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.

At the end of the game something is revealed about Aliya, and she must make a choice. Unfortunately, neither option held any impact for me. The core mystery of Heaven’s Vault and the puzzles that must be solved to illuminate it are compelling. Yet, like its world and its core character, Heaven’s Vault gets caught up in physical things and forgets the human, rendering its final revelations as cold as the dead moons where Aliya digs up her artifacts. Then again, perhaps it’s fitting for an archaeologist that the story she uncovers is more compelling than her own.

I had good times with it, and I’m convinced that with better controllers and a tweaked upgrade system, my son and I would eventually be able to find greater success. Crytpicle is close to being a must-play, and even as it stands, it’s worth a look.

Truberbrook is a beautiful sight to behold, and its story is a great example of light comedy sci-fi. It’s only the overly-oblique puzzles that killed the adventure genre in the first place that keep it from being a truly exceptional title. There’s a valuable lesson here to adventure game developers here — it’s possible to have the best production values and plotting imaginable, but if consideration isn’t given to how players interact with the work, the result will wind up frustrating instead of magnificent.

Coming from seasoned developers who’ve turned out great games like Just Cause and Mad Max, the quality of this brand-new IP is incredibly disappointing. I hope that it continues to be patched and improved, because the current state of affairs can’t possibly showcase the vision Avalanche must have originally intended.

Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel lacks vibrancy, the animations lack imagination, and the characters are a bunch of bores. Not having played any other games in the series, I can’t say whether this series is suffering from sequelitis exhaustion, but this installment just lacks so much. It’s an excruciating play that I cannot recommend.

Co-op certainly helps make a dull game slightly less dull, but the nicest thing I can say about God’s Trigger is that it’s serviceable, and given how crowded the market is, being competent simply isn’t good enough.

I appreciate what Witch Beam Games has attempted to do with Assault Android Cactus+ – they’ve created a game that’s accessible to almost anyone while simultaneously delivering a solid, twin-stick arcade shooter.

Attack of the Earthlings is by no means a bad game — its personality and anti-capitalist, anti-human stance works, and the ideas underlying the mechanics are well-thought-out. Unfortunately, the execution, lack of optimization and muddy presentation undermine a title that was already going to struggle in a genre well-stocked with plenty of superlative examples.

I was ready to love Days Gone, and in some ways, I still do. It didn’t love me back, though. If SIE Bend had cut the length by a third, cleaned up the technical problems and had more variety in level design, it could have been one of my favorite games of all time. It’s tragic in hindsight, because I can feel the love and passion flowing through it. Unfortunately, the shared appreciation of our homeland pales in comparison to the astoundingly long list of problems on display here. It’s heartbreaking, but only homesick Oregonians like myself need apply.