Flight Simulator presents itself as a work in progress. A lot depends on the nature of that remaining work. It’s a game whose potential is evident, but so are the hurdles to realizing all that potential.

Total War: Troy is a good example of a type of Total War game whose time, hopefully, is ending. It undercuts its strongest features with administrative bloat and repetitive action, forcing you into too many rote battles and campaigns rather than letting you focus on the truly epic clashes that characterize Total War games at their best. If Troy just removed the heavy ankle weights it fastens on the player, it might be a series highlight. As it is, it's an interesting and clever variation on a theme that has gotten a little tired. It succeeds in breathing some new life into it, but after Three Kingdoms’ reinvention, it feels like a surprisingly good encore at a show that’s gone on just a little too long.

Skater XL comes at skateboarding from the angle that it’s extremely important. It’s serious, and in cutting out the extraneous pieces and paring the mechanics down to the most basic elements of real skateboarding, they try to get the player to take it as seriously as they can. But in my heart of hearts, I think that a good skateboarding game should feel like skateboarding culture. It should be a little destructive. It should be goofy, and the things that seem so important to the culture should look absolutely goofy in 10 years. It’s as important as you make it, as Boulala says, and my ideal skateboarding game treats it as slightly less important. By treating it with less importance, we might get a bigger world of possible tricks and ways of playing with a skateboard. That game would be closer to what I love about skateboarding.

The end result is that you’re spending a lot of time in combat, and increasingly, I’m putting on a podcast and zoning out whenever that happens now. The Origami King even includes an option to spend money to have the game automatically move many of the enemies into the right spot, making even the most challenging fights trivial. The Origami King has so many options to help avoid combat, without being honest with itself and letting you skip it entirely.

Anger, like the biomass of Carrion, can only be steered. It can’t be controlled. Carrion lets me hold on to my anger and gives me the illusion of control of it. The dual sense of becoming that which is feared and riding rage make it the perfect game for the moment.

It’s a game where so many individual components feel really good, but it’s all dropped into outdated structure.

The Last of Us Part II feels complacent, yet also preoccupied with its predecessor. Every facet of the original game has been expanded and enlarged in the sequel, but not actually improved. It is as if its only inspiration is the original game, and the well of pop culture it was drawing from. There is practically nothing here we haven’t seen and done repeatedly throughout previous Naughty Dog games. It sets out to surpass its predecessor, but the only meaningful contrast between them is in its even more oppressive bleakness and violence. It digs two graves, fills them with blood, and then just fu.king wallows in them.

Prior to Wastelanders, Fallout 76 didn't have anything to say about that vision. If anything it fetishized it, just as it fetishized the worst fears of the Cold War world by having players play nuclear tag. Wastelanders brings the classic Fallout lesson to the hills and hollows of Appalachia: Global nuclear war didn’t end civilization and it didn’t stop the old fights. It only stripped away the pretense.

A police procedural version of XCOM with a good story, funny writing, and only bite-sized battles.

A nearly-great game that captures the best parts of Gears, but which is let down by its campaign structure.

A satisfying new chapter that develops the story of 'Control' but doesn't add much to the playground.

Most importantly, it's platform agnostic, meaning you can play with your friends even if none of you own the same console or a PC. As long as you can play the game, you can easily join a group of friends no matter what platform they're on.

In Final Fantasy VII Remake, everything looks like how I imagined it when I was a kid. This is not the Final Fantasy VII I remember, but the dream of a Final Fantasy VII. It’s a surreal, staggering, and loving tribute to a beloved role-playing game. The voice work, the music, the story, and the combat system are rebuilt from the ground up and brimming with detail.

It’s not bad enough to hate and not good enough to praise. That’s disappointing for two reasons. The remake of Resident Evil 2 was excellent, and the Mr. X encounters suggested that Capcom could update Resident Evil 3 and do something interesting and innovative with Nemesis. Instead, Capcom chose the most boring path possible.

It’s also a performance hog of a video game. My PC is quickly aging, but my GTX 1080 is usually able to brute force its way through a lot of things. Alyx, however, chewed away at my older CPU, despite the settings being at “low.” This didn’t prove bothersome for most of my time with Alyx—VR can get away with cutting corners on fidelity because of the way you interact with it—but there were a handful of sequences, especially towards the end when things ramp up, where my computer slowed to a crawl. It’s less fun to fight your way through a hallway of enemies when their animation is moving at half speed. Your mileage may vary...All the problems were worth it, though.

Doom Eternal is the platonic ideal of a Doom game. The combat, level design, and enemy encounters have never felt better. And it sure does have a story. Not just plot contrivances to get the player from point A to B, but elaborate lore with multiple cultures, planets, characters and sci-fi and fantasy tropes. Page after page of fucking lore that I puzzled over as I moved through the legion’s of hell, ripping the eyes out of cacodemons and decapitating the damned.

There's a simplicity to life on Ella that I cherish.

The moment you scratch beneath the surface, you find a fascinating world of surrealist art, copyright infringement, kids doing weird experiments, and so much more.

A bad remaster of a good game that recreates old mistakes while adding loads of new glitches.

A masterful and memorable tragedy about the magic and terror of the ordinary world.

It’s fun, and I liked it, but it’s disappointing to see Star Wars shrink its video game horizons as its film and television series widens the franchise’s scope. Fallen Order feels great in the context of what Star Wars games have become. Enjoying it feels like settling. For me, Star Wars was always about the video games. The movies were something my parents enjoyed, the books and comics something my friends told me about.

An approachable but rewardingly tough wargame gives a fresh take on familiar battles.

A thoughtful and gorgeous game of work and exploration, held back by lackluster action sequences.

A frustrating yet rewarding game of bad starts and good endings.

There are some beautiful, grotesque pixels in this game, and it's backed up by an equally fun ride.

A dynamic stealth-action approach to Ubisoft's template, with frustratingly ambivalent politics.

The racing portion Mario Kart Tour is bad, it’s Mario Kart with guard rails. Maps are pulled from the series greatest hits and races are limited to two laps. The finger controls work well. I placed my finger below the racer, holding before the starting gun to get a little boost, and drifting side to side to toss blue sparks and blast ahead of the rudimentary competition. But there is no sense of stakes or risk thanks to the guardrails on the levels. Mistakes didn’t send me careening into a field or off a cliff, but bounded me back on to the track.

In 2019, I don’t need any more revisionist celebrations of high difficulty and tight dodge timings. I don’t need games without room for silliness or self-expression. What I’ve needed more of, and what Code Vein is happy to give me, is more of that good jank, and permission to have my own fun with it.