The dreadful studio that brought you Quantum Error has delivered a game very much in line with its library of shameless trash. It is legitimately sad that not enough people knew of its lineage before Code Violet benefited from a whole lot of ill-gotten hype.

At $29.99, the price is frigging obscene for just how little you get, and how little of that is enjoyable....Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a short, flimsy, and overpriced beat ‘em up that offers so much less than its contemporaries in the genre. Skating by on brand recognition, it’s amazing how tired of it you become despite being able to finish the dire campaign in almost no time at all. The game’s barely done wiping its feet on the mat before outstaying its welcome, and it’s ready to leave soon after. Awful shite.

I take no pleasure in admonishing this remaster. Sacred 2 occupies a small but precious space in my heart, and I’m shocked to see how disastrously this has turned out. There’s still fun to be salvaged from the wreckage, but I can’t ignore the fact that Sacred 2: Remaster qualifies as a defective product. I have so many questions about how this came out in the state it’s in, but one query stands above them all.

Enjoyment can be finely sliced off of ARC Raiders like edible shreds from a doner kebab smeared in shit. That these slivers are entirely dependent on its players is hardly a triumph of the base experience, which is generally boring, flavorless, and lacking much of a point. If not for one intensely fragile hook, this is a sub-mundane peashooting box breacher that, despite a lack of originality or quality gameplay, still needed help from an algorithm.

The word “slop” has recently been overused to the point of death, and that’s a shame, because I’d very much like to call Double Dragon Revive slop. It baffles me how you can put out something this ugly and unenjoyable without attaching an apology to it instead of a price tag, but that's videogames for you.

If you took out the branding and populated it with generic creatures instead of marketable pocket monsters, Pokémon Legends: Z-A would be rightly seen as a sub-mediocre and sloppy RPG, the kind with 115 "mostly negative" user reviews on Steam. Game Freak knows how much grace the public affords Pokémon and has taken the absolute piss with it, churning out a cheap budget game with a premium price, expensive DLC, and a ten buck markup to get a decent framerate...The audacity of this exploitative cash-in is honestly quite disgusting. At least Ekans is in it.

I smiled when I first started playing this thing. I was directly controlling Unimarutchi, exploring the world with literally my favorite character, but my smile faded within seconds of realizing what Namco had dared to shovel in front of people and charge for. There’s nothing to explore, nothing to enjoy, just the grinding menial filth of a game that doesn’t give a f.ck.

Poorly made and ineptly designed, MindsEye cosplays as an open world game to its own detriment. The lifeless cardboard realm we could generously label a "world" is aggressively closed off, its sandbox appearance nothing more than desperately shallow dressing for a cover shooter so bereft of features it’s bloody embarrassing.

This appalling paid-for tutorial is inexcusably lazy on top of being just plain inexcusable to begin with...The only thing Welcome Tour has welcomed us to a brand new breed of garbageware.

I’m so tired of this manipulative garbage. I can't wait to stop being addicted to it.

Transformers: Galactic Trials is overpriced and full of nothing. The gimmick of switching between vehicular racing and robotic shooting might have worked if both halves weren’t so thoughtlessly welded together like a shoddy cut-and-shut car. Then again, its meager content and technical sloppiness suggests it never had a chance...Also I’m still seething at the lack of Starscream.

Cynical doesn’t even begin to describe such a poisonous display of IP leverage. There’s something actively nasty about the thing. It’s a reminder that creativity is not owned by the creators, it is imprisoned by the least creative among us, those of us who force others to dance but can't carry a tune.

To say there’s a lot to hate about Concord implies it has a lot of anything. While not strictly skeletal in content, it nonetheless offers little of note in a market that’s already saturated with similar games all vying to dominate the finite time of their players. Sony’s delivered the perfect picture of a game nobody was asking for, an impeccable example of the nonessential product. Even if I didn’t hate it, I sure as hell wouldn’t find enough to love.

