Scores are obviously anathema to what we do at RPS, although I'm not so strong a person that I can avoid pointing out that if someone were to show me a picture of original series protagonist Six right now, I'd nod sagely and say "indeed". Again, there's a couple of really inspired scenes and more than a couple of arresting sights here, good enough to drag me from 'meh' to 'oh damn!' a few times. It plays like what it is, really: a cover act. A tribute. A flatpack knock-off of a trendy piece. Good quality. Well built. You could hit it with a wrench and it'd barely shake. Then again, I do have to ask whether it's a good thing that I find myself assessing a game like a piece of furniture.

The game's online sandbox spaces have an eerie vitality in their mangling together of realism and colour-coded objective design. I am perennially fascinated by how the swarm thinks in Battlefield online, how that little pebble tumbling through a gap in the fortifications becomes an avalanche. Add a narrative component, however, and you create expectations of meaningful context, consequence and even introspection that the creators of military shooters are seldom able to fulfil.

Regardless of the implements you use to battle your way through Hades 2’s beautifully illustrated regions, my favourite of which is a clever series of fights across the decks of ships in the Rift of Thessaly, as of 1.0 you can finally achieve Hades 2’s much-hyped true ending. How is it? Well, I’ll try not to stray too far into spoiler territory (though consider this your spoiler warning), but I think it’s one that might prove a bit polarising. On the one hand, Hades has always been a series about bringing families back together, and on that front the ending delivers no matter which way you slice it. On the other, given how often the motto "Death to Chronos" is repeated throughout, the manner in which he ends up defeated arguably isn’t as satisfying a form of retribution as is built up over all of those hours.

While The Beast was fun to binge through in a few days (around 21 hours, with plenty more side-quests still left to do), I feel like I've had my fill of Techland's specific brand of open-world design for now. But if the zombie parkour itch hits again, I think it says something that I'll probably return to Dying Light 2's sprawling cityscape over another scenic alpine excursion.

There's nothing I love more in life than a piece of art that triggers a desire for discussion, and in the face of my own assumptions, Silent Hill f has done that for me. Its combat, its new setting, or even its subject matter might not do that for you, but the bottom line is, it turns out that even after all these years, Silent Hill can still strike up an exciting conversation.

Borderlands 4 takes everything that worked about the previous games, removes the majority of the hindrances (cough Claptrap cough), and refines its RPG aspects, all of which make this easily the best Borderlands I’ve ever played. It has its share of issues: not just the tech stuff, but also what sometimes feels like endless travelling and the overabundance of terrible weapons. But what is Borderlands, even a much-improved one, without its billions of garbage guns?

The satisfaction of a fully-ticked list kept me going to the end, and I happily lingered for a few more hours to identify objects I'd missed. The highs of Strange Antiquities – and there are many – match those of anything else I've played this year, and surely put it up there with Blue Prince among the best puzzle games of 2025. It is fiendish and delightful, and hopefully, one of many more Strange games to come. [RPS Bestest Bests]

All in all, it’s the usual fridge full of good and bad ingredients, making for a soup that tastes slightly different to last year’s - but not noticeably superior. As such, unless there's a specific change you like the sound of, 2K26 is probably a year to skip. It’s best summed up by its version of The City - the explorable hub where MyPlayers wander around and join impromptu street games. Rather than 2K25’s ridiculously extravagant urban sprawl, complete with pirate ship area, mech workshop and Michael Jordan-themed coliseum, this time, almost everything is tightly packed into a nondescript shopping centre and park.

Silksong, I can and will get mad at you. But I can’t STAY mad at you. You brilliant, beautiful bastard of a game.

And I love it, honestly. It made me feel like fighting. But god, if anything could convince you that, really, there are no new stories, then what better than a game that presents itself as subversion, and ends up in exactly the same place as everything else.

The invisible orchestra is another kind of herd that mirrors the one you drive before you – sometimes devolving to individual performers when your beasts are scattered, only to gather itself furiously when the Calicorns are in full flight. It’s a lovely audible modelling of a disorderly group of beings in motion. It’s also an audible expression of your power over those beings and the limits of their simulated autonomy.

