It’s time to visit Hope County and do… pretty much the same thing you do in pretty much every “AAA” Ubisoft game.

The Switch continues a hot streak as Kirby’s latest sequel turns out to be good… because it’s a Kirby game.

A good game that sadly lives in the shadow of its excellent original.

An enjoyable take on visual novels and other story-driven games, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a pleasant little game indeed.

This is already easily in the running for one of 2018’s worst game. Woefully inadequate nonsense.

For all I could criticize Nintendo for, I could never begrudge it rescuing Bayonetta from the scrapheap and continuing to have faith in the series...I’ll also happily take the excuse to play Bayonetta 2 again!

Poignant, clever, and creepy as all hell!

Metal Gear Survive is here, and it’s worse than I expected...I thought they’d at least TRY and make it feel like Metal Gear, but instead it truly is a derivative, irritating, bog-standard survival game...There was so much rubbish to laugh at I forgot to even mention the microtransactions!

Make no mistake about it, this is the worst Dynasty Warriors game of them all, at least as far as mainline entries go.

I swear this is a real thing that is on the PlayStation Store. I promise you it has the nerve to charge $19.99.

It really sunk its teeth into me...I'm starting to see what people have been getting out of it. I still don't see the Game of the Year quality to it...It's still far too rough and ready.

Yeah, it’s alright. It’s not Yooka-Laylee, and that’s better than being Yooka-Laylee.

Hand of Fate 2. It’s basically as good as Hand of Fate. The new twists are good, the old problems are a shame.

This is so much more than a bad mobile game in premium skin...It’s also buggy, unfinished, and mediocre “AAA” garbage to boot!

Suffers under the shadow of Super Mario Odyssey...I'd rather be playing that.

It's no Sonic Mania, but that aside, I had fun with it. I played it and beat it on launch day... As far as 3D Sonic games go, this is all right... Not quite as good as Sonic Generations.

It's more Horizon Zero Dawn...No better or worse. More of the same.

Another November, another Call of Duty. Rinse, wash, open loot box in front of friends, repeat...Goes through the motions.

Super Mario Odyssey isn’t just good, it may well be my favorite mainline Mario game to date...It's brilliant.

It's okay, it's been enjoyable, but I must confess, I've not enjoyed it as much as the other one, the previous one...The gameplay itself, I don't know, something just doesn't quite feel as satisfying, enjoyable. I mean, taking a fire axe to a Nazi's head is always going to be fun....The levels, as well, just not quite as well-designed. The other ones had a lot more pacing to them.

It's a fairly good game, I'll give it that. Definitely in regards to design.

I, for one, just truly appreciate seeing a game that isn't desperately, embarrassingly trying to pry open the customer's wallet after purchase to see what extra little coins it can scoop up in its talons and scurry off with like a cockroach in the night.

A pretty decent survival horror game, immediately better than the first one...Remarkably better than the first one.

The game has been affected by the loot box system...The game is compulsively playable.

the core of Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is there, but it feels significantly held back by its adherence to only use MCU marvel characters. It hampered the roster and character design, two constant elements of the experience, and it’s hard to overlook those and see the strong fighting system underneath.

Even at its grindiest, Destiny 2 remains an oddly compelling adventure...While there's still plenty of room for improvement, I've got say Bungie put its heart into this one, and it definitely shows.

The sequel nobody asked for turns out to be the game nobody needed to play.

A quickly-produced cheap spin-off.

I was really impressed by my time with Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. It’s a polished X-Com style game that removes some of the obtuse layers to ensure the early gameplay curve is accessible, uses humor very well, and kept me coming back for more.

Nothing in this game feels quite finished, which is the overbearing problem. Agents of Mayhem is brimming with potential and can be quite a bit of fun, but it's inevitably dragged down by the fact that every little element, no matter how much promise it has, always consistently feels so half-baked.

Sonic Mania is a brilliantly staged celebration of the past that acts as a true sequel to the Genesis line of games.

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.

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

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.