It should be nigh impossible to f.ck up releasing Doom at this point, but trust this collection of utter clowns to find not just one, but several ways of doing so. DOOM + DOOM II oozes carelessness and ineptitude all wrapped up in an attitude of apparent contempt. Still, the remixed soundtracks absolutely slap.

Anomaly Pools has jumped on the liminal bandwagon with a game best released under the guise of a freebie “experiment” rather than a game that charges too much even at $1.99...Sorry. Having finished critiquing this, I feel like I’ve wasted all our time.

The First Descendant is the last thing I want to play right now, nauseated as I am by how much of a swindle it is. Designed entirely to frustrate and trick money out of players, it gives nothing in return but the same “live service” mundanity that’s soaked the market in an ocean of filth...It’ll probably be dead within a year like so many of its sordid ilk. That would be a genuinely good thing for the industry and for the players it’s trying to scam. I hope it dies on its toxic vine.

With an actual hint of production value, Garten of Banban IV is better, but it’s nowhere near acceptable. The larger environments lead to obscene amounts of backtracking, while the story and scares are as sad as ever. It is every bit the ugly, exploitative commercial its predecessors were.

They say familiarity breeds contempt, and the more time I spend in this series’ dismal world, the more relatable a statement that becomes.

Puzzles are more tedious, scares are more pitiful, and for all its expanded gameplay, this sequel manages to be no better than the last.

Ugly and threadbare, both mechanically and aesthetically, Garten of Banban has spread its lumpy legs and given birth to one of the most cynically manufactured franchises of all time.

How f.cking dare Star Wars: Hunters? I really hope it becomes yet another “service” game that’s been shut down in less than a year. It deserves to be burned to nothing.

Can we turn one of these 80s horror films into something with some substance now? This asymmetrical online shit has clearly reached the barrel’s bottom if this is what we’re getting.

Terribly balanced, broken in several ways, and barely able to support the online mode it’s pushing, Sker Ritual is a waste of time. If you like Maid of Sker you don’t need this poor follow-up, and if you like COD: Zombies you don’t need this poor facsimile. Nobody and nothing needs Sker Ritual’s bullshit, least of all Sker Ritual.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is outwardly hostile to its audience, embracing everything that made the original such a hassle to enjoy. A game designed with the purpose of wasting a player’s time, which makes Capcom’s “time saver” microtransactions all the more sickening. It’s a glorified xerox that you will adore if you believe Dragon’s Dogma was literally perfect when it released in 2012 and absolutely none of the progress within games development in the past twelve years meant one fucking thing. Indeed, if your idea of a good time is having a terrible time, you’ll love this malignant resurrection of ideas and implementations that should have stayed long dead.

Helldivers 2 struggles to appeal after stripping out so much of what made its prequel memorable, and if that’s all that was wrong with it I’d be sadly grateful. Miserably, it’s such a wreck of a product that it spends significant amounts of time in a near-unplayable state while the rest of the time is typified by frequent crashes and other technical difficulties. You're supposed to expect a certain level of quality in a Sony-published game, and Helldivers 2 is a reminder that such expectations are naive as all f.ck.

By selling Gangs of Sherwood, Nacon is robbing from the gullible and giving to the inept. I’d have worked on a better closing analogy, but this game isn’t bloody worth it.

Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is really rather sad. It looks and feels cheap, the drought of available options is stark, and the fact they couldn’t even include save states or rewind options without being extremely frugal about it is audacious at the very least. To top it off, all six games - masquerading as seven - are garbage. Pure, utter garbage. Yes, even the ones you remember...Especially the ones you remember.

GameMill Entertainment continues its run of rushed, cheap, utterly contemptuous scam jobs. Yet another game where you can see how the developers at one point hoped to make something good until reality hit them in the face, forcing them to spray some vomit onto storefronts and call it a day...It’s only marginally better than Skull Island: Rise of Kong because I can f.cking laugh at it.

