That really should be a given for a game with the phrase "Nintendo Switch 2 Edition" in its name. Unlike other games to have worn that badge so far, though, I’m thoroughly convinced that there’s enough here to justify the price of its upgrade. What I’m still unconvinced of is whether this expansion is so good that the whole Wonder package is now an $80 game. Not because I don’t love Wonder and everything it brings to the table, both in the base game and its Bellabel Park upgrade, but because I’m yet to be convinced that any game is worth $80.

There's still a long way to go of course. I'm about halfway through the campaign, I've only unlocked three dungeons. I don't know what the end-game grind will be like and the rogue-like activity Torghast is still unknown to me. But I'm enjoying the process more than I ever have before, and more than anything, I just want to rescue the heroes of Azeroth and stop Sylvanas and the Jailer from doing... whatever it is they're doing.

There’s no doubt that this is an incredibly fun way to play Capcom arcade classics - better than throwing all of your loose change at a game you’ll never actually finish, at least - but the selection available here hasn’t left me feeling inspired. The games in this collection feel like the last options, the games that could never be sold individually. Cult classics like Darkstalkers and every other version of Street Fighter are entirely missing - instead we have a bunch of Capcom arcade games that, for the most part, weren’t deserving of sequels, or any other recognition this far removed from their release. It sounds harsh, but these are the rejects, propped up by Street Fighter 2 and Ghosts ‘N Goblins. There’s fun to be had here, but without nostalgia you probably won’t find much to love.

While the VR medium definitely makes the game scarier, there’s absolutely nothing about Wraith that wouldn’t have worked just the same in a normal game. The hide-in-seek genre of horror games has been done to death, and Wraith would have been much better served by more scripted encounters, on rails scares, and fewer (or no) fail states. Once a monster catches you and sends you back to your last save, it loses almost all of its power to scare you. Wraith stopped being scary when it started being tedious. It’s one of the most disappointing horror games I’ve played because I loved the way it started, but its strong introductions never developed into anything more compelling.

There is value to Modern Warfare 2’s campaign. It is art. It’s also just intense fun throughout, because it is ultimately a video game. To say anything else is to take away from the years of hard work that has gone into producing this spectacle. But we can’t forget about the context: millions of people, a lot of them very young and impressionable, will play this campaign. This is why it’s important to have these sorts of conversations. The campaign constantly dances a wobbling tightrope between being too fantastical and exposing the realities of modern war. Sometimes it slips too far into the realistic horrors, and it’s unable to commit, so it has to pull you back with just one more big budget explosion. [Campaign impressions]

Dark Descent is a generic XCOM clone with brief moments of engaging puzzle-piecing strategy. The horror is underused and feels wholly out of place as it pushes you further and further into action. Music is adrenaline-pumping and clearly designed to compliment firefights, troops yell ‘LET’S GO TEAM’ every time you move, and xenomorphs are easier to mow down than avoid. Nothing about Dark Descent wants you to be scared, but everything about Aliens does. Mix in the cocktail of performance issues and thin mechanics, and what you have is another disappointing entry in the catalogue of Alien games.

Shadows of Rose is a shorter, worse version of Resident Evil Village. It’s so committed to recreating a micro-version of Village and following it beat-for-beat that it even copies its major flaws. It concludes in the same location with the same info-dump of lore that quickly wraps up all the loose threads. It ends with the same boss fight (somehow even clunkier and more frustrating this time), and unbelievably, also ends with the exact same cutscene. The scene where Rose visits her father’s grave at the end of Village isn’t the start of Shadows of Rose - it’s the end of it. There’s no new context that makes this scene more meaningful, and in fact, that weird line where the driver calls her Eveline is an even more bizarre thing to say after these events. Capcom is quickly running out of Resident Evil games to remake, and this expansion didn’t give me a lot of hope for the future.

If bringing Sakura Wars back means sacrificing tight, strategic gameplay, good characterization, and memorable storytelling for a sloppy heap of half-melted vanilla ice cream, I'd rather it stay dead.

There’s a real promise in what stands to be a modern successor to one of the all-time greats of the genre, NCSoft’s Lineage 2. [Review in Progress]

I want to like Steelrising, I really do, but it just won’t let me. Every aspect of the game feels like a barrier to the one thing I enjoyed: combat. Even that got boring. The characters are bland, the story is dull, the setting is derivative, and the finished product is too buggy and bloated to truly enjoy. It needed a few more turns of the key to go the distance and keep on ticking smoothly.

Ultimately, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet finally lets you experience a story in this world that doesn’t feel out of place, marked with a tone of childlike innocence that, for once, doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the subjects that it presents. Unfortunately, the performance is so abruptly bad that it completely ruins, to an infuriating extent, what otherwise could have been the best Pokemon game to date.

Ultimately, Pokemon Scarlet & Violet finally lets you experience a story in this world that doesn’t feel out of place, marked with a tone of childlike innocence that, for once, doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the subjects that it presents. Unfortunately, the performance is so abruptly bad that it completely ruins, to an infuriating extent, what otherwise could have been the best Pokemon game to date.

I was really hoping to be wowed by Maquette, but my time spent with it was not the magical, romantic experience I was hoping for. The bugs, overall wonkiness, and lame puzzle design annoyed me to no end. Especially when it would punish me by making me start a chapter over because it had broken itself. As a result, my already low tolerance of the love story between Michael and Kenzie grew to the point where I couldn't stand the couple. I would actively cheer when things went wrong because I didn't like them. The game seemingly wants you to feel like their relationship is one for the ages, but it just felt like a couple who had issues after the honeymoon period was over. It's a tale as old as time, but not one worth basing a game on.

