I have a love/hate relationship with Endless Dungeon. When it’s good, it feels excellent. The early-game progression is incredibly satisfying, filling out quest logs and completing pages of upgrades is rewarding, and it looks and sounds sublime. On the other hand, the lengthy runs take a toll, and once you get into the late game, the rate of progression doesn’t cut it anymore. Suddenly, the time invested doesn’t match up with the strength of the upgrades you can acquire, and the game feels very much like a Sisyphean task as originally intended, a punishment.

While much of Visions of Mana’s bloated side content misses the mark, its gripping storyline, likable cast, ample mechanical tweaking, and engaging combat combine to forge a very good game, if not quite a great one.I wasn’t at all confident that we would ever get another big swing at the series, so for all my caveats, I’m damn glad this game exists.

The procedurally generated tracks look and feel great, providing plenty of challenge for those looking to master the downhill course, but being welcoming enough for casual players looking for something more than another Trials-clone.

Considering how long Onimusha fans have been waiting for Samurai’s Destiny to make a return on modern platforms, the lack of significant bonuses doesn’t feel like a big sticking point. More than anything, it let me finally experience a brilliantly unique series that for years I’ve been missing out on.

Homeworld 3 is a solid game for new and returning RTS players. Creating massive armies and watching the digital chaos unfold is one of my favorite parts of this genre, and Homeworld 3 does it better than most RTS games I’ve played. With that said, diehard Homeworld fans will be polarized about this campaign. Waiting over two decades for a story that abandons the principles of its predecessors is a tough pill to swallow. And when you consider the paltry post-campaign offerings, I find it difficult to recommend Homeworld 3 at full price. It’s a good game that could be great with some patches and DLC, but as of now, I’d sit this one out.

Fans of The Expanse will enjoy this story. I’m curious about what happens in the next couple of episodes, and that’s exactly the sort of narrative pull that I was looking for. But you might also get frustrated with the game at times - it’s not a flawless experience by any means, and I really wanted more from it.

This is a title that is intended for One Piece fans and it offers one of the most fun trips to the world of pirates so far.

Star Wars Outlaws is a frustrating experience to critique because its high points are numerous, from spending an entire hour infiltrating a deceptively vast imperial outpost to upgrading Kay’s skills by engaging with the open world in ways that feel natural and rewarding. There are times when I didn’t want to put this game down, which only made its glaring omissions all the more noticeable. A lacklustre story, a bizarre lack of polish for a production of this scale, and a main character that isn’t the step forward she should have been all hold the game back from excellence.

Lego Bricktales could be up your street depending on what you’re looking for. If you want a simple action adventure like so many other Lego titles then this isn’t for you. However, if you want a unique puzzle game that uses Lego elements well then you’ll find more here to enjoy. The main thing that lets it down is the clunky control system and the variable difficulty means younger players hoping for a building game will likely end up frustrated. The environmental puzzles you’ll need to solve to collect everything can also get very repetitive. Overall though it’s a fairly average game that offers a decent-length story mode, some interesting puzzles, and a few extras for those who want them. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a pirate ship ride to build.

Wild Hearts shows up as a colorful and curious contender in the hunting game genre, and a very welcome one right now. With games like Monster Hunter Rise going for a less challenging approach, this game brings fascinating ideas that make it the breath of fresh air that the genre needs, combining difficult battles with some twists in mobility and construction, in a completely unexpected fashion. Some improvements to the unfortunate performance issues are needed, but the overall experience isn’t less enjoyable because of them.

If you like playing games that ask you to make difficult decisions that you’ll agonize over, then this could be the game for you. Otherwise, Yes, Your Grace demonstrates that sometimes it's not good to be the king.

It’s a game with a goofy premise told with the utmost sincerity and conviction, buoyed by its believable cast and comforting aesthetic. If you’ve ever loved a video game – like, truly loved one – this is the game for you.

The balance of needing to manage your lair and check your world map is particularly well done. As your network grows it can get harder to avoid lockdowns, but upgrades bring it back in line. My only minor gripe is that you can’t properly micromanage minions. They have auto-assigned tasks and if you need things prioritizing - for instance, the removal of dead agents blocking the corridor - you need to get your Genius to step in, which can be dangerous. If you love building games, creating elaborate strings of traps, playing the bad guy, and generally living your best island life scamming tourists, Evil Genius 2 is for you.

I’m enthusiastic for the future of Lemnis Gate. You can play for hours and never see the same map twice, and you can play for an eternity and never have two identical matches. There is so much depth and strategic potential that it feels like you could spend a lifetime learning the game and inventing new strats and synergies. The turn based, asymmetric nature of the game makes it feel like a competitive shooter for people that don’t like shooters, and I’m always impressed when a game can cast a net so far outside of its core audience. Unlike a lot of team-based indie games, Lemnis Gate can theoretically survive with a much smaller player base thanks to only having 1v1 and 2v2 game modes. Despite its inaccessible premise, Lemnis Gate has a lot going for it and I’m excited to see how deep the wormhole goes.