I’d call Skull Island: Rise of Kong embarrassing, but I’m not sure you can be capable of feeling such an emotion if you’re able to sell this thing. Ultimately, Skull Island is a scam. It’s not even bad in a funny way, it’s just insulting - it’s not been finished, it was roughly stitched into the vague shape of a videogame and given the price tag of a legitimate product...It’s the kind of game that makes the case for some sort of independent trading standards body in the game industry. I say this with all due gravity - The Game Mill should not have been allowed to sell Skull Island: Rise of Kong. In an industry with adequate customer protections, it should be recalled.

I adored the first Alan Wake, and I’ve either loved or liked every Remedy game since then. This is the first time I’ve felt so displeased by the studio’s work I’ve actually been angry about it. The pompous writing, the shoehorned mechanics that push a tiresome narrative conceit over the quality of the narrative itself, the archaic combat, the amount of time it spends doing almost nothing, Alan Wake 2 is fucking insufferable most of the time...It’s impossible to tell where the stylistically bad writing of the title character ends and the inadvertently bad game of Alan Wake 2 begins. The difference, at this point, matters not.

Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes...To play it is to cringe at a rare extremity of creative shamelessness. This stunning example of maladroit artistic negligence struggles to achieve the deeply grounded bar of “playable” yet has the insulting nerve to try and claim a desperate connection to Silent Hill. The temerity of this crime against spookiness is off the charts...How dare Stray Souls? How f.cking dare it?

Mythforce is shallow and inauthentic, hiding its creative mundanity behind the insincere promise of retro silliness. This lack of artistic integrity is matched by a lack of quality control, awkwardly bolted together as it is with unrefined controls, dreadful performance, and archaic gameplay. At its very best, we have a boring and bland dungeon crawler of a distinctly unrewarding stripe, but it’s almost always far worse than that. Masters of the Universe was a show made as cheaply as possible, reusing the same backgrounds and animations about twenty times an episode. It was high fucking art compared to Mythforce.

If you’re the kind of person who thinks videogames peaked with Fallout 3's launch version and they’ve required neither evolution nor improvement since, this game is absolutely for you. If you believe Bethesda doesn’t need to exhibit growth as an artistic outlet and hasn’t had to change a thing about the way it’s made games since 2008, I can safely say you’ll adore Starfield because it’s all that a Bethesda game has always been... and literally nothing more...Starfield is a shallow ocean, hiding its lack of creative ambition behind the physical size of a universe that’s minuscule where it counts...In short, it's everything a fan of these games could love.

It’s cheap from both a visual and combat standpoint, it’s unpleasant to control, and the incentives for enduring multiple “runs” are among the worst rewards and unlocks I’ve ever seen. All it accomplished was getting me to replay Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4, two games that completely embarrass this sorry little thing...Damn fine soundtrack, though.

It’s one thing to rip another game off, but to only pretend to rip one off for attention while doing something so threadbare it doesn’t even clear the low bar of plagiarism truly is deceptive on a whole other level. The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is not a forgery of The Last of Us - it’s a forgery of a forgery, it’s something so completely fucking fraudulent that it sells the idea of a counterfeit and delivers instead a handful of minimally functional assets structured just barely enough to resemble half an hour of navigable gameplay.

Daedalic had an opportunity to prove the cynics wrong when so many people wondered what the hell the point of a Gollum game would even be. Instead, they handled this with such utter clumsiness they likely ensured a game like it will never happen again.

Redfall is a sorry skeleton of a game that meets the lowest bar possible to be considered a functional, sellable product, and it manages to bungle even that elementary task. At its very best, this embryonic embarrassment almost aspires to mediocrity, but such heady heights are too frequently beyond its reach. If it were interesting enough to inspire any emotion other than boredom, the humiliatingly cretinous enemy AI, recycled assets, lack of basic features, and laundry list of glitches would be laughable. The quality of this game, however, isn’t funny. It’s exasperating. Arkane Studios is so much better than this, and be it through a lack of time or a lack of money, they’ve made something a studio of such pedigree could rightly be ashamed of.

