The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is indeed a game with two faces - one welcoming and the other viciously hostile. While it features a wealth of content, brilliant innovation, and genuine incentives to play with its toys, the spectre of its predecessor’s pernicious encroachment on fun is dispiriting in its ubiquity. The neat new tricks this sequel pulls simply aren’t enough to make Hyrule’s realm of brittle weapons, slippery surfaces, and tedious chores any more welcoming.

The “remastering” is of highly questionable value and the extra content is weak. No Return is a cheaply recycled and tawdry take on roguelite gameplay, while the Lost Levels were lost for a reason. Worse, such additions hammer a final nail into the coffin of this game’s creative ambition, definitively invalidating an already flimsy story with the kind of combat-focused experiences that communicate only one thing to the player - violent videogames are cool.

Everything good about Dead Space 2023’s basic gameplay, combat, and narrative is a result of what Dead Space 2008 built. Most of what this remake adds is either less appealing artistic alterations or side content that generally amounts to unnecessary padding, and quite frankly I’d have been more interested in a remaster than a glitchy new take that’s less enjoyable and costs more. When you add the repulsive context of EA benefiting from a series it once destroyed right down to the developer, you get a game that leaves a sour bloody taste, even if it’s an acceptable mimicry of its predecessor...Dead Space 2008 is fifteen quid on digital storefronts.

Feels like a tiresome retread – enjoyable enough when it sticks to the old script, but frustrating in its disappointment when it does attempt anything new. With a rushed story, colorless characters, and total misuse of a whole new playable character, the best I can say is that I didn’t hate it. I didn’t particularly like it, but I didn’t hate it. Dishonored deserves more than that.

A lot of flash and some substance, it’s a very fun game in a package that doesn’t live up to its massive potential, much less the massive price tag it’s introduced to mainstream gaming.

Bayonetta 3 is a good time when it allows itself to be. It consists of an excellent core experience buried under superfluous bilge, an otherwise quality experience interrupting itself to such a degree as to drag down the entire experience. The high notes are high enough to ensure a genuinely quality game, but the incessant sidetracking into mediocre stealth gameplay, mundane alternate characters, and half a dozen other deviations holds it back from being truly great. Thank god for trainsaws and spider women though, because they do a heck of a lot to keep this game entertaining.

I don’t know if it’s a credit or an indictment that Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s best stuff is entirely ancillary content that doesn’t represent its core gameplay. While all the lightsaber twirling and space magic is serviceable enough, it’s the side corn that appeals most, and it’s not even particularly rich corn. Simply kicking back with NPCs at the cantina, filling its aquarium and customizing its garden, was not only a relaxing break from the main game, it’s what I’d rather be playing. The general jankiness, technical setbacks, and consistently unfinished feeling doesn’t help anything, and I can’t say the huge amount of slow paced platforming is enough to coax one out of the comfort of the saloon either.

The campaign is flimsy, and despite claims of signifying a new generation for the series, Gears of War 4 is ultimately an upholder of the status quo.

Halo 5: Guardians is okay. Its campaign is rubbish, but the multiplayer is solid thanks to the foundation it’s built upon. Warzone is a really enjoyable experience, and while combat is still mostly about tossing grenades and hitting the melee button, the whole Requisition gimmick adds some much-needed flavor to proceedings.

Fundamentally, Signalis is an accomplished emulation of PSX survival horror. Its graphics are both authentic to the era and perfectly disturbing. Taking place in a fascinating world and populated by threatening creatures, it’s a game I very much wish I could enjoy more than I did. The crushing limitation on the player’s inventory coupled with a reliance on memory puzzles that represent a genuine accessibility issue put me off wanting to ever play the game again to get an ending more satisfying than the rather unfulfilling conclusion I got. That’s a real shame, because it’s still one of the best retraux survival horrors out there. It’s just not good enough for me to love it like I want to.

It's a good game... but lacking that dazzle of the first experience.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is an old game with an obscene new price tag that doesn’t offer anywhere near enough to convincingly get away with it. The original game was great, but this package is a cash grab from a company intent on selling its flagships out. It's really sad to see Kirby, my favorite Nintendo series, used to normalize this exploitative new price point.

I wish I could say I love the game, that its plagued by only minor setbacks, but I cannot honestly do that. I can’t look back at how much time was spent not enjoying myself, at how much time was spent actively wrestling with the game to wring anything worthwhile from it, and say I played the masterpiece many are going to say it is. Maybe, a long time ago, that’s something I’d have been able to say. Not today though. Not today.

