In a year of change, EA Sports FC 24 doesn't revolutionize the series. Even with the goal at its mercy, EA has decided to bet on the game's new image, tidying up the wrapping paper and maintaining the same experience that all fans already know so well. Graphically it has never looked better, but there are few new features in terms of gameplay. New jersey aside, the gameplay of FC 24 is very similar to that of FIFA 23, for better or for worse.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is a visual spectacle that captures the essence of feudal Japan, but fails to realise its potential. Despite stunning art direction and historical detail, the game is held back by its own ambition to appeal to different types of players. The duality of protagonists, which promised innovation, ends up creating more obstacles than opportunities, with stealth and combat mechanics that don't evolve significantly from previous titles. While the open world invites exploration due to its beauty, it quickly reveals the repetitiveness of its missions. For fans of the series, there are rewarding moments, but Shadows leaves the feeling that it doesn't intend to change the Assassin's Creed formula, remaining hostage to a design that shows signs of fatigue.

The introduction of a roguelike element in Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap results in a somewhat contradictory fusion. Setting up a defence with traps and tearing apart entire columns of Orcs remains highly entertaining, especially with friends, with constant pressure forcing you to adjust your strategy, wave by wave, map by map. However, progression through the levels is inconsistent and outside of combat it's simply uninteresting. Even so, Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap offers many good moments of gameplay, if its slow progression doesn't bore you.

Minecraft Legends is a solid attempt to adapt the world of Minecraft into a new genre. In the process, it clings too tightly to simplicity and leaves behind the creativity that defined it so well. The result is a game that manages to be enjoyable, but often ends up becoming repetitive and shallow, as it seems to have been made with multiplayer modes in mind.

Lord of The Rings: Return to Moria doesn't mess with the formula we already know from survival games. The focus on Tolkien's narrative offers good moments, but still leads to a relatively linear progression, lightly sprinkled with references to the journey of the Fellowship of the Ring. The bugs and the overly basic combat bury too much of the fun that the game can offer, yet fans of the genre and The Lord of the Rings willing to sift through these problems may find some golden nuggets.

Emio - The Smiling Man struggles to remain as interesting as its premise, a battle it loses over the course of the more than 10 hours of gameplay it has to offer. The simplicity of the narrative adds nothing to the linear and predetermined gameplay, diminishing the initial interest I had in seeing an answer to the interesting mysteries presented at the start of the game. On the other hand, this safe, simple and even quite competent path could serve as a gateway for those interested in taking their first steps in a thriller visual novel with a subdued horror narrative.

AEW: Fight Forever successfully fulfills the founding principle it set for itself: providing an experience that brings back simple, frenetic, fun gameplay that gives wrestling games back the arcade vibe that has been lost over time. At its best moments, AEW is all of that, but it still fails to be much more. The scarcity of game modes, a roster with gaps, the somewhat persistent bugs, and a Road to Elite far from the quality of the predecessors it draws inspiration from are damaging to the experience and don't give us many reasons to come back. Nevertheless, with promises of constant development and regular updates from the studio, we have reason to believe that there is room to fix these shortcomings and offer a more complete wrestling experience. It just isn't it at the moment.

Gotham Knights is no Arkham, not by a long shot. Competent enough, it takes us into a fantastic recreation of Gotham City, unfortunately marred by activities that become recurring after a while. The combat starts off interesting, but becomes a repetitive waltz, stuck in a shallow crafting and loot system. Helped by a solid storyline, Gotham Knights is fun in short doses and can be an enjoyable experience in multiplayer.

The weak AI and the poor adherence from other players to Aliens: Fireteam Elite impede that the whole central idea from the game, a co-op shooter from the Aliens franchise, becomes real with its true potential. Even so, and for now, there’s a satisfactory gameplay that stands on the central mechanics of the game, which are enough to keep us interested. Until when we still don’t know.

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – The Official Video Game gives you interesting, perhaps memorable, moments, but the lack of cohesion, the short duration of each event and the shallow gameplay make the game look more like an arcade compilation than an accurate portrayal of the Olympic Games. The fun is undeniable, but the ephemerality of this title is its biggest downfall.

Hood: Outlaws and Legends brings together good ideas in a very interesting setting, it is fun if we have a team of three friends, but it does not disguise the notorious lack of content and a schematic doomed to fail into a routine of fights, which goes against the intention the of game’s design. The game would benefit from a story mode and a richer progression system with better visual feedback. It is certain that there is newer content on the horizon, which will promote other synergies and greater unpredictability. However the game runs the risk of not deserving the attention it boasts nowadays.

Making Gylt cross-platform was a wise choice from Tequila Works. The game that was exclusive to Stadia now has the opportunity to reach more players, and raise awareness for bullying. Despite the stealth and combat mechanics being very basic, the story that sustains the action is interesting enough to hold us until the end, making the experience extremely satisfying.

Slitterhead demonstrates admirable creative courage, and functions less as a final product and more as a creative manifesto - a glimpse of future possibilities. However, the forced cyclicality raises questions about how such a promising concept - a time loop of supernatural horror - can be simultaneously so expansive in its ambitions and so claustrophobic in its execution. For an independent studio on its first flight, there is something courageously poetic about creating a game about a formless entity that seeks to define itself through others. Perhaps, in the end, that's Slitterhead's real victory: not so much what it achieves technically, but what it tries to suggest.

