The saving grace of this game is multiplayer.

Day of the Tentacle is a classic, and this remastered version is a great way for old fans to see the time-hopping adventure looking its best. Hopefully, it’ll also give a new generation of players a chance to experience all of the silliness for themselves...The few technical terrors I encountered were annoying, but they only momentarily zapped the smile that I wore throughout the rest of my playtime.

Gorogoa is a brief but beautiful foray into mystery. But its puzzles are elegant rather than elusive, relying on internal logic and a cohesive exploration of the main character’s psyche and the world around him.

If I was a more cynical and lazy person, I could have written this review in one sentence: Yup, it’s Soulcalibur. But I also happen to like Soulcalibur, so I won’t complain too much.

Grim Fandango is still one of the best stories any one has ever told in a game. If you’ve never played the original, the convenience of a multiplatform release (and the better control options) really should push you to finally try this classic.

Axiom Verge uses Metroid’s building blocks to create a fantastic adventure that can stretch for hours if you want it to … though maybe not always in a good way. I’m not a big fan of the genre, but even I started getting obsessive over my map and item completion rates.

I have a lot of games on my plate right now, and I think it’s a good sign that I want to go back and keep playing Streets of Rage 4. It’s something that feels good to control and look at and listen to. If you are going to make a beat-’em-up in 2020, the act of punching better deliver a shot of dopamine. And this game absolutely crushes that.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted wishes it was a Burnout game. It has the right developer, the right approach to open-world racing design, and the right gameplay to make it a worthy sequel to 2008's Paradise. Unfortunately, it's not a Burnout game. It lacks the punch and thrill of that series, replacing it with something that can't fairly be called "blandness" but is still too generic to set it apart from other games in the genre.

Fans will like it, but they won't love it. It is a bit of a letdown when it comes to providing enough new experiences.

The tutorials make it super easy to learn the complicated game, and making decks is easy and fun. It might play better once it’s on PC and consoles, since all of that tiny text will become easier to play. But even now, Magic fans will enjoy this digital version of the classic card game.

Resident Evil: Village is going to make fans of the franchise happy, especially ones who aren't cowards like me. But even if you also find yourself shying away from the horror genre, I'd encourage you to screw your courage to the sticking place and consider a look at Capcom's latest survival horror stunner.

It has more than enough to satisfy the hungriest RPG fans: fun exploration, in-depth combat, and a scope that will keep players engaged for a very long time.

Resogun does everything it promises, and not a a bit more. It has gorgeous graphics and solid skill-based gameplay, with valuable online co-op support and just enough content to keep things interesting for a while.

This is a polished, well constructed gaming experience with few glaring errors.

The flip side of being accessible is that some people will complain that the game is too easy. It only has 23 levels, and so you’ll get through your first run in just a few hours. I understand it was made with a small indie team, but I would have been happy with 50 levels, with harder difficulties.

Carries the standard proudly, offering all the smart level design, split-second escapes, and tight gameplay that creates (and deserves) such devotion. But it's not a system seller, and it lacks inspiration. Mario U is comfort food … warm, filling, and delicious but not particularly remarkable. And Mario should be.

Barlow is single-handedly creating a genre out of the movie-video game combination. This story is more complicated than Her Story, which revolved around a single actress. Four more people are relevant in this tale, but the game has more than 30 characters altogether.

In spite of its uninspiring story, Splinter Cell: Blacklist creates a sense of urgency that few games can match. It gives you the tools — the guns, the high-tech devices, the goggles — to accomplish your mission and then lets you use them as you see fit.

Without a doubt, FIFA 16 provides countless hours of fun football. Any soccer fan will find tons to enjoy here. After all, this game is your mom’s mac and cheese. It’s familiar. It’s comfortable. And that’s the problem.

Even though you can technically enjoy Lumines at a lower price on mobile devices, their smaller wells actually constrict the gameplay compared with wider console and computer platforms, and their soundtracks aren’t as compelling. If you want the full Lumines experience, this version’s reasonable pricing and interesting features nearly offset its remaining rough edges.

