Citadelum successfully channels the spirit and charm of classic genre entries like Pharaoh and Zeus, bringing this iconic style of city-builder to the modern era, but lacks the variety and content to remain engaging for long. Abylight’s take on this style of game is excellent for those seeking a rush of nostalgia, but merely solid for everyone else.

SpongeBob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake isn’t a bad game, but it’s not a particularly great one either. It exists firmly in the middle, a game that is slightly more good than it is bad, and a game that could be quite good with just a few tweaks and changes. If I were an eight-year-old kid with plenty of time and patience, I don’t think I could find much to fault here, and given that’s primarily who this game will be aimed at, that’s probably good enough.

How much you get out of AEW Fight Forever depends on what you like most about wrestling games. If you’re a solo player who likes to take these TV characters and create your own matches and stories, then you’re not going to find any of that here. However, if you want a wrestling game you can boot up to play on the couch with your mates, then Fight Forever is a blast to mess around with, it just doesn’t have quite as much variety as WWE’s offering.

The Tribe Must Survive is a solid pick-up for those who love a battle against the odds and have the patience to overcome unfair circumstances by puzzling things out over a long time – for the rest of us casuals, it’s not a fun experience.

Nightdive has simply made it look nicer on modern screens, run at approximately a bajillion frames per second, and updated the controls so they don’t make the modern player’s brain fall out of their head. Lovely stuff. I hope Nightdive keeps wearing other game studios’ skins.

War Hospital falls a bit short for me as a video game – it has good ideas and scratches that management itch at least a little bit, though it’s quite repetitive and feels too punishing at times as opposed to simply challenging. It somewhat grinds down your will to play, which isn’t the best quality in a game. What it excels in – ironically, exactly because it grinds down your will to go on – is making you experience the sheer overwhelming despair and helplessness the brave people serving in these field hospitals must have felt as they fought to save as many lives as possible only to lose a countless number of them along with their own sense of humanity. War Hospital is a valuable history lesson and I’m glad I experienced it.

For a game I was so quickly sold on by its trailers, I came away disappointed by Schim. It very rarely showed glimpses of the great game it could’ve been, but never committed to that level of fun puzzling gameplay. Instead, I was left bored as I hopped around the shadows. While the story and overall aesthetic are fun at first, they can’t carry the entire experience when the gameplay has very little of substance to offer.

Park Beyond is a fabulous theme park builder with vibrant aesthetics, rock-solid controls and UI, and satisfying mechanics – and thanks to the power of impossification, the game has a much longer staying power and more variety than many other representatives of its genre. The game does exactly what it promises: It lets you build your wildest dreams.

It’s a shame, as there’s real potential in Mineko’s setup. It has a strong blend of the fantastical and mundane, and that’s refreshing in a genre where “fantastical” usually just extends to “you can run an entire farm by yourself and not die.” The art direction is also bolder and more striking than we usually see, and it goes a long way in creating a unique, mildly eerie atmosphere that helps sell the island’s mythology.

I’m left struggling with how to talk about The Teal Mask. Like the main game, it is one of the most enjoyable mainline Pokémon games ever produced, but the series’ old problems keep rearing their ugly heads and dragging the experience down from both a technical and gameplay standpoint. I love this DLC and I love Scarlet & Violet, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.

There is so much to praise Another Crab’s Treasure for. The story and characters are genuinely delightful, and I love the fact that a studio dared to innovate on a formula as strong and established as soulslike. These innovations are even successful in places, though others need closer examination and refinement. I could see what the team was trying to accomplish in so many places, which made it even worse when the game didn’t live up to the vision. But my primary takeaway from this experience is that the state in which Another Crab’s Treasure has launched on Switch is unacceptable. It simply doesn’t work, and you definitely shouldn’t buy it.

The simple fact is, if you’re an RTS veteran, then there isn’t anything here for you. However, if you’re new to the genre, then this might just be the best introduction there is. It gets you into the right mindset and teaches you the conventions of RTS, challenging you just enough so that you have to improvise strategies. It’s far from the pinnacle of the genre, but it will make you hungry for more.