MotoGP 21 ends up disappointing on different verticals, even though it attempts to replicate everything that made it's predecessor the best game in the saga. The lack of novelty features is overwhelming, the career mode is a replica true to it's name, having only the new brake system and the arrival of the Autodromo Internacional do Algarve escaping the copying process. It is still a good game, but not on it's own merit. But for everything that MotoGP 20 was.

All in all, Immortals of Aveum is an interesting proposition, with an intense and fun combat system, even if it doesn't revolutionize the FPS genre. The world is interesting enough, the light show mesmerizing, but the plot leaves a lot to be desired, with characters and clichés we've seen hundreds of times in other games and films.

The Quarry joins Until Dawn on the shelf of must-have terror/horror games. If you are a fan of the genre, this is the one you have to play at least once, since repeating it can become extremely boring, given that the story is told slowly and the interaction with the characters reveals little about the relationship between them. Even with some bugs, The Quarry offers a strong horror experience that can surprise even the strongest stomachs.

FIFA 23 tries new things and doesn't quite get them all right. It's not a bad game, but it's also not the best we've ever seen, not even close. It brings slower gameplay, a more patient passing game, but patches will surely change this over the coming months. Career Mode threatens to score a banger, but gets lost with repetitive cutscenes and some bizarre bugs in the Artificial Intelligence's behaviour. Ultimately, EA Sports and FIFA won't be saying goodbye with grand ceremonies, but rather with a timid exit from the pitch.

The Crew: Motorfest is a solid and capable title, but it can easily be labeled as a clone of its competitors, such as those in the Forza franchise. Despite this, it still offers a mature arcade experience with plenty of customization and attention to detail. It has taken a few steps backwards, but all the ones it has taken forwards have been in the right places.

Pecaminosa – A Pixel Noir Game is a bizarre RPG noir adventure, with elements taken straight from the classic 40’s and 50’s detective movies, but also with a pinch of demons, skeletons, zombies and other occult creatures thrown in. All this in a pixel-art style accompanied by a wonderful jazz soundtrack. A drastic shift in tone, repetitive boss battles and frustrating backtracking keep the game from being a masterpiece, but it's a promising starting point for the Portuguese developer, Cereal Games.

An exciting new game engine and a wider range of tactical options are not enough to hide an ineffective and, in most cases, dysfunctional interface, as well as numerous features that have disappeared since the last edition. The fans waited two years for this game, but Sports Interactive is telling us that we'll need to wait a bit more until it grows on us. We're then left waiting, and wanting.

After a long voyage on a rough sea, Skull and Bones has reached a safe harbour. It's not the disaster many were expecting, but it doesn't offer an outstanding experience either. There are positive and genuinely enjoyable aspects, such as the combat or the artistic direction, but these are swallowed up by the swamp of live-service elements and the time it demands from players.

Gods Will Fall tries to formulate a dungeon crawler based on the principles of Roguelikes and Soulslike. Although the idea is good, both narrative and gameplay, some fundamental elements of the genre don't quite hit the mark, leaving Clever Beans a few notches lower than what it could be. Many of the problems can be resolved with some patches and by adding new content, which would certainly improve the experience. We'll be waiting, but for now, you can't help getting the feeling of an opportunity missed.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare III is the ultimate proof that the franchise's annual release schedule is breaking down. The campaign feels uninteresting and rushed, the multiplayer mode appeals to the nostalgia of the community and isn't fundamentally different from its predecessor, while the zombies mode comes across as a PvE version of DMZ, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. All in all, Modern Warfare III struggles to justify its price and each of these elements would have benefited from a modular release rather than the hastily put together package we have on our hands.

There really is very little of interest The Teal Mask. Throughout the four hours of gameplay - which left me sleepy - I felt like I was playing an uninteresting filler, or some kind of visual novel with no content. The bulk of the DLC is dialog where you spend your time pressing "A". All of the story and characters introduced are nothing more than an excuse to sell Pokémon and cosmetic items to players, sneakily masking a completely insignificant story and additional adventure. Despite its flaws, and as I said at the beginning, here's hoping that part 2, The Indigo Disk, will be better and deliver an interesting Pokémon experience.

eFootball 2023 does so much right on the field that it becomes tough to look beyond it. However, the lack of optimization for a closs-platform title, as well as the continued scarcity of offline modes, stop this game from completing its great comeback. The turnaround has begun, but Konami's is still trailing.

Spelunker HD does everything a remaster should do, improving the gameplay and challenge of the 1983 original. But its biggest downfall is being a remaster for Spelunker, a platformer with very archaic mechanics, made for a specific type of audience. There is magic between the hours of suffering, but there are several titles in this genre that provide this type of challenge in a more competent manner.

Wanted: Dead falls short of the reputation of Ninja Gaiden's developers. Not only it doesn't bring anything new, but it also demeans everything that already exists, adding elements that detract from what is essential in a video game, regardless of genre. The characters are hollow, the story is superficial, and the combat, which should be the strong point, is a complete mess. In the middle of 2023 and with a resume of weight, it was expected a different result from Soleil.

Saints Row could be something special. It really could, but Volition still doesn't know how to treat this franchise, placing it somewhere between Grand Theft Auto and Just Cause, never managing to leave its own fingerprints on the open worlds it creates. The Saints Row reboot is so similar to the original franchise in tone, gameplay and content that it leaves you wondering why it was even necessary to hit the reset button. There is fun to be had, but it's hidden behind bugs, repetitive missions and a detached story that doesn't know whether it wants to be a caricature of other plots or a candid tale about a group of friends involved in the criminal world.