John Cantees
Gravel isn't perfect but it nails enough of the essentials and brings just enough style to the table to make it a great racing game overall.
TERA may look past its prime on consoles, and maybe it is, but it's still a fun and relatively accessible Action-MMO Role-playing game that fits perfectly in the console space.
Unravel Two takes some respectable risks with making a charming and competent cooperative experience, but pays the price by feeling more like a whimsical diversion than a true sequel.
Earthfall has some great flashes of fun, but lacks the imagination and balance needed to sustain it for very long.
Without reinventing much, Dead Cells combines the best aspects of multiple genres seamlessly and effectively.
We Happy Few features one of this year's most interesting settings but fails to fill it with quality gameplay most of the time.
Shenmue fans couldn't have hoped for a sequel more compatible with the previous entries. They will immediately feel right at home.
Except for its solid core gameplay and intriguing story, Warcraft III: Reforged lacks any major updates over the original. In the end, what we have is a game that is a complete disappointment..
The Champion Edition still comes up short compared to many other recent fighters, but Street Fighter V is now the best it has ever been.
Cloudpunk reaches higher and achieves more than I thought it would, barely missing a spot among the giants of its genre.
I appreciate the shots that NHL 21 takes at improving the formula, but at the end of the day, most of those shots are too little too late, and end up making the overall experience just barely better than mediocre.
Despite DiRT 5's boilerplate customization and being a tad too eager to punish its players at times, it exceeds as a true step forward for its genre in the ways that matter most.
Hot Pursuit Remastered misses a few chances to really bring itself into the current era of racers, but it still has no trouble reminding you why it is one of the best racers of its time.
Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a delightful platformer that mostly does a great job despite coloring inside the lines and staying a bit too easy most of the time.
Miles Morales is a meaningful expansion to 2018's Spider-Man that, while perhaps not quite as polished, gives Spidey fans more than enough reason to check it out.
Chronos doesn't totally shed it's VR veneer, but the simplicity of it's roots make it an inviting, uncomplicated option for fans of souls-likes and RPGs.
Twin Mirror's inconsistent presentation and short length contaminate its otherwise excellent story-telling and solid detective gameplay to a degree, but thankfully, it still manages to land on its feet as a respectable narrative-focused adventure.
For every time MXGP 2020 races forward, it seems to slip backwards somewhere else. Depending on what you want out of a motocross game, this could either be a cautious recommendation or a hard pass, neither of which are likely to impress you.
Supercross 4 is as big of an improvement that we've gotten in the genre for a while, but that's not saying much. A good amount of content and some new ideas round things out nicely, though.
MotoGP 21 continues Milestone's slow crawl of tweaks and improvements, which will be fine for most enthusiasts, but still falls short of being universally recommendable to a broader audience.