Intriguing, intense and extreme, Killer7 is as relevant, playable, and valuable as it has ever been.
It doesn't offer the dense and intelligent narrative of Final Fantasy at its very best, but it's a joyful and heartfelt ball of fun, and it's great that Square Enix is able to find a way to balance out both approaches with its premiere franchise.
If nothing else, the developers are doing genuinely good work in highlighting a job that we should all be much more aware of. We don't survive without our farmers, after all.
There's no forced path or endless pile of hints to the point that the game almost plays itself. Hitman 2 lets you play your own way, and it's all the more rewarding as a result.
Nintendo and Game Freak have managed something quite special with Pokémon: Let's Go.
It's by no means an essential game, but it's passable for (very) short bursts of play.
I'm sure there's something good at the core of Road Redemption, but over and over again the developers made some truly horrible decisions that let that core down. Coupled with an attempt to emulate the aesthetic of Mad Max without the slightest understanding on why Mad Max is such a revered series of films, Road Redemption comes across as a wild swing for glory that didn't even come close to connecting with the ball.
Over and over again some truly baffling decisions let it down, and while the scenarios justify the asking price in themselves, for any of us that prefer the sandbox mode of the simulations that we play, Townsmen is a complete misfire.
This is a deeply immersive, elegant, intelligent take on Tetris, and the best example of it since the original on Game Boy, all that time ago
It's a pity that everyone that doesn't have a VR headset will miss out, because Déraciné is really quite remarkable. It's rare that a game developer has attempted to make time a thing to explore to the same extent that we usually explore space in games, but FromSoftware succeeded there, and esoteric as it is, the darkly emotional story that is spun around Déraciné's unique structure makes for something truly compelling.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Mercenaries Wings: The False Phoenix. When you're in the mood for a tactics JRPG, but not necessarily concerned with narrative, then this no-frills approach to the genre will scratch the itch.
Of course, it's also "just" another match-4 title, and perhaps that's why the developers didn't feel like putting the price up to something more appropriate to the size of the game. Lucky us, then; because while Swap This! is by no means going to end up on anyone's favourite games of all time lists, it's bright, pleasant, and perfect for those times that you do want a quick burst of puzzle action. And all for the cost of candy bar.
In that context, 11-11 Memories Retold is something precious; it’s a rare foil against the lies about war that the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield get away with far too easily.
While it might make you uncomfortable, as far as extreme horror goes, Death Mark also offers an unparalleled sense of atmosphere and a genuinely engrossing mystery to follow along with.
For this collection to be really worth the price of admission, SNK needed to dip into its more recent history, and particularly the fighting game genre, where the company has a genuine leadership position. It didn't do that, so it's hard to shake the impression that you'd be better off with a couple of the dozens of Neo Geo Classics that are available as individual purchases on Switch.
It's not without its issues, but these are the kinds of experiences that really stick in the mind, and I'd rather that that yet another stock-standard action game that neatly fits within structures that we've already seen dozens of times before.
Hidden Folks is good as a mild diversion, but doesn't offer much beyond that. The development team seems to have missed what made Where's Wally books truly special - it wasn't simply in packing the books full of stuff, and then challenging people to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. It was in filling the books with vibrant, exciting, and imagination-stirring scenes. Hidden Folks doesn't do that.
Still, Project Highrise is the ultimate example of efficiency. Coming in at around 150MB to download, it's actually one of the smaller games available on the PlayStation 4, and that's because it cuts corners in the presentational elements to focus on the quality simulation. It's a delight to play, and replay, to come up with different tower designs, and I expect that I'll keep coming back to this for quite some time to come.
Home Sweet Home isn't a classic that transcends its genre roots, but the developers behind the game show that they understand how fear works, how to build tension, how pacing should work in a good horror game, and how to create some shocking imagery. I wanted more of the promised delve into Thai ghost stories, but overall, as a genre fan I found this an engrossing enough diversion.
It's truly impressive just how substantial the Anabasis expansion is; by rights it could be an entirely separate game in the Battlestar Galactica Deadlock series. But Black Lab Games and Slitherine opted to make it an expansion, so it's an excuse to go back to that base game if you've put it down for a while, or finally pick it up if you somehow missed it the first time around.