Absolver is a great combat game, and a fantastic blend of genres. It’s just sad that the PVE side of things is so short, because I’d really have enjoyed the game if there was more of an adventure to play through. Still, if you’re an old pro and fan of fighting games then Absolver may very well be worth the buy. It’s unique blend of ARPG and traditional kung-fu mastering is a whole lot of fun.

In the end, I came out a fairly happy camper. Just like any other game, War of the Immortals has its ups and downs. However, unlike any other game War of the Immortals is going to provide you a unique experience that you really will only be able to understand once you check the game out for yourself. If you're looking for a new MMORPG or are in the market to try out something you may have not played before, it is definitely worth giving this game a shot, because you may come out more satisfied than you came in.

The graphics won’t blow you away and it won’t be making too many “best graphics of the year” lists. But it’s a loving tribute and beautifully recreated edition of a much-beloved classic. There’s a lot to like in this remake, and if this is the building block for what’s to come in the franchise, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic.

Will I keep playing Blade & Soul Neo? Probably. It’s a way for me to relive the summer of 2014, hunkered down with my laptop, next to my partner, coordinating how to duo a boss we had no right fighting. And if I stick around long enough I might even get the chance to check out classes that were released by the time I dropped the game. I just can’t see the revival of this MMORPG being a particularly large success for NCSOFT, even if I wish it would be.

Just like a visit to the carnival, even though it wasn’t the greatest experience ever, I haven’t ended a day playing Elyon feeling like I had a bad time. The bigger question for me is how long this carnival can last? We’re only a month past launch, and if you aren’t online for the daily reset, finding a group to run dungeons with can be difficult. The same can be said about finding a match for the various types of PvP. The fewer players there are, the harder it will be to turn a profit, so it won’t be long before the financials start to dictate what items go into the cash shop. And when that happens, the player base will shrink even further. So I guess I’ll keep on riding this roller coaster until it breaks down. Aaaaand, it’s gone!

Lichdom: Battlemage is a fun, if shortsighted RPG with some fantastic upsides. Is it worth the asking price of $40? I’d say no at this point, and hold out for a Steam sale. It’s definitely something fans of the old Hexen will enjoy, but fans of open ended RPGs will find Xaviant’s game lacking. A solid effort, but not quite what I’d hoped for after seeing the game at PAX East this year.

The bones of Worldslayer are excellent, but the story and end game content are greatly lacking.

The Age of Wonders IV: Dragon Dawn content patch feels like a natural addition to the game. The developers at Triumph Studios have done a great job implementing it. It adds an extra ruler type for players to explore and a dragon thematic line of spell tomes. If included in the base game, it would have easily bumped my original review score by 0.5 or even a 1.0. As a stand-alone content pack for $9.99, a few more minor additions to the new features would have gone a long way in fleshing it out. It's a good value, but not a great one.

There are a lot of enjoyable aspects to Immortals Fenyx Rising, but very little feels new. Instead, it’s similar and safe, like I’ve done this all before. And I have but with a different main character and color palette. Its biggest sin is being entirely forgettable once you move on to the next game.

While I wouldn’t ever call it a masterpiece, I had hours of fun and laughter as I found the joy in killing orcs. One of the most satisfying things to do was to launch a grenade into a group of low level orcs and watch them explode with orc guts flying all over the place. It was humorous. It was satisfying. It scratched that itch to just sit down and shoot something especially after a bad day. My hope is to see OMD!3 come to the Nintendo Switch and/or Steam where the internet issues I experienced with Stadia won’t be a factor. All the same, if you’re a Stadia Pro member, I do recommend giving it a try. You just might find that you too get a kick out of killing orcs.

Far Cry 6 has some explosive action, but in my 25-or-so hours of gameplay the stretches between the most explosive missions bring the experience down. Yara is huge and full of things to explore, but exploration should not mean "walk 1000 in-game meters to get an objective that sends me 2000 meters in the opposite direction. Every character is expertly portrayed--not the least of which is Giancarlo Esposito, whose Anton Castillo ranks right near the top of best Far Cry villains. The world and the people in it are interesting, interesting enough to overcome the monotony, but getting there can certainly be difficult. Far Cry 6 doesn't move the needle at all, but it still holds its own amongst the other shooter games available.

Let's get one thing straight: I do enjoy playing Dying Light 2 Stay Human. The story is great and warrants additional playthroughs thanks to multiple endings, the combat feels awesome, and there's a ton of stuff to do in this sprawling city (500 hours worth, apparently). It just needs to clean up the technical issues and stop spawning the final boss inside the platform he's standing on, among other things. If that happens, the impact--much like the game itself--will be night and day.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed my play through of Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior. The replayability is there with the time objective to try for a better time, with different modifiers and different spells. Lysfanga has challenging arenas, but it feels so rewarding when earning that victory. The story doesn’t stick out particularly strongly with the plot, but the gameplay along the way was pretty fun.

