Nobunaga's Ambition: Taishi has some small bugbears with its presentation, but thankfully nothing that hurts that core strategy experience too badly. It is one of the few of its kind that mixes both the excitement of battles and the mundanity of managing politics, while making both engaging. The UI designs and tutorials making the game an excellent place for genre fans to give it a try. An easy recommend for the kind of player who's sunk hundreds of hours into Civilization or Total War.
Toukiden Kiwami is a solid expansion on Age of Demons, and a reasonable facsimile to Monster Hunter should the 3DS entry not be your bag. But it does need to be treated as the remaster it ultimately is, and really isn't worth it for veterans.
Helldivers is a fascinating experiment in community involvement mixed with a classic tactical shooter. It doesn't fire on all cylinders, but get a group of people together and Helldivers can be a hell of a time.
Samurai Warriors 4 might have followed up on the last warriors title quickly, but it does enough differently to be worth a look on it's own merits. Not really anything that will get new fans, but enough to keep the attention of existing ones.
Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate is still very much Warriors. If that's not a thing for you then this isn't going to change your mind. If you were going to try to jump in though, Warriors Orochi 3 is an excellent point to give it a shot.
Elite Dangerous is not going to be the game for everyone, and in fact most are going to be turned off by all it demands from players. The fact remains though, that the game does exactly what it wants, and does it very well. It isn't here to please everybody, but those who it is for are going to have a good time.
While it's an acquired taste to be sure, and has a bit of a sting to it when the hardware isn't quite right, OlliOlli brings solid skating to the PC and is worth a look for anybody who enjoys a good scoreboard chase.
Mafia III is a case study in why open world does not always make things better. What begins as something really tight and interesting quickly spirals away from that strong core and ultimately ends up as little more than yet another sandbox game this generation.
If Games Workshop is throwing Warhammer at every wall to see what sticks, Eternal Crusade is certainly one of the splatters that has the most promise. Games of this nature inevitably evolve over time, but at worst, we've got a really good shooter here. Just don't expect it to walk you into the world properly. It wants you to shoot stuff.
The Surge is great, and I say that with only a single qualifier - It's standing in a genre built by games that did more than great. Which isn't exactly fair to hold against this game, but if you've ended the age of fire, woke from the nightmare and torn through Japan, The Surge is going to scratch, if not satisfy that itch.
Galak-Z is a fun take on the rouge like, and as punishing as they come. Maybe you like that, maybe you don't. Stick with in and Galak-Z will reward you, but it sure isn't going to make it easy.
Super Smash Bros for Nintendo 3DS is a very large game in some ways, and shockingly small in others. While there is an amazing amount of busywork, you might even feel like you've seen most of what the game has to show you within a few hours of play. As a companion, Smash 3DS works. it functions. As it's own entry though, it just feels light and without identity.
I can’t fault Killing Floor 2 that much for focusing on a co-op experience, and it does that very well. The gunplay and gameplay loop is great fun when you have a core group of friends with you, I just don’t see it as having value outside of that setting.
Though I do have to knock it quite a bit for failing on the presentation, as that is a rather large part of a game like this, the story that Batman: The Telltale Series has to tell is strong enough to carry it through the technical hiccups. Telltale clearly understood Batman as a beloved character and then used that to turn it on its head and fan or not, this is worth a look.
Digimon World: Next Order is a different breed of RPG in a pretty stagnant genre, and for what it tries and does to bring this old favourite to modern times, I have to commend it somewhat. But what it does is in places archaic, or not explained well enough to be managed properly without a guide.
Portal Knights is not completely unpalatable or unsavable, it just also isn't super elegant in the same way the heaviest hitters of the crafting genre marry together all of their systems. Revisions or sequels that totally rebalance this could create something special, but for now, Portal Knights is just kind of there.
STRAFE gets a lot of presentational things right, and even though it undermines and contradicts its own mechanics in some places, the singular sense of style the game exudes is fantastic. Running through the swarmed halls of the dilapidated space station has a lot of appeal for classic shooter fans.
Get Even is the core of a fantastic, provocative game that has the potential to be the kind of experience that only games could do, but that core gets rather frustratingly lost within decisions that would better fit within a box standard shooter that impudently goes after Call of Duty's crown. This is a game and a team with potential, but with Get Even, you're only getting a glimmer of that.
Longshot is a promising start to story mode for Madden, and with polish could become even more special. In all, it's more Madden, but with a few flourishes that make it a decent time.
Fallen Legion: Sins of an Empire shows more ambition than it probably had any financial right to show, and it pays off in some really surprising ways. If you want to try something unique in the RPG space, this is certainly reaching for something beyond its grasp but comes out great anyway.