Huge, inventive and the reason I'm sleep deprived. It's brilliant.
Gathering Storm is an ambitious expansion full of welcome additions, even if it does falter at the end.
Passive AI and a flawed economy ruin what could have been a refreshing 4X experiment.
Lethal League Blaze doesn’t flip over the table, but it’s an extremely confident sequel that improves on just about every part of its predecessor.
Two Point Hospital is a brilliant management game, regardless of nostalgia.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a nearly flawless remaster of a mixed bag that I'm still incredibly fond of, even after so many deaths.
I don't want to bad-mouth cool dinosaurs, but cool dinosaurs can only carry a game so far.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, within the first couple of hours, contains the phrase "Cannon-fucking your boat to sodden splinters." Pirates might not make everything better – you wouldn't invite them to a booze-free wedding – but they've done wonders in Obsidian's RPG sequel.
A brilliant early game and bold experiments almost make up for the AI niggles and the boring march to the final battle.
Northgard is a surprising, elegant RTS that's laden with a very dull story.
Surviving Mars is a lot of hard work, but managing a burgeoning colony never stops being compelling.
Every part of Stellaris is still here; the pieces have just been rearranged, neatly.
Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is a solid remake of a game that's past its time.
Easily confused with Life is Feudal: Your Own, Life is Feudal: MMO takes the multiplayer medieval crafting and survival game and makes it larger and, through developer-run servers, more permanent.
Railway Empire should be so much better.
Rise and Fall is a great addition to Civilization 6 that doesn't quite go far enough to be essential.
The Tomb Kings are ultimately a great addition to Warhammer's perpetually pissed-off factions, but their poor integration into the Vortex campaign suggests that Creative Assembly haven't quite figured out how to add factions who don't share the core participants' objectives.
SpellForce 3 is a game that, when pulled apart, doesn't always come out looking great, but that I've still really enjoyed.
A brilliant stealth sandbox and unconventional RPG in one very ambitious but buggy package.
If you're in desperate need of a historical strategy romp, you could do a lot worse than Empire Divided, and it's the best piece of Rome DLC by quite a large margin, but barely a turn went by without me wishing I was bullying Elves or fighting the hordes of Chaos instead.