The Last Oricru is a masterpiece of bad design. When a game has to warn its players not to invest in half the available skill points because they’re worthless, you know you’ve got something special, and that’s what Oricru is - special. It’s so profoundly wrong it deserves to be studied, dissected, remembered for years. Its creators should tour universities and give talks about their artistic philosophies so future generations can learn how never to make a videogame. If you’d told me aliens had developed it, I’d struggle to argue, such is the incomprehensible absurdity on display...I am in awe of such a marvel.

The Callisto Protocol isn’t scary. It isn’t fun. It isn’t entertaining, fascinating, or mildly enriching. It lays a self-entitled claim to Dead Space’s stylistic and mechanical elements yet wields not a single one with grace, instead performing a crude pantomime. It’s mechanically unpleasant, bereft of a single original idea, and hostile to its own players. There's literally one jumpscare tactic reused at a rate best described as pathological. It's got some damn nerve wanting to be seen as a worthy successor - it can't even rival the weakest of pretenders.

Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic...Yep, that’s the word for it...Sonic Frontiers is fu..ing pathetic.

Gotham Knights takes the concept of inconsequential open world busywork to a ludicrous extreme, exquisitely culminating years of creative laziness in the genre. Nothing can adequately convey how monotonous, how unimaginative, how fucking banal this thing is. It manages to be offensive in its structural mediocrity, and that’s before we consider its enervative combat, inadequate controls, and threadbare world. Wearing the flayed skin of a live service and managing to be worse than any one of them, this sorry mockery of the Arkham series will rightly be forgotten in a year’s time - sooner if we’re lucky.

Trap... that's actually the perfect word...So much about Scorn feels like a trap. It’s designed to cost you progress, to waste your time, and some might think this burdensome despair is some sort of brilliance on the part of the developers. To someone who values their finite time on Earth, it’s snide crap that shows contempt for its audience at every opportunity...I have nothing but contempt for it in turn.

As for me, I can’t say I was hooked. Dreamlight Valley is a world of cardboard, its inhabitants little more than set decoration and animated sources of material gain. It’s a game about menial labor for menial labor’s sake, the most monotonous elements of a life sim emphasized and weakly justified by the shallow inclusion of marketable Disney characters. It masquerades as a game about friendship while portraying personal relationships as little more than means to an end. Worse than all of that, though, it’s simply boring. Dreadfully, interminably, boring. [Early Access Score = 30]

Repeats itself constantly...If you've got all the time in the world for another desperate, cloying band-wagoning looter-shooter style game...then somewhere deep within Marvel's Avengers, it can sometimes be quite fun to punch robots in the face. It's just not fun enough to last for hours. Maybe just 10 mins a day, for like a week.

It's decent. It's a good little game...The violence is inherently fun... I don't think I've seen a bigger gap between promise and reality since I played Fable 3. [7.5 out of 10 "if I were doing review scores still..."]

Darksiders Genesis is a strange one. While it may look like a Diablo style affair, it remains a Darksiders game at heart, with combat and mechanics taken straight from the main series. The new perspective is jarring however, especially when it comes to jumping and platforming. The lack of dungeon crawler RPG features also makes the pulled back camera feel just a tad cheap. Nonetheless, it's a decent enough game.

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is a terrific game that has aged astonishingly well, a fact that becomes clear within moments of playing it today. A good excuse to play it today is Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition, which recently came to Switch. It's the same excellent game with the addition of a weapon/style switching mechanic, practically the one thing it needed to stand next to its modern sequels. The Special Edition is the best version of an already great game. Can't say fairer than that.

Technically it's impressive, and the people producing content for it are talented as heck... sometimes. Unfortunately, for those looking to play the games rather than make them, Dreams is hard to stick with. The best projects are in "early access" for want of a better term, and they're surrounded by baffling memes, half-baked nonsense, and bids for YouTuber attention. Oh, and tons of copyright infringement. Dreams is amazing, but I'm not very interested in playing more of it.

A competent, mechanically enjoyable shooter that suffers from aesthetic blandness and a quiet, drab atmosphere. Basically, it's a Call of Duty battle royale game.

More intense and aggressive, Doom Eternal gives the player more tools to play with, and an increased pressure to use them. Coupled with the fluid environment traversal, the result is one heck of an engrossing game.

