It’s still kind of incredible to think that a single developer working alone made something like Iconoclasts, but after playing, it’s easy to see why it took as long as it did. Rough patches might remain, but Iconoclasts is a singular effort that, had it lived in the time of its inspirations, might have stood tall alongside them to inspire future generations of creators. In present day, it’s a sharply contemporary work that incorporates those lessons to result in a brilliant, unique experience.

The Surge is mechanically compelling. Battles are challenging and brutal. Traversing the environment is tense, and, ultimately, rewarding when a shortcut or a new area is unlocked. The fact that the core of the experience is frequently exhilarating, so often makes the faulty links in the chain all the more confusing and frustrating. A Walk in the Park is a rollercoaster ride of an experience. It’s just unfortunate that big chunks of the track are missing.

Although this is ultimately just more Dishonored, fans now have five more missions to play and some new powers to test out. Those who didn’t like the original games or who feel burned out on the franchise won’t find anything here to change their minds, but if this is, indeed, Arkane’s sendoff for the series, they went out on a good note.

Shadow of the Colossus ranks among the best works this medium has ever produced, so giving it new life in this way is both giving players everywhere a gift and erecting a monument to its greatness.

Despite how many technical and design issues it has now, and regardless of however irrelevant it may be in a few years, PUBG is revelatory, and will always hold a special place in my heart.

End of Zoe is incredibly well-paced and zips through four mid-sized locations in around an hour, including a return to an old haunt that’s been completely transformed by the Umbrella-led cleanup. End of Zoe is an incredible expansion to RE7 not just because it completely rebuilds the core gameplay and still works perfectly, but because it reinforces just how transformative VR is to the horror experience.

The new areas are a little more open than one might expect from the claustrophobic RE7, but they’re packed with enemies to blast with Chris’ new semi-auto shotgun, and the faster, more combat-heavy gameplay works just as well in first person as the main game’s slow and tense exploration does. There’s a about an hour of content in Not A Hero, including a boss fight and a truly jarring close-quarters battle that proved traumatic in VR. This is a stellar piece of bonus content, which has only one thing keeping it from being the definitive piece of Resident Evil 7 DLC – it’s not End of Zoe.

Another year, another fantastic game in the Atelier series. Wonderful characters, an expansive story, a great big open world to explore… never once has it felt like this series has rested on its laurels. I see similar themes and callbacks to earlier games, of course, but fundamentally each Atelier series looks at what came before and builds something new and beautiful atop it – and Firis is no exception. I feel like I say it every year, but I honestly have no idea how they’re going to top this. And yet, I’m fairly confident that they’ll manage it somehow.

As weird as some the diplomacy and other mechanics can be, it’s an impressive title with a ton of depth to get stuck into. Now, I’d better get back to my current mission in progress — those enemy armies won’t eat themselves, after all.

While I’m glad that I waited for Darkest Dungeon to hit the Switch, I still have misgivings. It’s certainly better on the go now than it was on the Vita, if for no other reason than the screen is simply larger, but it doesn’t feel like a great fit. However, in docked mode it’s still the same amazing game that it’s always been, although it looks sharper on PS4. After holding out all this time to finally get the optimal experience, there’s just no easy answer. However, one thing does remain clear — now that the devs have added even more tweaks and amenities, the core experience is still outstanding no matter what platform it’s on.

While the idea of starting a whole new sport may seem a little ambitious, Sparc‘s developers have pulled it off effectively. I don’t know if it will catch on, or how widely it will spread, but it establishes everything that it needs to. It’s easy to start, it tests reflexes aggressively, and at the end of a few matches, everyone will feel like they had a good workout. Really, what more does a sport need?

Even if Bungie backtracks on some of these horrendous missteps, there’s evidence that the dev team is either flailing around without a clear idea of the experience they want to present, or even worse, they’re happy to offer the least amount of mediocre content possible until the player base starts pushing back. When free-to-play titles like Warframe and Let it Die seem monumentally more generous and offer vastly more entertainment value than a triple-A sixty dollar release built with a budget large enough to feed whole continents, it’s clear that something has gone horribly wrong.

Well O’Neill is clearly a smart man and a sharply observant writer, but this is a case where some restraint and a shorter running time would’ve made Little Red Lie a more tolerable, or perhaps even an enlightening experience. Instead, it’s an interminable slog through a world of misery starring terrible people, and I left it feeling worse for wear.

Once I overcame my disorientation, figured out my tasks and conquered the middle of the Inverse, the last few sections were considerably more straightforward and delivered feelings of being awestruck similar to those I experienced at its beginning. InnerSpace suffers from some minor issues, but remains a game full of original ideas that’s worth getting lost in.

