Lil Guardsman is funny, occasionally heartwarming, and a ton of fun. It takes a simple premise and builds it into a unique and excellent video game.

TEKKEN 8 is an outstanding fighting game. An extremely strong 3D fighter with lots of offline content, strong core mechanics, and all around a fun and stylish game. TEKKEN continues to show the world why it’s the winner of the Iron Fist Tournament.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth opens 2024 with a bang, showcasing the best of what the series has to offer and more.

Barring a middling ‘middle’ entry, The Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy brings a set of great games from a series I love to the big screen. There’s no beating the bush around this one: this collection does Apollo Justice.

Bulletstorm was been a guilty pleasure of mine around launch. It was never the best looking, and the story was terrible. It was just good, mindless FPS fun. The translation to VR, while commendable, doesn’t translate into an enjoyable gameplay experience. Combine that with a game that hasn’t aged well, and constant crashing on both PC and Quest 3, especially at $40, is not something I can recommend.

Turnip Boy Robs A Bank is a damned good time, that is just as long as it needs to be. Whether you’ve played the first game or not it is well worth checking out on Game Pass. Good looks, fun gameplay, and excellent music make it another solid addition to the platform.

The Spy Who Shot Me expertly manages to both be a homage and a parody to the legendary GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64, offering a little humorous gem that plays like old school shooters (though not all that much like its source material), but not without a handful of shortcomings and compromises that doesn’t quite allow it to enter the hall of fame of boomer shooters. Still, the game’s cool style, cheap price (about 8 bucks) and surprisingly decent gameplay variety makes this an enjoyable romp to blast through on a rainy evening or two, starting this 2024 on Xbox with a fun and funny experience.

An instant classic that gets what makes the Metroidvania genre so good.

When there is an alternative path, you can sometimes find bits of lore about the world which is pretty neat. It can be annoying, but despite getting pigeon-holed a bunch of times, I still came back to METRO QUESTER again and again over the week. I feel that all its systems mesh together really well and it’s definitely a unique RPG experience you’ll not often find on consoles.

Close to the Sun is short, sweet, and a solid yarn. It takes an interesting alt-history setting and is pretty enough to put up with occasionally clunky gameplay. It’s short at only 3 hours for a full playthrough, so it’s worth giving it a try if you have any interest in the premise.

Raccoo Venture isn’t a chore. It’s beautiful and the music is lovely. I loved the environment design and when you do find challenges, they are fun to tackle. I do think that Raccoo’s jumps get too tight later on, having the player jumping off specific angles to make jumps isn’t fun especially if they’re not part of the beaten path. The game performs amazing on a wide variety of systems, too, and that’s impressive given it’s just one man making this game. Raccoo Venture has its landings, you just need to get used to them.

TEVI is a fantastic 2D Metroidvania. One that is fun to play for just about all levels of gaming ability, but it’s also a replayable one and has plenty of content you can run through, backgrounded by beautiful visuals and fun music. An easy recommendation for the action platformer fan and then some.

As of this writing, of the 3 new modes in Fortnite’s new metaverse, LEGO Fortnite is by far the most popular, and it’s certainly not only thanks to the behemoth brand that is LEGO. This is a not excessively daring but surprisingly fun, polished and good-looking survival game – a genre often notable for quite ugly, poorly running and janky experiences. All the basics of a good survival experience are there and players have solid freedom in constructing their own LEGO creations or, alternatively, to follow the guidelines and build standard things as suggested by the game. With lots of customization and servers allowing up to 8 players to work together towards a common goal (or to troll each other, if they want to), LEGO Fortnite has the potential to become a mainstay for prior Fortnite fans, offering a new enough experience to perhaps convince newcomers to hop into this title as well. If future updates keep making the game more varied, deep and fresh, we could truly have a near unmissable gem on our hands.

It looks and runs great, plays fantastically, and has more high-quality content than most RPGs I’ve played before.

