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.
Overgrowth feels like a mod created for a wacky physics sandbox where all the openness and experimentation has been pushed to the side, and everything else has been twisted around a forgettable, barely present story and a series of brief and ugly levels. I'm just glad that, at around two to three hours long, it's incredibly short.
With the combat system and the way it's actually trying to make a point with its exploration of social issues, The Fractured But Whole does improve on its predecessor in some ways, but it quickly starts to coast, relying too much on familiarity to get by.
Tooth and Tail is an elegantly simple RTS that's perfect for newcomers or anyone wanting to play on the couch.
It's an exceedingly strong beginning to this chapter of the Warhammer trilogy and is a strong contender for the best game in the series.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is a sprawling, inventive adventure and one of the best RPGs ever made.
Obsidian's dark RPG deserves a better expansion than Bastard's Wound.
Thanks to the myriad possible move and combo loadouts, along with the various weapons and classes, PvP is both challenging and full of unexpected comebacks and knife-edge duels, but it just doesn't feel like a complete experience. Bugs, server issues, a small, dull open-world and the lack of modes is definitely holding it back.
Norsca is a brilliant last hurrah for Total War: Warhammer. It's full of spectacle, monsters and thrilling wars, but where it really succeeds is in its campaign twists.
I don't think Aven Colony is terrible, despite these 1,500+ scathing words. The combination of survival and constructing a frontier colony is still an intriguing concept, and Mothership Entertainment have used the alien world conceit to create some novel, if ultimately irritating, obstacles. But the balance is all off, and its slog of a campaign and the attempts at streamlining make this a disappointing extraterrestrial outing.