Sons of the Forest is an utterly engrossing game, and in losing myself in it, hours went by as I explored. For me, the main concerns are in content density, lack of direction, and a lingering feeling of being unfinished which, to be fair, is totally understandable from an early-access title. The building is a little clunky. There are visual issues with certain animations. It’s also given way to many hilarious glitches, including a physics issue that launched my character into the sky while chopping down a tree. If you can tolerate these issues, it’s absolutely still worth playing. [Review in Progress]

Indeed, Prey is the best performing triple-A game I’ve played for many months. It’s incredibly rare to be able to boot up a game at maximum settings and get consistent reports of 90+ fps when using mid-tier hardware, but here we are. No matter how many benchmarks I ran, the reports came back clear and consistent: on a GTX 1060, an average of over 100 fps is easy to attain. [Tech Review]

The shooting is sharp and impactful, and the slow and snipey set pieces feel as slick as they did all the way back in All Ghillied Up, but it feels like the ratio behind this tried-and-true formula is a little off this time. It’s more stop-start than any COD in recent memory, and the highlights are diluted by a few too many drab stealth missions. It’s not one of the best Call of Duty campaigns, but it’s far from a bad one. [Campaign review]

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is the greatest RTS I have played since I first started flirting with StarCraft II. It’s blessed with the detail of Wargame, the interesting terrain of Company of Heroes and the iconic style of its space-based predecessors. Diverse, distinct units; a genuinely compelling sci-fi story of mythic proportions; and absolutely the best sound design in the genre work toward making it a stand out RTS.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream wants to spin a grand Dickensian tale centered on the familial bond of a street urchin and her brother, but this ambition is betrayed by its lack of emotional stakes. And while its stealth puzzles can be intriguing and challenging at times, thanks to the ability to swap among multiple characters, these largely fail to deviate from the genre's long-held conventions.

A fantastic soundtrack and handful of excellent scenes aren’t enough to give Karma: The Dark World an identity greater than the number of sci-fi and horror classics it bluntly references throughout its story.

Q.U.B.E. 2 takes the first-person puzzler in a direction I can only hope Portal 3 might someday go.

Ubisoft have done a solid job with For Honor, then, forging it from worthy materials and engraving it with a few details that place it above other games from similar scale publishers. There may be the odd occasion when it feels like it’ll buckle, but in the end its blade always seems to strike true. [Tech review: Pass]

Red Barrels should be commended for trying a different approach to their sequel, but unfortunately it’s just not the instant horror classic the first game was.

It’s almost absurdly simple. The thing I’ve always liked about twin-stick shooters is a sense of escalating chaos - the idea that you’re only just keeping a lid on waves of baddies. Spartan Assault never manages this: there just aren’t ever enough enemies on screen, nor do they ever feel particularly dangerous.

Shadows of the Damned Hella Remastered is a crude, mean-spirited, and dangerously unfunny trip down memory lane with a grating cast, middling gunplay, and only the most minor of visual enhancements.

Proof that bad writing can ruin anything, Ghost Recon Wildlands feels like the death knell for a particular style of open-world game. Occasionally great moments, like the co-op play and the Sync Shot, are sadly drowned out.

State of Decay 2 is a strong sequel that, bugs and odd design decisions aside, expands on the innovative original in all the right places. The larger map might not add much, but the game is deeper and more refined. I found that the best stories in State of Decay 2 were the ones I wrote myself but, while the game can stand on its own in single-player, I look forward to doing that even more with friends.

Most of the time it revels in being mediocre and cowardly by the numbers rather than outright terrible, though there are moments where it manages to be both. If this isn’t a wake up call, showing once and for all that churning out more or less the same stuff year after year only serves to dilute the quality of a franchise, then I don’t know what is. It’s completely shameless, and it’s undoubtedly going to sell phenomenally well.

Nine Dots Studio's RPG will appeal to people who love fiddly systems and have enormous patience. But if that isn’t you then it'll simply feel like a time drain.

I sincerely hope this isn’t the last we will see of Tyranny, because - in its current state - it has ended with a whimper, absent of a single fight or NPC who could be characterised as memorable, or quests that would inspire anyone to start the game all over again. Obsidian’s dark RPG deserves a better expansion than Bastard’s Wound.

The Precinct takes a welcomingly sober approach to videogame policing, focusing as much on the mundane as the action-filled aspects of the job. But this isn’t enough to make enduring hours of its repetitive mission design and poor writing worthwhile.

The marketing materials surrounding Lightfall built it up to tell the story that would lead us to the space game’s final chapter. But Bungie should know one thing: if it wants to keep its players happy, it should never make a promise it can’t keep. [Review in Progress]

Consortium is a tragedy. There’s an extremely clever game to be found within, but only when it works. It’s just the first part of a planned trilogy, and I have so many questions that I won’t be able to help myself, I need to play the second part. But I can only hope that it’s not held together by chewing gum and sellotape again.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League offers some fun, frantic action, but it gets lost in shallow, repetitive mission structures and frustrating narrative sensibilities.