A delight for fans of Avatar, this game is so damned good that even one apathetic to the IP like myself couldn’t help but fall in love with it.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus is a success in bringing the movement and combat stylings of the ever-popular series into the VR space. While it is playable on a Quest 2 it’s downright gorgeous inside the 3. It’s the first time in a while I’ve played a VR title that felt close to a Triple-A release. There may be a hell of a lot of AC games, but after this solid entry, I hope there’s more to come in VR.

SteamWorld Build is a city-builder with heart that successfully mixes various genres. It is also accessible to players who don’t put hundreds of hours into Cities Skylines and for players who have played many games in the genre it is a cute palate cleanser that can be played through in one weekend. The game offers various maps, but the replayability is what’s going to hold this title back.

Aside from some surprisingly gory moments, in Chucky’s table in particular, there isn’t much here that Pinball FX players haven’t already seen many times before, making Pinball M a far from essential buy. Yet, it’s more of the studio’s trademark bloody brilliant (pun intended) pinball mechanics, with a couple cool additions, a better progression system and none of the controversial elements of the previous game. Sure it doesn’t have the crazy list of available tables of the other games, but it’s not meant to replicate that game, just to offer something slightly different as a side dish. And that is reason enough to recommend Pinball M to all fans of the pins and metal balls – provided they’re up for the M-rating of these violent tables!

With big boss fights, fun combat systems, and a charming story featuring justice and righteousness, ASTLIBRA Revision is a great 2D action RPG and well worth the time investment.

Gangs of Sherwood was fun for 15 minutes. Every second after that was a dreadful monotony that I cannot recommend to anyone living or dead.

The big question I asked myself when it came to writing a review was this: Is this just a low-effort cash grab, or is it worthy of the fantastic show? I’m pleased to say, I feel they’ve landed firmly in the latter camp. The usually impeccably imparted ‘lesson’ each episode of the show delivers arrives here in the game exactly where it should be, heart and warmth intact.

Though Sociable Soccer 24 offers fun arcade football action (and with a lot of teams to boot), its slower speed and poor AI makes matches feel samey very quickly. This impacts the progression more than I would have liked, making climbing the ranks very uninteresting. But there’s a solid arcade game in here and I hope to see improvements made to the core gameplay overtime.

All in all, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) is, at its best, a safe and minimal upgrade over last year’s episode and, at its worst, a visibly rushed, somewhat poorly designed, and unbalanced collection of game modes. Sure, it builds upon the excellent technical and mechanical background from last year’s game, but much more worryingly: it offers a short Frankenstein monster of a hybrid campaign with much of it being essentially repurposed Warzone content; a Zombies mode that also feels like an unbalanced and unpolished rehash of things we’ve seen in said battle royale mode and last year’s DMZ; lastly, with multiplayer limiting itself to fairly superficial (if generally positive) changes, alongside merely introducing remakes of old maps.

I’m not too big a fan of how much was stripped away in Ninja Storm’s Connections History mode, but it still does a good job of picking the right moments to sum up for Naruto-noobies while still offering fun fights alongside Boruto’s extra story. Ninja Storm fans will know what they’re coming back to, this time with a larger roster than Storm 4. Connections is ultimately a great little collection of all things Naruto.

It’s a short and sweet DLC that gets a short and sweet recommendation. If you love PowerWash Simulator then this is $8 you should go and spend right now.

The Last Faith is a mostly good game, with a few moments of brilliance, and a few more that drove me into a rage. It’s a beautiful, great-sounding game with decent combat and a world I found intriguing. In a year of stellar releases, this is one to, at the very least, add to your back catalog.

I love a good challenge every now and then, but I don’t mind being able to coast as I please and feeling powerful to destroy foes to boot. For that, Yohane’s little adventure offers a fun journey through a weird labyrinth with funky, eldritch-looking monsters. An easy recommendation for the 2D action beginner.

Teardown is really damned fun. The devs took a solid premise and built a great sandbox around it. Performance on console is better than I could have hoped for, and with proper mod and DLC support it should have tons of content for years to come.