While Nemesis DLC adds some interesting twists for for endgame, it ultimately doesn’t seem to justify the add-on’s asking price. Stellaris overall already offers hours of interesting and engrossing grand strategy gameplay, but this addition doesn’t add much to what was already there.

The handling of the tribes in Green Hell is a shame because it’s one of the most mechanically compelling and balanced survival titles I’ve touched in years — it’s well-realized experience that offers a sincere commitment to placing the player into a harsh environment. But given the script in story mode? Stick to survival mode instead.

The Battle of Steeltown is a well-written piece of additional content for Wasteland 3 that doesn’t quite live up to expectations due to its experimental approach to combat and short running time. It’s a pleasant enough playthrough for a few hours despite the difficulty spikes, but it’s ultimately a compelling enough reason to come back to Colorado.

If one can stomach the questionable story choices, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2 has some of the most engaging sniping action around. Whether a player wants to simply click a button and watch a slo-mo bullet explode a head, or whether they want to be forced to calculate exactly how far an enemy will walk in the one and a half seconds between the bullet leaving the barrel and closing the deadly distance, SGWC2 scales exactly to any level of interest and skill. It may be brutally violent, but it’s an intensely satisfying sniper experience.

It may not tackle deep, meaningful themes, but Maneater is a great way to shut one’s brain off and chill on the couch for a couple of hours with a simple (but satisfying) power fantasy. This fantasy just so happens to involve a shark who can attack sunbathers by dropping in them from twenty feet in the air…

The Forgotten City is quite interesting as a new release that’s actually an enhanced and expanded mod that retains all of its key elements while being offered to players who might not be familiar with Skyrim. Despite the performance issues, it’s an adventure that will fascinate until the end, and the riddle surrounding The Golden Rule is one worth solving.

Sporting only a few minor upgrades, the Legend of Mana is largely the same game it was over twenty years ago – lots to do, but doesn’t really excel at any one aspect. The story and graphics are still delightful, but gameplay feels unpolished compared to today’s standards. That said, it’s still always great to see older games receive re-releases making them more available to larger audiences.

Putting Eric’s handling aside, I had a great time with Boyfriend Dungeon. It’s a low-stress series of engaging dates and the character artwork, voices and music are superb. The combat could be tightened, but bouncing back and forth between the dunj and the attractive cast was exactly the kind of easygoing experience I was wanting, and after rolling credits I’d say that Boyfriend Dungeon’s attempt at genre fusion was a successful one.

While I appreciate that the team behind Mad Devils is trying to deliver a good, solid shooter, I cannot in good conscience recommend it until the bugs are worked out and the level design is tweaked.

Writing a review of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is something I never thought I’d get to do, but I am so glad that Capcom decided to take a chance in bringing these two exceptional stories to the West. Despite its status as an offshoot from the main franchise and a heavy reliance on very specific settings, it might even represent the best opportunity to delve into this wonderfully quirky and original series thanks to excellent quality-of-life improvements and slick presentation. Longtime fans have surely bought it already, but The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a fantastic pickup for anyone looking for a good yarn coming from a series filled with them.

Despite the gameplay showing its age, it is what it is and I was enamored with it. It’s a wonderful refresh for a classic title like this, and hopefully, we’ll see a similar return of other mascot platformers from bygone eras in the same style.

Death’s Door is a strong offering featuring challenging combat and amazing art design. The amount of love and care Acid Nerve put into this quirky afterlife can easily be seen in every little animation or dialogue. Granted, the combat may be a bit overwhelming at times (especially when the puzzles become infrequent) but for lovers of the genre and those who won’t mind a bit of swordfighting and dodging, Death’s Door might be one of the best titles to come out in 2021.

Overall, Dark Deity may not have the polish or reach the heights of those classic ’00s Fire Emblem games, but I wouldn’t expect it to — it’s an indie title with a development team of six, but the passion of that team for the genre is apparent throughout the finished product. This is a love letter to classics that’s still accessible enough for those who may want to give the genre a try. And for those of us who miss a TRPG uncluttered by slice-of-life mechanics? It’s a much-welcome addition to the library.

Unless one is a hardcore fan of classic platform titles or a Wonder Boy completist, there isn’t much to recommend Asha in Monster World. It’s an okay example of its genre’s older titles, but I’d say it’s a bit too rooted in the past to interest players who aren’t coming to it for the nostalgia.

