Gran Turismo 7 isn't a departure, but rather a newer, shinier GT game. Its physics model is accurate, and while the racing can be formulaic it's always a giggle. The attempt at humanity is a bit cringe,the lack of up-to-date cars seems like an open goal missed, and game may not have changed drastically, but that's not the worst thing in the world. There are medals to claim, cars to collect, and people on the internet to embarrass around Goodwood, the 'Ring, or, well, anywhere really. PlayStation petrolheads are in for a good time.

WWE 2K22 is a surprising return to form after the Shockmaster-sized disaster that was 2K20. The extra year of development has done a world of good, and the only hope now is that the series doesn't return to an annual schedule. There are still failings when it comes to multi-person matches, and not all of the new modes are particularly engaging, but 2K22 establishes a solid foundation for the future. Ideally, WWE will calm down when it comes to gutting its roster, and the next game in the series won't feel quite as outdated. It will also be interesting to see how Yuke's upcoming AEW game fares. Competition can only be a good thing.

Most Souls-likes tend to adopt a grimdark fantasy aesthetic, but Tunic harkens back to the 8- and 16-bit eras by presenting a vibrant and colorful world that also offers a fiendishly difficult challenge. It's not simply evocative of games from the late '80s and early '90s because it creates facsimiles of their graphics or gameplay, but because it manages to capture a tangible feeling of exploration and difficulty, where an instruction manual is your tool to deciphering everything. It's the kind of game you would've purchased because the box art looked cool, eagerly flipping through the pages of its manual on the car ride home, not quite understanding it all but getting excited at the possibilities all the same. In Tunic's case, this grand adventure lives up to the expectations.

While it might be confusing and memey, disjointed and weird, Stranger of Paradise is also a lot of fun. It's full of cool combat with a wide variety of options, and a job system that lets you customize your playstyle or just try out what feels like 30 different ones. Its challenge makes every fight a battle of skill, while also giving you the tools to feel like a ludicrously powerful Final Fantasy badass. And despite being bizarrely delivered and wildly strange, there is a delight in uncovering what the hell is actually going on in the game's story and the weird ideas it brings to bear on the Final Fantasy series. Stranger of Paradise is mostly a more focused version of Final Fantasy that shows some different directions for the series from its traditional games, even if those directions take it down paths that are sometimes a bit...stranger.

When I began Triangle Strategy, the plodding pace of the story was a low point I had to get through to play the tactical battles. As time went on, that calculation flipped. The strategy segments are streamlined and enjoyable, even if the class system is missing the amount of flexibility and nuance that I'd like. But instead of getting through the story segments to play more combat, I found myself getting through the combat to see more story. It's overindulgent at times, but I became invested in my band of trusted advisors as they carefully navigated a fraught mixture of war and politics. And more than many games, I felt the burden of the decisions I reached, the relationships they shattered, and the lives they impacted, as belonging to me alone.

I don't want to seem entirely negative on Puzzle Quest 3, as what is included in the game is enjoyable. I did have fun matching wits with the game's match-3 system, and there were moments where I snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat that thrilled me. However, when you hold it up to its predecessors, this game doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's the same Puzzle Quest we've seen before, only now there are limits to certain modes, microtransactions, and a story that's barely there.. The stripping away of things like explorable towns and non-linear world maps skew the puzzle/RPG balance hard toward the "puzzle" part, making it feel less like a RPG that uses puzzles as its battle system and more like a typical match-3 game with RPG elements added on as an afterthought. I had hoped for a grand quest, but what I got only left me puzzled.

Dawn of Ragnarök is almost transformative for Assassin's Creed, teasing the possibility of what the series could become without the overt hand-holding that has defined it for almost two decades. However, after an intriguing opening, Dawn of Ragnarök falls back on old habits, and that feeling--coupled with how the expansion's narrative themes feel too similar to the base game--creates an experience that too often resembles something you've already had once before. But Dawn of Ragnarök is built on the bones of a great action-adventure RPG, and that carries much of the expansion, especially with the rewarding considerations introduced with the Hugr Rip. Only time will tell if Eivor and Havi's story continues beyond Dawn of Ragnarök, but if this is the end, it's a fine-enough conclusion to the relationship between the two.