My Friendly Neighborhood offers a unique execution of a conceit that’s otherwise become trite among horror games. Taking the “spooky kiddy thing” idea and pulling it onto a framework built from equal parts BioShock and Resident Evil smartly separates it from the ocean of similar concepts in the genre, even if none of its individual components are particularly original. It’s sadly let down from a lack of variety and consequently runs too long, unable to stay fresh or surprising enough to sustain its runtime. However, it’s a fun ride while it lasts, and it’s story is charming enough to be worth seeing through to the end.

Honestly, Tekken 7 is a content predictable fighting game surviving off the back of it’s relatively unchanged combat system.

What I have experienced is at least seven hours of good, quality gameplay, that was scuffered by the worst luck imaginable and the unfortunate decision to do the whole single save file auto-save structure...Even with the game ending the way it is, I have to admit that it was a good bloody time and there are a lot more expensive games out there that offer a lot less.

If you’d like to play a limp amalgamation of Deus Ex, Crysis, and BioShock with a multiplayer mode you’ve been able to play eight times in as many years, then Call of Duty: Black Ops III is definitely for you. For the rest of you, it’s just another condom of a game to be spunked into and thrown in the trash.

It’s just one of those games - the ones you like but have to acknowledge are riddled with things to complain about. Fun and frustrating all at once.

Fantasy Life’s biggest problem is a complete lack of ambition, being interested only in replicating what was done ten years ago despite how much should have been done to update the gameplay and make something truly worthy of a promising concept. It’s definitely got its enjoyable side, and its aping of Nintendo games gives it some longevity, but otherwise this is a so-so retread of an archaic game that was always far too limited compared to what it claimed to be. And its NPCs need to just glue their mouths shut. Stop. F.cking. Talking.

Avowed ought to have been a more linear action game. Combat is good enough that a streamlined and direct experience could serve it well, but as an RPG there’s simply not enough of anything. It feels like vast chunks are missing, with an initial promise of adventure that rapidly shaves off expectations until you’re left with a toothless story and a frustrating dearth of material...It’s fun to create a snowstorm and jab lizard men with spears, but the shallow trudgery between fights is consistently disappointing. I don’t think it’s unfair to have expected far more from Obsidian. Thanks to Avowed, I know I can expect far less.

I had fun going back to Crash Bandicoot, even if I found myself wanting to toss my controller at certain points and that notorious sky bridge level is still one of the absolute worst pieces of interactive crap you could ever suffer.

It’s six Mega Man games and something that takes all those games to create a far more interesting prospect. Mega Man fans deserve better than this, but it’s the best they’re apparently getting, and it’s pretty good for what it is.

For all its visual appeal, however, Far Cry 4 remains a shallow experience. It has loads of things in it, but having a lot of things is not the same thing as having depth. With a vapid story, activities that rely more on regurgitation than anything else, and a campaign that is exciting only for as long as you can ignore how insincere it all is, this is a game that affects a meaningful experience, rather than manage to be one.

Tom Clancy’s The Division is a “playable” game in the same way Anaconda is a “watchable” movie. As adequate as entertainment gets, it’s capable of providing solid amusement while it lasts, but it’s not something worth remembering beyond the scope of the time spent actively utilizing it. It’s something you can use to waste time, and it’s good at that, but it’s not particularly brilliant at anything else.

It’s really quite nice. Completely inoffensive rhythm-based fun. At the very least, it’s something your kids will dig, if you happen to own any of those little freaks.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins is one of the best disappointments I’ve ever played. The groundwork it lays could’ve been the basis of a genuinely amazing Dynasty Warriors game, but this one is so obvious about its corner cutting, and conflates “realism” with a lack of personality. The huge battles are impressive, general combat’s rather fun, and the parrying system works way better than I thought it would, so there’s a good wad of stuff to enjoy. I just wish Origins was an actual Dynasty Warriors game and not something so flavorless.

That’s Prey all over. It works, it’s well made, and polished, and all those things we expect “AAA” games to be. What it is not is exciting. At all...It’s an also-ran that I was quite frankly happy to see the back of once I was blessedly finished.

It’s okay, but it just doesn’t do anything anywhere near special enough to make it little more than an aping of games and sci-fi media that have come before.