Blackout is so fun that it could be a game unto itself, complete with set pieces that the players themselves create, either through bloopers in my case or amazing expert gameplay by others. It might take you 30 matches to become proficient at it.

It's not bold enough to be excellent, but Ghost of Tsushima is enjoyable enough to keep fans of these kinds of map games busy and happy for a good while.

I found myself mostly thrilled with Kid Icarus: Uprising right up until the very end of the ninth chapter. It's almost impressive how quickly this game goes from being a great, well-rounded experience to a total narrative disaster that drags on for far too long.

One of the most enjoyable Call of Duty experiences in years.

Aside from wishing it was longer, Astro's Playroom is an easy recommendation. I mean, if you have a PS5, you have this game anyway. Just play It.

Lara Croft Go emphasizes cunning and exploration, not challenge, but this doesn’t make it a pushover.

I'm not sure if you should call Persona 5 Strikers a spinoff or a sequel. Honestly, it feels more like the latter. But if you want to call it a spinoff, it's the best one that the Persona series has offered yet.

I do not regret the possible hundreds of hours I am going to continue to lose to Shin Megami Tensei IV, and I hope it has the power to win over newcomers to the franchise. I like quirky, demon-summoning high schoolers as much as the next Persona fan, but you haven’t truly experienced a Megaten game until you’ve tried to wrap your mind around the infamous conversation system.

It’s not quite Persona 5, but it’s still a meaty (down, Chie) role-playing experience.

The Disney side is still the best side of Kingdom Hearts, and Kingdom Hearts III nails that part. But even it's story, as ridiculous as it is, gives fans emotional moments and satisfaction.

While there is a competent fighter to be had, the woeful way in which Capcom has blatantly stripped out significant chunks and promised features, or locked away vital content that already exists on the disc, all with the vile intent of having you pay for it again, makes this a hard game to recommend.

The common thread of all of the subgames is that they are very hard to master. Most of them are easy to pick up and start playing, with the exception of Strike Force. But you'll want to play them over and over again until you finally conquer a mission. Once you get that mastery, you'll feel great.

It still manages to be deep and suspenseful some two decades later, which is a testament to how skillfully crafted the original was. By keeping true to its roots, Resident Evil HD Remaster manages to strip away all of the superfluous additions we’ve seen piled on over the years, leaving only survival horror in its purest form.

This War of Mine makes the most of its clean, attractive graphics, its moody ambient soundtrack, and the intense, emotional nature of its gameplay. You’ll care about your refugees, and you’ll want to work hard to keep them healthy, fed, alive, and well. Unfortunately, This War of Mine doesn’t make it easy.

The entire game is surprisingly replayable after some time to unlock hidden characters and weapon combinations.

The core mission of Ring Fit Adventure is to make you forget that you’re exercising, and I think it’s only partially successful at that.

The depth of puzzles and creative building aspect will keep players hungrily coming back for more.

Transistor is beautiful and engaging with a brilliant combat systems that encourages careful planning before and during battle. It’s just a shame the story holds it back from being a true classic. It’s a more flawed experience than Bastion was, but it’s also a more interesting one.

An immediately accessible yet infinitely deep puzzle game where Korobeiniki has been replaced with dozens of uptempo car commercial anthems. While Electronic Symphony is a tad expensive for the limited content "on-disc," you're getting the same solid music-fueled experience you've come to expect with some exclusive new bells and whistles.

Splatoon 2 is just an easy game to like. It’s bright, cheery, and employs endless tricks in a constant quest to make you smile.

Yakuza 6 has an ambitious narrative, alternating between lighthearted and dramatic. Unfortunately, it doesn't give its characters enough love and care to truly pull off the pathos.

I never thought I would be this enthusiastic about an MMO again, but I’m in love with A Realm Reborn. Its beautiful world always offers something fun and interesting to do.

It’s even more remarkable that all of this exists in a browser-based game.

