Even with a dull story and flat characters, Trials of Mana's fun, varied combat makes it easy to recommend to fans of action RPGs new and old.
Moonlighter's original conceit blends shopkeeping with monster-slaying in a way that's satisfying for most of its length. While both its combat and trading eventually get repetitive, the gorgeous graphics and pixel art make it a pleasant journey while it lasts. Unfortunately, your character's quest comes to feel as shallow as the merchant's life he wants to escape with its uninteresting goal and uninspired conclusion.
Graveyard Keeper makes a lot of bold choices, replacing the friendly, relaxing atmosphere of typical life sims with a more goal-directed structure in a more cynical setting. While I found its pace tedious at times and would have preferred more focus on the grave-tending mechanics, more patient players will find a lot to like in its wealth of well-developed diversions, fantastic art and music, and pitch-black comedic aesthetic.
Death's Gambit is buggy, unpolished, frustrating, and derivative. At the same time, it features some interesting bosses and unexpected storytelling tricks. It's sure to be a divisive game, but you may be won over by the atmosphere its fantastic art, music, and voice acting create, if you can overlook its flaws.
Below is a dark, mysterious game that invites you to illuminate its secrets, then punishes you for trying. While it does a great job invoking a sense of wonder, thanks in part to its sparse, tense soundtrack, its genuinely great moments are spread far too thin. Below will certainly be a divisive game, but it offers a compelling experience for players willing to put up with a good amount of frustration and tedium.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw brings a smaller scope and simplified controls to a sometimes intimidating genre, watering down the grandeur of spaceflight, but making it more fun and accessible at the same time. Its repetitive missions and sparse narrative weigh it down, but its fantastically engaging dogfights make it an easy recommendation.
Black Future '88 is a fast-paced, thrilling roguelike, but it offers little to shake up the genre's inherent repetition. Its often underwhelming gear and lack of variety in levels makes for dull runs too often, even though its gunplay consistently satisfies. You'll find lots of hidden depth in its upgrade system if you stick with Black Future '88 despite its uninspired structure, which is made easier by its great art style and stellar soundtrack.
Smoke and Sacrifice tells a compelling tale of a mother searching for answers after being forced to give up her son. While the game's gorgeous art brings its grim world to life, its story is ultimately undercut by poor pacing and vague objectives. Smoke and Sacrifice shines in concept, but falters in execution.
Spiritsphere DX remixes a well-worn genre, adding tons of variety on top of a simplistic core mechanic. It offers plenty of unlockables and play modes, but they don't add much to its replayability. Spiritsphere DX shines in short multiplayer sessions, but likely won't hold solo players' attention for long.
Bladed Fury doesn't break any new ground, but it's got its 2D hack and slash fundamentals down to a science. Its beautiful hand-drawn art style and great enemy designs bring its mythological rendition of ancient China to life, even when its story fails to.
The list of things I don't like about Rage 2 is much longer than the things I like about it, but the one thing it does better than I even expected is combat. Once you've filled up your toolbox of weapons and powers, you have seemingly endless ways to take on the game's foes. Unfortunately, its bland story, drab tone, and scattered open world drag it down, but the fierce firefights kept me engaged the whole way.
Wargroove has the confidence to stick to simple, familiar gameplay with a few twists, rather than try to wow you with its novelty. While its charming graphics might make it look cute, it offers a vicious challenge that gets a bit uneven at times. If you get into its slower pace and high difficulty, it also offers plenty of alternate game modes and custom campaign creation tools to extend the fun.
Outward is an ambitious, uncompromising game, sometimes to its own detriment. There’s a lot to like about it, from its unique take on player character death to its focus on the mundane aspects of adventuring. But every moment when it really shined was surrounded by drudgery and frustration. Outward is sure to appeal to some players, but it often undercuts its own best features.
Project Nimbus: Complete Edition doesn't break any new ground, and it likely won't keep you playing for too long, either. But what it does offer is some incredibly fun, fast-paced combat with a varied set of mechs to pilot, and an enjoyable but corny plot like something out of a mid-tier anime.
Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns is a good combination of addictive puzzle gameplay and RPG character-building. While it will likely play best to fans of the 2007 original, its central mechanics are still fun, if a bit dated. Despite sometimes slow battles that don't always mesh its puzzle and RPG sides well, Puzzle Quest is still worth a look for fans of puzzle games.
Cyber Protocol's escape-the-maze puzzles are easy to grasp but quickly ramp up the difficulty with frequent twists and new mechanics. This neon-bathed, synth-scored puzzler offers both single-player and multiplayer modes and an absolute mountain of levels. It would be easy to dismiss Cyber Protocol as style over substance, but with this much style, that's not entirely a bad thing.
BattleTech: Heavy Metal adds great new mechs and an engrossing campaign, but it's aimed squarely at fans.
Despite an extremely promising opening, The Low Road fails to capitalize on its own interesting premise. Every part of its presentation, from art to music to voice acting, is fantastic, but the puzzles that make up the game fall flat. Though I was happy to spend time with The Low Road's characters, the game around them doesn't hold up.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker sets up an epic story, expansive world, difficult combat, and lively characters, but all these elements eventually become tiresome. Its unforgiving difficulty and strict adherence to Pathfinder tabletop rules will likely turn away more players than it attracts, and while its kingdom management sim sets it apart from similar RPGs, no part of the game ever feels wholly original. Despite boldly putting players in the role of a king or queen, it never engages enough with the consequences of your decisions, or whether you have the right to make them at all.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden's blend of turn-based tactical combat with stealth is interesting, but not always successful, and its story doesn't take advantage of its unique setting. Although the ability to explore the world and sneak up on enemies adds a fun twist to the genre, it brings unwelcome complications and technical hiccups as well. I also ran into numerous performance issues, including game-ending freezes, that strained my initial fondness for the game.