While Modern Combat does offer some amount of charm with its highly produced interludes and its slick unit-switching mechanism, ultimately this multiplayer-focused military shooter falls short of its promise with design flaws in its campaign and clunky vehicle handling. The obvious graphical enhancements for the Xbox 360 do add something to the overall package, though.

Lacks polish and, in some cases, feels unfinished. It makes decent attempts with its different styles of gameplay, but none of them are particularly well done, and the game's storyline doesn't tie them together in a satisfying way.

The game's cohesive presentation is engaging, offering some genuine scares that are a rare treat.

With additions like a frighteningly deep franchise mode and online play, SlugFest's already option-laden package gets even deeper this year, though some of these additions are better suited for the game than others.

It's important to remember that The Long Dark is just waking up from early access. It's cold, hungry, and huddled somewhere under a rock face, but it's just gotten the fire started. Another three story episodes are still due, so there is time to turn things around for Will and Astrid. However, because the best parts of The Long Dark are already alive and well in survival mode, perhaps Wintermute's weak beginning is reason enough to stick to what's worked for the game all along, blemishes and all.

It's uneven, yes, but there's undoubtedly more good than bad, and there are poignant scenes, tense moments and breathtaking images that will resonate long after the end credits have rolled.

XCOM 2 Collection forces you to strategize on a tactical battlefield skewed in favor of your opponents, and that handicap is what makes it so enjoyable. However, the performance limitations on the Switch add an artificial challenge to your encounters that frustrates in a different, unwelcome way. It's lovely to be able to play one of the strategy genre's highlights on the go, but it's going to take a fair bit more work for this port to be as great as its legacy deserves.

Arizona Sunshine 2 is not the mythical killer app that will finally get people to believe in VR. But it's certainly the kind of sequel that goes bigger than its predecessor and is better for it. It almost feels like a tall order to ask people to still care about zombies and VR in 2023 when so many seem to have shrugged them both off years ago. But I'm not such a person, and if you're like me, you'll find Arizona Sunshine 2 is an enjoyable, albeit predictable, road trip through the apocalypse.

A game that you can't help but have fun with, but which might be best rented for parties and suchlike given its bundled-with-a-peripheral price tag and somewhat limited single-player appeal.

Sonic Generations proves that two Sonics are way better than one.

Ruined King: A League Of Legends Story has set the bar for future forays into League of Legends lore. The story Airship Syndicate tells here delivers in a big way, turning these six champions into the new faces of the franchise. The JRPG Airship crafted around its story is also wonderful, creating a feeling of playing League of Legends while actually playing a turn-based RPG battle. A few technical issues pop up here and there, but outside of the rare crash, none of them break the experience for every game. If this is the level of detail that future Riot Forge projects reach, we will all hail the Ruined King for ushering in this new era.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a fun throwback to a simpler era, but visibility issues and a lack of online co-op get in the way of your enjoyment.

It simply tightens up the whole package, adding a boon of new content, new abilities, new minigames, and lots and lots of those loveable monkeys. It's no giant step forward for monkeykind, but it's pretty much exactly what you would want from an Ape Escape game.

It's still Sonic the Hedgehog, and though it's not quite the quintessential Sonic experience, it's still a classic.

Thomas Was Alone utilizes its diverse characters and varied obstacles to create an engaging platformer.

Getting to the end of Quantum Break can be an interesting ride at times, but no matter how impressive the combat is, or how great the game looks, there's no getting around the fact that it's driven by a story with limited appeal and hindered by disappointing design decisions.

Unfortunately, you have to put up with a fair amount of frustration and filler before you get to enjoy the best of what World of Final Fantasy has to offer, namely charming writing and Final Fantasy fan service. If you’re willing to put up with some of the game’s mundane sequences, you’ll get some enjoyment out of it, but if you’re not a Final Fantasy fanatic, the magic in these moments may be lost altogether.

The main character of this cleverly designed game gets to swing around using his tongue and inhale grubs and other bugs, but it's a whole lot more pleasant than that.

Though it can be frustrating that its core gameplay never evolves past the often one-note rhythm of hacking and jumping across different levels, keeping it from reaching greater heights, I still came away impressed with how much Blasphemous stuck close to its haunting, dark storyline. To that end, playing through this send-up to metroidvania games was a satisfying trial to overcome in its own right.

Universe at War has three engaging factions and some interesting ideas, but it's also saddled with some annoying issues.

It is stellar in spite of a few big missteps and the fact that, with the exception of the world itself, none of the experience feels cohesive.

Interloper distills the core elements of every good RTS and adds a little extra to put it over the top. No matter if you love or loathe traditional real-time strategy, the deep tactics and puzzle solving crammed into a nicely condensed package here come highly recommended.

Reduced micromanagement and streamlined automation make Hearts of Iron III an absorbing game of grand strategy.

It stands as proof that all it takes to make a fantastic game, even with today's available technology, is a solid set of core gameplay mechanics with inherent depth.

Evidently, EA Sports has been hard at work these past six months, because FIFA 06 not only addresses the aforementioned problems, but also adds online play and an entertaining ball-juggling minigame to the mix.

Although the main mission path isn't difficult to finish, completing Gunvolt's optional trials and seeing everything through to the end will challenge and please even the most hardened veteran looking for a fresh, Mega Man-like experience.

[Time reversal is] a nifty effect at first, but the rewind as a whole undermines one of the formula's most treasured elements: ownership of your decisions.

This gem of a space tactics offering is everything that fans of the genre have been waiting for, as it takes gorgeous, next-generation graphical technology and applies it to an exciting game about starship combat, rogue artificial intelligences, galaxy-spanning wormholes, and more.