I'm sure Shadowrun Chronicles: Boston Lockdown will eventually get itself together and grow with new features and content. Hopefully, it can overcome its server problems before they drive away its player community. Personally, I want to stay, but this town is making it really hard to.

Super T.I.M.E. Force’s writing can be obnoxious, but the strength of the gameplay conceit carries it through. Making death less punitive puts a unique spin on a staid genre. Using these tools to solve the combat scenarios is a blast, and worth suffering through some of the silliness and frustration.

Freakpocalypse moves the Cyanide & Happiness universe into the gaming sphere much more effectively than its predecessor. Its main story arc of finding a prom date for its hero Coop works well as a narrative thread to hold together all manner of tasteless nonsense. The game is being advertised as the first of a trilogy and has enough to see and interact with to satisfy its core audience. The relatively low price and time investment of around ten hours are inviting, but I suspect the subject matter and confounding frustrations brought on by genre design tropes will put off the general gaming audience at large. Easy to recommend to Cyanide & Happiness fans, but all others should check out the comics before proceeding.

While it offers much of the Persona experience fans will enjoy, such as the deep and challenging combat system, ability to fuse Personas, and unpredictable story, there are still some things fans of the series will certainly miss. The inability to randomly explore your surroundings or to take one of your friends out for a bowl of ramen in order to improve your bond with them is one I missed greatly while playing Persona Q.

Rollers of the Realm, by most respects, is an excellent pinball and RPG hybrid. However, it takes a great amount of skill and no small share of luck to get through it.

What stands out to me is how all of the new elements and tweaked versions of older elements combine together to create something that, in many ways, feels less like a Warriors game and more like a proper Action-RPG. It's almost as if the team had ambitions of moving in that direction, but felt unsure about pulling too far from its roots. Who knows if we'll ever see a third game that will go all-in on that approach, but what we've been given here is a decidedly fun, if flawed, Dragon Quest adventure.

Hakuoki: Edo Blossoms is a great cap to Kyoto Winds, even though the two games being released so far apart and as two packages does tend to cheapen things. It's a little on the short side too, but it's got everything a great visual novel needs and then some. If you're interested in wooing samurai vampire boys or just in the mood for something a little less on the nose than other current visual novels, this should make for a great weekend play. Just make sure you enjoy those vampirism scenes in private, you hear?

The Knightling offers a colorful world, fun characters, some interesting gameplay gimmicks, and a lot of Stuff to Do. The downside is an overall lack of “finish” that makes the more intense gameplay feel unrefined and inconsistent, and an open world structure that doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from peers. It’s a fun, cheerful platformer with plenty of personality and ideas, but perhaps doesn’t achieve all its goals as intended.

Looking at The Star Named EOS as a whole, it’s a good time. The lovely visuals and animations are almost worth the price of admission alone, and the story being such a strong element in contrast with its short length seals the deal. It’s an easy recommendation for fans of puzzle games and quiet, but serious storytelling. That said, the story isn’t remarkable, and often suffers from its own insistence on being a mystery for the first half and some change. EOS is a good time but has things holding it back from being an amazing time. “Solid” is the word of the day here, with a capital S.

Read Only Memories: Type-M translates fantastically to mobile devices, and it's an excellent example of how to create a cyberpunk-influenced adventure game that encompasses the full spectrum of the genre. It has its own road bumps, none of which are related to its mobile status, but overall it's a point-and-click adventure that you won't want to miss, as long as you can tolerate Turing.

Skin Deep is a neat, little game that takes recognizable gameplay conventions from immersive sims and repackages them into something smaller and sillier. Rather than gathering garbage, crafting endlessly, listening to pretentious audio logs and grappling with awkward combat physics in dark corridors, you’re doing similar things but in a framework more like The Three Stooges in colorful boxes with weird, blocky cats everywhere. It’s familiar yet distinct, and legitimately funny despite repeating the same three or so jokes over and over again. Combat’s still fumbly, though, and the parts asking you to do more of that are a buzzkill.

Even though Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Tipping Stars isn’t a “full” game in terms of what it offers and its pricing, it still has lots of potential. The end product is a puzzle game that is easy to play, but difficult to master.

Valiant Hearts may get repetitive at times, and struggles to find its tone, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a game that better explores the complexities of war.

D4 is bizarre. There's no other game out there where you'll find someone playfully tossing a rat in your mouth or strutting around with their lover that also happens to be a mannequin. But underneath all of those quirky story beats is an intriguing mystery, bolstered by a solid use of Kinect.

What we have at the end of the day is a strange, silly game that is a little too sure of itself to stick its landing effectively. It stretches itself too thin to be consistently funny and its story is clumsily told despite its put-on air of poignance. It has its moments though, and for as grumpy as I was by the end I still look back at its early hours with some fondness. Watching a dumpy nerd slide down a muddy hill is pretty funny the first few times; it just doesn’t stay funny as long as Baby Steps wants it to.

