This new Collection — on Xbox One, PS4, and PC — is great for a bunch of reasons: a new rewind feature that lets you perfect speedrun strats or just cheat your way to the end; Time Trials and Boss Rush modes that offer new ways to engage with each game; and an assortment of digitized relics that give you a peek behind the scenes.

Capitalizing on the franchise's best assets and tiptoeing around its flaws, Shadow of the Tomb Raider takes the latest imagining of our girl Lara out in style. From incredible graphics to artfully designed gameplay, Shadow of the Tomb Raider does not disappoint.

The best part is, whenever I took off the Quest 2, I'd be right back in my room. I didn't have to trek back home from some far-off location with a heavy backpack filled with gear; my real hands weren't chalky or bloody like they appeared in the game (they were sweaty though); and I wasn't traumatized from the experience of hanging on for dear life when my stamina was running low. That's the benefit of rock climbing in VR — it's very low risk.

It's a lovely little puzzle game with a darkly relatable underbelly, driven by a story that distills modern society and the human experience of 2020 into a colorful parable. A video game can't save us from ourselves, but maybe talkin' 'bout those bugsnax can get us part of the way there.

The story's emotional beats are written and executed well enough that I was nonetheless happy to go along for the ride even if some of the pieces didn't make much sense in hindsight. I'd still recommend waiting for a few patches to hit before you jump in, especially if you're planning to play on PC. But despite all the issues, I was invested the whole way through and came away with the feeling that The Medium is a journey worth taking.

In the end, I found Carrion to be an enormously frustrating experience. The pieces are there for an amazing game. I had some incredible moments while playing, and would even go as far as recommending this as a worthwhile use of a more patient player's time, despite the issues.

A normal shooter game wouldn't really do John Wick justice. John Wick Hex captures the kind of tactical thinking that the Keanu Reeves action hero requires to be the deadly boogieman he's known to be, and also works as a fun and inventive puzzle/action game.

Choice has been the great strength of every recent Telltale game, but it's especially powerful in a story about a beloved character that's been interpreted and explored in dozens of different ways over the past 75 years.

Outriders has me sold.

Rocket Arena is enjoyable enough, just relatively average overall. It’s the type of game you’d mindlessly play for a few hours when unmotivated to do anything else, before loading up Overwatch for a better rocket feel. It's still fun to jump in with friends — but maybe only for an evening or two.

Nailing my simple sequence reminded me of something else: that feeling you get when you beat a difficult boss after trying and failing over and over. You know, like in action games like Dark Souls or the more recent Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice — games that require you to master their systems and controls in order to progress past their unrelenting enemies. Once you do master them, at least for the moment, that feeling of success is electric...That feeling was my main takeaway from my hour-and-a-half in the room with Session. That and the passion I felt from developers Houde and Da Silva. [Early Access Impressions]

The playground is very real in this game. You're meant to have more toys to mess with than the story's length can realistically justify. That feels like the whole point. Rage 2 left me wanting in the best way, and I can't wait to see what's next.

Wattam is impossible to describe, yet it's imbued with an unmistakable and universal humanity.

Days Gone seems like an accurate reflection of how things would go after an actual, IRL zombie apocalypse: clumsy, violent, and filled with failure.

The Hong Kong Massacre exists to let you strategically gun down armies of bad guys and look cool while doing it. What it lacks in originality it more than makes up for in stylishly bloody good times.

The most frustrating thing about Mass Effect: Andromeda is how much of a regression it represents after the successes of Dragon Age: Inquisition. That was a larger and more involved game by almost every measure....Andromeda's story may be about blazing a trail into an entirely new galaxy, but it feels slimmed down by comparison. There are fewer spaces to explore in general — less than 10 in all — and three of them are different shades of "desert planet." The locations themselves are gorgeous, but they are too few in number.

Minecraft Dungeons doesn't do much to change the game, and it stumbles in ways that threaten to push away longtime fans of the genre. But it's a compelling and entertaining mash-up that's hard to put down once you get into the groove.

A saving grace for Watch Dogs' London is that you can walk up to and talk to anyone you see, recruit them, and play as them. It's a concept that breaths life into the game, and makes you connect deeper with the story, knowing that peoples' actions can directly affect someone who you could play as and embody. The "legion" part of Watch Dogs: Legion works.

The idea of being a vampire stalking the streets of early 20th century London seemed like such a cool idea, but the game's poor execution on almost all fronts is egregious. Vampyr has almost no good qualities, and any that you can squeeze out of it are far outweighed by the negative qualities.

It's a bad sign when an indie movie made 20 years ago with a $60,000 budget remains endlessly more immersive than a video game made in 2019.

Man of Medan in particular is unique among horror games in giving you, the player, a ton of agency in shaping the story’s eventual outcome. You can’t dictate every single beat — where’s the thrill in that? — but you’re role-playing all of the potential victims. So when you sit down to play, find a way to live inside the story and just let the horror wash over you.

Almost from the word go, it became painfully obvious that Wolfenstein Youngblood would not be the lady power fantasy I'd always dreamed of. And some design hitches with the open world and co-op make it difficult to see the new entry as anything more than a lukewarm experiment.

The world is beautiful and rich with promise. There's plenty of room to grow...But there's already a rock-solid foundation here. Sea of Thieves sets out to deliver a particular experience, and it nails that perfectly.

Try as it might, Just Cause 4 does not live up to its predecessors. In a game that's built around normally fun elements like chaos, destruction, and revolution, Just Cause 4 ends up getting in its own way far too often with extraneous menu-based systems, a wild camera and controls, and (on PC) a litany of performance issues and inexplicable game crashes. It's a disappointment, to be frank, and made me want to give up and play Just Cause 2 instead.

It's an absolute joy, and one you can share with up to three other friends online or at your side (though I sadly didn't get to try co-op yet). There are plenty of games that do ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove's basic schtick, but the charming world, outlandish characters, and weird-but-cool presents system deliver an amusing and surprisingly sticky twist. Just so long as you can get down with the funk.

Wizards Unite may evolve to become the biggest, best, and most spectacular AR game we Muggles have ever seen...But on the other hand, there are more problems to be tackled here than the Whomping Willow has branches, some of them more daunting than others.

Traditional definitions of "fun" don't apply, and so following some kind of guide to "win" is missing the whole point. Ancestors is constantly challenging you to mess around, and to derive pleasure from the thrill of fresh neurons snapping into existence. You're immersed in the chaos of a pre-human world from the very first moment, and the biggest wins to be had are those you create for yourself.

Crackdown 3 is basically a can of Pringles in video game form: rapidly consumed, only vaguely satisfying, and completely forgotten within minutes.