Betrayer is an FPS where the shooting is lackluster and the enemies annoying.

Despite the promise of its setting and philosophically informed morality system, Broken Roads fails to set itself apart from or come remotely close to matching the many post-apocalyptic games it’s inspired by.

It’s been a shame to watch all of Perils of Man’s promise go to waste. It got its hooks in me, made me eager to jump down the rabbit hole, but it just led to disappointment.

Hellboy Web of Wyrd’s sharp art direction, warm voice performances, and goofy if basic combat struggle to shine through in a roguelike that is otherwise too messy in too many ways.

All Firefall’s opening does is shove your face right up against grubby textures, shoddy animations, and invisible walls. Your first two hours with it will see you retreading ground completing repetitive fetch quests for characterless NPCs in a world that does nothing to excite the eye...You have to wade through that swill of a beginning to understand Firefall’s potential.

Skull and Bones promises the pirate adventure of our dreams and falls far short thanks to a sparse storyline, lack of personality, and gameplay that oscillates between frustrating and boring.

Modern Warfare 3 is an uninspiring trip down memory lane, hacking together old ideas in an attempt to create something new. With a campaign that even the most die-hard fans would struggle to enjoy, and a multiplayer mode that offers nothing fresh, it’s best to steer clear of this full-price travesty.

I have no doubt that some folk will dismiss Sacred 3 because it bears no resemblance to the previous core games in the series. But that’s not why it should be avoided by most. It’s simply not fun to play.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is peak mediocrity and lacks any real meat to make it stand out from the rest of the pack.

With its awful characters, inconsistent voice acting and combat hampered by problematic enemies, what little there is to enjoy is whittled away. It’s something to be tasted when absolutely starved for RPGs and could provide enough sword and sorcery shenanigans to tide one over until something more appetizing comes along, but it’s unlikely to prove fulfilling.

The recipe for a good adventure game is there, but the measurements are all wrong. Rector is too flawed, the puzzles are too easy, the metaphysical elements get too ridiculous are not well explained - everything is just off.

Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown is a frustrating mess of conflicting, grindy systems made worse by a dull open world and unexceptional racing.

The management aspects are shallow, and made entirely redundant by how easy it is to reach Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth. And there’s a serious dearth of good reasons for veteran Cities players to return. They’ve seen it all before.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum fails to live up to both the Tolkien name and its own potential. From exhausting, repetitive gameplay to a poorly constructed narrative, this is a piece of Middle-earth you should never explore.

It’s a universe filled with boring people living on boring space stations, and playing in this universe is, unsurprisingly, really bloody boring. There’s not one thing that X Rebirth does that Albion Prelude or, indeed, any of the X games doesn’t do better beyond a few visual treats. Even when the bugs are fixed, the bizarre design choices will persist, as frustrating and counter-intuitive as they were at launch.

Minecraft is beloved because it’s a celebration of creativity. CastleMiner Z is the antithesis of Minecraft: it’s a depressing, cynical cash-grab almost wholly designed to hijack gamers’ excitement for Mojang. For 69p, its survival horror elements are a nonsense novelty. But at the price demanded on PC, we should be throwing it out to the creepers.

Ultimately, there just isn’t anything that Interstellaria does remotely well, beyond the cracking soundtrack.

No matter where it falls on your moral compass, Palworld has given the static formula of Pokémon a clear shake-up, both mechanically and ethically. On a technical level, I can’t say it’s good. However, its sheer playability is carried by just how bizarre it is from moment to moment. It’s certainly not bad going for a game that many people dismissed as vaporware at best, or forecast to go the same way as Fntastic’s The Day Before at worst. Anyway, my Pengullet’s feeling down because of the bad working conditions, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to chuck him into a hot spring. [Early Access Review]

For the time being, though, it’s a beautiful and mechanically impressive city builder that still has plenty of room to grow. [Early Access Review]

Bland visuals and a lack of motivation combine with frustrating mechanics to make Ark of Charon little more than a temporary distraction. [Early Access Review]

33 Immortals is so much of what I love about gaming mushed into a tight package, one I can make a tiny dent in while I wait for my partner to return home from work before inevitably recruiting them to join the fight. Should I ever try 33 Immortals on Steam Deck, it could very well consume me. And I’d welcome it with open arms. [Early Access Review]

Slay the Spire 2 is more about refinement than evolution. By honing in on the elements that made the first game so addictive, Mega Crit has elevated the deck-building experience to consistently deliver more of those unforgettable “I can’t believe I just did that!” moments. Don’t let this game being in early access deter you from playing it; even in its current state, potentially years out from its full launch, this is an all-time classic that you won’t want to miss out on. [Early Access Score = 100]

With Masters of Albion, Molyneux and 22cans have achieved what they set out to do. Is it going to be a game for everyone? No, but that's the nature of god games, and strategy games more broadly. Is it a game you should spend some time with, however? Yes, yes you should, if only for the rush of dopamine and the creative new insults you'll learn along the way. [Early Access Review]