A great selection of games make this a strong collection, and I also appreciate the accouterments that Digital Eclipse has thrown into the package. If you're a beat-'em-up or a TMNT fan, The Cowabunga Collection is going to offer a lot of fun for you and your friends.

This is another fantastic collection of Mega Man games, this time highlighting two series that you may have missed if you didn’t have a Game Boy Advance or DS.

Starfield is not a perfect game, and I can see some players becoming frustrated with some of its bigger imperfections. It’s a game that offers a massive world that’s not always particularly full, which could turn off some players. However, past its initial rocky start, Starfield feels special and interesting and deserves to be tried at least. More than anything else, I’m curious to see where the Bethesda audience takes Starfield. Each game from the company has its own dedicated community and I want to see what Starfield’s community will look like in a few months’ or years’ time.

Monaco is an amazing co-op game. It works both as an arcade-style romp and as strategic game that rewards deep thinkers...If you don’t want to play with others, however, I would skip it.

The Deus Ex series has a great storyline, and it paints a compelling, serious vision of the future that we should all consider to be a warning, given our own divisive political climate. I love how a video game can bring up a serious subject and hold up a mirror to our own times. But the ending makes it feel like this story just isn’t finished, that it’s simply a midway marker to a larger, more weighty tale with a full and satisfying ending. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes us only part way there, and we still want to get to those enemies in the shadows.

Trials Rising does so much right. It doesn’t muddy the gameplay with distracting additions. It has dozens of excellent courses. And it has great systems for playing against your friends either with online multiplayer or asynchronously with ghosts.

Despite the slightly higher cost of admission ($75 versus $60), and the addictive yet very wallet-unfriendly collectible aspect, Skylanders Swap Force is still a great game and a great value for the content and replayability you get right out of the box.

It’s easy to recommend to anyone who’s enjoyed the series before. It’s very easy to recommend to a baseball fan who has a PlayStation 4 and never played The Show before. I just hope that next year’s edition wows me a bit more.

Prison Architect is arguably one of the most important and disturbing games I’ve ever played.

In other ways, I really can’t find an enjoyable groove in the fighting system itself, which is the most important part of the experience. I’ll admit that it’s partially my fault. I like my mind games to have certain things going on, which maybe isn’t compatible with Mortal Kombat X. But part of the blame is definitely on NetherRealm Studios, with strange system decisions and move animations that are implemented poorly.

If you like JRPGs with neat worlds and systems that reward combat and planning, you'll be able to spend a lot of hours in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

One of the things standing in EA’s way here is its penchant for introducing a game riddled with bugs and balance issues that need correcting in further updates.

I was concerned about Shadowlands and Blizzard development in the COVID era. All those complex systems made a real mess on beta servers near the original game launch date in October. But other than some balance issues — and that core problem with covenant choices — the extra month of development time after the release date delay really gave Blizzard a chance to paint on some polish. The end result stands as one of the very best expansions the game’s ever had.

One of the best open-world games available, portable or otherwise. The atmospheric world, likable cast, and clever, entertaining mechanics make it a title that you can easily sink many joyous hours into, even if you spend a lot of them just flying around the city and hunting for gems.

Pokémon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby are worthy updates of classic games from the Pokemon pet battle series. They add modern graphics and sound, the gameplay updates of the previous few installments, and the new evolutions without ruining the nostalgia of the original Sapphire and Ruby titles.

Card game enthusiasts, in particular, will probably find a lot to like here. Tequila Games has a great creation here, and if it continues to update Earthcore and add new cards and challenges, I only see it getting better.

I’m now preparing to storm Drezen, a fortress-city full of demons. Along the way, I have plenty of quests to take care off to both defeat the Abyssal incursion and dive into the stories of my companions. This is what I want from an RPG, and Owlcat does an stellar job delivering this. The few bugs I encountered were either pathfinding errors (sometimes, one of my characters would just spin around as they tried to get to where they’re going) and one instance of freezing when I was casting a buff spell on my cavalier.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a pleasure to look at. The combat is deep and highly kinetic, but the rest of the game can't keep up with that energy. What's left is an inconsistent and sometimes boring product that doesn't live up to its potential.

