Alex Donaldson's Reviews
In that, it feels like the rare auteur-driven game – where it’s not just self-aware fun, but also a piece of art with something to say about the past, the present – and even how our changing understanding of ourselves, and our stories, can color the future. It’s brilliant, and exactly what I hoped it would be.
Splatoon 3 feels quite samey, but a high level of polish and the series’ best single-player offering to date elevate this sequel.
I want to be clear. These caveats and other elements of the game combine to mean that, no, Live A Live isn’t quite as good as either Final Fantasy 6 or Chrono Trigger. Even with that said, however, it does feel like it belongs alongside them. It feels monumentally important, wonderfully clever, and full of a gleeful energy that’ll make the heart of any old-school RPG fan swell. Top marks on this website doesn’t mean it’s a perfect game; it just means we recommend playing it absolutely unreservedly – and such is the case here.
Put simply, I love it all. It’s a worthy successor to the GameCube game in particular, which I still rate as a real classic.
When Nintendo gets these sort of lifestyle ‘event’ games right, they’re always a slam dunk. Sometimes, the accuracy of MotionPlus is missed. One can see how Nintendo could've done more new, and included more all-new stuff. And yet... Nintendo Switch Sports is pretty much exactly what I wanted. I can see how it'd be one of my absolute favourite games of the year. That's Nintendo's magic power.
Technical shortcomings and minor frustrations can’t take away what this game achieves elsewhere; it’s the best main-series Pokemon game in a long, long time.
Halo Infinite isn’t perfect. It has foibles and struggles here and there. But it’s also a slam dunk of a release; it’s exactly what Halo needs to be now. As Halo’s relevance has felt to wane over recent years, this is a bold statement that, no, Halo isn’t ‘over’. It was never close. It matters, and it’s still brilliant. I don’t mind waiting to see where updates take it, because what’s here at launch is already largely brilliant. I’m excited for the future of Halo again.
Let’s be clear for a moment: Forza Horizon has always been good. From the moment it burst onto the scene in 2012 as a spin-off to the core, more po-faced Forza Motorsport series, it established itself as a fun, thrilling, and subversively moreish alternative thread for racing on Xbox. It was in many ways the spiritual, open-world successor to Project Gotham Racing, and in turn traced its roots back to arcade racing royalty like OutRun. This is a tough lineage to stand up to, but Horizon 5 takes all that history and experience and runs with it, incrementally upgrading this series into must-play brilliance. It’s an achievement of a game.
You'll enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy if you go into it with the right expectations.
Metroid Dread is likely to give those that have been counting down the days to its release exactly what they want: a thrilling experience in line with what they loved about past games.
It’s one of my favourite games of the year - and one we’ll surely be talking about for months to come.
WarioWare: Get It Together is unabashedly Nintendo, fulfilling its mission statement to the letter with alarming precision, but also not rocking the boat very much at all. The game’s one big change - controlling a cast of characters - didn’t turn out to be that big of a deal after all. The result is a wonderfully infectious game to play alone - while it lasts - but the true value of the package will be in playing it with others.
Twelve Minutes ultimately presents a compelling, thrilling experience that feels more than worth the price of entry. It has interesting things to say through its looping core conceit, and it’ll tease your brain more than a few times - sometimes genuinely, sometimes through slightly cheap requirements to progress. I also admit I was less of a fan of where the story went in its later stages - but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t hooked. The journey matters more than the destination, after all - and a gripping journey this is.
To a certain type of player, Legend of Mana is likely to be considered the perfect remaster. It touches up the visuals, but not too much. It makes quality-of-life changes, but preserves the original design and difficulty – warts and all. Some may find that preservation detrimental, with this twenty year-old game showing its age – but it does also make this the new definitive way to experience a classic.
Mario’s latest sporting adventure doesn’t exactly have the greatest story mode, but its core gameplay and modes are excellent.
Game Builder Garage seems to want to showcase just what it’s like to make a game, albeit in a simpler way. It’s sometimes challenging to the point of being headache-inducing. It is unrelentingly complicated. When it clicks, however, it’s fun, magical, and incredibly rewarding.
Yuffie's episode is thrilling fan-service and a welcome slice of more of the same for fans of FF7 Remake, but it's also easily skippable.
Taken alone, any one slice of the game – like a single house, the village itself, even the way combat handles – has its issues. But combined, it merges into something that’s still special – even if it isn’t quite as brilliant as Resident Evil 7 or 2 Remake. It’s an easy recommendation – though if you didn’t back in 2017, you might want to play RE7 first.
If you’re the sort of player who got really mad about the national Pokedex in Sword & Shield, you might also bemoan the level of content here. But I think this is plenty, delivering far more than the original and with a whole lot of replay value – it’s just a shame the developers felt the need to stretch it out artificially to justify what they’ve managed to build.
While the backtracking remains, it feels much less painful this time around thanks to it being part of a game with smooth performance that’s ultimately much more fun to actually play. The game is considerably improved as a result, and much of what made the original quietly special can now shine far more brightly. It might not be perfect, but within this slightly flawed framework beats the heart of an absolute masterpiece. Those who fell in love with Nier through Automata should go into this with a clear expectation that this is not that game – but if they do, they’ll find much to love.