Perception is miles better than the myriad “me too” horror games saturating Steam, but it’s certainly not exceptional. Underneath the visual style – and it’s ultimately just an aesthetic choice – is regular ol’ walk-and-talk horror game that manages a little panache but contains no material of substantial value, be it narratively or interactively.

Arms is a really weird game. At its core it’s a simple, accessible fighting game with a really strong gameplay loop and room for player growth competitively, but a pair of fundamentally flawed control schemes, a lack of decent modes and a glacially slow random unlock system for items that fundamentally change how characters can function make it a really tough package to recommend. Which is a shame, because there’s such a good game in there

Nothing I wrote here in 2008 applies to the ugly, sh.tty, port job with woefully poor controls and instances of the whole thing being plaing f.cking broken.

RiME is certainly one of those games that prove how ridiculous it is to rail against linearity considering how a well paced, smartly designed corridor can be as enchanting, if not more so, than any massive open world on the market.

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

Injustice 2 takes a strong fighting game, delivers an incredibly rewarding and lengthy single player that feels like a priority rather than a tacked on afterthought, and considerably increases the scope of the game by adding in a vast number of well made additional characters to the mix. Sure it hits the uncanny valley a bit, and I’m not keen on the loot boxes or their DLc plans, but it’s hard to deny how much fun I had with the game at launch.

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.

All told, Flinthook is a damn good time. It’s demanding with its difficulty but provides all of the tools necessary for success; not so cruel as to seem unfair but steadfast in its expectations of the player. The core mechanics are satisfying to use and well balanced, while offering the player ways to upset individual aspects of that balance through perks and carve out their own style.

I say this without hyperbole and not as a stealth insult to anything else – I quite genuinely believe this to be the finest addition to the Switch’s library so far. I can’t argue with how much I’ve been playing it and how much I want to keep playing it, even as I type this. It’s exactly this kind of compulsive experience the Switch needed, and if that had to be the result of a remaster, so be it...It’s a damn fine remaster of a truly magnificent game.

While it didn’t bring literal tears to my eyes, there are moments that certainly feel like a kick to the soul thanks to impeccable writing and direction.

Outlast 2 might have had a better shot if it released years ago and hadn’t followed Outlast. As it stands, it’s a lower quality photocopy of itself, with any attempts at improvement acting more as defacement of an element that needed no correction.

I wish this game had a head so I could stamp on the back of it and push it mercilessly into a pile of sick and guts.

The remaster itself, tragically, is really quite good. It runs beautifully in 4K at a smooth 60 frames-per-second, with characters and environments that still look striking today. Aside from some occasionally buggy ally A.I., it’s polished up nicely, and I wish I could say it was worth rushing out to buy...At $59.99 however, with launch-day DLC besides, Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is little more than a pisstake. And that’s that.

Make no mistake – The Sexy Brutale deserves as much attention as any Horizon, Zelda, Nioh or Persona.

Andromeda is an undeniable mess, one that is now being hurriedly fixed after it already “enjoyed” its most effective sales period. The state it released in – considering the money and publisher behind it – is hard to conceive, let alone forgive, but a game can be a buggy mess and remain fun. Andromeda is fun… sometimes. Other times it’s a dreary slog through recycled cutscenes, infantile character interactions, and a lot of badly masked loading screens.

Yooka-Laylee is a game out of time, clinging so desperately to past glories it doesn’t seem to understand the Earth kept spinning after the N64 was discontinued. It’s everything wrong about the formative years of 3D platforming and it somehow retained none of what made the genre’s highlights endure...Yooka-Laylee is, in a word, rubbish.

As someone who has spent a lot of time with the Switch recently, and who loved the hell out of the Vita during that year or two it was getting regular games released on it, I really did find myself at times wishing this game had some kind of portable version. It just felt like the social life aspects of the game might have been more at home when I experienced them on the Vita in P4G...Still, the fact that’s my biggest complaint in 120 hours of JRPG says a lot. I was damn impressed by Persona 5, and will certainly be returning to it once I’ve had a few months to decompress from this super concise playthrough. I played 120 hours in just a couple of weeks and damn it was a lot of fun.

Few games are able to showcase the power of the medium like Nier: Automata...If history forgets this game, then f.ck history.

