Conscript's grimy, disturbing setting and gruelling combat are effective and poignant, and a sturdy and well-crafted survival horror skeleton keeps things compelling.
Two-thirds exhilarating and ingenious, one third asinine and frustrating, Anger Foot feels played out by the time you've finished the first few stages. Through great level design, constant novelty, and mostly solid fundamentals, it remains intoxicating for another sixty of them.
Building on Sekiro's parry system in a layered and fascinating metroidvania world, Nine Sols is a punishing but encouraging 2D soulslike spilling over with personality and creativity.
Engaging from start to arguably too-soon finish, Felvidek is a raw, strange, and brilliant RPG that alternates between deadly combat, plummy prose, crass jokes, and odd beauty.
A compact but effective expansion for an already brilliant game, The Splintered Sea's additions are sure to make considerable waves for your toolbox of destruction.
A beautiful paper-folding puzzler that screwed up the last remaining scraps of my self esteem and yeeted them into the bin.
A lavishly presented, detailed, often gripping RTS with most of the atmosphere and tone you'd expect from the series, held back from greatness by playing it too safe, some control issues, and favouring reaction speed over tactical depth.
While obtuse in places, Manor Lords is an idiosyncratic, lively and sturdy sim that will keep you curious and delighted with its many intricacies.
Goblin Stone makes a wonderful first impression with playful and charming presentation, but that charm spell soon dissipates, revealing a sometimes stodgy, grindy, and unsatisfying tactics game with diminishing returns.
In the moment, Broken Roads offers up creativity in spades, but the bigger picture story - combined with weak combat and a dry take on moral choice - never coalesces into anything especially entertaining.
A potent blend of tactics and RPG possessed with raucous momentum, Sons of Valhalla is excellent. Then it's not for a bit. Then it's excellent again.
Every single change Pharaoh makes to Troy is for the better, and some changes are so good that it's going to be difficult to play any Total War without them going forward. But the fundamental issues of Total War - mainly enemy battle AI - are far too entrenched to fix in a few years, and the bronze age setting doesn't allow for enough unit variation to make up for them.
This hack-and-slasher clings to its Soulsborne heritage too tightly, but does creative things that no other Soulslike until now has managed to pull off
This realtime 4X makes great use of Dune's furniture in crafting a compulsive, busy, and well-made strategy game, and its new campaign is a great addition. But the soul of Dune remains elusive, leaving its desert planet feeling barren in the wrong ways.
Expanding on the basic role playing structure with seemingly limitless reactivity and options, this game is so varied you'd swear it was sentient
Aliens: Dark Descent is an authentically atmospheric campaign borrowing from both turn-based tactics and survival horror, stymied by a seemingly deep paranoia you might mistake it for one of those strategy games for nerds. It's not. It's not for nerds. It's for cool Aliens fans. You can use a controller. It's not for nerds.
Behind the screams and stunningly-costumed demons, this is escapist junk food for gamers – which may be exactly what you're after
A derivative, uninteresting and fundamentally broken stealth action adventure that fails to capture anything interesting about Tolkien's fiction
This grungy medieval low fantasy tactical RPG isn't just a sandbox, but a quick-sandbox, capable of sucking you right in with emergent stories and moments equally thrilling and silly. The trade off here is it can lack a bit of momentum, but if you stay curious, you'll end up well rewarded by its layered and considered world and systems.
This first-person shooter from Rick and Morty's co-creator pairs a barrage of nihilistic jokes with flimsy gameplay