I'm notoriously lacking in patience, but Animal Crossing has always had a charm to it that allowed me to tolerate its time wasting bollocks. Considering New Horizons wants you to work just to get to Animal Crossing's usual brand of time wasting bollocks has eliminated that tolerance.

Weirdly though, it's not really a bad videogame. It's got several key problems, but the core has real potential... provided players don't get turned off by the balancing issues and lack of content first.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is as excellent as it is scary, and it is very scary. Take it from someone who doesn't scare easily - Capcom pushed the boat out on making this one pure paranoia fuel...While the zombies can sometimes be annoying, the overall experience is just as good as Resident Evil 2, which was already amazing, and adds more tension. Also, the new Jill Valentine is just too darn likable.

Resident Evil: Resistance is the multiplayer game attached to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and unfortunately it's just that - a mere attachment. It's half-baked, and not very good at all. I also strangely like it, or at least I've been playing it a lot. I wonder what it's like to play as a Mastermind though. Matchmaking won't let me try.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is something new. It's something different. It's bold, and clever, and overwhelmingly arrogant. It's contentious, controversial, conceited, and some people may view it as simply a... con. But if it ain't a subversive masterpiece nonetheless, I don't know what is.

I'm a big Dark Crystal fan - loved the movie, adored the Netflix show. The latter has been adapted to videogame form as The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance Tactics, and it's really quite bad....A bare bones turn-based strategy RPG that runs poorly, looks dated, and plays without any of the streamlining and convenience of a modern game, Age of Resistance Tactics feels like a cheap and cynical cash-in...Well, it's hard to call it "cheap" when they want twenty bucks for this garbage.

Journey to the Savage Planet is a fun little game that looks a bit like No Man's Sky and plays a bit like Metroid Prime. It's also full of bug-eyed round birds that are kind of adorable, and has a cute sense of humor. It's a fun little game that I've been having fun with because it's fun. How fun!

Alien: Isolation may be the very best Switch port I've played in terms of accuracy and performance. It looks amazing, it runs smoothly, and in several departments it outclasses the PS4 version...On top of that, Alien: Isolation is just an amazing game that's still absolutely terrifying.

It's okay. It's pretty much more Pokémon, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, it's quite clear the game needs a proper overhaul, something to drag into the modern day. Or at least the modern century.

It's okay. It's pretty much more Pokémon, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, it's quite clear the game needs a proper overhaul, something to drag into the modern day. Or at least the modern century.

It's okay. It's pretty much more Pokémon, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, it's quite clear the game needs a proper overhaul, something to drag into the modern day. Or at least the modern century.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order feels like a throwback for Electronic Arts, a nod to a time when the publisher let its studios simply make and sell honest videogames...While it's deeply flawed in several aspects, Fallen Order is pretty fun, and it's nice to finally see a mainstream story-driven Star Wars game. Shame about the glitches and the frequent annoyances, but when it's good, it's really quite good.

It's wonderful that Hideo Kojima gets to do whatever he wants to do. It's equally wonderful that I can do whatever I want to do, and what I did was stop playing his game...Death Stranding is a hassle. A slow, monotonous, fiddly, irritating hassle. It's pure indulgence, every whimsical fancy that crossed the studio's minds has been tossed in without regard for the player's time or the gameplay experience.

Disco Elysium is one of the best roleplaying games you could hope to experience, provided you're looking for something savagely dark, political, and introspective...Bearing a brutal wit and a deep, contemplative story about depression, addiction, societal struggles, and everything in between, Disco Elysium is one of the most fascinating games you can play this year.

MediEvil's PS4 release is a remarkably faithful recreation of the 1998 classic, and that's a problem. While the remaster is a near-perfect recreation, it recreates something archaic that, even at the time, was rather clunky....Unfortunately, MediEvil needed a full overhaul or, better yet, a brand new game. An authentic recreation of an old and messy game isn't what the series should settle for.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare may revel in its edgy depictions of armed conflict, but it's so one-note and routine about it that none of it really lands. It's visually impressive, and the combat all works well, but ultimately I spent hours playing something I just can't care about. I think I kind of hate it. Not because it's a bad game, but because it's just so... Call of Duty.

