Elden Ring Nightreign is worth taking out for a few runs, but the incentives to keep on running aren't quite there yet. The prospect of ending another forty minute expedition empty handed after an anticlimactic wipeout isn't quite coaxing enough.

Reigns is shrewd and playful, with a straightforward interface and a handful of terrific twists thrown in for good measure. Whenever things risk getting too stale, a new event or set of cards can turn up to keep one hooked, and a single playthrough won’t uncover all the secrets, as well as the ways to meet some grisly fate.

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.

When it comes to fighting against someone, it’s one of the most polished Street Fighters to date. When it comes to everything outside of that fight, it’s a huge steaming turd that I look at with a scrunched up, grossed out face.

Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is a truly beautiful production, far more so than one boasting a cast of animalistic amalgamates and sentient polyps ought to be.

While not quite the revelation Hyrule Warriors was, it’s nonetheless another case of lightning in a button-smacking bottle.

If only its laudably permissive tools were supplemented with more substantial material, it would be a top tier production. A weirdly large selection of unlockable fences just doesn't put any gas in the tank, but it really is a fun ride while there’s fuel.

Pacific Drive is one of those amazing games that I’ve fallen in love with despite it doing so much I’m inclined to loathe. It’s brilliant in its externalization of survival gameplay with a car that acts perfectly in its dual role of burden and bearer. Its humor, style, and a luxury assortment of modifier settings have kept me spellbound. I can paint my car pink. Game of the year contender.

Quantum Break is not the most revolutionary of games, and its cute time toys cover what is, at heart, a fairly standardized shooter. However, it carries itself with style and speed to create something genuinely fascinating to play, flavored by a story that, while failing to pay off in the final stretch, is more detailed and engrossing than most in its league.

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

The Sword in the Darkness sees Telltale’s Game of Thrones start to really hit its stride.

No game yet has quite captured the look and feel of the only real Transformers experience quite like Devastation. The fact they added a brilliantly entertaining combat system and an engaging bit of looting on top is a very welcome surprise.

Amnesia: The Bunker is a pleasant step up from its predecessor Rebirth, but it all too often falls into the problem many horror games have - resource management and monstrous harassment are balanced in such a way as to inspire annoyance more readily than fear. For much of its campaign, The Bunker is an absorbingly gloomy experience with a nice sense of rhythm to its progress and an effective illusion of dynamism in both its monster and environment. This is somewhat offset by enforced backtracking, a piddling inventory, and an embarrassingly rubbish flashlight. If it had expanded its promising ideas and balanced its threat-to-tedium ratio better, this could have been a fantastic experience. But, y’know, it didn’t do that...It still did well enough though, and for the average horror game these days, well enough is pretty good!

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.

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

As an overall game, it offers a basic shooter with a nice gimmick, and I do think you can gather some friends together to get an afternoon’s worth of laughs out of it. I don’t believe there’s enough mileage to have those laughs regularly, though, and certainly not enough to where I’d recommend rushing out and getting it so soon after launch.

Cronos: The New Dawn is far and away the best work Bloober Team’s put out and a splendid survival horror game in its own right. What starts as a post-pandemic Dead Space cover version becomes its own brand of scary that conditions paranoia into its players with undeniable expertise. There's a great script to go with the A-grade psychological puppeteering, and the whole package deserves to be seen as a genre classic...I am truly impressed.

Karmazoo is a wonderful cooperative puzzler that encourages wordless teamwork in a way that should lead to chaos but instead results in elegant simplicity - most of the time. With its cute sense of humor and even cuter character designs, there’s a huge amount of appeal in simply unlocking and trying new characters, of which there are many. A game about being polite to strangers is as twee as it sounds, and it’s a tweeness I’m absolutely here for...Plus you can be a duck.

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.

The plot’s driving forth at an effective pace, the characters are each growing in their own unique ways, and things end in a way that promises a lot of huge things for episode five. If you’ve been following along with the series up to this point, you’ll definitely be gripped by this one.

It’s the best game about a toy cat using his sentient hoverboard to dismember killer unicorns you could play this year.

Thanks to the improvements made – and maybe the lack of anything like it outside of maybe Bayonetta 2 – it was a true pleasure to return to Capcom’s world of jacked up angels, plant dragons, and Dante hamming up every single delicious scene he’s in. Truly, it’s good to be back. It’s better to be back than it ever was.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood continues MachineGames’ commitment to offering classic ultraviolence with some sensible modern concessions and a deeply buried philosophical side.

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.

There’s more to this game than it’s 90 minute runtime. The fact I’m still thinking about it, deeply, hours after I played it is all part of the value too...The fact it prompted me to write much of what I wrote here is something… special.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is actually good.

Far Cry Primal is a great example of trying new things in a smart and relatively safe manner, demonstrating how a popular series can keep itself invigorated. While other venerable franchises like Call of Duty are afraid to challenge themselves and make only halfhearted gestures toward invention, Primal plots a course through uncharted waters with a battle-tested vessel and actually commits to making its new ideas more than vapid window dressing. The result?...You can ride on a goddamn bear. Enough said.

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