Overall, the expansion is good. The graphics still hold up, combat is fun, and the new zones are interesting to explore. The developers did a great job with the story, and while the ending was a bit of a letdown it leaves enough open story threads for hopefully something interesting in a future patch. Everquest 2 Visions of Vetrovia kept me engaged and rekindled my interest in EQ 2 to the point where I have started a new Monk and am already level 50.

Fire Emblem Engage has a lot of great elements, from its striking visuals to the classic Fire Emblem turn-based strategy gameplay. The story being told, however, does not live up to the bar set by other games in the series, while some battles drag on to the point where I'm fighting off a nap just as hard as I'm fighting the enemy armies. I enjoy the game in spurts, but before long I find myself wondering when I can stop engaging with this Fire Emblem. There's enough here to enjoy Fire Emblem Engage, but only the most dedicated will be able to see this through to the end.

While there’s no doubt that AoW has levels of intricacy that are unusual in MMOs today, those intricacies are numerous, and the localization an ongoing effort, making the whole experience difficult for many. Not everyone has the time or the patience to read through scads of text, assimilate and apply those many, many lessons. For those that do, power to you. Here’s hoping you find plenty of gold at the end of that complicated, text-heavy rainbow.

I think this game is going to be a sleeper. For me, the only thing that might make TMI’s silly aesthetic even better is if they replaced the grown-up sound effects with recordings of gamers going, “Pew! Pew! RAWR! Crash!” But as I said, it’s still early yet. The Missing Ink is one to watch.

If you’re looking for something new and fresh in the world of strategy games, this might not be the game for you. But if you’re looking for technical, celestial battles with lots of tiny details to optimize and organize, you might end up falling in love with this behemoth of a game.

If the developers went back to the drawing board and designed a strategy RPG from the ground up and implemented the systems present in PXZ2 they would be off to a great start. However an overly long introduction that becomes boring after a few hours distracts from what is otherwise a decent game. If this game had a tighter story, trimmed up the dialogue, and improved upon its technical performance by reducing slowdown, it would be something special.

Risen 3: Titan Lords sets out to cater to a niche of the RPG market and does so, for the most part, successfully. The pirate setting differentiates it from other, similar, games on the market and the open and explorable world is vast and potentially very dangerous. The game is crippled somewhat by a lack of graphical shine, and the storytelling leans heavily on lazy cliches and trades mystery for clarity and motivation. Despite those problems, players looking to plunk a parrot on their shoulder and slap a patch over their eye then head off in search of buried treasure will find a lot to enjoy.

Despite its missed opportunities and forgotten promises, I’m still glad I dropped the money to experience No Man’s Sky. It’s something unique in a world where most of what we get are sequels or off-shoots. Fortune favors the bold, and I hope this is just the beginning of the type of innovation we can expect to see from Hello Games. And frankly, I hope they take all the time they need with their next game.

What could have been one of the greatest features to this game turns out to be one of its biggest weaknesses, the DM Mode.

For all of the things that it does well, Forge feels like it needs more time in development and beta to achieve its potential. I really like the game's model of instanced PvP, and enjoy Forge's dynamic third-person combat. The overall features feel unfinished, however, and while it looks like Dark Vale Games is aware of Forge's missing - and necessary - elements and is working to include them, the game in its released state requires a bit of faith in the developers to make it what it should be. The core gameplay experience is fun and frantic, but Forge will need to attend to a more robust feature set to encourage the dedicated community it requires to succeed.

Order & Chaos is a novel, interesting, and intriguing application. Being a truly fully-fledged MMORPG on the iPad makes it very endearing to a goblin-loving veteran such as I, but there are some glaring problems with the game to overlook before you can truly enjoy it. A WoW clone until the end, but for the price of admission, and the amount of "I Can't Believe It's Not Azeroth" fun you can have, you might just forgive it.

You will find great value for the cost of nothing with Prime World. It’s also a fairly small download, currently clocking in at 1.36GB, so there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t try the game if you’re a fan of the MOBA genre.

Devilian is free to play, and is infinitely better than most other imported MMOARPGs on the market right now. If not having an MMO world isn’t a deal breaker, you might be better off with Diablo 3 or Path of Exile. But if you’ve always wished TERA and Diablo would just make a baby and let you have a Corgi pet, then this is the game for you.

In the end, Age of Empires Online works well as a demo rather than a F2P game. There just doesn't seem to have been enough thought about what each element from the MMO and RTS genres bring to the party. Instead, they've just been thrown together.

There's quite a bit to see and experience in Spirit Tales so it's worth your time to at least give it a try. Just be mindful that the game, while cute and pretty, falls short in certain areas and still needs a bit of improvement.