Most impressively, Iconoclasts evokes nostalgia without feeling derivative. It hits a lot of character tropes, but it manages never to feel stale thanks to fantastic visuals, a memorable world, and solid gameplay.

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is dense, detailed, and varied. It is more dense, detailed, and varied than I considered possible for a video game before playing this. It is a stunning accomplishment, and the 500-to-1,000+ people who worked on it should feel proud. It has its problems. Combat is clunky, the menus are a slog, and leveling feels off. But those issues never made me want to stop playing. I want to keep playing right now.

Tropical Freeze does little to justify the Wii U’s existence, but it’s still mostly a fun, challenging platformer. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this difficult, beautiful romp through Donkey Kong’s islands, but the game will frustrate less-enthusiastic players.

It's not only the best-looking 2D fighter ever created, but in my opinion, it's also one of the best and most feature-laden fighting games period - a statement I do not make lightly.

Dungeon of the Endless works well with the iPad interface and is a great game in its own right. Be warned if you’re unaccustomed to roguelikes. It can be discouraging starting over from scratch, so even though the action enticing, failure is so punishing it can be difficult to brush yourself off for another attempt.

It may not be worth $40 for everyone now, but if you haven’t touched the series before and want a good starting point before Gears of War 4 hits next year, this is the best place to start. If you’ve already played the game, you may already know whether you want to go back, but the Ultimate Edition does right by one of the defining games of the last generation.

The new, light-hearted tone and its likable cast of characters are a good fit for this series. But it’s a shame that Ubisoft couldn’t get its online features working properly before it launched.

Other than some really frustrating quirks, Sneaky Sneaky is a cute and challenging game that gives you plenty of options in how to survive its obstacles. Just stop walking in front of those damned guards, Sneaky.

Pokémon Alpha Sapphire and Omega Ruby are worthy updates of classic games from the Pokemon pet battle series. They add modern graphics and sound, the gameplay updates of the previous few installments, and the new evolutions without ruining the nostalgia of the original Sapphire and Ruby titles.

Like its source material, Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has no shortage of flaws, but it also provides a wholly unique gaming experience that can last for untold hours, whether you're mining alone into the deepest depths of your randomly-generated world or crafting a giant Starship Enterprise replica with a crew of up to seven other players.

Super Stardust Delta does not reinvent the genre, but it does offer a few new tricks on top of an already immensely enjoyable package, all for an extremely reasonable price.

Whatever frustrations and let-downs fans of The Division suffered, their patience has been more than repaid with The Division 2. With new, free content scheduled for release throughout 2019, and considering Ubisoft’s recent track record with keeping releases like Rainbow Six Siege and Ghost Recon Wildlands fresh for years with new content, I wouldn’t bet against The Division 2 being a thousand-hour game for dedicated players. The Division 2 is surely the game that fans of The Division wanted to play and that Massive Entertainment wanted to deliver the first time around.

N++ is the new co-op game of choice in our house. And, if you like crazy, physics-based platform action and a decent challenge, it’ll likely find similar favor in yours. Even just played solo, N++ offers so much content and replayability — and is so obviously a labor of love — that it’ll stay on your PS4 home-screen for months to come.

Few console games in recent years are as special as Dyad. It can captivate with its beautiful synthesis of visuals and audio while delivering a gameplay experience that grabs hold of you and simply won't let go.

Antichamber is the film "Cube" sans horror, the threat of death, and poor acting. It's insanely hard and painfully simple, just like any expertly crafted puzzle. Bruce has created one of the finest and most challenging puzzle games I have ever experienced.

As it progresses, you move from overconfident to worried to intensely focused, extremely frustrated, and, finally, triumphant.

It delights in its subject matter, and what the protagonist lacks in dialogue, they make up for in puckish charm. Yes, the story is short, but it doesn’t waste any of its space or time. It’s a wonderful game to play, especially now before the really massive releases start later this year.