I respect Hangar 13 for not feeling like they had to join in today’s arms race of ever-balooning open world/action things and sticking to their stated principles in doing so. Though, I think the manner in which they’ve executed that vision has its eyes too firmly glued to the rear view mirror. This isn't a game that pulls the best bits from how things were done back in the day and melds that with positive innovations developed since that point to create a middle ground that could represent a better way forwards. The Old Country feels stuck in the past.

I should also stress that none of this difficulty tweaking eventually fixed my disappointment about the loss of early levels' sense of fluency. In games like this, where a steady flow is gained by practice, I sometimes wonder: what is the least amount of practice I must invest before I feel that sense of flow? In early sequences, Ragebound asks very little investment: you quickly earn a basic understanding of all the dashing, dodging, slashing, and boinging required to bloodstomp through an average level with a speedrunner's abandon.

Personally, I look at it and see a game that only barely iterates, even slipping backwards on gun design and tech fidelity, and that’s just not an appealing approach during what often seems like a golden age for more ambitious co-op shooters. Helldivers 2 deftly balances large-scale warfare with slapstick comedy. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a deceptively deep and immaculately presented horde brawler. And Deep Rock Galactic has good-natured teamplay down to a science, thanks in part to its own clever arsenal of sci-fi tools and weaponry. Killing Floor 3? That has a good headshot and a plus-2% foregrip.

Sometimes working out how you feel about something is best done by imagining how you'll talk about it in the future if someone mentions it. "Oh yeah, S.p.l.i.t! F.cked up, that one," I'll say. "Play it for sure, though". I'll say that because there's more than despair here. There's an ailing sort of triumph, too.

It's a far cry from Messhof's previous works - the incomparable Nidhogg remains one of the best fighting games of all time. And I'll admit it feels a bit weird to set Wheel World's sweet and ultimately harmless roamaround racing next to the snarling energy and electro fury of the fencing worm and its serpentine sequel. But that redefining of studio style feels inevitable when it expands beyond its origins - Messhof used to be a moniker for solo developer Mark Essen, but is now the name of his broader indie studio made up of many Messhoffers. If you're going in expecting something similar to Nidhogg in tone, vibe, and surreality, you'll only find trace amounts. But if you go in with a heart open to easygoing races and good music, Wheel World will quickly coast you through.

There is a contagious fury in Hell Clock's bones, louder than its flaws or features list. Pajeú staggers, weakened, through a razed village in a storm. When he returns, he is the storm. Still spinning, still winning, made of wrath and gunsmoke and a circle of blades and lightning that just keeps expanding with every suspiciously perfect upgrade. I am certain there are numbers under the hood, stewing like the spirits of avenging dead, nudging the RNG just so. Much obliged, furious ghosts. One more run it is, then.

Between the emotional core centering around Mick and his family, the B-movie batshit tinfoil sci-fi stuff, and the eventual revelations that tie everything together in both theme and plot, there are a lot of elements jostling for space and time in The Drifter. It's impressive that it manages to wrap things coherently, nevermind the satisfying and touching way it does. Ultimately, it's a good story, well told, that knows when to lay on the head scratchers and when to ferry you along with simple tasks. I just hope Mick's actor remembered to combine honey and lemon with tea after recording.

This isn't a full review of Eriksholm, simply because after five or so hours, I didn't fancy playing any more. Maybe it gets amazing after five hours and one minute. Oh, I still don't like it. Yeah but what if it gets amazing after five hours and two minutes? You can probably tell by now this is sunk cost at its silliest. Lots of games to review, and I have to draw the line somewhere. So, here's some impressions based on the time I did spend with it. Apologies to Erik, I'm sure he's very nice.

In some sense judging Mecha Break for these free-to-play foibles is a pity. Because buried beneath the weedlike mass of microtransactions, the noise of lootboxes opening, the lecherous lingering over chests and butts, and the legion of screens popping up to flummox you with unintelligible currencies, there is a slight but glowing core: a decent multiplayer action game with a lot of admittedly cool robots. It is a shame this core is housed in the greebly shell of a desperate salesbot, hawking at you every step of the way. Mecha Break upsells to you even as you leave - quit the game, and there is an advert to follow it on social media. Mate, I can barely follow what you said in the briefing room.

