Oscar Taylor-Kent
Unifying Japan has never felt so personal. Ascension is as much about your own story as it is about Japan's, and what will be best for your clan is not always necessarily what will be best for you.
A stripped back game of duelling, clashing, and waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is a great fighting game right now, but it's just getting started.
The way Kiwami weaves itself into a symbiotic relationship with 0 enhances the pair as a sequential experience.
It's the best Dragon Ball fighting game, one of the best looking fighting games in general, and a rare welcome entry point for newcomers to understand what competitive fighting games are all about.
While The 25th Ward is still a great, gripping sci-fi crime story, it's really only going to appeal to big fans of the first game
Crash 4 is the kind of retro throwback that actually earns its spot as a successor to the original trilogy. There's the occasional bandicoot stumble, but it's a responsive, precise platformer that looks as good as it plays.
Technically impressive but just not as fun or innovative as its predecessor.
When taking charge of the action, Bayonetta is more fun to rip and tear with here than ever before, with some smart evolutions in how her role as a summoner can add to her combat without taking anything meaningful away. But some of the same issues that plagued its predecessors are just as present here as well, if not more-so
A cute My First Metroidvania with charming characters, wrapped up in some fairly basic and uninspired platforming levels. It's not Illusion at its best, but should entertain kids.
You can't overlook the originality and the amount of love that oozes from the true heart of Final Fantasy XV.
It's great to see the life of this really fun 3D fighter extended with more content across the board. Picking up Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 again, the mechanics of the fighting are just as easy to get into and as exciting as they were on release. Road to Boruto doesn't add a crazy amount of new content (and considering the anime movie is well over a year old by this point, not all that new), but what it does add is nothing but good. It would have been nice to see more, but there isn't a whole lot more of the Boruto story out there yet. It does prove that more Ultimate Ninja Storm is definitely a good thing — and maybe we'll see it return in the future.
Score Attack hammers home how straightforward and bland the dungeon design is.
Episode Ignis is far from a perfect dish, but with plenty of seasoning in the pot, it's possibly the tastiest of the bunch, and adds some much needed flavour to the main game.
There's a serious wealth of content in Kikuya.
Edo Blossoms feels like the weaker of the two halves, which isn't always the best position for a conclusion to be.
Whatever the reason The King of Fighters XIV feels like it lacks some of the magic of the earlier games. It's a game that really wants to be the "king of fighters" itself, but has forgotten that means having some fun along the way.
Alpha Mission II has some nice ideas, and the occasional spectacular set-pieces that were pretty forward thinking. The armour system feels fun to play around with, and provides a lot of different options to try out over multiple playthroughs, but without more of its own identity there isn’t all that much reason to playthrough it more than once on single or co-op play.
Being an interesting historical item sadly doesn't make Fatal Fury all that fun these days.
When more exciting retro-styled throwbacks like Project Octopath Traveler are on the horizon, Tokyo RPG Factory really need to take a look at what they're going to do with their next game to make it stand out from the crowd.