Dan Stapleton's Reviews
Hardspace: Shipbreaker makes disassembling giant spacecraft piece by piece fun for a bit, but due to a lack of variety in its puzzle-like objectives it soon devolves into hard labor.
Weird West's five dark-fantasy adventures contain a wagonload of bizarre encounters, twists, and reveals, and its stealth and chaotic combat are challenging but come with the built-in safety nets of unlimited slow-motion and an old-school quickload system.
It may look extremely basic, but if you give Vampire Survivors' clever one-stick shooter idea a chance to sink its teeth into you it might not let go for a while.
Chorus gives you fun and flashy superpowers that make its space dogfights stand out, along with its strong main characters and beautiful scenery.
Mass Effect 2's Legendary Edition upgrades the graphics to near-modern standards and lets us immerse ourselves in the best game in BioWare's epic RPG trilogy all over again.
The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos isn't a grand finale for Obsidian's RPG, but it gives us an intriguing whodunnit in a new location and a reason to return for another adventure with the crew of the Unreliable.
Do you like Slay The Spire? If so, you should absolutely try Monster Train's more tactical spin on the deck-building roguelike, which literally layers on new ideas and has every bit as much depth and variety.
Watch Dogs: Legion's bold use of roguelike mechanics in an open-world action game pay off in interesting ways, making this visit to near-future London feel more varied than the previous two games.
Serious Sam 4 still has the spectacle of hundreds of enemies bearing down on you, but its long stretches of run-and-gun shooting quickly become monotonous.
The Outer Worlds’ Peril on Gorgon DLC is mechanically unambitious in that it doesn’t introduce any new ideas to change up gameplay, but it does take the crew of the Unreliable to several new locations around the Hyperion system as it unveils a fairly lengthy and entertaining detective story.
The Destroy All Humans! remake recaptures the simple, campy joy of of rampaging through 1950s America as an angry gray alien.
Orcs Must Die! 3 is very familiar to players of the second game but still a fun and goofy action/tower-defense challenge.
Phantom: Covert Ops takes itself way too seriously and it stealth is basic and reliant on virtually blind enemies, but infiltrating an enemy base with a murder canoe in VR does have its bright spots.
Disintegration's single-player campaign has some novel ideas and its robot enemies die well, but it never achieves any tactical depth.
Maneater's monster-shark feeding frenzy is fun but simple, and that lack of depth causes it to become repetitive as time goes on.
Gears Tactics does an excellent job of grafting Gears' signature look and feel onto XCOM's turn-based battle format and looks great doing it.
Half-Life: Alyx has set a new bar for VR in interactivity, detail, and level design, showing what can happen when a world-class developer goes all-in on the new frontier of technology.
Black Mesa is the best way to play the classic original 1998 Half-Life today, but it's a remake that already feels old enough that it would benefit from a remake itself.
Phoenix Point's more complex take on the classic X-COM formula has some great ideas, but most of them feel experimental and in need of fine-tuning and balance.
Simplistic combat and a predictable story leave Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series Episode 3 very little to work with.