Everything in Genesis Alpha One ultimately boils down to being over-ambitious. I appreciate the attempt and see something great beneath the surface somewhere, but in its current state it’s just too rough to recommend. With more assets, more things to do, and shortening the grind of finding resources and blueprints, it might be worth building a spaceship and breeding a clone army. For now, it looks like humanity’s mission to repopulate is a failure.

Thematically, Broken Toys is a hit-and-miss. The ideology of peace involving no violence against humans nor walkers is a high point for me since it’s a new approach to viewing the apocalypse. Personally, I’ve always thought ‘the more zombies that get killed, the less there are to roam’, but his new tack did leave me thinking about it. On the other hand, much of the content here feels like ground the series has covered several times before, and the lack of standout characters dulls the entire experience.

I probably won’t spend hundreds of hours the way some do with Football Manager 2019 Touch, but I’m glad I gave it a try. It might not convert sport sim non-fans, but those who enjoy this kind of content will surely feel right at home.

The retro appeal is lost, the mechanics aren’t updated for modern times, and it offers nothing of historical or archival value. Frankly, I have no idea who Toki’s intended audience is – someone obviously loved it enough to dig it up and give it a fresh coat of paint, I’m just not sure why.

Yes, the Switch has a solid touchscreen, but it handles controls so much better with a joystick and buttons. Not even providing the option to use the joycons in handheld is an unfortunate omission. Just a few stages shy of the end of Solar Flux, I gave up directly due to the lack of controller support in handheld mode. As somebody who primarily plays the Switch undocked, it’s too big a problem to look past.

Capcom has taken their one of their greatest triumphs and successfully modernized it for today’s audiences — it’s quite an accomplishment, and even if it can’t deliver the kind of grueling visceral horror that Resident Evil 7 did on PSVR, it’s still a hell of a ride.

Onimusha: Warlords still boasts solid story and innovative creature design, but more than anything else, this title is lesson on game design in the days when consoles could have beautiful art or 3D worlds, but not both.

It’s great to see more of Travis Touchdown, but it’s also a shame that he’s not in top form. Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes isn’t necessarily a bad game… but it’s not a very good one either. Players who don’t have an appreciation for Suda’s trademark style or any emotional attachment to the series will undoubtedly wonder what the fuss is all about.

Burst Re:Newal plays better than any SK game before it and has the most satisfying story yet. If it weren’t for the lackluster fields of battle, I’d have no trouble calling this the best game of the franchise. Regardless, it’s a perfect starting place for those new to the battles of these soulful, buxom shinobi, a fantastic plot resource for fans who didn’t play the DS game, and one of the most player-friendly brawlers around.

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.

Save Me Mr Tako is a cheery delight with surprisingly thought-provoking dialogue, but I could only perform the same gameplay for so long. Ultimately, the experience wasn’t engaging enough to push me through to the conclusion, but I wish Mr. Tako the best in his efforts to end the tragic conflict between octopi and humans.

It’s punishing to go through what Vane offers without even the slightest understanding of what Friend & Foe’s grand vision was supposed to be. I went into it with no prior knowledge about the game, and I got as much out of Vane’s final cutscene as I would reading a paragraph of Mandarin. Maybe there’s a secret ending that I missed or a subtext that re-contextualizes the bizarre events that unfold over the course of this brief experience, but until I hear about it, the only thing clear to me about Vane is that I didn’t like it.

I have rarely seen a game go from being absolutely sublime to absolutely awful, but Subnautica manages to pull it off. The first 25-30 hours are a superb sci-fi survival experience that I would happily recommend to anyone, and I’ll cherish that time under the waves for years to come. But the endgame? It really does ruin a good thing. If the first chunk of the adventure were scored on its own, it would rate much higher. But as a complete experience? The issues are too large to ignore.

Sanctus Mortem isn’t perfect, but the flaws can be overlooked in favor of characters I cared about, engaging action, and a story that kept me hooked the entire time I was exploring Kisareth’s universe.

Nairi: Tower of Shirin is a beautiful-looking title, but finishes feeling rather rough and unfinished. There are plenty of puzzles to enjoy, but the script takes some strange turns and I can’t help but feel like there should have been more to the story.