This isn't a criticism as much an attempt at elucidating what you're getting here, and perhaps an acknowledgement that cyberpunk as a genre probably once held some aspirations to be a bit more insightful and incisive than whatever very fun but ultimately slightly goofy and perpetually unsurprising pastiche we end up with in many cases, even if you can hardly blame it for abandoning attempted prescience when we live in a state of ketamine-droopy tech mogul grins proudly announcing their investments in the The Torment Nexus v2.1.6. Making you feel cool probably isn't the most important thing a cyberpunk game can do. Nonetheless, CK:F is pretty great at it.

It's telling that the missing feature I desire most is not an emote or a graphics setting or a - pffft - "mandatory pass". But just some way to auto-rematch, so I don't have to tap Y at the end of every game within a 10-second countdown to re-enter the queue for another game. This is how moreish (and perfectly named) Rematch is. My biggest complaint is that I'm sick of the game asking "Do you want to play again?" Of course I do.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot as I finished To A T (it clocks in at about 4-5 hours). It is full of moments when the controls change, and you must move them in some new way to brush your teeth, eat food, or whirl like a ballerina. The immediacy of game controls is something that necessarily gets lost the further this game travels into it's almost entirely non-playable final episode. But it otherwise resists the trappings of modern games that remove us from that body-to-button feeling. There's no cluttered UI or silly systems of meta-progression. Like other games by the same creators, To A T understands that the most basic unit of wonder games can offer is still: press button to move shapes.

The game's need to be a reasonably performant piece of management software means that it can't quite be a fluid and believable third-person action game. The spacebase is sort of a glorified menu (though there are proper menus as well) and menus need to be responsive, so the elevator whips you between levels with what ought to be bone-rupturing speed. The lesser Jans should be scraping Jan Prime off the ceiling every time he uses it, and the fact that this doesn't happen seems appropriate to a story that can't determine whether you're a human being or one among many grades of mass-produced screwdriver.

Right now, it’s lacking, and not just in musical numbers.

So, yeah. Not for me. Which is a shame, because I'm certain that if I kept playing, I'd keep finding more things that made me laugh or smile or spark more curiosity about the town's mysteries, but I'm not willing to push through any more of this cold and oddly soulless churn to see them right now. As a functional open map, it's a treat-sprinkled diorama. Static and mundane. As a management sim, the busywork is simultaneously so insistent and so lacking in complexity or choice that I ended up on a sort of trudging, mildly annoyed autopilot, like an underpaid shopping centre security guard on a deflated Segway. Deflating to say the least.

As survival games go, however, I cannot call it "bad". Fair warning: there are weird glitches and choppiness (one bug saw me backdashing every time I exited the inventory screen). And I had to abandon playing on a controller because of the obnoxious virtual cursor in menus. But this wasn't enough to interrupt my bloodsucking. Awakening is dense with lore, and loyal to the childlike "sand is lava" flavours of Dune. I've enjoyed it for the strength of its world, and I admire how straightforwardly Funcom have adapted the memorable features of Herbert's fiction in exactly the most sensible way. If you walked out of the cinema after the Dune movies of recent years only to have your thoughts and dreams peppered with imagery from those films, then this is probably one of the best ways to visit and inhabit that distant desert. Just so long as you acknowledge, going in, that you'll be doing a lot more rock mining, water farming, and unexpected laughing than Timothee ever did.

There are some potholes, sure. That story is borderline insufferable, tutorials don't do a great job of explaining things, and there's some bugginess. I only got a fraction of the cash I was supposed to earn from some missions, for example, which made it difficult to progress up that ladder of nice vehicles. But even so, I'm left with the impression of a racing game punching far above its weight and landing an impressive number of blows. If I knew more about drifting as a motorhobby, I might say something big and powerful like "this is the definitive game of a racing subculture!" But I'll let some other bumpernerd put that label on it. I wouldn't want to upset all the fans of Night-Runners or Togue Shakai. Regardless of where it fits in its racing niche, JDM may not yet be fully tuned, but it has rolled out of the garage in fine form.