At its absolute best, Breath of the Wild offers some of the most absorbing experiences a Zelda game ever has. Unfortunately, it makes you work harder for it than you should, buried as it is under a pile of small but constant irritations that collaborate to form a thick crust of frustration around a delectable center. Breath of the Wild is a delightful adventure, one that tries its utmost to be as big a pain in the arse as possible.

Vaccine is shit, but it does say its own name in a creepy deep voice when you start it, which is the single thing it has over Resident Evil 7.

Berserk and the Band of the Hawk isn’t a bad time, but it’s not quite the Berserk Warriors I was hoping for. The story mode is great fun for a while but soon falls apart, character unlocks are tantalizing until you realize how thin on the ground they are, and generally nothing good the game does comes without at least some minor caveat.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is just brilliant. I speak as a critic who has played more "open sandbox" games than any one human should and has grown so very weary of them. I should have gotten sick of this thing in an hour, but I've been glued to it for days and days and I don't want it to end. I love existing in this world - a world of desperate survival but of growing culture and a sense of hope. A world of giant metal animals that promise some breathtaking fights.

Ultimately, For Honor doesn’t focus on making sense or being historically accurate, it just puts cool stuff in a field and tells it to go out and fight. Everything outside of playing online sucks, like microtransactions, customization options and single-player. Hell, the multiplayer itself sometimes sucks when it pairs you with a badly selected host player...However, when the game is working and you’re murdering a single human player while screaming “FOOOOOOOOOOOR HOOOOOOOOOOOONOOOOOOOOOOOR” at their corpse, it’s pretty damn rewarding...It’s just a shame the single player couldn’t capture the soul of playing online.

I’ll end my review of Dynasty Warriors: Godseekers by saying Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends Complete Edition was a crown in the jewel for the series and I highly recommend anybody interested in Tecmo Koei’s sprawling franchise consider it for a starting point.

Nioh got attention for its similarities to other titles, but it deserves to be remembered as its own special game, one that sees and raises the efforts presented by its inspirations. With fast and uncompromising combat, an engrossing economy of loot, and a mesmerizing artistic style, action-RPGs have rarely been this refined or this captivating.

Life of Black Tiger is a massive piece of f*cking shit. Also it has multiplayer.

In its current form, Resident Evil 7 is a damn fine game. Damn, damn fine. Although it initially looks like a desperate chase for Outlast‘s credibility, it slowly reveals itself to be more of a traditional Resident Evil adventure than one might believe, while taking successful elements from contemporary horror games and utilizing them effectively...After Resident Evil 6, this is exactly what the series needed. Both a change of pace and a return to long-neglected roots, it thrills me to say that, for the first time in a long time, Capcom is on the right track.

If Yakuza‘s always been this magnificent, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do and a lot of “friends” to chew out for not recommending it to me sooner.

Gravity Rush 2 is a bigger sequel, but not necessarily a better one. While it offers more to play with and in greater variety, the lack of improvements to core features – as well as graphics that are far from impressive – hold it back from being something truly great.

I’m glad we got two wonderful action games out of the Darksiders property, even if that’s all we ever get, and I’m really glad I played them again, because they’re not lost a step.

Super Mario Run would have been better if it had committed to a single idea. Instead, we’ve got a lacking runner game melded to a half-baked city builder that relies on repetition and artificial setbacks in order to pad itself out. With a premium cost – as well as a data-hogging always-online requirement – this is a game that’s worth neither the time nor the money it’s demanding.

This is why Final Fantasy XV, despite significant and glaring problems, is still a lovely time that managed to make me like Final Fantasy again. It’s a character piece, and the characters we spend our time with are fully realized and play off each other so well. It’s a lighter journey that nonetheless knows when to get serious, spurred by a charismatic nemesis and a quartet of lovable, beautiful boys...And good God is it weird.

It’s definitely worth the time, especially being free to start, and I would recommend anybody with a PS4 and a love of brawling check it out. It’s a well put together little game with a good dash of trademark Grasshopper oddity. As a throwaway bit of violent action with some clever online features, it’s a good time...A good time, but not a particularly enthralling one. At some point, as with everything involved in this production, you’ll eventually just have to Let It Die.

