At the end of the day, Need for Speed Heat is a decent arcade racer that racing fans will enjoy, but shouldn’t be expecting a top tier title like others in the series or in comparison to premier arcade racers like the Forza Horizon. At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a new Need for Speed game, this brings police chases and big crashes to an average at best title.

You can tell that a lot of extra love and attention went into this pack. The animations of the menus and games have all received an upgrade, and every game has a special closing song that is a lot of fun to listen to. Stuff like that was usually only saved for one game in the pack but I am glad they had the extra time and money to do it for all the games this time. I think this pack has a good variety of games, and none of them missed the mark this time. If you have a group of 5 to 8 friends or like to stream online and have your viewers play along, then you’ll find there is a lot to do and a lot of fun to be had with The Jackbox Party Pack 8.

The story is interesting, characters have growth and mystery, acting is done wonderfully and the multiple endings means you’ll always have some sort of surprise by the time the credits roll again. My first ending was dramatically different from my second, so I’m glad it wasn’t just minor differences for the outcomes as a way to sell the multiple ending angle. The real question is, will you choose to smash or blow up the toilet?

Fun would be a good word to describe Disco Dodgeball with. It’s not a GoTY contender, but it isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever touched either. It simply is what it is and does that thing well. It looks serviceably good while selling its theme perfectly, it sounds like a night on the town in your twenties and plays as well as a dodge ball game ever could. Disco Dodgeball is a great game for kids and grown-ups alike, and offers up enough content to keep the player busy for a long while.

Block building mixed with RPG and survival elements and even farming works quite well within the Dragon Quest backdrop. Slimes and traditional enemies are fitting for a cute aesthetic like this and I kept wanting to progress further to see what new items I could craft and build with. Able to focus on any aspect you desire, DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 is a great blend of genres and may surprise you with how expansive its world actually is.

Even after a dozen hours and more, I still want to log on every night with my friends and grind some genie challenges out to try and get a new piece of gear and upgrades. Best enjoyed with friends, visually it can become quite chaotic when four players are all casting their spells and abilities, filling the screen with particles, explosions and damage numbers. I don’t normally get hooked on ARPG’s like this, but Torchlight III is addictive, beautiful to look at and sounds great, it’s just a shame that there’s so many issues and crashes that are a constant frustration. With a patch or two that fixes its main problems Torchlight III could easily hang with the bigger names in the genre, but until then it’s still an entertaining game to enjoy, but you’ll constantly have to battle against the game itself.

Multiplayer is where Tricky Tower shines, causing some hilarity at the best of times, and anger directed towards your friends the other times. Sure, you’ll get frustrated now and then, as it’s sometimes hard to recover from a misplaced block, but that’s where the challenge comes for this game. Tricky Tower is quite 'tricky' to get the hang of, as it takes some time learning, and remembering, the ‘half’ moves the blocks make, and that these same blocks aren’t locked in place once they land. At the end of the day Tricky Towers can be an enjoyable experience, especially if you’re craving some Tetris-like gameplay with a unique twist.

Overall, I found Islanders: Console Edition to be a little under-stimulating, while my wife found it truly enjoyable. She appreciates the calming nature of the game combined with the ability to be competitive in the leaderboard. While we’re not 'wowed' by the quality of the graphics, we do feel that the developers hit the mark with what they were after. We recommend Islanders for anyone that likes Sim City or other such puzzle and strategy games as well as anyone, young or old, needing a quick brain break.

Stories of Bethem: Full Moon is a great old school RPG with lots of action in it. Although this title definitely hits the nostalgia level, the story had me wishing for a little more substance. All in all the gameplay and exploration aspects are a lot of fun and will easily entertain for hours. Hopefully the developers will build on this title and release a sequel or two in the future because there is most definitely room to expand on the world they have created for Stories of Bethem.

If you’ve yet to play it, give LEGO City Undercover a chance on Xbox One. It’s a smartly written and often hilarious game that has a lot to offer for the first time player, while also being a good option for kids who are simply too young to play Grand Theft Auto proper.

While Long Gone Days may not be the most engaging RPG I’ve played recently, you would be hard-pressed to find one with as much passion for the subject matter presented. How you feel about the story will likely vary between person to person, but as someone with strong ties to the military, but also being a person who strongly dislikes the thought of war, it spoke to me on a deeper level than I anticipated. I would have liked the combat to be more engaging and some of the topics to be covered in more depth, but overall it was a surprising and ambitious game that I am glad I got to experience.

If you're a hardcore fan of 2D platforming that feels impossible to beat then step right up to Fenix Furia and see what lasts longer, your controller or your patience.

Instead of just porting over the original with a few pieces of polish, DICE made sure to try to address every single aspect in Mirror's Edge Catalyst, from the plot changes to the upgrade system, and the heavy amount of attention given to balancing the fairly fluid gameplay with realistic and enjoyable controls.

At 400 Microsoft points and the fact that it’s going to charity, I can easily recommend it to those looking for a new music based puzzler.