This series simply hit its peak eight years ago, and has been struggling to stay relevant since. Just Cause still has the potential to stand alongside power fantasy franchises like Earth Defense Force and Dynasty Warriors, but this latest entry just feels old, sloppy, and phoned in. The formula can still work and I was kinda-sorta entertained by Just Cause 4, but nothing about it was impressive in the least.

Putting aside the fact that I find it incredibly weird that Dancing in Moonlight and Dancing in Starlight are being sold as two separate, full-priced games (they’re too similar in concept and execution for it to make sense) it’s neat fanservice for those who wish to spend more time with the Tartarus SEES and Phantom Thieves crew. Ultimately, though, I wish that the devs had tried just a little harder to carve out a new and exciting rhythm game, rather than something that fits squarely into established genre norms and coasts by on the charm of its characters.

Putting aside the fact that I find it incredibly weird that Dancing in Moonlight and Dancing in Starlight are being sold as two separate, full-priced games (they’re too similar in concept and execution for it to make sense) it’s neat fanservice for those who wish to spend more time with the Tartarus SEES and Phantom Thieves crew. Ultimately, though, I wish that the devs had tried just a little harder to carve out a new and exciting rhythm game, rather than something that fits squarely into established genre norms and coasts by on the charm of its characters.

Drawing from a pool of the classics – things like Rubik’s cubes, complementary rotation, circuit building – Iris.Fall has a puzzle for for everyone. Unfortunately, this has the corollary of ensuring that players with a weakness for a particular kind of puzzle will end up absolutely stuck at least once in the game. I personally found myself banging my head on a task involving building a bridge for the better part of a half hour, and it’s entirely possible that were I not reviewing the game, I might have quit there and then. I’m glad I didn’t, though, since the story deserves to be seen through to the end.

It may have the right attitude and style for a VR shooter, but nearly everything is implemented abysmally. From its awkward controls and awful presentation to the fact that the whole experience lasts less than an hour, there’s no reason to invest time or money. There’s almost certainly a much better game lying within, but for now Grave should probably stay buried

Although it’s got some serious shortcomings, I would strongly encourage the developers to keep going in the direction that they’re going and to deepen and enhance what they’ve already built — this piece of work is absolutely headed in the right direction, it just hasn’t reached its destination yet.

I avoided Far for much of the year, thinking it was another bog-standard indie exercise in gloom and ambiguousness. I was delighted to instead discover something beautiful, unpretentious and even hopeful. Don’t make the mistake that I almost did.

Darksiders III is shameless. It copies Souls level design right down to some of that series’ most famous tropes, such as hiding enemies around corners in long hallways with an archer. Fury’s Havoc form is strikingly similar to Devil May Cry’s devil trigger. However, in limiting the number of influences this time around, Gunfire Games has been able to focus on making those influences work together rather than fitting in as many popular game influences as possible. Instead of the tasteless sludge of the past, Darksiders III is closer to being a pleasant smoothie.

Overall, Dead Age felt like an old-school educational computer game — something like Liberty’s Kids or Carmen Sandiego where the extent of gameplay is reading and being shown things happening, with little engagement from the player. There was no excitement or thrill to it — the presentation is dry, the gameplay is simple and repetitive, and the story goes nowhere. Send this one back to the boneyard.

In another year with less competition, I would have given Chasm a higher score because it’s a mechanically strong, if often frustrating addition to the metroidvania genre. The thing is, it’s 2018 and there are better examples out there right now that make it hard for me to ignore the chasm-sized flaws in its design.

While it’s nearly impossible to hate a Pokémon game, Let’s Go Eevee doesn’t rank with the greats. Rather than forging a new path in the current generation, this quasi-remake relies too heavily on the weak gameplay of the mobile hit and lacks both the strategy and motivation to succeed. Eevee is cute and innocent, but this particular entry has not reached its fully-evolved form.

In many ways, Battlefield V feels like a big step backwards for the franchise. The campaign is boring and frustrating, multiplayer is unbalanced, and bugs keep popping up in every mode to ruin the experience. The fortification system is a good shakeup, but the good it brings is tempered by the cumbersome and murky Grand Operations. With some patches, balance changes and bug squashing, BFV could be a fantastic game, but at the moment, this soldier needs to go back to basic training.