Maid of Sker is a competent horror adventure where the player explores a well-designed 19th-century hotel. But its clumsy stealth, forgettable puzzles, and lukewarm scares prevent it from hitting the high notes.
Desperados III is a great tactical stealth game with five diverse characters traversing through large open levels with alternate routes that enhance replay value. Picking off patrols and executing multiple actions works marvelously through both the swamps and the frontier towns. And with high quality presentation, this is one entry that fans of the genre shouldn't miss.
There is an interesting story in Someday You'll Return and a potion-crafting system that works suitably well, but players must endure an overlong adventure through a confusing forest with questionable puzzles, bad stealth, and too many clunky mechanics.
Oneiros is a simple puzzle game with concise escape rooms and a few surreal levels. Its third chapter is the strongest, thanks to more traditional adventuring, and is enough to see this indie game break from the pack.
Doom Eternal's core shooting is strong thanks to grand weapons and enemy variety, but it buries the action under irksome resource management and stilted combat arenas. The bland multiplayer and silly platforming only hurt it more, driving this sequel below previous games in the series.
Stunning visuals and brilliant music is just the first course in Ori and the Will of the Wisps. With its large world, lavish combat, and a smooth implementation of the metroidvania design, this sequel is a must-play for fans of the original, and highly recommended for everybody else.
Uncovering the past has its ups and downs in The Suicide of Rachel Foster. While not a horror game, it only needed a slight nudge to become one and it would have been better for it. At least its roomy hotel setting is nice to explore, even if the world needed more detail and excitement.
LUNA The Shadow Dust is a streamlined point & click adventure that offers superb art design and peaceful music. While many of its puzzles are simple, some late-game challenges make fantastic use of the two well-animated characters in a brief tale told adequately without words.
Lightmatter rests somewhere in the middle of the pack when it comes to first person puzzlers. It uses the basic light tools satisfactorily, and the sharp visual style and brisk pace help it succeed. Unfortunately some technical blemishes offset its better qualities.
Although Life is Strange 2 offers varied themes and visually exquisite moments, it falters by featuring an unappealing road trip adventure with disconnected episodes that lack character growth. Lethargic pacing and shallow interaction make for a boring sequel about two brothers that should have stayed home.
With an excellent droid companion and entertaining lightsaber combat, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order could have been a truly forceful addition to the franchise. However, navigation problems and unnatural level design takes it back down a darker path.
Crammed with different modes and maps, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare offers extensive multiplayer possibilities. The online action is slower, with emphasis on sound cues and open maps, and the campaign is better than average thanks to mission variety and choreographed house incursions. Despite the PC technical issues, it is a noteworthy reboot.
Deliver Us The Moon offers a strong mystery on Earth's natural satellite. Plentiful world interaction, detailed environments, and a good structure help with pacing, although linearity and a lack of definitive answers make for a rough landing.
GRID is an average racing reboot with no real personality. Despite the short races, strong AI, two new street tracks, and the shift towards arcade, it struggles because of so many recycled tracks, poor damage modeling, and disappointing multiplayer.
Control offers some of the best combat from Remedy, balancing supernatural abilities with a handy service weapon. Its non-linear twisted levels, populated with varied Hiss enemies, make for an appealing supernatural world. With a better protagonist and some fine-tuning, it could have been truly extraordinary.
Dynamic empire management and deep tactical conquest forge the perfect alliance within the colorful sci-fi worlds of Age of Wonders: Planetfall. With nearly endless replay value, it is one of the most tantalizing turn-based games in years.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is an adequate shooter, buried under a glut of unnecessary RPG elements and an obnoxious focus on cooperative play. Fans should look to the other games in the series to quench their thirst for straightforward Nazi killing.
Sea of Solitude dives into a broad range of mental issues and treats them carefully enough to be both educational and emotional. It's just a pity that the bland gameplay drowns out some of its best parts.
The Sinking City is a decent adaptation of Lovecraft's work, meshing dark themes with a variety of great investigations that culminate into tricky decisions. If the combat was less clunky and the world more polished, it would have beckoned all to its desolate shore.
Repetition and a general lack of polish crushes Warhammer: Chaosbane before it has a chance to put up a fight. Although the game has decent visuals and competent action, it is just too stagnant, with the same basic enemies filling poorly-randomized levels.