keep Driving is an easy recommendation for sure!

Mortal Kombat has rebooted itself into respectability.

Despite the super armor mechanic, there’s still an absolute ton to love about Streets of Rage 4. The enhanced combo engine is a neat addition that can lead to some seriously insane beatdowns, four player local co-op’s great, and the sleek graphical style, fantastic music and bonus retro characters are all excellent accompaniments to an undeniably strong entry in the 2D beat-’em-up genre. It’s a truly wonderful return to form for a beloved gaming franchise that’s been absent for far too long.

Warhead expands on the forward-thinking ideas presented in Crysis and truly takes them to the next level.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is caught between two worlds. The game can't quite decide if it wants to be an arcade or a simulation racing game, and it takes a lot to get used to this in-between zone it occupies. That said, once the adjustment period is over, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had when it's not being frustrating.

The larger issue, though, is that heavy, uncomfortable shooting mechanics like these have no place in a series like Uncharted. It was fine in a gritty, downtrodden survival tale like The Last of Us, but this is a series in which inhumanly characters are constantly falling from perilous heights and surviving without a hair out of place afterward. This is a power fantasy. Let it be a power fantasy.

Ironically enough for a game which centers around the concept of genetic ancestry, however, it continually lets itself down by refusing to break away from its own tired and worn-out heritage,

When I’m up against players at a similar skill level and we’re all using the default characters, Soulcalibur VI can be a beautiful dance between players who are one with their weapons. This is a rare occasion, though. More often, I’m stuck trying to fend off oversized custom characters spamming Reversal Edge. With so many people killing what could be a good time online, I think I’ll stick to Tekken to get my fighting game fix.

It’s damn near perfect, and offers an immensely satisfying experience with plenty of replayability — it’s so good, in fact, that after completing it for the first time, I sat down and immediately completed it again on Hard Mode.

While I’d say that the Aliens vs. Pinball pack delivers great value for money overall, the Aliens table all by itself is an absolute knockout. For fans of Aliens or of Zen Pinball 2, picking this one is the definition of a no-brainer.

My advice -- hold on to your $30 until Nintendo releases the inevitable sequels to Super Mario Advance featuring games far worthier of another look.

It’s not an absolute slam dunk for the return of the Tales series, but it’s a solidly-crafted JRPG with a great battle system and fabulous environments to adventure through. It’s a shame the dialogue and story don’t match the stellar work done elsewhere, but on the whole it’s still a trip well worth taking.

If I were to look at any single aspect in isolation, Shape of Dreams isn’t the best roguelite I played in 2025, but it shines by delivering an enjoyable experience with plentiful meta progression that encourages diverse builds and character mastery. These qualitites keep me coming back to grind for more unlocks and the options and modifiers give ample choice to tailor the experience to my taste. For players who are interested in trying this style of combat, or for those who just want to just hop in for a chaotic dungeon run with friends, I fully recommend Shape of Dreams.

For fans of the dungeon-crawl genre or for those who just want their Nintendo 3DS to host something a little off the beaten path, Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan is at the top of its class, and guaranteed to be one of 2013's best.

Resident Evil Village proves that the developers at Capcom knows exactly what series fans want, and they’re happy to offer it, along with a lot more than anyone was expecting. Resident Evil 7 was a revolution for the series by framing the action in personal, intimate terms that intensified the scares and violence via the first-person perspective. Resident Evil Village proves that the same approach works just as well when removed from the small-scale, southern gothic setting and the action ramps up. Village really is the best of both worlds, and an amazing accomplishment for the series.

I don't know what possessed People Can Fly to saddle such an exceptional action experience with such a terrible story, but being surrounded by monstrously stupid, foul-mouthed sociopaths actively lessened the gameplay experience for me. So long as a player can tune out the plot and characters, Bulletstorm is an unmitigated action masterpiece, but damn, does the story work hard to mitigate everything good about the game.

FRU absolutely delighted me with its ingenuity and elegance. It has gone on to become not only a surprisingly enjoyable indie gem, but one of my absolute favorite exclusives for the Xbox One, and one of my favorites of all time.

For most of its length, FTL is good, bordering on great, but the end is so poor I'd rather quit than win the game.

Due to the bugs, it felt at times like I was fighting New Vegas rather than playing it, and the weariness I felt at the prospect of that battle sometimes was not outweighed by the draw of exploring yet another minimalist location or mowing down more legionaries. That's a real shame, because Fallout: New Vegas almost manages to perfectly synthesize the different strengths of Fallout 3 and its predecessors. Had the world design and the code been as excellent as the writing, we might have had a masterpiece on our hands.

There's greatness in Xenoblade Chronicles X, but it's a shame that it's too often buried under terrible writing and awkward design decisions. That said, when standing atop a forgotten mountain in a hulking Skell as the sun sets... well, it's easy to forget those issues temporarily. Despite all my complaints, I still had a hundred and ten hours go by in the blink of an eye. Xenoblade can be a great experience and surprisingly absorbing at times, but its extreme rough edges could easily shear the skin off a rhino.

A good game that will give gamers roughly twenty hours of offline entertainment and countless more online with friends. My biggest beef remains the fact that the game feels more like an expansion of last year's title as opposed to a new experience.

While the story is pretty obvious from the jump, I still enjoyed it and the great sense of atmosphere that abounds — I was eager to dive deeper, and the flexibility of the puzzles always made me feel clever. In that sense, Viewfinder is an experience I’d readily recommend to anyone, whether they’re a puzzle aficionado or not.

Puyo Pop achieves what a good puzzle game asks for, simple execution yet addictive and deep fun, adding a distinctly weird Japanese flavor to a premise that originated in Russia.