Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown strikes a harmonious balance between combat, puzzles, and exploration, providing a satisfying blend for players. The shadow of the deluxe edition looms, introducing cosmetic items and early access at a questionable price point. Despite this, the core game experience remains untarnished, making the deluxe edition an optional, albeit somewhat disappointing, add-on. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a delightful journey, offering a well-paced adventure that managed to keep me engaged from start to finish.

Cookie Cutter is a good Metroidvania, elevated by some pretty stellar graphics. Don't expect to walk through this one - the game raises the difficulty in response to your character powering up. A lot of value here for the asking price.

Towers and Powers is an excellent example of how virtual reality can enhance certain genres. I’ve played tower defense games before, but what I didn’t know until now is that VR is the definitive way to enjoy them. Towers and Powers convinced me of that, making it an easy game to recommend on PS VR2.

It's rare to see such a massive VR game, especially on a mobile platform. Asgard's Wrath 2 delivers a ton of gameplay and a mountain of content. Minor issues aside, this game has it all for VR owners and is a great sequel to the Quest 2 game.

TEVI is an enjoyable game with a great art style, fun dialogue, and a combat system that can somehow be both simple and complex at the same time. The Metroidvania-style gameplay isn’t quite as strict as others in the genre and most of the bullet hell scenarios take place during the boss fights which require a good amount of patience and strategy. If you enjoy the demo, I definitely recommend checking out the full version.

Despite its flaws, Gothic II remains a fascinating relic, a testament to the ambition and innovation of early open-world RPGs. While its clunky controls, outdated mechanics, and fetch-quest-heavy narrative might not resonate with modern players, its intricate world-building, hidden secrets, and surprisingly complex player agency shine through even today. It's a game that demands patience, but rewards exploration with a sense of discovery and genuine joy in overcoming its challenges. Ultimately, Gothic II's legacy lies not in its polish but in its pioneering spirit. It helped lay the groundwork for the genre we know and love, and for that, it deserves our respect, even if I ultimately choose to leave its clunky controls and endless errands in the past.

While I eventually began having fun with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the game was a very difficult nut to crack. Rather than being open to the way I wanted to play it, Avatar pushed me to find the way it wanted to be played, and then kinda punished me for doing so. Frontiers of Pandora should feel free and flowing, but I've found a lot of the experience to be restrictive and near-punitive. Once I pushed through the game's many barriers to entry, I started having a good time, but don't expect to just jump in and have fun. Like Jake Sully, it's going to take a while to find your Avatar-legs.

Arizona Sunshine 2 might not be the groundbreaking landmark the first game was, but improved gunplay, a fun companion, and rapid-fire jokes make this a ride well worth taking. Often tense, always fun, and sometimes emotionally impactful, Arizona Sunshine feels like big-budget entertainment. Just play by yourself the first time so your friend doesn't chatter through all the good stuff.

Sanabi is a secret masterpiece. I don't know why it's a secret, but it is. It's a platforming clinic, with extremely tight controls, and the story hit me in the center of my heart. You'll probably play it one more time to speed run it, but I wont. Some games are better left one and done. This is one of those games. Unbelievable.

Without a ton of bells and whistles, Pickleball One delivers a streamlined Pickleball experience that feels great. Pickleball One will teach you how to play Pickleball, train you to get better at it, and allow you to take those skills to the community that has gathered around the game. It ain't fancy, but it certainly gets the job done.

Lego Bricktales VR pulls of an amazing trick, allowing you to play with gorgeous Lego sets floating around in your own home through the magic of mixed reality. Detailed and beautiful, while still being a fun and challenging game, I can’t think of a better way to show off VR to stubborn non-believers. The potential of what is on display here is limitless.

Assassin's Creed Nexus brings Ubisoft's amazing level of polish and fun to the VR space, with spectacular results. While the combat is a bit clunky, everything else - from the effortless parkour to the highly entertaining stealth - works like a charm. I was amazed and delighted by the fact that this is a full game, and not just a small collection of levels crammed into a "VR experience". Wildly fun, this game goes a long way toward re-establishing my faith in VR as a viable video game medium. This is a landmark title.

Bringing a new, adult spin to Zen Studios' winning pinball formula, Pinball M does enough new thing to differentiate itself from the Pinball FX mothership. Bringing a strong opening selection of tables and many ways to interact with them, Pinball M feels like the start of something new and mysterious. I can't wait to see where it goes next.

Despite minor complaints about the story's pacing, the overall experience of Persona 5 Tactica is rewarding. Engaging combat dynamics and a strategic depth that is hidden at the game’s slower-than-I-wanted start kept me invested in the tactical twists. Persona 5 Tactica successfully delivers a compelling inter-quel that stands on its own within the beloved franchise. Persona 5 Tactica is a solid, enjoyable tactics game that still feels like a Persona game despite not being a true RPG. It successfully blends the Persona universe with a tactical RPG gameplay style. This one can be enjoyed by Persona 5 fans and tactics fans alike.

