AngerForce: Reloaded is a decent shooter that controls well and offers some fantastic boss battles, but the problematic health/continue system will probably limit its appeal to only the most hardcore shmup fans.

At its heart, Ghost Giant is a story centered around mental health struggles and the necessity of seeking help from others. Unfortunately, the developers do little to explore the issues beyond using them as a pretext for the Giant to solve Louis’ external, superficial struggles, leaving little opportunity to bridge the emotional gap between Louis and I. Luckily, Ghost Giant has a beautiful world full of charm to help fill that gap.

She Remembered Caterpillars is a beautifully crafted and well-designed puzzler that also touches on the grief of losing a parent. While the game doesn’t tackle its emotional themes on a large scale, it certainly left a lasting impression on me after only a few hours of gameplay.

While there have been a lot of games like it recently, Observation’s interesting player perspective, stellar production values, and exceptional level of detail might just make it the best of them.

There was something enticing there, and the exploration and the mood made it stand out beyond anything I’ve experienced recently. It’s glitchy, bewildering, addictive, and strives for greatness. I strongly recommend it, even though I’m sure it will infuriate almost as many as it enraptures.

While Dark Quest 2 holds an extra level of appeal for people who played HeroQuest back in the day, it’s still a wonderfully compact package perfect for those who enjoy virtual boardgames or bite-sized adventures on the go. I actually kept playing once I’d rolled credits, and for me, that’s just about the highest praise I can give.

Ultimately, Falcon Age feels undercooked and under-developed. While the basic mechanics mostly work (when using a controller) and the setting carries a bit of charm, it’s clear that the experience lives and dies on the connection the player has with the bird. Without that, there’s little reason to care about the bird, little reason to care about the rest.

Zanki Zero: Last Beginning is a bit of a disaster. It looks nice on its surface, but the initially-promising setup soon devolves into complete drudgery thanks to inferior dungeon crawling, poor combat and a cast I had no empathy for whatsoever. My interest in the overall mystery got snuffed out long before it was solved.

Pathologic 2 is a harsh, unwelcoming experience that took a lot out of me, but everything in it, no matter how odd or seemingly inconsequential, is setup for an eventual payoff. Players capable of embracing its dour atmosphere will be rewarded with one of gaming’s greatest narrative accomplishments — it’s an epic-length refutation of the idea that gratification can only come through success, that stories need to be about heroes, that “fun” is the only metric by which a game’s quality can be measured. Pathologic 2 is a masterpiece not in spite of its shortcomings, but because of them. There is truly nothing else like it.

Homo Machina is short, it can’t offer a noteworthy puzzle experience, and it also fails as an educational piece, but it’s a thoughtful little experiment that survives on style alone.

Moero Chronicle H generally gets the basics right, but that foundation is undercut by repetition, a lack of nuance in the combat, and a botched translation that makes it tough to care about anything that’s going on. It delivers a ton of fanservice, and the core is at least competent, but it doesn’t even attempt to reach beyond such an unambitious goal.

With above-average level design and usually enjoyable combat, The Wizards is an entertaining, but short-lived experience held back by technical inconsistencies. The immersion of the combat butts heads with the sometimes-cumbersome controls, but these issues didn’t detract much from the times I felt like a badass wizard showering hordes of enemies with lightning bolts and fire bombs.

The best thing I can say about Team Sonic Racing is that kids will probably love it, although that’s damning praise considering its predecessor. Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed was a wonderful title offering both nostalgia and gameplay, easily giving Nintendo’s efforts a run for their money. Sadly, while Team Sonic Racing can boast improved driving physics and a solid team element, nearly every other aspect of the experience is a step backwards.

Submersed is a tragic mess of mistakes, and in addition to everything above, it’s buggy. I had several crashes, textures sometimes disappear from walls if one gets too close, and I’ve fallen through solid floors. If it wasn’t already obvious that one solid setpiece can’t prop up a mediocre game, Submersed should be all the proof that’s required.

This season created problems and solved them, but the overarching themes of the series as a whole weren’t sufficiently addressed, and I feel as if the ending leaves too much unanswered. However, putting my feelings aside, it’s nearly impossible to hate on the final episode of The Walking Dead. It wouldn’t even exist if not for the outstanding effort from the developers and publisher, and for the sake of the fans like me, it was appreciated.

