A fun but ultimately limited quiz game that’s a great way to entertain guests for a few hours.
As a linear, narrative-driven horror game, The Medium is easy to recommend – and a no-brainer if you have an Xbox Game Pass subscription – thanks to the balance of unsettling exploration, involved puzzles, a handful of terrifying encounters, and frequent narrative beats.
Life is Strange: True Colors is Deck Nine’s best work to date and I’d place it just behind the original brace of games. It’s more streamlined, has no “fail” states, and doesn’t delve quite as deeply into the supporting cast, but the story is compelling.
There’s always something to do, the first-person parkour and combat remain top-class, and the story missions offer both memorable locations and set-pieces. On the other hand, the bulk of the gameplay on offer feels derivative. It’s hard to immerse yourself in the world when you’re engaged in methodical icon-clearing.
While ELEX II’s core gameplay could be dismissed as traditional or dated, the way all the elements of the world interact with you and one another is what creates the magic.
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is easy to recommend as a compelling action-RPG with well-written protagonists and rewarding systems, though the second half of the game loses the plot - both literally and figuratively.
Amnesia: The Collection offers up a good 15+ hours of tense exploration, puzzling, and scares that survival-horror fans should enjoy. With a strong focus on the narrative and mostly linear progression, you're unlikely to play through them more than once, but it's still great value for money.
The Surge 2 doesn’t feel like a massive technological step forward from the original, but on the narrative and gameplay front, it exceeds or refines the experience. Jericho City is a joy to explore, the narrative is more complex, bosses more numerous, and the excellent combat and progression system still engaging.
Fast-paced combat, limb-specific attacks, easy to understand crafting, and flexible levelling is what sets The Surge apart from its peers and, at times, puts it ahead of the Souls series. The bulk of the gameplay, and indeed much of the narrative pacing, is lifted straight from Lords of the Fallen and should be familiar to fans of the genre.
When the gruesome pixel art, amazing soundtrack and arcade-like gunplay come together, Let Them Come is an experience.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a great coop experience that manages to retain several elements of the prior Wolfenstein games – the gunplay, the characters, the excellent writing, and presentation – but changes up the mission-flow, enemy encounters, and the levelling mechanics to better facilitate a faster-paced game.
Performance and controller nit-picks aside, Pinball FX3 is a solid pinball simulator with an impressive amount of content, only let down by the inclusion of overbearing progression systems and annoying UI design.
Piranha Bytes sticks to what they know best, providing another distinctly Gothic-like RPG, for better and worse.
The sights and sounds of the forest keep you unsettled, Ellis’ flashbacks and conversations slowly unravel his past, puzzling and combat is nicely interspersed with exploration, and Bullet is one of my new favourite animal companions in a video game.
I kept going back to it this time and found myself getting swept up in cathartic violence and juvenile insults for hours at a time.
Legrand Legacy is a strange proposition: it’s a love letter to JRPGs, produced by a small indie team with AAA ambitions but a small budget, capable of providing over two dozen hours of classic gameplay brought down by some rough edges and bland writing, all priced at what you’d expect for a AA game.
Void Bastards is great fun in short bursts but is, unfortunately, let down by the limited scope of its environments, with no unique ships or even distinct "boss" encounters.
They Are Billions on console is still a great survival RTS, but is let down by poor controls and variable performance. Despite those issues, I’d recommend it to RTS fans craving new content (it's not as though we get many RTS games on console), but take note it still requires some work.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning still plays much the way it did in 2012 – ambitious in scope but lacking in depth. You may not be compelled to see it through to the end, but you’ll enjoy most of the time spent with it.
A serious lack of polish and some unnecessary padding keeps it from being great, and it’s still got nothing on the criminally underrated and oft-forgotten Warhammer 40k: Space Marine – the pinnacle of action games set in that universe.