Journey To The Savage Planet is a short, sweet and near perfectly crafted puzzle platformer with a refreshing and satisfying take on co-op progression. Those who love to explore, climb into, under and on top of everything to find hidden areas in the games they play are in for a treat with this one.
Ultimately, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 is an entertaining, albeit often simple, game full of sporting events that'll get friends and family set for some multiplayer fun. It's not as comprehensive as it perhaps could be in the way it allows players to set up their multiplayer sessions, but the variety and charm when it comes to the way everything is presented helps lift the whole package up.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece. No other game has ever tried and succeeded to capture a sense of a time and place long gone while also blending social commentary so well. The addition of a multiplayer mode that's a real step up from Rockstar's last effort makes Red Dead Redemption 2 unmissable on PC.
Studio ZA/UM's first foray into video games is a fantastically adult piece that takes the established and perhaps tired tropes of moral choice and player agency in RPGs and turns them on their heads, twists them into unexpected new shapes, surprising and delighting as it does. Its mixture of melancholy, mystery, fantastical mundanity and internalised musing make for a unique and thought provoking experience.
Borderlands 3 is a safe step forward for the franchise, but rough optimization, a leaning toward old jokes and a pair of underwhelming antagonists take some of the shine from this otherwise thoroughly enjoyable and beautifully rendered sequel.
RAD's mix of randomized abilities, enemy variation and busy landscapes make for a middling rogue-like. These elements combined with difficulty that's too often mitigated with ranged attacks keep RAD from being truly radical, but there's definitely fun to be had.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a masterwork in the strategy RPG genre. Everything about it is honed, polished and customizable in such a way that series veterans and new players alike can jump in and find a staggering amount of fun, challenge and charm.
Beyond Two Souls is a mixed game, with many elements of the story amounting to binary choices, some aspects of the narrative being poorly fleshed out and gameplay regularly amounting to choosing whether to be terrible or not. At the same time though, there are enough satisfying moments that provoke empathy for Paige's character and moral quandary to intrigue and entertain those drawn to coming of age stories and tales of the supernatural.
Earth Defense Force 5 doesn't do much to get away from the series standards of campy story telling and underwhelming graphics, but does improve upon the series' unique appeal by reducing grind, increasing enemy variety and giving soldiers some new tricks to get around the battlefield. There's nothing quite like EDF and this is the definitive entry in the series.
Death's Gambit takes a slightly less punishing approach to progress than other games in it's sub-genre and is all the better for it. While the vast majority of world building and gameplay concepts are a loving pastiche of Dark Souls, Death's Gambit's balanced challenge, sense of humour and unique visuals allow it to stand on it's own feet and earn a rightful place in the game collections of those souls who are drawn to the fire of the first flame and others who simply enjoy a challenging adventure, laden with mystery.
Persona Q2's gameplay is a clever offshoot from Persona 5's highly refined battle system and is a consistently fun challenge. It's story isn't quite the serious social commentary of it's console sibling, but the fun and fan service on offer is fantastic.
Green Planet provides an end game and sense of conclusion to Surviving Mars, offering up enough challenge and new content to keep those already interested on the hook and perhaps even provoke some fence sitters to reach into their pockets and pay up for a ticket to a potential future.
Project Laika's low price point is just about low enough to justify a DLC package with such little impact on gameplay. If you're the sort to coo over digital animals then it's going to hit the spot, but it's not likely to justify it's cost to the rest.
Team Sonic Racing is, above all else, a fun kart racing game that stumbles a little with difficulty spikes in single player and slow down in split screen multiplayer, Those looking for a challenging but welcoming racing game to play with friends and family are likely to get exactly what they're looking for.
Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey has all the hallmarks of a well acted and mysterious adventure game but is held back terribly by a lack of polished design and a glut of technical shortcomings. Giving no hint of what can be interacted with until you've moved your painfully slow avatar close by leads to a lot of slow wandering around, while attempts at combat gameplay fall flat and take time and momentum from the building narrative.
Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain sacrifices the franchise standards of city scale battlefields and hundreds of enemies for the sake of flashier graphics, but in doing so loses some of the unique charm the series offers. The grind required to unlock exciting weapons undermines the fun potential, unless you're looking to spend a lot of time with the game.
Over a decade after their first releases, the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy collates and returns the courtroom sleuth to the limelight in style. As funny and gripping as it ever was, fans of crime dramas as well as language and logic puzzles are going to love Wright's redux.
Nintendo's trademark charm runs through the core of Yoshi's Crafted World and as a result it shines brightly. Perfectly quaint visuals abound as much as interesting level designs and puzzles that test a player's ability to use Yoshi's abilities to their fullest.
Anthem's technical shortcomings, dull combat and pretty but messy environments combine poorly with a narrative that uses pointless binary conversation choices, a thoroughly typical, snarky protagonist and worn out tropes to fuel it's characterization and plot. These elements come together to make Anthem a chore of a game that's highly unlikely to satisfy anyone but the most desperate groups of loot motivated gamers in it's current state.
Genesis Alpha One's genre mixing works very well indeed, though it isn't without rough edges here and there. It's unusual combination of first person shooter and roguelike/management game mechanics create a unique challenge set in an inhospitable, brutal sci-fi universe.