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.

While there are some disappointments and archaic clunkiness, Dead Rising 4 is a great time that makes smart improvements over Dead Rising 3. The comedic beats are surprisingly well executed, especially early on in the campaign, and while the conclusion may be hugely disappointing to some, I can’t fault the series its boldness.

Despite my grumbles, I have to admit Sun and Moon gets its hooks in even if it’s tough to get into at first. Once it clicks, it can instill obsession as well as any prior game, and that’s before getting to the new minigames and features that only serve to make the adventure more rewarding.

Despite my grumbles, I have to admit Sun and Moon gets its hooks in even if it’s tough to get into at first. Once it clicks, it can instill obsession as well as any prior game, and that’s before getting to the new minigames and features that only serve to make the adventure more rewarding.

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.

Most importantly, Watch Dogs 2 offers a sense of humor running through it that the series badly needed. You don’t need miserable family death stories in a ludicrous game about “smart cities” and cartoony hackers. You need writing that leans into the silliness, that has a laugh at its own expense, which is exactly what this game gets.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is very much like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate in that it’s a promising show of energy for a series that desperately needs a break. Despite alternating studios and the claim this game took Infinity Ward three years to make, the backbone of this series is tired and needs a considerable rest. Incremental updates just aren’t cutting it, especially not so soon after the financially less successful but creatively superior Titanfall 2. Still… good campaign while it lasts.

A shoddy product all the way through, Super Slam is a sneering grab for ad revenue and microtransactions that weakly trades on nostalgia and brings nothing else to the table. Unappealing on its own and doubly distasteful to anybody who actually knows what Pogs are, it’s safe to say this is not the big Pog comeback it pretends to be...I’d rather play with fucking Tazos, for God’s sake, and a diehard Pog expert like me should not be saying that.

Titanfall 2 is everything Titanfall should have been – storified, robust, and sufficiently multiplatform. The real series starts here, and I’m surprised at how nothing at all feels phoned in or tacked-on.

At this point, playing The Elder Scrolls V is like putting on a comfortable old pair of sweatpants. It’s not exactly stylish, it’s frayed around the edges, it’s showing its age, and there might be a few old cumstains, but it’s warm and familiar and it just feels good to have around...The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is that same pair of sweatpants put through the laundry.

Owlboy may have a few annoying navigational hangups, but none are enough to counter the overwhelming magic of the adventure at hand. Beautiful in both a visual and aural sense, littered with lovely characters, and home to a number of jawdropping combat encounters, Owlboy is a game almost ten years in the making that doesn’t show a trace of development hell.

It’s reverent without being mawkish, exciting without being tacky, and robust with content despite all the usual trappings of a big-budget EA product. War is hell… but Battlefield 1 is pretty damn lovely.

With the humor and silliness of Dragon Quest, a series of goals to keep players compelled, as well as the introduction of form and meaning in that everso popular survival crafting gameplay, Builders escapes being the cynical reskin it may at first glance appear to be. On the contrary, it evidences more love and care than could be expected.

The worst that can be said of Mafia III is that it’s tolerable. This is also the best that can be said. A perfectly sufficient game that does nothing unique with a unique setting, providing instead hours upon hours of predictable, uniform material. Likeable enough, but nowhere near as gripping as it should have been.

These glimmers of entertainment, however, are not frequent enough to make up for the number of times I’m left shaking my head at another “Failure” screen, wondering exactly what the hell just happened.

Here They Lie smacks of cynicism – a game designed with the knowledge that horror works really well in VR, without anybody involved knowing how VR games should operate. It’s distinctly unpleasant to play, and I fear it’ll be only one of many horror games that pull the same stunt as virtual reality continues to hold sway.

RIGS: Mechanized Combat League joins Until Dawn: Rush of Blood as one of the very few virtual reality games I’ve truly come to enjoy. The head-track aiming system works great, the combat is engrossing, and it’s a remarkably comfortable experience even after extended periods of time with the PSVR clamped on...Guerrilla most definitely gave Sony what it needed – a deserving mech battling game for its virtual reality foray, as well as a damn fine multiplayer frolic to boot.