Forest Grove is very short and a little rough around the edges but it's a decent mystery story that kept me interested throughout and made me want to keep playing to find every piece of evidence I could to complete the story.

I enjoyed Astral Ascent when it was in Early Access and I still enjoy it after it’s official release. Multiple characters, spells, and abilities along with procedurally generated areas and some fun and interesting boss fights against the Zodiacs give Astral Ascent plenty of replayability. If these kinds of games are up your alley, you’ll get plenty of gameplay out of Astral Ascent.

Some games don’t need to be ported from board to video. Settlers of Catan is one of those games. The rules are exactly the same. The resources have been left unchanged. The robber still shows up with you roll a 7. That isn’t the problem. Settlers of Catan: Console Edition has taught me that the game isn’t the board; it’s the players. The human interactions happening while playing, the back and forth between rivals, and the race to get to 10 victory points feels meaningless against AI opponents. I tried to get others to play with me in person, but if you don’t play video games, you won’t have fun, and the person trying to help you with the controls won’t either. There is zero online presence, I waited for over half an hour only to find no one. Settlers of Catan: Console Edition is a faithful adaptation, but the jump to the video game screen makes me dream of playing with a group of friends, in person at my dining room table.

Can torturing prisoners in a secret underground laboratory be kinda boring? The Kindeman Remedy shows that it can. Essentially a time management game, The Kindeman Remedy has players putting an evil doctor and his nun assistant through the paces of dark experiments in a way that ends up feeling a lot like a repetitive day of work. Some cheap kicks to be had from the not-so-violent violence, but the shock value is short-lived. Not a prison I would want to spend any significant amount of time in.

Barbaria is fun in the moment, and very visually pleasing. Assembling dungeons and raiding the dungeons of other players are both very entertaining activities, and the high-end VR implementation makes things that much better, but the overly open-ended progression system ultimately left me feeling stalled and frustrated. There is massive potential here, and with a few more guardrails in place, Barbaria would be an all-time great VR game.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was a tough game to review. The campaign almost completely lost its way with respect to the soul of Call of Duty campaigns. Meanwhile, the multiplayer and new iteration on Zombies are fun, with Zombies in particular being a real surprise. As a total package, it is deeply flawed, but taken as disparate parts there is a lot to like, depending on your personal tastes.

Jagged Alliance 3 couples irreverent 80s action hero humor and turn-based combat in one of the best tactical RPGs I’ve played this year. It could use some slight optimization tweaks but is an otherwise great port from PC to consoles, including an excellent gamepad control scheme. It’s a game that sets the hook early and refuses to let go as the hours fade away.

Teardown is one of the most fun games I have played this year. The combination of destructible environments and timed heists never gets old. Not quite mindless, Teardown is still a great way to turn your brain off and just blow stuff up. It is packed with so much content that you likely won't get bored of anytime soon.

Demeo Battles takes the assets and mechanics of the original VR dungeon crawler, and remixes them into a fast and fun 2v2 multiplayer game. Easy to pick up for almost anyone, Demeo Battles contains enough deep strategy options to produce some true nail-biter endings. If this game gets the same great support as the original Demeo, there’s no reason it shouldn’t grow into another VR classic, just like it’s daddy.

Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2 has even more potential than the first game at launch. It's a good continuation, more so a way better start than the last game's abysmal beginnings. However, with clunky controls, favorite characters missing, and a useless campaign, maybe wait until "Nickelodeon's All Star Brawl 3: Shredder's Revenge 2" comes in 2025. Or at least give it a few months for things to get smoothed out.

Through all the performance and optimization issues, all the problems with shading and rendering, I believe there's a good game waiting to be unlocked. However, as it stands, Cities Skylines II is a major disappointment that should have been pushed back to fix these issues. Instead, gamers are stuck dealing with yet another game that falls victim to a rush and will need multiple patches until we see what the final product actually is.

Slay the Princess is my first visual novel in my roughly thirty-five years as a gamer and I enjoyed every minute of it. With so many dialogue options to choose from, no two runs of the story are the same, and even when you get to the story’s finale there are still a few different ways it can ultimately end. The voice acting and soundtrack ties everything together beautifully and for someone who never got into visual novels, I can’t recommend this one enough. If you’re looking for a psychological horror story with quite a bit of comedic dialogue thrown in, then definitely prepare to Slay the Princess…that kind of came out weird.

Vampire The Masquerade – Justice features an intriguing stealth premise that should be perfect for the immersive world of virtual reality. Unfortunately, it’s a lowkey technical mess that struggles mightily to get out of its own way, in addition to losing its identity at key moments. Fleetingly fun and frequently frustrating, this vampire adventure will suck the life out of you.

DreamWorks All-Star Kart Racing is a fairly decent, though basic, kart racer. All of the usual mechanics are present, and the character roster is fun, if a bit limited. Though the sound and visuals are wonky, kids will likely not notice, and a good variety of tracks will keep them busy for a while. Nothing extraordinary, but also nothing extraordinarily bad or broken.