Yonder is a game that matches is aesthetics, design, and vision in a way that very few games could even hope to achieve; even those games that end up with astronomical Metacritic scores and GOTY awards from every corner. It's a beautiful, clearly heartfelt masterpiece, and if more games were to follow this one's lead, I would have a great deal more faith in the emergence of video games as an art form.
Flip Wars' problem is that it has no depth whatsoever. That silly, simple, chaotic, and utterly pointless button masher that you had a quick laugh at when you play it for the first time really is all that's on offer.
While it's not to the standard of its rhythm games, Rayark did well with its first RPG. Implosion looks gorgeous and is a very slick production.
Final Fantasy XII's willingness to be different and innovative has left it feeling every bit as modern and poignant now as any new JRPG on the market, and it remains my favourite game within a series that I hold very precious to me.
Damascus Gear is fun. It's clean, well-playing fun. It could have been an awful lot more, and it's a little frustrating that the game didn't make better use of the opportunities that the setting provided it. It's also not a game that you'll remember a year down the track, let alone feel nostalgic for in a decade. But it's, again, good clean fun, and if you've got a weekend to kill, this one will do it.
Chess Ultra is as good as I can conceive Chess actually getting.
Ultra Despair Girls might be an outlier, and even a game that only the most hardcore Danganronpa fans will ever truly appreciate, but underneath that hood, it's a smart one, and has a wicked sense of humour to boot. [OpenCritic note: Matt Sainsbury separately reviewed the PS4 (4 stars) and Vita (4.5 stars) versions. Their scores have been averaged.]
DiRT 4 might not be my kind of racing game normally, and nothing will ever compare with the thrill of weaving in and out of a clustered mass in an F1 game, but I genuinely enjoyed everything the game offered, and on that basis I know that it must be something special indeed.
Valkyria Revolution is an intense, special, and downright important game, with a powerful message to share not just about war itself, but also how we also talk about, and share stories about, war.
Perception was an opportunity. It was a real, genuine opportunity to do something remarkable with the horror genre, and join a couple of other experimental 'walking simulators' such as Layers of Fear, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, and the recently-released The Town Of Light, in proving that the horror genre in video games can be cerebral, rather than visceral, but this one largely misses the mark.
The general ignorance of the west towards Japanese folk stories and philosophy mean that this is a game that a lot of people will scratch their heads over. This includes those that generally likes the games that Japanese creators make with the western market in mind. But I hope it's a game that others embrace as a stepping stone towards understanding a history and culture that too many are too eager to dismiss as "weird" or different.
Victor Vran is a cut-price Diablo clone that has a really delightful sense of humour, superb production values, and genuinely entertaining gameplay.
If you've somehow missed all the other Harvest Moon games on the 3DS, then you could get a real kick out of Skytree Village, but at this stage the only people in that position will be the people that either don't own a 3DS (and this game won't be enough to buy one for, that's for certain), or people who aren't interested in Harvest Moon in the first place, and this game won't turn them onto the series either
It might not have the charm of Harvest Moon, but there's a purity to the experience in Farming Simulator 18 that also means it avoids the irritants.
It might look like Civilization on the surface, but once you realise it's actually a hybrid of card game, gamebook, RPG, and strategy game you'll be hard pressed to think of anything that you've played this year that's more fundamentally fascinating than this one. [OpenCritic note: Matt Sainsbury reviewed both the PS4 and PC versions. Their scores have been averaged.]
I can see people who enjoy the aesthetic and the intensity of the battles spending a lot of time in playing this one, and it will sit with Splatoon as Nintendo's quirky, creative, fundamentally different take on competitive gaming. I just don't think I'll ever play it again, having now wrapped up the review.
I love this game. I really, truly love it. It's the realisation of a genuine fantasy, and, as I said at the start of the review, this is the kind of completely immersive experience that is exclusive to VR that makes for the most compelling argument for the technology.
Could you argue that not enough of this game is new for fans of the series - especially when Sony has the VR headset now and a speedy racer would be such a great thing for it? Probably. You probably could argue that. But this is still a package of three of the best twitch racers out there, and given that we need to wait for Sony to find a new home for the WipeOut series, this will keep us going just fine in the meantime, you'd think.
This game manages to mix some quite serious themes in with its plentiful fanservice and Compile Heart trademark sense of the ridiculous. That it manages to do both successfully makes this a really special game. Yes, this is a game that was produced on a budget, but then, if it hadn't been, it would have been deemed far to "odd" and "risky" to have been greenlit.
I came away from Tekken 7 with a greater appreciation for the series than I went in. I enjoyed my time with the story mode, and it did help me to better understand the unique flow to combat that the game has. I also really enjoyed some of the newer characters; this game has a more rounded cast than previously. But I still struggle to get along with the approach to presentation.