Jackbox Party Pack 8 is a great entry in the Jackbox series, propped up by Job Job and Drawful Animate. The Wheel of Enormous Proportions is one of the better trivia games when it’s not trying to be funny, and less punishing than Trivia Murder Mystery Party. The Poll Mine and Weapons Drawn are both new ideas for the series, but only Weapons Drawn really lands, and even then if you have the collective works of Jackbox, I don't think it'll come up in the rotation much. It's a solid Jackbox Pack with two great-if-not-quite-legendary games, one good trivia game, and two more experimental titles that your mileage may vary on. It's not Jackbox 3, but hey, it's also not Jackbox 6.

There are teething issues and a reluctance to let go of the past, but it’s also a daft Sonic game with a charming story told in the most competent way we’ve seen in years. Sonic might not be back in the big leagues yet, but he’s catching up. Like Sonic Adventure all the way back in 1999, Frontiers could give the series a new lease on life - Sega has to ditch the old ways and let it happen.

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.

Ace Attorney is a wacky series, balancing murder plots and despair in the face of injustice with punny names and the supernatural. Despite this clash in tone, its narrative and character writing are strong enough to carry each entry and make this collection a worthy successor to Phoenix Wright’s original trilogy. Bringing these particular games to modern platforms is a worthy effort in itself, but Apollo Justice is guilty of going above and beyond to produce an experience worth the time.

While I’m sure that’s not going to be enough for those who have already played hours of Worms Armageddon or who already own it on PC (which remains the best way to play), for everyone else it’s a nice way to experience the series at its best. Hopefully, above all else, it’s a reminder to Team17 what makes Worms works so well - and it isn't when it's trying to be a battle royale.

Mechwarrior 5: Clans gets most of the important stuff right. If you like the idea of manning mechs, I’d say it is well worth climbing into the cockpit.

Under all the dinosaurs, the bug hunting, and the match-3 boards, it is at its core a love letter to game development and an indictment of the industry as it exists now. It seems impossible for one short game to juggle all this, to feel so unique in a gameplay sense and so prescient in a thematic one, and yet, it does. If only I wasn’t fighting against all these real-life bugs in an attempt to find the fictional ones.

PopCap has brought together the defining elements of each port for the definitive Plants vs. Zombies experience. But it's hard to look past the discredit that Replanted does to the talented devs who brought us this game nearly two decades ago, and the many cut corners.

Sintopia is a far better game than its title suggests. The title Sintopia sounds like someone came up with the name first and built a fabulous idea around it, but look past that, and you have a deep, charming, and constantly unpredictable experience that is well worth your time.

At the moment, Everything Is Crab is in a great state, but I think it’s missing a lot of content for more replayability and variation from run-to-run. I can see a ‘meta’ developing quickly, too, which will reduce choice even more. That being said, even in its current evolutionary form, I’d say this is one of the better roguelikes so far this year.

I think I’ve sunk about 250 hours into Ace Combat 7. Most of that was spent just endlessly replaying the campaign with as many different aircraft as were available. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to play Project Wingman for quite as long, but given how I’ve lost sleep all week just so I could play one more mission, I suspect I might come close.

WarioWare: Move It! is a complicated game to talk about, because at its heart the whole thing is so deceptively simple. You follow simple instructions presented on screen to stay alive and complete bizarre tasks, all of which are framed by adorable characters and fun stories which aren’t important, but remain stylish and lovable enough to ensure this cute package feels complete, despite its short campaign length and a reliance on local multiplayer to draw the most fun out of it. Nintendo has repeatedly said this is a full successor to Smooth Moves on the Wii, and I’d be lying if it doesn’t capture the same joy that comes from waggling WiiMotes around in my living room as a kid.

Lords of the Fallen’s Umbral world is unlike anything we’ve seen, providing a unique spin on the Souls genre. Copycats have started to stagnate in recent years, rarely offering anything new, and the genre as a whole risks growing tired. FromSoft itself tried to break out of that habit by exploring what it would look like in an open-world setting with Elden Ring. To see a Soulslike that iterates in its own way rather than chasing new trends is a breath of fresh air, and offers hope for a genre that has never escaped FromSoftware’s shadow.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is a shooter unlike anything I’ve ever played before. Its depiction of Japan is frighteningly lifelike in its execution, begging for us to explore its abandoned streets and dimly lit alleyways in search of wayward spirits that all have stories to tell. Whether you’re bounding across rooftops or doing battle in construction sites, it is constantly surprising in ways that few games in recent memory have managed to. It is fresh, exciting, and a demonstration of what a major studio is capable of when they’re given the freedom to tackle a new universe without compromise. It isn’t perfect, but it’s so different, and that should be more than enough for people to take notice.