Outbreak: Endless Nightmares might be the worst game that I’ve played for over 50 hours. It was a frustrating, unsatisfying experience, and yet I couldn’t stop because I wanted to see if it would get better — and it never did. As a longtime fan of RE-style games and roguelikes I’m the exact target audience for this title, but it honestly had nothing to offer. Plagued by one bad bit of design after another, I can’t recommend Endless Nightmares to anyone who doesn’t have an unusually specific passion for survival horror roguelites.

It’s not overstating the case to say that overall, Dying Light has aged like fine wine. There aren’t many parkour-focused games to begin with, and and of those, the ones containing zombies are even more scarce. So, Dying Light is still a unique experience and I’m glad to report that it still holds up. It may have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle when it first debuted, but there’s no better time to play it than now.

Fuzz Force: Spook Squad has quickly turned out to be one of my favorite roguelikes. The cute atmosphere and board game mechanics provide a sense of childlike glee, and each run rarely takes more than maybe an hour, but players can also save and quit at the end of each map to come back later. I imagine that I’ll keep coming back to Fuzz Force for a long while.

Cotton Reboot! is an efficient repackage of the original with a new mode that isn’t just a simple graphical overhaul, but a reworked and more modern way of playing. The love and care taken here is appreciated! On the other hand, due to the fact that it’s currently listed at a surprisingly high price point and offers no supplementary/archival materials or unlockables to increase its appeal as a historical offering, this one comes recommended only to dedicated fans of ‘cute’ and cute-’em-ups.

Admittedly, it all leads to a well-foreshadowed resolution focusing on her troubled understanding of the verb “living”, yet thanks to the appropriately-intense focus on introspection, I can report that Minute of Islands manages a symbolic triumph at the end. It’s succinct in the exploration of its central themes, and impactful when arriving to its point.

Just Die Already is like seeing a meme flood social media. The first few variations of it are funny. Then, as time passes and the same joke keeps popping up over and over, it just gets annoying. Like its characters, the content in Just Die Already starts old and it only goes down hill from there.

Sniper Elite VR has scrunched down everything great about the series and created a near-perfect recreation that players can now experience from the inside.

It’s a shame for something so beautiful and pure to leave me so emotionally cold, but it’s a tight, wholly unique platformer nonetheless. At five dollars, it’s an easy game to recommend… just a difficult game to truly love.

While the gameplay is fairly standard, this version of Save me Mr Tako still ended up feeling like a win — it’s great to see the developer release a more complete version of the game after being denied by the original publisher, and I think anyone who enjoys small indies or throwbacks can appreciate that.

Recommending An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs depends a lot on one’s tolerance for backtracking and exploring huge areas with no map available. While the great wit and sheer absurdity of the situations managed tograb ahold of my interest, it wasn’t enough to keep me playing until the end.

The campaign offers a good mix of classic characters, the location in which the adventure happens is unusual, the tactics are rich and the gameplay is enjoyable — if the script and voiceovers didn’t dump a bucket of hog slop all over everything, we’d be in business. Unfortunately, the narrative aspect of Naheulbeuk is truly abysmal and it ruins everything else the game gets right. In this case, a boring by-the-numbers ‘save the world’ questline would have been far, far preferable to what we actually got.

I don’t make this comparison lightly, but Knockout City almost reminds me of the elegance of Rocket League – it’s that combination of simple and fresh, where it’s easy to understand but offers a sky-high skill ceiling. Only time will tell if Knockout City has as long a tail, but it deserves a chance.

In summary, Guilty Gear Strive is an excellent evolution of a series that’s always provided players with a unique and interesting approach to weapons-based combat, and now it’s slightly less impenetrable for newcomers. It’s got room to grow, but it’s a stylish, standout fighter whose strengths absolutely outnumber its flaws.

Griftlands’ successful experiments in branching narrative, combined with a deckbuilding system that ranks among the genre’s richest, make it one of my favorite roguelikes to date. Whether I’d recommend it on Switch, however, is another matter. Roguelikes sing on handhelds, but anyone opting to experience Griftlands on Nintendo’s hardware is setting themselves up for a massive learning curve that may turn prospective players off. One way or another, though, Griftlands is a title that deserves every roguelike fan’s attention.