It's always a pleasure when the storyline is as intriguing as the gameplay. The Station is good at both in equal measure. The solutions to the sundry problems on The Station are just challenging enough—not too easy, not too hard.
With a great balance between playability, ominous ambiance, and well-designed VR elements like mobility and weaponry, The Wizards is an excellent model of the compelling and enjoyable things that can be done with VR. It is attractive and enticing without being too easy or too hard. Level designs are challenging but fair, although they may not feel that way at first exposure.
While notably short, 39 Days to Mars is a lot of fun, delivered in an attractive artistic design. It's really more puzzles than adventure, but the puzzles are satisfying to solve and never caused one of those "how was I supposed to know that??" moments.
Wreckfest offers the eRacer something not available anywhere else: the ability to race on the computer in cars and at tracks that are accessible to the common man. Don't let the 70's era rust buckets fool you, though - the driving and damage physics are quite good, the damage models are entertaining, and the racing is close and brutal. It's astonishingly fun!
Blind is basically a room escape game that does an excellent job of taking a fairly common type of game and making it extraordinarily uncommon. It uses an innovative simulation of blindness to add a large measure of personal discomfort and stress to truly make the player feel as if they MUST get out of that building, but doing so is going to be next to impossible with their unexpected and frightening affliction.
With an approachable learning curve and a forgiving flight model, Air Combat 7: Skies Unknown welcomes players new to the franchise as well as veterans of previous versions. Beautiful graphics and fast-paced action are the very hallmarks of an Air Combat and number 7 delivers plenty of both.
Even skippers used to playing the PC version might want to give the PS4 version a look. It has been built from the ground up in order to leverage the processing and graphics power of modern consoles, and far more content is available from the get-go. If you want to skip the process of upgrading your ships and waiting to unlock more of the fleet that the free-to-play version has, you can opt to just buy the entire fleet all at once for a fixed price.
If you can imagine Asteroids meets Frogger in Space, you have a fairly good idea of what to expect from LOST ORBIT: Terminal Velocity. The game play is entertaining and the difficulty levels ramp up at a reasonable slope. The storyline doesn't bring much to the table, but the game mechanics stand on their own just fine.
Well worth the time of any Tex Murphy fan. Even those that know nothing about the history of the protagonist will find something to like.
World of Warplanes is easy to learn but hard to master. It offers an easily accessible way to join in online dogfights, but survival is a matter of skill, practice, and experience. In its current state, it is very playable and provides a strong foundation for future development but may not have a lot of staying power due to limited strategic depth.
Simple does not always equate with easy. War, the Game has stripped away the deep complexity typical of the real-time strategy game and left the player with a simple-to-learn, hard-to-master global dominance game that allows the armchair general to concentrate far more on the actual strategic planning and implementation of battle than on the logistics that support them.
With a trippy art style reminiscent of the LSD-enhanced art of the 1960's and a unique musical sound, GNOG is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously and encourages you to just play with it, and maybe even solve a puzzle now and then.
Trails of Cold Steel is one of those games where you get out of it what you put into it. While it is playable for a rank newbie, there is far more depth available to the experienced player. There are some small rough edges, but it works very well overall.
With its excellent focus on online multiplayer supported with some innovative fair-play features and related social features, Gran Turismo Sport is a great choice for drivers focused on those aspects. For offline players and those that don't want to grind to gain access to an extensive collection of cars and tracks, though, there are better alternatives.
FORM was an enjoyable and mildly challenging romp through some beautifully crafted spaces populated with puzzles that achieved a nice balance between being interesting without being either too easy or frustratingly difficult. Sadly, I was ready for more than it had to give.
Kingdoms and Castles is entering into a competitive genre and may struggle to get noticed, but the ease of play and nice balance between simplicity and complexity makes it worth taking a look at. Just be sure to consider what you're going to do when the Vikings come calling.
High Hell is ample demonstration that good and simple game play still has a place in world of multi-gigabyte monsters with eight-figure (or higher) development and marketing budgets. It's perfect for those situations when you just want to sit down and shoot things for a few minutes without having to deal with even an iota of realism. After all, they're called "games" for a reason.
GUTS is gory, messy, bloody, violent, and... did I say "gory" yet?
Reign: Her Majesty is a simple game mechanically, but don't let that fool you. Your decisions are not always easy, and the consequences for bad decisions are often fatal. Tread lightly, My Queen, tread lightly indeed!
While selecting individual cases from the full game leaves the player with a disjointed and incomplete story, enough of the 1940's ambiance and the rough and tumble crime fighting of that era is included to offer up a compelling preview of what will hopefully become LA Noire 2: VR. There is some work to do on some of the mechanics, most notably the way in which weapons are handled, but this weakness is easily offset by the compelling, immersive world and some of the action sequences that occur in it.