High on Life just isn’t very good, and there’s not much more to say. I think a lot of people are taking the route of ‘well, if you love this humour you might enjoy it’, but I already do love this humour and I did not enjoy it. It’s the ghost of video games past, with boring shooting and a bafflingly slim progression loop propped up by bad jokes that feel like some bros on a podcast writing their own Interdimensional Cable skits. It’s free on Game Pass, but your time on this planet is precious. Give this one a miss.

The Gunk is not a disastrous game. I enjoyed turning my brain off for five hours and exploring this strange and mysterious planet. It’s okay for games to just be empty calories sometimes, and I wouldn’t knock The Gunk for just being a generic popcorn flick. The Gunk aspires to be more than that though, and it falls considerably short. The quality of the SteamWorld games gavethe expectation that this would be a fresh take on the third-person adventure genre, but The Gunk is too shallow for me to recommend - even in the slow December months. If you’re looking for character-driven action-adventure games on Game Pass, Lake and Firewatch were both added earlier this week. Give those a look and leave The Gunk in the gutter.

It’s hard not to be disappointed with this 2042 offering. You know when the devs said this is a game to “celebrate Battlefield”? They’ve stripped away some of the most fundamental elements of the series and added tornados and Wingsuits to make up for it. It’s Marketing 101. Explosions, tornados, and swooping helicopters look great. One day, they probably will be great. DICE is one of the best when it comes to post-launch patches - for better and for worse. But if you’re on the fence about buying Battlefield 2042, I would just wait. It’s hard for me to condone purchasing what is essentially an unfinished product - an unfinished product with Battle Passes, too. Just wait. It will be a better game in a year’s time. Maybe even six months. If you’ve never played Battlefield and want to experience some of the sheer beauty of 64v64, I say go for it. Just don’t expect an experience that will keep you interested for more than a couple of weeks.

Even for the niche audience that this game is aimed at, I imagine this will be too unintuitive and exhausting. With a better user interface and some quality of life improvements, I could see how this game could be enjoyable for everyone and not just history buffs. As it is right now, Port Royale 4 is great for those who love crunching numbers, but probably won't be much for those who want to play a video game.

Exoprimal is a prehistoric relic of its own making, and a harsh but necessary lesson for a developer who has been sitting atop the pile for far too long. Future seasons could salvage the flashes of excellence on display here, but I doubt players will stick around long enough for that to become a reality. And to think we could have had a new Dino Crisis instead.

Every looter struggles in the early days, and it would be naive think a studio that's never made a game of this type before would nail it right out of the gate. That being said, it's already in way better shape than I ever expected it to be at launch, and, most critically, the combat — particularly in multiplayer — is an absolute blast. I'm hopeful, and I'll be sticking around to see where things go from here.

If you love Crash Bandicoot and you've been waiting years for what once was Wumpa League, there's probably just enough there to convince you that this is a good game. But it's not. It's a bad game. They shouldn't have made Crash Bandicoot into this thing, and deep down all of us know it.

If you loved the original Shenmue and Shenmue II, then you'll likely love Shenmue III for how closely it adheres to the original games. If you enjoyed the HD remasters of Shenmue & Shenmue II, then you will likely enjoy Shenmue III as a faithful sequel. There isn't much to recommend for everyone else, as Shenmue III is a ponderous experience that exists more to waste player's time than tell a compelling story.

There’s no point to anything in Tron: Identity. It took a magnificent sci-fi world and gave us an hour of closed-off, inconsequential guff to fill the space. Its additions to the Tron mythos are interesting but underused, the characters are flat functions for a deceptively shallow adventure, and you’ll be walking away from the Repository with the vague feeling that you’d just wasted your time.

But, I will say that Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars is very true to its subject matter, as it did feel like the life was being sucked out of me as I played it.

Little Witch Nobeta is not for me, but then I’m not certain who it is for. It is a catastrophic fumbling of the bag with a narrative that makes no sense, combat that feels far too basic, puzzles that don’t even warrant a mention, and a distinctly unappealing target demographic. The only magic I want from Nobeta is a disappearing act.

For older fans wanting a hit of nostalgia, plenty of these games don’t hold up to revisits almost 25 years later. With none of the usual gubbins we’ve come to expect from retro anthologies, all you’re getting out of Early Days Collection is having your rose-tinted glasses stamped on. Lacking in games, lacking in upgrades, and lacking in content, this feels more like a slightly heftier update for Nintendo Switch Online than a full ode to Yu-Gi-Oh!’s golden era.

While My Hero One's Justice 2 definitely "went beyond" the foundation My Hero One's Justice laid down two years ago, the developers certainly still have a ways to go before they figure out a video game formula that can be classified as "plus ultra!"

Although there are lots of ways to upgrade and decorate your van - which, I suppose, is just about the only saving grace of this game - I had absolutely zero interest in doing so. Why should I bother putting the time into making my van look nice when the world is so devoid of character? There are dozens of cozy survival games that nail everything Outbound is trying to do, and go so much further. I do expect another developer to pick up where Outbound has dropped us off though: people want a cozy campervan game, and I’m certain someone else is already cooking one up.

For now, Shadowgun War Games isn’t a threat to any of the big competitors. Call of Duty Mobile, Fortnite, and PUBG can all relax knowing that Shadowgun War Games feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game. With that said, developer Madfinger Games is likely aware of the game’s shortcomings, and over the coming months there should be substantial additions in content, else we won’t be hearing much about the game.