I’ll be playing a lot more of Trials Rising in the coming months. There’s nothing like the agony and ecstasy of conquering one of its more difficult tracks, the heart-in-mouth tension of landing your bike on a near-vertical surface and revving just enough for the rear wheel to bite without flipping your rider backwards. Every tiny movement of bike and rider is significant and fully within your control. It’s a game about self-mastery, and believing you can do better. It helps that it’s also tremendous fun.

If you want to play a Halo game with the simpler story, backs-to-the-wall tone and cinematic flair of Bungie’s good ol’ days go right ahead and play Halo Wars 2. Just don’t expect the quality of the game to match that of the cutscenes.

The overwhelming impression I got playing both games this year is that they’re just tired. Both series are in need of a fresh shot of adrenaline (and a fresh coat of paint), and they were never going to get it in 2019, in the twilight of the sixth console generation. We can only hope that this year’s stagnation is just a result of something bigger and better coming along next year.

It’s like taking a nice walk through a sleepy town on a sunny afternoon. Except, of course, for the fact that all the characters in the game are the ones taking that walk, and you’re there to honk at them until they change their minds and decide to never go outside again.

What Battle for Azeroth lacks in new stuff, it makes up for in character.

Rise & Fall gets its hooks in deep, showing that the enlarged game’s greatest strength may not be its scale or its history, but the sense of togetherness it inspires, and the way it drags the player down to the surface of its gorgeous world.

Time Stranger sometimes awkwardly fumbles its way to the point it’s trying to make, but every time it shows its hand, it proves it’s willing to punch above its weight.

I might run out of gas in the second half, especially if the difficulty keeps ramping up, but so far Khazan has been one of 2025's nicer surprises. [Impressions]

When I finished Lost in Random, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to not just praise it, but really dig into the world and its combat system. It’s that kind of game that makes you wish you had a few people around you who also played it and who want to spend a few hours just going on and on about it. Sure, I wish there were bigger decks in the game, but that’s less a complaint and more an admittance that I just wanted more of Lost in Random.

Part of my frustration with Detroit is that I’ve spent the last several years watching other game developers make far better narrative-focused games, often with substantially fewer resources.

Structurally, The Answer is an often frustrating epilogue that shaves off some of the best parts of Persona games. Thankfully, Reload’s quality-of-life updates make the grind more tolerable and the remake adds enough small social elements like reading books and watching movies with your friends that it doesn’t feel like it’s all business. But as a meditation on grief, it feels like a kindness afforded to characters who once had to rile in the ambiguity of the original ending. It would have been easy for Persona 3 to end on a nihilistic note, showing the entire group fall apart without their leader and denying all the lessons they learned. But grief never really goes away. We just learn to help each other live with it a little more each day.

A Way Out is a simple story told very, very well. Its levels run the gamut from car chases to robberies to a full on assault on a drug lord’s mansion. Nothing is more affecting and memorable in this game than that simple button prompt. It is a game full of smart moments, perfect for bringing together dedicated gamers and curious onlookers alike.

For now, Stellaris is a game that reaches for the stars, only to fall just short.

Fans primarily looking for a meaningful addition to Breath of the Wild’s canon can skip this game. It wastes the opportunity to establish the deep connections present in Breath of the Wild, instead serving only as a vehicle for beating up bokoblins as your Breath of the Wild fave. In the absence of other payoffs—for example, I’d forgive every sin named here if, as is typical for the Dynasty Warriors franchise, each character got their own story mode—not even my ardent love for these characters was enough to sustain my interest over the entire, artificially padded game. Again, you can play as Lady Urbosa. That’s it. That’s the game.

Like junk food, Borderlands 3 is an exercise in cheap hedonism. It’s not meant to take the place of a meal, but it still warrants criticism for being what it is, what it’s always been: a compulsively playable shooter with some good ideas and also some frustratingly retrograde attitudes. There’s enough good here to understand why you’d keep it around, but also enough troubling aspects that you could justify cutting it from your life entirely. But, even then, if you came across it at a house party, you’d probably take a bite.

It’s a charming little game with just the right amount of “what the fuck?” to keep me on my toes for hours on end.

Granblue Fantasy Versus is a fantastic new fighting game that more than justifies its existence in an already overcrowded genre.

Even the most clumsy and gnarled duel will achieve moments of greatness. And when two experienced players operating on the same wave-length begin stringing together slashes, parries and counter-attacks in an unbroken chain, the resulting exchange feels as much like a choreographed ballet as a fight to the death…if ballets ended with severed heads flying into the orchestra.

Right now, Marvel Rivals has the potential to learn from its inspiration’s mistakes, rather than repeat them. For now, it’s an extremely fun One of Those. Let’s keep it that way, yeah?

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a good game made worse by some really bad choices. It features annoying characters who ruin the isolated and haunting vibes that this latest sequel strives so hard to create, and forces Samus to drive across a boring desert over and over and over again for no good reason other than forcing you to do some extra busy work to extend Prime 4’s runtime to around 11 hours for most people.

Gaiden plays the familiar hits in a compact package that’s a delightful way to wile away a rainy weekend. If you’ve left previous games in the series unfinished due to the hefty time investment required, this is a great way to get back into the swing of things, even if all the lore-dumping might leave you feeling like you’ve taken one too many bicycles to the head.

While the three new features don’t exactly revolutionize the series, they’re enough to make The Force Awakens more than just another licensed Lego action game.

What surprised me most in my time with Nobody Wants to Die was its deep lore. The premise of a future without death isn’t just a shallow idea that starts the mystery, it’s a moral and ethical quandary that Critical Hit Games investigates at every turn. In 2329 New York, we hear talk of bodies as literal government property. That’s as horrific an idea as you would imagine, and the game digs into this with further details like drinking and smoking being illegal so as to not ruin a body for its next owner, a subscription fee you must pay to use your body, and the emergence of a new death kink for rich people who can afford to buy poor bodies and take them over just to get killed in for a quick high before returning to their old body. It’s a biting allegory of wealth inequality and how rich people see poor people as a literal commodity to control. Learning more about this world is one of the best parts of Nobody Wants to Die and the flavor text you can find is full of interesting tidbits that only add to your understanding of the crimes at its center. This game came out of nowhere for me, but its tightly paced film noir mystery is built on such a fascinating world that it’s quickly become one of my favorite sleeper hits of 2024.

I don’t think Tomodachi Life as a series is at a critical tipping point just yet. I’m still enjoying Living the Dream a lot, but the game’s focus on user-generated content seems indicative of the direction the rest of Nintendo’s cozy games seem to be heading in, too. Really, the problem with the game is spelled out in the title. When I’m playing a life sim that’s known for being an ant farm full of ups and downs, I don’t necessarily want to live the dream. I just want to live life.

El Paso, Elsewhere is both a badass shooter and a study of how people handle toxic relationships. It walks that tightrope and sticks the landing so strongly that I ended the game and immediately wanted to play it again. And I probably will, because James needs me to help him once again save himself and the world.

For a game that loves strangeness, it only extends that love to a certain kind of strange person who is harmless and normative, who looks and acts the right kind of weird. Sure, it has a big heart. I just wish it was bigger, and that its teeth were sharper.

For all of its strengths, Crisis Core is ultimately too obsessed with itself to serve as a perfect prequel. The game’s core narrative is an excellent half or three-quarters of a story. The final plot arc, however, fails to recognize that VII is its own story with its own characters. Crisis Core’s depiction of VII’s characters, and its refusal to stop shoving new characters into existing narratives, makes for a disappointing conclusion.

By the time I reached the end of Life Is Strange 2’s final episode, I had been on the brink of tears for hours.