Where the previous Total War instalments have tried their best to faithfully recreate 15th century Japan or 200 BCE Rome, Warhammer's setting is a love letter to the devotees who painstakingly create miniature figures, infused into a game that combines high strategy and micro-management.
All in all, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a fantastic addition to the Switch line-up, and it's also a great strategy game that brings fresh ideas to the genre.
Life is Strange: Before the Storm is proof that good prequels don't just extend the atmosphere of what fans loved about its predecessor, but complement one another.
A showcase of social gaming at its best, you owe it to yourself to put on your (virtual) toque blanche and revel in the delight that is Overcooked 2.
The Last of Us 2 delivers where it counts. It's oppressing, it's brutal, and it's a sucker punch, by way of the positions it puts you in to drive home what a change of perspective can do. As it's said, every villain is the hero of their own story — and vice versa.
Playground Games can offer up an iterative experience and rake in the money, because Forza Horizon 5 is in a world of its own. It's wonderful, but it's also sad.
God of War is back after four-and-a-half years — and it’s great.
If what you want is to plonk down a bunch of rides, be creative with your layouts and create a happy mini-universe for guests and yourself (you can go on the rides too, in first-person view), which brings out and caters to your imagineering side, then Planet Coaster is the game for you.
Firaxis has done a good job making its long-running franchise leaner than before, while introducing new things (such as Districts, Eureka and Inspiration) that make Civilization VI more straight-forward, in a bid to appeal to a broader audience.
Unsolvable moments are far too common with Obduction, and hence it’s best that whenever the game makes you want to bang your head against the wall, put it aside for the day. If there’s one trap the game falls in, it’s the puzzle maker’s most obvious fallacy. The logic, while apparent to the creator, can be quite opaque to the player.
Overall though, the ex-LucasArts game veterans have created an appealing, and effective love letter to the movement they started back in the day. If you loved growing up with those titles, your decision has most likely already been made. For everyone else, Thimbleweed Park's darkly humorous and self-referential approach, in combination with its oddball bunch of characters – everyone will have a different favourite – makes it an adventure well-worth pointing your cursor at.
Life is Strange: Before the Storm shows that it understands what pulled people into the nostalgia-fuelled Arcadia Bay, and creates an emotionally-charged intriguing opening chapter to a story that we'll be keeping an eye on.
It's not going to challenge you, and it can be a tad confusing at times, but Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 is a fun-filled adventure worth diving into.
Rise and Fall continues Civilization 6's aim to deconstruct its complex structure, making it leaner and more approachable for a larger audience.
FIFA 19 has some welcome additions that bring it closer to the sport.
Volta would have certainly kept the FIFA 20 team busy what with the new assets and all that, but since the game doesn't need the same thought and strategy like its big brother, it's in service of a product that's ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
Ghost of Tsushima falls a bit short. The narrative blocks and storytelling are too straightforward. To add to that, the side-quest bloat seeps the narrative of its pacing
FIFA 21 is full of goals. With FIFA, EA Sports is constantly engaged in a balancing act between attack vs defence. And it's a process that continues after release, with some FIFA titles transforming into a whole new beast by the time we're ready for the next annual iteration. At launch, FIFA 21 is a goal fest. I've had a lot of high-scoring games on FIFA 21 where the result looks more like cricket scores, and I've also broken my personal best scoring record, with a final score of 20-0.
Watch Dogs: Legion lacks a soul. It's also a passive game, since there's no active push-and-pull. Albion took over London, and now you push them out one borough at a time.
[Far Cry 6] is happy in its groove, delivering a fun and immersive Latin American experience, an open world sandbox you can mess around in, and giving you the tools to do what you want. Better yet, it lets you enjoy all of that with a friend.