Delving into all its new features, new missions, new locations, and new raid, The Witch Queen has been extremely impressive and a ton of fun. The centerpiece is the laudable story campaign, making a lot of the game's best design more approachable for a variety of characters, but The Witch Queen also invokes the best parts of Destiny's past, as well--like the secret-laden, dense, and fascinating locations found in The Taken King and Forsaken expansions. The Witch Queen is a massive step forward for the game, the culmination of a recent history of great refinements and additions, resulting in a Destiny 2 that's in its best form yet.

Warhammer 3 opens strongly. The narrative hook of the prologue sinks deep and the raft of tweaks to the strategic layer and tactical battles are all welcome. But it can't sustain the early momentum. The endgame objectives feel like a distraction, even though they're the main point, and serve only to diminish the entire campaign. The factions all have different reasons for wanting the endgame MacGuffin, but none of those motivations make a difference to how the campaign plays out. They're all trapped in the same Chaos Realm, going through the same motions, in pursuit of the same unsatisfying win conditions. In the end, Total War: Warhammer 3 is a good game--there just isn't a good reason to see it through to the bitter end.

Its popularity does, however, speak to its quality as a new MMO. There's a sense of scale and spectacle that isn't often seen in the genre, and its fantastic combat is only dampened by some archaic and rudimentary quest design during the main story. Once you reach the endgame, it really comes into its own with some thrilling and challenging encounters, so it's a shame this also devolves into a tedious grind due to an unpleasant emphasis on microtransactions. The excellence of Lost Ark's combat is reason enough to give it a try. It might not match up to the titans of the genre just yet, but it's a solid start, and I'm eager to see how it evolves over time.

Ultimately, it is these interactions that could have elevated the game and provided more emotional depth if they were leaned into a bit harder. Rather than spend so much time forcing background characters off their phones, it would have been compelling to explore more of Holland's internal narrative and relationships with her family, slightly estranged friends, and her potential new love interest. So much time was spent walking around, showing others the light rather than basking in that warm glow ourselves, a choice that would have made the game more impactful. Land of Screens ultimately feels like a predictable-yet-endearing Netflix romcom--though think more Love Hard rather than Someone Great.

In a genre that has become wrought with bloated and over-designed games, Elden Ring is defiantly contrarian in almost every way. Its commitment to design by subtraction and to placing the responsibility of charting a path through its world entirely on the player makes it stand head and shoulders above other open-world titles. Elden Ring takes the shards of what came before and forges them into something that will go down in history as one of the all-time greats: a triumph in design and creativity, and an open-world game that distinguishes itself for what it doesn't do as much as what it does.

I'm enjoying The First Soldier and I'll keep it in my BR rotation, but it already seems like a game I'll struggle to get better at. This is a battle royale title that's good enough, smart enough, and different enough to attract and keep a healthy player base--it's bursting at the smartphone's seams. On PC or console, The First Soldier would take a well-deserved place against other BR powerhouses, but on mobile, it's just too cramped.

Most King of Fighters veterans and newbies looking for a new title to dive into probably won't care that KoF XV isn't shaking up the fighting game paradigm. It delivers fisticuffs that overflow with a unique style and personality unlike that of other fighting game series, and that's more than enough to satisfy a lot of players. The King is back, and personally, I'm glad to see SNK swinging strong yet again.

Grapple Dog isn't doing anything new or revolutionary, but it is nicely delivering on a simple premise. It felt like uncovering a forgotten gem in a Game Boy Advance bargain bin, then taking it home and discovering some parts that are a little uneven or awkward. It's the kind of game that's just imminently likable and endearing, even if I don't expect it to hook me long-term.

Overall, though, Horizon Forbidden West does a lot more right than it does wrong. It might be jam-packed with stuff to see, do, know, and remember, but when its many systems come together, it can be a beautiful, exciting, and delightful open-world experience. The story that drives you through the frontier is often well-told and does well to center actual characters rather than audio logs, and while the map is littered with icons, it's much more often that they're fun, skillfully crafted diversions than random busywork to fill a checklist. There's a huge amount to do and see in Horizon Forbidden West, and the great majority of it is worth doing and seeing thanks to strong writing, great visuals, and some marked improvements to the series' underlying ideas.

Dying Light 2 is a perplexing game. Its story and characters are headache-inducing, and it appears to lack polish in many areas. But even a dozen hours after I rolled credits, I've found myself going back to the game to do another parkour challenge, rummage through another abandoned science lab, or just see if I can get from Point A to Point B without ever hitting the ground. It's rough around the edges and it asks players to invest a lot in its weakest element, but once you realize the story, like gravity, is only going to pull you down, you can begin to defy it and enjoy the things Dying Light 2 actually does well.

