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.