Avalanche has built a gorgeous open world with as many framerate hitches as there are load times (i.e. basically none) and id has filled it with their usual incredible gunplay. It’s not quite a replacement for Doom Eternal, but it’s made the wait far easier.

While the difficulty level may scare some away, Yuppie Psycho has so much great writing and clever gameplay that it would be a crime to overlook. Pasternack’s journey through SintraCorp is equal parts scary and hilarious, and the handful of annoying moments were more than made up for by a fundamentally humane story about people trying to connect and help one another within a system designed to grind them into a slurry of blandness. Sometimes literally.

It doesn’t quite reach the level of quality found in Kingdom Hearts II (which I don’t particularly think is fair because I don’t like to compare a sequel to its predecessor when said predecessor was one of the best games ever made), but I find it hard to believe that any fan of this series would walk away from Kingdom Hearts III unsatisfied.

J&M was released on Earth Day, and includes information on two nonprofit organizations aiming to preserve the world’s oceans. Between that and its jubilant presentation (aided by a bouncy main theme that briefly fooled me into thinking that the game would be much more enjoyable than it turned out to be) J&M is too well-intentioned to get angry at. Unfortunately, I imagine most players will be too bored to be persuaded by its important message.

With hundreds of weapons to collect and different ways to play, RemiLore’s charm makes it enjoyable in short bursts. That said, it definitely has major flaws and requires a great deal of patience — especially in the early going — to get the most out of the experience.

When it comes to compilations like this, there’s three criteria to meet. One, the games have to stand the test of time. Two, they have to be emulated well. And three, substantial historical features and content must be added. In all three categories, the team at M2 knocked it out of the park. While there are a couple of clunkers here, that doesn’t diminish the fact that there are four outright classics available in this package. Anyone interested in spectacular 2D action titles or in learning about Castlevania‘s history would do well to bite on this collection.

Aside from the occasional lack of communication and visual blurriness, I enjoyed my time in the arena. It’s refreshing to see an action title where the choices players make have a significant effect, and each playthrough brings new interactions and scenarios for players to test their skills. It might not be The Price is Right, but Bow to Blood: Last Captain Standing is a virtual competition worth entering.

X-Morph gives the player ample time and information to strategize, and zipping around in the spaceship offers a level of real-time agency uncommon in tower defense games. It feels odd to say, but I’m glad the aliens conquered Earth.

Though it doesn’t break the mold (and in some ways steps back a bit in terms of narrative scope) Fate/Extella Link is the ideal sequel, holding tight to what worked best about Fate/Extella: The Umbral Star and building on that foundation with a set of well-thought-out additions and changes. Fans of the previous entry and the Fate franchise should give it a look.

Far: Lone Sails is a wonderfully lonely trek that will take the player from one end of a dry ocean to the other, and it’s the rare sort of experience that says a lot without ever saying a thing.

While I’m sure Warplanes works fine on phones and tablets, it needed a lot more work to get console-ready. There’s too much repetition, too little progress, and no narrative to give players a reason to keep plugging away. In fact, so little work was put in that the mission generation would occasionally toss out complete nonsense like asking the British to blow up an oil refinery in rural England. The developers couldn’t get something as basic as this right, and that same lack of effort is indicative of the entire experience.

I’d much rather have a meaty and engaging adventure that’s happy to embrace its videogame origins over a lavishly budgeted and beautiful ‘experience’ littered with dull introspective and endless navel gazing. Darksiders III gleefully provides the former while completely shunning the latter, and I’m all for it.

Apart from being uninterested in the grind to unlock everything, I’ve got no complaints about Mortal Kombat 11, and I could go on and on about the highlights like the jaw-dropping graphics or an incredibly comprehensive tutorial mode that’s robust enough to take a complete newcomer through the ranks and turn them into a competitor who can hold their own — every aspect is polished and tuned, there’s a mountain of Kontent to dig into, and the whole thing is just cool as hell thanks to strong designs and on-point aesthetics. This game is a far, far cry from what it was back in 1992, and if there was such a thing as a quadruple-A game, Mortal Kombat 11 would be it.