On a technical level, Star Trek: Infinite has been a stable experience for me, though not without some rather annoying hiccups that I’d describe as typical Paradox launch shenanigans. Some missions were bugged and could only be completed by reloading to previous points in the game due to the wrong conditions being given, for example. Nothing in terms of visual glitches or crashes on my end, though.

It’s never going to be on the main stage of Evo, but SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is fun for fighting game fans who don’t take themselves too seriously. Jump into online lobbies while playing as a boss character and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

That’s Forspoken’s biggest problem – everything I like about it gets dragged down by the unrelenting dullness of everything else. The story is boring, the characters are boring, the enemies are boring, and the world is boring.

The Queen’s Gambit Chess does its best to motivate you to play chess, and to keep playing chess. But whether this will transfer to real life, where Beth’s vision and markers on the board don’t exist is hard to see. However, it will certainly make you feel like a genius even when starting out, and that is as much as you can ask for a chess app.

I wanted to like Ty 4 a lot more than I did, and while there is some fun to be had with the game, I found myself wishing from start to finish that it was the 3D platformer game I pictured in my head when somebody said Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.

Alone in the Dark’s biggest flaw is that it’s unfocused, unwilling to commit to its core premise, and unable to settle into anything that feels comfortable. When it’s in its puzzle-solving element, everything feels great, but in trying to ape other recent games in the survival horror genre, it ultimately falls apart.

The Va'ruun are beyond boring when you get to know them, Dazra is small in the scope of the grand cosmos, and your ship just sits there beckoning you despite there being no new way to customise it, nor anywhere interesting to go. Combine that with annoying enemies and scant new loot to discover and there’s not really much reason to blast off again.

Slitterhead is quite possibly the single most interesting game of 2024, but prospective players need to be aware of the journey that’s ahead of them. If seeing some genuinely bold and indulgent game design decisions is worth fighting against a bit of jank, then this game is absolutely for you. If you want to always know where to go and what to do next, maybe not. Even then, I think you should play Slitterhead, simply because you’re unlikely to see anything like it ever again.

What’s left is a game with a weird amount of dodgy fan service, an almost nonexistent story, a SRPG battle system that feels largely hollow, and a dicey frame rate on Switch. I’m sure, somewhere, there’s somebody for whom this is the perfect game, but that somebody is certainly not me.

At the regular setting, enemies don’t telegraph their attacks, and you need to go into accessibility if you even want to have a chance at dodging. Your dodge also offers limited or no invincibility frames and a short range, meaning you are unlikely to come out of a fight feeling powerful. The different weapons you grab, and the boons you pick up don’t add to the depth of the gameplay, while let down a visually stunning game.

A year on, and Mortal Kombat 1 is still plodding along. If you’ve felt a bit gore deprived recently, Khaos Reigns is a great way to refresh your sicko meter and have some fun with friends, but even with infinite combos and a variety of new characters, MK1 still feels stuck in the mud. Hopefully, the next MK game will take place in a timeline where the gameplay doesn’t feel stiff, though I’m not sure even the Kamidogu can help with that.

If you like previous Strategic Mind games, this one delivers the exact same experience, which in turn means that if you didn’t like any of its predecessors, there is nothing interesting for you here.

I really wanted to like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – you can tell a lot of people worked very hard on it. I love the Arkham games and there isn’t another studio I’d have trusted to tackle a concept like this, but everything good about this game is undermined by its games-as-a-service shackles. There isn’t a single thing in here that wouldn’t be improved by the kind of actual level design and quest design you can get in a story-focused single-player game (or even a co-op game, at that).

If Telmari had any level of polish, then it’d be a fun, if simplistic, platformer, but that level of care hasn’t been put in. The result is a game that fails at its core purpose and is a mere echo of far better games.

I don’t see much of a future for Skull and Bones. Ubisoft has announced its Year 1 roadmap, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the studio jettisoned the cargo and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean way before that, it certainly feels like they only finished it out of obligation anyway.

Reynatis tries to tick many boxes, and in the process ends up ticking very few. Despite some strong presentation and some genuinely fantastic ideas, the execution is lacking in just about every department, with a story that goes nowhere and gameplay that’s more frustrating than fun.