Curse of the Moon 2 didn’t need to innovate on much. The whole point of the series is to give Castlevania fans an experience similar to those classic 8-bit adventures. And Curse of the Moon 2 does that well, offering a fun and challenging sidescroller with beautiful pixel art and tons of replayability. But it also lacks the nostalgic punch of its predecessor. Instead of feeling like the first new classic Castlevania game in decades, Curse of the Moon 2 is the first one in a couple of years. That’s really through no fault of its own, but just as Mega Man 10 doesn’t have the same reverence as Mega Man 9, I expect a similar fate for Curse of the Moon 2.

Even as a collection of well-done ports, 3D All-Stars feels lacking.

Tekken doesn't need more stuff. It needs more focus. Like the archetypical weathered warrior, the franchise needs to look within to find inspiration.

Dragonborn is a creepy descent into madness set in a mini Morrowind that isn't quite as epic as Dawnguard, but it compensates for that with a wealth of new items, shouts, and spells.

Galak-Z: The Dimensional is worth the pain, but it involves a great deal of effort. Like its arcade ancestors, you can appreciate its high replay value well before you beat it the first time.

That’s the heart of Hitman: giving players the power to create their own stories. And that’s as big and powerful as ever in Hitman 2. So I don’t care if it’s not the newest thing in the world. It’s still one of the most solid and rewarding games you can get. And it’s an ideal antidote to games that are more obsessed with looking immersive than playing great.

If you haven’t tried Skullgirls yet, this is this best place to start, but if you’ve already played it, there’s not much reason to switch to this version for now.

The new, vibrant graphics make Spyro a playable fantasy cartoon. It’s one of the most attractive kid-friendly games you’ll find.

Smashing baddies, exploring dungeons, and scrounging for as much money and items as you can find is a satisfying departure from many strategy-heavy games coming out these days. Dragon’s Crown is a nostalgic return to classic side-scrolling brawlers found in arcades in the early ’90s, complete with flashing “go” arrows and food that falls out of villains and chests.

The final product doesn’t feel like a 2016 game. Instead, it’s this strange adventure that invites you to get lost in its world. I love that, and I think anyone who loved Team Ico’s previous games will appreciate what they find here.

Delivers huge value at a generous price: $40. If all you want is racing, you might be disappointed when you learn everything that awaits you, but it's easy to appreciate the wealth of multiplayer options, the smart gameplay and design, and how well it all comes together.

I can forgive The Walking Dead: A New Day's weak puzzles and occasional technical issues because of all the other things it gets right. By focusing on moral choice and character relationships, Telltale has managed to remain faithful to the source material while simultaneously crafting a zombie game that feels fresh compared to its more action-oriented brethren.

The characters are interesting, the writing is sharp, and the story switches effortlessly between thoughtful investigation sequences and more action-heavy scenes featuring some of the most effective quick-time events I’ve seen in a while.

It’s like learning language from scratch each time you play, piecing together unfamiliar sounds until they form up into words.

Clubhouse Games is the kind of game that actually makes a platform for me. The Switch wouldn’t be the Switch without Zelda and Mario, but this is the kind of release that fills out a library. Clubhouse Games is something that you will look back on years from now, and get to say, “oh, yeah — I love that game!”

Whether your favorite was SSX Tricky or SSX 3, this latest entry, simply titled "SSX," has virtually nothing to do with the franchise fans fell in love. Voiceovers from DJ Atomika have been slapped on top to reassure you that yes, you're playing an SSX game, but the gameplay, courses, and overall quality are saying something else entirely.

As strong as the writing is for the background conversations, the main story is confusing, and, at the end, predictable.

If you're a fan of Mega Man but feel uneasy about how Mega Man 11 looks or adds to the formula, don't. This is a fantastic 2D action game worthy of the Blue Bomber's name.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is charming, fun, and — in a rarity for Nintendo’s Wii U ports — right-priced for the Switch.

Joe Danger 2: The Movie is a good game, but even with the Hollywood theme, it doesn't innovate enough on what Hello Games did two years ago.