Cold War takes all those positives from Modern Warfare, and now we’re one step further with pretty much cross-everything. The multiplayer and Zombies matches are crossplay and cross-generation, meaning no one gets left behind if they couldn’t score a new PS5 or Xbox. There’s also cross-progression, so you can switch platforms without losing your progress.

Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 5 is very much the Demon’s Souls you remember from PlayStation 3. It doesn’t miss a beat, nailing the same melancholy atmosphere and compelling gameplay that would eventually spawn fellow instant-classics like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. While there were bound to be a few aspects that could have been more faithful to the original, PlayStation 5’s Demon’s Souls remake stands out as an incredibly fun way to revisit the cursed land of Boletaria. It’s creepy. It’s gloomy. You’ll get invaded by laggy assholes near the end of a long level and have to do the whole thing over again. It feels like coming home.

The changes Valhalla brings to the franchise feel as great as a warm hearthfire during a cold winter night. The game’s developers have crafted a world that is wonderful to explore, that soaked up hours and hours of my day before I noticed It. The changes to how the game handles loot and questing, for example, make it a nicer experience to play. Overall, it feels a lot of care and thought went into making Valahalla feel less like a checklist of things to do and more like a world to organically experience.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a beautiful game with a big heart, weighed down by the obligation inherent to all the names in its title. In its absolute best and most joyfully surprising moments, it reminds us that cities are shared spaces with overlapping stories. It shows us that the opposite of web-swinging through Manhattan isn’t stealth setpieces and fight scenes with dozens of enemies, but chatting with your deaf/hard-of-hearing neighbor using sign language. It plays, looks, and feels like the game it evolved from, but it has aims that are both bigger in theme and smaller in scope.

This game is really for my 12-year-old nephew. He loves Lego and Minecraft and is a natural tinkerer, and would rise to the challenge of creating different courses in a limited, largely immutable space. That’s not to say an adult couldn’t also experiment, and I expect social media at Christmastime will be flooded with images of truly wacky course design. If you have a suitable space for it, and can tap into the latent power of your imagination, then Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit will enjoy a decently long life in your household. Or, if you’re like me, someone whose creativity has been worn thin by the realities of being a bill-paying adult, the kart alone will deliver plenty of fun just from chasing around your pets.

Star Wars: Squadrons is good. For folks who have been wanting a Star Wars game all about X-wings and dogfighting, you’ll more than likely be happy with what’s on offer in Squadrons. Bugs and some multiplayer issues prevent it from being a totally smooth experience, but I’d still highly recommend Squadrons to anyone who thinks it sounds fun to moonlight as a hotshot Star Wars pilot.

It is so large and generous that it’s going to leave many different people with many different takeaways based on which characters and ideas they latch onto first or last or in the middle. Some will be longer-winded than mine, others will be as simple as “dash good” (and oh man, the dash is so, so good). This is not all to say that Hades tries to wriggle out of saying anything definitive. It says plenty no matter how you slice it. But a good story is in the telling, and Hades tells its story a little differently to everybody. It’s like a good myth, in that regard. Or a hydra, in that it has a lot of heads, but nobody can quite agree on exactly how many.

Don’t let the lush, colorful graphics and whimsical, xylophone-heavy soundtrack fool you. Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time’s fun and frivolous facade hides a game that feels like it’s actively trying to murder mischievous marsupials. It’s about snatching victory from the jaws, bombs, fast-moving vehicles, spinning blades, laser grids, and fire spouts of death. I failed much more often than I succeeded during my run thanks to Ray West and his lackeys, but I had a great time doing it.

Genshin Impact is a solid action-RPG with an open world on the scale of something you’d expect from a full-price game rather than something that’s available for free. It spices up formulaic combat with creative ideas. Even the derivative parts are, for what it’s worth, well-executed. At the very least, the game is worth checking out. Just don’t expect it to be Breath of the Wild 1.5. [Impressions]

Every game in Super Mario 3D All-Stars is a triumph, a clear indication of why Mario has remained an inextricable part of gaming history. They don’t even have to tell you how to jump in these games anymore; Nintendo knows that every player’s thumb will inevitably hover to the appropriate button. Although I have my qualms with this collection—strange inconsistencies in the Super Mario Sunshine port chief among them—it does what it set out to do: chart Mario’s evolution from a bushwhacking pioneer to the inimitable mascot of 3D platforming.

In 2K21, just like we’ve seen for the last few years, every moment of fun on the court is undermined by the racket being run off it.

One of the lesser-discussed aspects of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is that it’s the first game in its franchise to be shipped without a number. (Even the original, 1982 version was billed as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0.) On one level, this is perfectly reasonable: Microsoft Flight Simulator is as much a platform as a game, and the inevitable updates to it–bug fixes, performance updates, a “fix” for Buckingham Palace, etc.–are more evolutionary in character than the wholesale upgrade implied by the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond. But the lack of any numerical identifier might also be read as a statement of ambition, or even permanence: what’s on offer, here, isn’t the final flight simulator so much as it is the forever one. From the Grasberg Mine to Redmond to your computer screen, it’s Microsoft’s world; we’re just playing in it.

Even with all its changes, THPS1+2 perfectly captures a moment in time. It’s a damaged Polaroid photo scanned, digitized, and lovingly retouched. It’s gravel picked out of a scraped knee. It’s a night of sleep untouched by nightmares and insomnia. It is, as it always was, just what I need in this moment.