For all intents and purposes, it is PSVR’s official demo – Sony just wants to ensure it makes some extra money off the thing. Not exactly a great look, kicking PSVR off with something so nakedly cynical, but that’s business for you...Worlds includes five games, barely any of which are worth playing more than once, and only one of which I genuinely enjoyed

Until Dawn: Rush of Blood may be a brief and silly spin-off, something far removed from 2015’s fantastic adventure game, but it’s the most fun I’ve had with a virtual reality game to date, and it’s just a brilliantly entertaining pop horror experience with enjoyable shooty-bang-bang combat.

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.

Zenith isn’t just badly made – it’s appalling. A boorish, cynical failure of a comedy game broken in ways I’ve never before seen. The fact it somehow – everso rarely – manages to show a glimmer of wit under all the misery only worsens the deal, highlighting how this could have perhaps been something decent before it was run through whatever thresher led to it becoming the mangled carcass it is...There is no cure for the disease this game carries. The kindest thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet between its glazed, gormless eyes.

With Virginia, Variable State has created a grounded piece of interactive narrative, free of the waffling conceit of the genre’s worst offenders, but not quite evocative enough to be a true classic. Thanks to a savvy use of visual communication, a stirring soundtrack, and a tale that confidently communicates much in spite of its silence, Virginia is a good little game and a worthy contribution to the world of minimalist indie offerings...If you like that kind of thing, of course!

Dear Esther may have played a huge part in the growth of interactive drama, but it remains an acorn compared to the trees it helped grow. It’s an ultimately shallow game, one that rattles off a story directly without any finesse or attempt to integrate it with the gameplay. Its disparate elements are boldly segregated, and there are none more filtered from the production than the players themselves.

With three great games and additional content that some would say is even better, The BioShock Collection is worth picking up for pretty much anybody interested, be they existing fans of totally fresh to the series. Despite some annoyances, each game run.

Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is a different beast than its prequel, and some may find its gimmicks a little too gimmicky this time around, but I find it hard to pick a favorite between the two offerings. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the cleverer of the two titles, boasting an inventive central mechanic that informs some thoroughly brilliant level design. Regardless of which may be the superior Pac-Man, this second round of Championship remains a bloody terrific time.

In spite of everything dragging it down, it’s a fun ride packed with stuff to do, from optional areas to replayable dungeons to passive “hunting” quests that reward players for taking out certain enemies using certain attacks. New Eden isn’t as big as No Man’s Sky‘s universe or even Far Cry 4‘s mountainous terrain, but it’s got far more compelling reasons to stick around.

The Tomorrow Children is bland, clumsy, and monotonous. A fantastic core idea wasted on yet another cumbersome burden of a game.

In short bursts, Attack on Titan can be a fun distraction. It definitely looks and feels like the animated series, runs through its narrative nicely, and features lots of stuff to unlock, upgrade, and play through. Sadly, almost every mission feels just like the last one, and with very little to shake up the process...Such is the curse of an Attack on Titan game. Unless someone gets really creative, attempting to emulate the way that world works is looking set to produce some enjoyable games undermined by the fact that cutting a giant man behind the neck really isn’t thrilling enough to sustain hours of gameplay.

Mother Russia Bleeds is fun, but that fun costs patience as well as the time lost when dealing with some of the nastier checkpoints. While nailing the simplistic amusement that comes with a little digital sadism, Mother Russia isn’t shy about showing a sadistic side of its own in ways that don’t always feel reasonable. Still, it’s a good afternoon’s distraction if you need a quick fix of something vicious..Oh, and it’s a shame that its representation of kinky behavior is a little bit backwards.

Despite a few missteps, Valley is an overall rush of an experience. Taking cues from BioShock with some Fern Gully on the side, there are few games that can claim to put players into the metal legs of an interdimensional necromantic freerunner, and be bloody infatuating while it does so.

At its very worst, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is just as good as Human Revolution, which is really not a problem if you think Human Revolution was absolutely bloody marvelous.