Obsidian's long-awaited The Outer Worlds is, quite frankly, everything I needed it to be. Rich, dense, brilliantly written, it's everything we've been missing in the wake of "live services" and other "AAA" trash.

A truly excellent game, Children of Morta is like a checklist of my favorite things. Hack n' slash gameplay, dungeon crawling, roguelike elements, constant rewards, charming narrative, gorgeous visuals. Children of Morta has what I need.

It works really quite well. Obvious graphical compromises have been made, but it runs nicely, retains the sheer volume of content, and maintains a consistent stability. While mostly a novelty for those who already played it, it's an adequate Switch version for those who haven't.

Might be worth picking up for the nostalgia. But I wouldn't pick it up expecting an amazing Ghostbusters experience. It's not bad, it's just annoying a lot. It's frequently irritating. And a lot of that is just the dated mechanics.

I don't like this game. I played it. Within the first ten minutes, I was f.. bored of it... I hated every moment I spent playing this game...I think I had less fun playing this than I did Anthem, and I had less than no fun playing Anthem.

With its focus on player flexibility and experimentation, backed up by tons of special abilities and character classes, Code Vein offers something engaging, even if its combat can be a little on the irritating side.

It's almost impressive just how wrong this game is. As a Contra game, Rogue Corps almost goes out of its way to be completely inept. As a general shooter, its sub-par in every way...Slow, repetitive, and ugly as hell, Contra: Rogue Corps is embarrassing even by Konami's low standards, and this is all before we get to the weapons overheating.

The Surge 2 represents Deck 13's strongest crack at a Soulslike yet, and it's really damn good. They nailed it this time...Fast, aggressive, challenging, and wildly entertaining, not even some shockingly bad texture glitches can hold back the sheer amount of fun I've had dismembering my way through Jericho City. The Surge 2 is, simply put, a brilliantly good time.

A stunningly faithful recreation of a classic Game Boy adventure. It's gorgeous, too. I mean, really gorgeous...Its got an aesthetic that demonstrates perfectly my argument that raw graphical power is not necessary make a stunningly beautiful game. In fact, Link's Awakening may be the best looking game on a console full of lovely visuals...As far as the gameplay itself goes, it's certainly nice. And old school. With a little emphasis on the "old" part of that phrase.

It's certainly not remarkable. It's a continuation of a formula that works really well.It's just more Borderlands with more stuff in it...Borderlands 3 is a pretty good game.

A solid, if undercooked, action-RPG that tries to dabble in some intriguing themes, Greedfall could use more action and a more creative setting, but it's fine enough.

Challenging, beautiful, and exquisitely mournful, Blasphemous flavors its methodical pacing with a little influence from Dark Souls and Metroidvanias, while maintaining its own unique voice...From gorgeous visuals to magnificent boss encounters and evocative themes of religion and punishment, Blasphemous is well worth checking out.

Gears 5 is pretty damn good, huh? A campaign that dares to revitalize the series' formula, backed up by some classic multiplayer, Horde Mode, and all that nonsense. It's real good. It's gorgeous to boot, with great lighting, meaty effects, and an icy new environment with all the snowy fun it entails. I'm tired. I was up all night playing Gears 5. So tired.

Like a Quantic Dream game, except good, Man of Medan really shines through in its co-op, where two players work together and sometimes spend large stretches of the story apart. And of course, if someone dies along the way, you can always blame them.

I gotta say, it turned out rather well. Not quite the creepfest I was hoping for, it's nonetheless inventive and atmospheric, and feels like it fits within the Blair Witch world without treading overly familiar ground.

Yeah, it's pretty good with a number of caveats. Terrific combat and a ground bed of fun ideas, marred by some poor writing and level design. Still, you get to throw a LOT of stuff around.