Marvel’s Avengers isn’t the best comic book game out there, but it’s certainly the best team-based comic book game I’ve played. It’s not simply that it gathers iconic heroes together and lets me become them, but that each one of them is equally enjoyable. When the first couple of minutes of any session is spent picking out which character I want to play as, something has gone wonderfully right, which makes overlooking all the little things I don’t like that much easier.

I would recommend Crusader Kings III to Crusader Kings II fans, obviously. But also to Civilization and Total War fans. To people who play The Sims. Or visual novels. Or Bioware RPGS. That’s testament to how wild and untamed this game’s scope it, but also how successful it is in delivering on the promise of wrapping it all up into a single cohesive offering. Crusader Kings III may begin in what we used to call the Dark Ages, but it’s a Renaissance for strategy gaming in 2020.

I can’t think of many times in the main game of Control that I was worried about what might be around the next corner or when I was truly concerned about what might be right behind me while I was searching for a power cube to turn on a generator, but AWE has tapped into those feelings with a weird, warped creature whose design is going to stick with me. Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that this is the last planned expansion for Control, since I’d love to see what happens when other horror genres get explored in the Bureau of Control (splatterpunk? slasher?) or maybe even other tones and genres entirely. Hell, give me a romance expansion. Let Jesse Faden smooch the Astral Plane (finally). I’m on board.

Tell Me Why’s first episode, “Homecoming,” took me about three hours to play, and I had to stop after the episode’s surprising ending to take the whole experience in. The first episode’s events weren’t all that intense, but they brought up so many memories of my own life and experiences that I needed a break. I leaned back in my chair and thought about my mom and my sister, and the painful road we’ve travelled to have the often uneasy relationship we have now. I’m not going to say the game made me see their side of our past and present disagreements, but it reminded me how all that complicated, difficult stuff is part of a trans life I’ve worked hard to create. I’m grateful to have this particular experience of my life, even when it hurts a whole lot. I’m excited to see how Tyler navigates his own version of it as Tell Me Why goes on.

Most importantly, Carrion’s smart. It’s an extremely finely crafted game, so much so that you’re essentially playing a meat-smeared Metroidvania without a map, and you won’t even miss it. That’s quite something. Add in the excellent puzzles, ever-growing cast of enemies, and constant sense of progress, and Carrion is much more than just the gore. But ho boy, the gore.

I’m not sure why Nintendo feels that Paper Mario can’t be a role-playing game: What exactly was the issue with the original games, which were widely praised and sold very well? But the major issue for me was not that Nintendo removed the series’ RPG mechanics, but that what it replaced them with was not as good. Origami King might not be the successor to Thousand-Year Door for which fans have been clamoring, but this time the formula works, allowing the series’ great writing and worlds to shine through.

Ghost of Tsushima is pretty as heck—sporadic capturing left me with almost 50 GB worth of screenshots and short video clips to sift through—but at its core, it’s just another open-world game. I found myself audibly sighing every time I crested a hill towards a mystery objective only to find another fox to follow or another haiku to compose. These diversions, while unique at first glance, proved to just be busy work as time wore on.

I know this won’t last forever, but it doesn’t have to. The whole point of the app is to establish patterns and break down resistance to something that’s really quick and easy, and it’s definitely doing that, so if it’s taking some Pokémon stickers to get that through to them, then whatever, that’s awesome.

Iron Man VR would have been better off being smaller, focusing the game on telling a story and using the suit in interesting and fresh ways. Instead, it focuses on being a big combat simulator that’s too clumsy to enjoy. Strong voice acting and writing can’t overcome all of Iron Man VR’s technical problems, which are bad enough that I would warn most players who haven’t tried much VR to stay away. For those with strong VR stomachs and a love of the MCU, there’s enough here that you might have a good time. But you might be better off just downloading the demo instead.

The first game’s story was polarizing; this one’s will clearly be as well. So many people worked on this game for so long, and at such cost, that I want The Last Of Us II to be more than the experience I had. It’s a visually beautiful game that feels distinct to play, and the story it tells and how it tells it, at the most basic level, certainly pushes the edges of what games have done before. None of those accomplishments elevated or redeemed it for me. Like the nature consuming Seattle, or the outbreak consuming humanity, its ugliness overshadowed everything else.

Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition looks much better than the original game, but that’s not what makes it the “definitive edition.” It’s a combination of the graphical upgrade and countless little quality-of-life improvements that breath new life into this modern classic. [Impressions]

I enjoyed a lot of Maneater, even if the repetitive missions grated on me. It was fun to swim around as a shark, fighting whales and hunting down evil humans. Exploring the world of Port Clovis as a sleek and deadly maneater reminded me of how great it felt to swing around NYC in Spider-Man, including ignoring objectives to explore just a little longer and find collectibles. Despite its lack of things to do, Maneater does one thing—being a bloodthirsty shark—very well.

The beautiful illustrations, framing, and score make this game truly special and well worth checking out.

Streets of Rage 4 feels more like a celebration of that history inside of a new and updated world. I will continue to play an absurd amount of this game in the years to come, and I’m glad to fit it into rotation when deciding which in the series I want to dive into with friends.

Were these simple yet satisfying battles presented without the expansive narrative, they wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying. Sakura Wars’ story is filled with passionate, dedicated characters, and that passion and dedication carries over when transitioning from theater stage to mech cockpit. I’m in the early hours of this new Sakura Wars, but I like what I’ve played. [Impressions]