AEW as a promotion is my favourite. Their talent and presentation are a spectacle, and I was hoping for that same feeling from the AEW: Fight Forever game. I enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it to wrestling fans with a few caveats. It’s not a full game yet, but it’s also not a standard full priced game either, so that’s the fair trade off. It has great bones and there is something enjoyable there, it’s just not fully formed. It needs much more content for its creation suite, and more content overall. If you don’t play online, there just isn’t enough there to stay interested long term. That being said, I’m hopeful for the future of the IP and hope to see more from them. Also, there really was something special about when I saw my create a character join AEW and I got that “Ophelia Payne is All Elite” graphic. That is my favourite memory of AEW: Fight Forever.

Even if you play solo, Crawl is a fun title that doesn’t require a huge time investment to gain some enjoyment. Defeating a dungeon’s massive boss is exciting and rewarding, as is landing that final blow to the survivor and regaining your humanity. With 4 friends on a couch, playing locally is a blast, though expect many swear words to be thrown at each other while doing so, in the best possible way of course. Even though an online component is sorely lacking, Crawl is still worth crawling through the dungeons for.

Section 8 looks great, sounds above average and tries really hard, but the short campaign mode will disappoint the non LIVE players; there are some out there, and the LIVE experience for me was just too much work for little reward.

What LEGO Marvel Superheroes 2 does really well is what all of the LEGO games do as it provides an entertaining adventure filled with nearly every franchise character you could think of, many of which you may not even know exist. You’ll be smashing bricks, collecting studs, fighting baddies and building objects throughout your adventure, the backbone of any LEGO game experience. For me though, this is more of the same, as it’s essentially the same game I’ve played for about a decade now, causing some fatigue to set in.

Fragments of Him is a fascinating take on storytelling with the game medium, and while I know that many simply won’t “get it”, I appreciate what it was trying to accomplish: showing the fragments of a man that touched people in his life who died much too young, and the aftermath of said event.

At the end of the day, even though I personally feel the difficulty was set a little too high, I enjoyed my time with A Hole New World for the most part, save for the horrendous framerate issues that pop up here and there. I grew up in the NES area of gaming, so titles like this are close to my heart and whisk me back to a day where I would sit at home all day on the couch trying to beat a single game. Sure, the game is unfair at times with its difficulty, but that’s how games were back then, and this is a love letter to an era long gone, which is a shame, as the artwork and gameplay comes from a special time in gaming, something you don’t see replicated well very often.

Drive on Moscow is very unfriendly towards new players if you’re not willing to put in the time to learn all of its strategic intricacies, though if you put in the time and really plan ahead, there’s some great historical gameplay to be had within, even if it looks extremely bland and uninviting. Sure, it’s going to only satisfy a very specific niche, but those fans will most likely really enjoy this theatre of war.

Having devoted lots of hours into this game I can say that The Dwarves provides a lot of content, but not a lot of meaningful content. It is definitely a game that will drain hours upon hours of your life away, but I felt that the more I played it, the less I actually wanted to.

If you love puzzles games with some great music you’ll enjoy Chime Sharp as long as you do have the time and patience to learn how to play properly, as it doesn’t hold your hand in any way, or even to teach you the proper mechanics. It’s rewarding and quite fun once everything ‘clicks’, but I do think that the difficulty level will most likely be a little too demanding for the average player to master the music, the gameplay, and the need to learn on their own.

Overall, for $9.99 Artifex Mundi has put together a point and click adventure game that relies on its strengths of presentation, and now also innovation, to entice your wallet to open up and relinquish some of your cash. Despite some drawbacks, such as issues with gameplay and little no replay value, there are some incredibly enjoyable aspects to be found within should you have the patience to find it. Rarely will we see puzzle games such as this done with such level of quality and detail, so if you have an extra $9.99 burning a hole in your pocket and you want a quality puzzle game, then look no further than Eventide 2.

ELEX II offers a continuation of the foundations that ELEX was built upon while providing you dynamic story options to choose your path, new characters and factions that enrich a narrative that thankfully continues. Faults and flaws aside, THQ Nordic created a game that was fun to play and, in the end, that's the only thing that matters.

As an overall package it has a solid foundation of gameplay mechanics that should keep you entertained for a while. If you love RPG’s with a mix of hack and slash combat, then give Anima: Gate of Memories a look and join The Bearer and Ergo as they fight back the darkness.

What the Dub?! is a fun way to spend a night with your friends either in the same house or miles away. It is an easy party game for friends and family to pick up and non-gamers will be able to just jump in with their own devices and play. They really do have a lot of clips to work with and it has us looking forward to playing more with the same friends and introducing new ones. It’s a great addition to our party game rotation which includes Jackbox, Cards Against Humanity and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. That is good company to be in.

With a couple small personal preference issues, I still believe that NASCAR Heat 3 is a fairly solid game. Is it perfect? No game is. With the sheer amount of content, modes, and overall experience while in gameplay, I would have no issue recommending this game to someone if you're a fan of the sport. If you want a fun racing game that you can just sit back, relax, drink a beer or two and race, this is the game for you. 3... 2... 1... Race!