I enjoyed my time with Welcome Tour. Just be aware of what you’re getting if you decide to buy yourself a ticket to this, Nintendo’s other museum. It’s not a bad game, it’s just not entirely a game; that, coupled with the higher cost if you want to experience all the program has to offer, results in a product that won’t be for everyone.

However, the biggest downside to Battle League is that there just isn't more to it, because we've seen that Next Level is capable of delivering more. Even if there are DLC characters coming down the road (Daisy fans, I hope you don't think I forgot about you), it won't fix the relatively low number of items, the gimmick-free stadiums, or the lack of substantial unlockables. This package could and should be so much better than what it is.

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have some excellent ideas that push the franchise in a fresh direction, but they’re unfortunately bogged down by unacceptable performance problems at every single turn. While my biggest problems with the games could theoretically be addressed in future patches, I’m not sure how feasible that is given the capabilities of the Switch’s hardware. That said, there is still a lot to enjoy, but it’s hard imagining that these games will have wide appeal outside of the dedicated Pokemon fans that are willing to put up with the issues and inconvenience.

Every positive–the twisting storyline, the iconic villains, and the superb combat–are undermined by other factors. Mediocre acting, rough dialogue, and overuse of the Batmobile, leave Batman: Arkham Knight that much less cohesive than its predecessors.

Artifact feels like the MOBA of card games, in more ways than one. There's just as much strategy, just as much variety, just as many resources to manage, and it's just as challenging.

Fae Farm is still an enjoyable farming sim where you can easily lose track of time, spending hours crafting items, petting animals, and spelunking in dungeons. The kid-friendly tone of the game makes it easy to recommend for all audiences, though the NPCs and thereby the town of Azoria lack depth. The main quests are more interested in having you explore dungeons than actual farming, and the game has more than several areas that need improvement. Still, despite its flaws, Fae Farm fits cozily among the rest of its farming brethren.

Sega is clearly capable of making a compelling mystery game that could stand in league with the work we see out of studios like Naughty Dog, but that will require a more focused, better-paced approach that Lost Judgement seems eager to avoid.

I had a good time playing Concord. The gunplay feels good, and the match pacing made it easy to jump in and quickly play a couple of games before peacing out. That said, I’m not confident that “just fine” will be enough to survive in the brutal landscape of live-service games in 2024. Concord suffers from a lack of innovation and identity, and I’m curious to see how Firewalk Studios and PlayStation will navigate the path forward.

The game is an easy recommendation for anyone that has been pining for the shoot-’em-up glory days or any fan of arcade-style games. There is a lot of trial and error that is inherent with games of this nature and if rote memorization coupled with some light strategy in weapon choices doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, you might not find it here. There are multiple difficulty modes, however, that add continues and alter some boss patterns. I found the easiest setting offers a fair challenge while still teaching lessons to take into the more demanding difficulties. R-Type Final 2 is a prime example of a competent product that fills a niche perfectly. Even though R-Type Final was meant to be the last game in the franchise, this new sequel proves there’s still some fight left for shmups.

Shadow Complex is a game that demands experiencing at least once. While those who played through multiple times and unlocked every secret the first go-round might not be especially compelled to do it again with such bare-bones revisions, it's a perfect vehicle for first-timers. If you haven't played Shadow Complex before, it's absolutely worth armoring up now.

A Total War Saga: TROY does a good job in retelling the events of the Trojan War by using interesting elements from Greek mythology as well as the Iliad. However, there were times where the controls felt a little stiff, such as troop organization. The game also doesn’t meet its full potential graphically. That said, battles are simplistic to play but difficult to master. Since there are different lead characters to play as, TROY offers plenty of replay value as well as a chance to enjoy some Greek mythology on each run. It's not a perfect game, but fighting the Minotaur is too cool to pass up.

All in all, Night Call sets itself up with an inspired idea and premise. The concept of a man living the simple life as a city taxi driver going through regular life while trying to catch a sinister serial killer is fascinating. When the different systems are firing on all cylinders and you can see the mystery unraveling, it’s a wonder to see. On the down side, the cabbie sim gameplay gets boring and the gameplay loop grows repetitive quickly.

I’m not sure King of Meat has truly captured my interest in order to keep me coming back after my work obligations are over. It’s a cute, welcoming multiplayer action game with a lot of challenges and interesting mechanics. But it also feels like I’ve seen pretty much everything there is to see after a few days of playing. Hopefully with time there will be more variety with post-launch content additions and a robust player content creation suite. I might not be around for it, but I’ll always be grateful for my awesome, new Discord server tag, a sword paired with a simple word: MEAT.