Hidden Dragon Legend has some good visual design but not much else, and it’s a shame. I appreciated the style, but the actual game is so shoddily produced that it’s impossible to enjoy. I don’t care that enemies look good if fighting them is sluggish and repetitive. With tighter controls and fluid combat, Hidden Dragon Legend could have been a minor gem, but it’s just an attractive failure.

I can’t make too much of the annoyances of the poorly-tuned jumping or terrible collision model. Even if The Secret Mine had rock-solid code, that foundation would be supporting an edifice of sand. Toby: The Secret Mine adds nothing of value to Limbo’s formula and accomplishes far less artistically than its progenitor. Even if it were better to play, there would still be no reason to play it.

In my view, Football manager 2018 is an absolute triumph that revels in the cliche, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. The changes, and especially the new dynamics system have never had me feeling closer to my squad, the new engine is slick, and the additional motion captured animations really do freshen up the proceedings. This is another truly stellar outing from Sports Interactive, true masters of their craft and pioneers of the management genre.

Shadowgate, Déjà vu and The Uninvited are obtuse, they’re rough to look at, and finding answers online is required, but their charm and atmosphere certainly carries through, even after so many years. Picking up all three of these classics for eight dollars is a no-brainer, but the quality time I had introducing these to my son was priceless.

Confusing movement patterns could be overlooked during most battles, but the same can’t be said about the pace of ACORN Tactics. Taking time to plan out the attacks of six different machines can understandably be a little time consuming. However, waiting for the enemy to complete its turn should not take the same amount of time. By the end of the campaign, missions were taking around thirty minutes to complete. Unfortunately, ten to fifteen of those minutes was just me staring at the screen as the AI took its sweet, sweet time to attack. An option to allow the AI to move faster would have greatly improved the flow of the game. As is, the battles are just too slow. ACORN Tactics is an interesting case – it may be the first time I’ve ever enjoyed the later stages of the game and at the same time wished it would hurry up and be over.

Road Rage isn’t half the game that it wants to be, and it’s hard to understand how it was released in its current state. There are plenty of places where I was able to drive through level geometry and out into a blank void, causing a crash. Likewise, I frequently found myself clipping off of courses into walled-off areas, and because the developers neglected to include a method for resetting my bike onto the track, I’d be forced to restart. Racing superbikes in a crowded city with narrow streets is a terrible concept to build a game around, and Road Rage marries that terrible concept with awful execution to create something that’s far less than the sum of its questionable parts.

For those who are in search of a good puzzler wrapped up in bloody homage, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a great way to go.

As someone with no deep knowledge of the franchise and severe misgivings about fighting game innovations, I was pleasantly surprised at how extremely playable Gundam Versus is. Great balancing and simple controls allow anyone to jump right into the combat, and the matches are always brief enough that I never felt like I was being forced to wallow in failure while learning the ropes. It turns out that a player doesn’t need to already know and love Gundam to appreciate high-speed robot carnage.

Opus is a small-scale experience, and I find that to be totally appropriate. While the story didn’t end on the strongest of notes, I enjoyed the ride and thought it was not only a positive experience, but a great fit for the Switch. However, I was only tolerating the telescope portions in order to find out where the plot was going, so basically half of this game was a wash. Since the entire thing can be completed in two hours or so, it’s not too hard to put up with actually searching for Earth, but fans of small games and indies should expect to show up to Opus for the narrative and nothing else.

Nearly a dozen years after it’s initial release, Okami remains a beautifully-realized vision that will still be enticing to players for a long time to come.

I’ve seen articles mentioning that Gorogoa was created by a single man over a number of years, and it’s clearly a monumental labor of love. I want to respect that and I appreciate the amount of work that must’ve gone into this title… I honestly can’t even imagine. That said, as someone coming to this project knowing nothing about it beforehand, I found the Swiss-watch mechanics and detailed illustrations to be impressive, but the experience fell short in all other aspects. I’d love to view an edited Let’s Play of all the sequences being solved in order, but I have a tough time recommending it as something to play.

This is ultimately what playing League of War VR Arena is — standing across from someone at a fake battlefield table, setting down toy soldiers, and watching them haphazardly run into battle like of a bunch of wind-up toys.

After having gone through as much of the content as I could without teammates, my take on Raiders of the Broken Planet is that it’s a great B-tier action title shoehorned into an episodic games-as-service model that absolutely does not fit. If it was a standard single-player or couch co-op effort, episodic or not, I’d have no problem recommending it to folks who don’t mind rough edges wrapped in style and character. However, I’ve got serious reservations that this project could have ever worked, and these concerns seem founded since no one’s playing. Broken Planet is a great property with a lot of potential, but it’s in desperate need of a structure that makes more sense.

The modified sports represented here include such standards as baseball, volleyball, and golf. However, outside of the volleyball levels, few of the games closely resemble the sport they are based on. The basics are there, like swinging a club in golf or trying to hit homeruns in baseball, but players shouldn’t expect anything close to simulations.