Sifu will likely ignite the difficulty debate once again, and it's certainly a shame that more people won't get to experience the game because of the barrier for entry. There's design and mechanical justification for having such a steep learning curve, though, and it's part of what makes Sifu so compelling. Your journey from student to master is thrilling, mainly because it's governed by your own improving skill level rather than traditional character progression. There are memorable moments that stand out throughout, such as the boss fights and an enjoyable recreation of the iconic hallway scene from Oldboy, but it's Sifu's combat that shines through most brightly. For as unique and interesting as its aging mechanic is, it wouldn't work without the combat carrying the load and ensuring that each replay is just as engaging as the last. Is one life enough to know kung fu? Maybe not. But I would happily spend mine playing Sifu to find out.

There's so much to OlliOlli World that you can always leave a course to try something else for a while before coming back. That freedom to just leave a problem and tackle it again later, or to shut off the point-scoring part of your brain and get into the flow, is what makes OlliOlli World so endearing. Its controls feel great, its art style is gorgeous, and its characters are light and fun. It's a game that will push you to be the most ridiculously skilled skater you can be, or just let you spend some time in its world for a bit. Either way, it's easy for hours to evaporate as you rattle off tricks and snag sick grinds. That seems like a perfect conception of skateboarding to me.

There's no question then that you are getting a vastly superior way to play both of the PlayStation 4's Uncharted entries, afforded by the more powerful hardware of the new generation of consoles. The upgrades are in line with what many other games from other publishers are putting out for free for players, but the upgrade structure here does allow you to grab both games for a small fee even if you only own one. That softens the blow somewhat, but it's a factor to consider if you've already experienced both games, with Uncharted 4 faring worse with its extremely slow opening when played through again. These are still both exceptional games, made better by more powerful hardware, making it an easy recommendation if you've missed them over the years.

Some of the new ideas in Arceus have rough edges, and it's slow to start before you get access to many environments and mounts. This is an awkward first step, and it was a big adjustment for me, a longtime fan of the series, to make. Once Pokemon Legends: Arceus finds its stride, though, it's the most daring and inventive the series has been in years, breaking apart the staid core and creating something new and exciting from its pieces.

Pupperazzi is a cute game conceptually, but it falters in its execution, making for an experience that I couldn't get behind despite desperately wanting to extend it all the same affection I have for our four-legged friends. Quite simply, the game fails to capture the liveliness and joy that dogs, art, and games can provide us with. While the premise is unique and wholesome, Pupperazzi is ultimately a lot more bark than bite.

Windjammers 2 is a fine evolution of a formula that's only become more beloved over time. The action's intense, the online's excellent, and the new characters, skills, and levels build well upon the foundation of the original. It's a wonderful competitive experience, but a lack of guidance for new players and a serious dearth of single-player content will turn some folks off of what should be a triumphant comeback. If you're planning on being a flying disc jockey, you'd better make sure you're prepared to fight online.

Though the story is weak and the design of the game favors certain characters, Extraction is a good Rainbow Six game that rewards you and your team's ability to adapt to deliver a compelling gameplay loop.

After finishing Nobody Saves the World, I went right back to it. There were still dungeons to explore, powers to unlock, secrets to uncover, and a New Game Plus mode to conquer. When a game is this much frictionless fun, it's hard to resist.

God of War isn't drastically different on PC when compared to the PS4 version that launched back in 2018, but its little improvements are definitely nice ones, making this a solid PC port overall. There isn't reason enough here to buy a second copy of the game if you've already played, necessarily, but the PC version is a great reason to check out God of War for the first time for anybody who hasn't had a chance to experience it. God of War remains an excellent, gorgeous, affecting action game, and with the port to PC, it gets a handful of nice, if somewhat minor, improvements.

Improves on what was already a fantastic game in almost every way.

It's a downsized version of Rocket League that streamlines and shrinks the experience, without sacrificing its fundamental nature. It also brilliantly takes advantage of the mobile medium with super-quick games, easy-to-understand mechanics, and excellent controls. Sideswipe is a smaller, quicker, lighter-weight version of Rocket League that still captures why the original is so endearing, and it's absolutely a game you should make space for on your phone.