Oninaki is a depressingly written game with a creepy story, but the actual gameplay is quite compelling, even if it won't be for everyone...Talking to ghosts, picking up dead souls and using them as weapons, riding on the back of a wolf spirit, there's a lot of fun to be had, even if the protagonist is having no fun whatsoever.

This is what people have (been) praising? This mediocre shooter with broken co-op and the most unimaginative boss design I've seen in years? Well... okay, then...Remnant: From The Ashes is a game I do not understand the love for. At best it's pedestrian, drab, and repetitive. At worst it's a pissin' nightmare.

Grandia HD Collection is a hefty reminder of what a clever, heartfelt, unique JRPG experience looks like. Square Enix could stand to take notes. I have a history of starting Grandia and never finishing it, so I'm appreciating the chance to finally get through it. It's still really good. Holds up terrifically, with a famous battle system that feels as fresh as it ever did. Great game... albeit one that really shows off in the graphics department, sometimes a bit too much.

It feels rushed, incomplete, and woefully imbalanced...With more time to develop, this could have been something cool, but instead it requires a lot of legwork before it becomes slightly fun, and the effort's just not worth it.

A dreadful action-platformer bolted onto a pitiful tower defense, SolSeraph is embarrassingly cheap, tacky, and boring. It looks and plays like a mobile game, and is way overpriced. Just play Bloodstained. Even if you've already played Bloodstained.

But seriously, it's pretty good. Y'know, it's fine.

The Sinking City revels in its Lovecraft inspirations and tries its very best to put you in the shoes of a detective without holding any hands. It's got a nice moody atmosphere, some great writing, and a heartfelt charm to it...It's also absolute rubbish, and I cannot recommend it. I like it. In fact I've grown remarkably fond of it. It's one of the worst games I've ever actually enjoyed.

Judgment is Yakuza with a hardboiled twist, which unfortunately means the addition of tailing missions and lockpicking minigames. When it's not doing that, however, it's brilliant as always...With all the usual punching, nightlife, and bizarre side missions, Judgment continues Sega and RGG's winning streak. More faults than usual, but nonetheless fun as heck.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has, amazingly, lived completely up to expectations. It's the Castlevania game we knew we needed, but Konami didn't want us to have. Koji Igarashi isn't trying to hide the fact that Bloodstained is a Castlevania game in all but name, and he doesn't have to. It's a heartfelt, authentic, beautiful MetroidVania game and I am so very happy with it.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has, amazingly, lived completely up to expectations. It's the Castlevania game we knew we needed, but Konami didn't want us to have. Koji Igarashi isn't trying to hide the fact that Bloodstained is a Castlevania game in all but name, and he doesn't have to. It's a heartfelt, authentic, beautiful MetroidVania game and I am so very happy with it.

Cadence of Hyrule marries The Legend of Zelda with Crypt of the Necrodancer. The results are quite charming indeed....I can't actually play it very well... at all... but I am enjoying it nonetheless!

I really want the Layers of Fear series to be good, but Layers of Fear 2 pretty much wallows in the same mediocrity its predecessor barely kept its head above...Though they've added tangible threats and a little more variety of gameplay, this sequel feels more like a retread through a bargain basement, severely outdated horror structure. The genre needs a shakeup, and this ain't it.

Void Bastards has a great name, a great look, and often great gameplay... when it's not being really annoying....For the most part it's fun and rewarding, and the British accents are employed to great effect. But when it tries to screw with the player, it really bloody screws.

Lapis x Labyrinth is a sheer joy to play. Rarely does one find a game so hellbent on encouraging and rewarding the player with endlessly positive audiovisual feedback. All the thrill of a casino with none of the evil, this NIS hackyslashy fun fest is well worth checking out.

Team Sonic Racing is fine. It's a decent enough racer and that's it, really. The team mechanics are okay, the tracks are okay, everything is okay...Except the matchmaking. And the pointlessly long results screens.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is the best game I've played this year. Easily the best. A stealth game with puzzle elements and a hearty dose of horror, A Plague Tale may turn heads with its killer rat swarms, but the real star is the great writing and character portrayals. This is something special.