As a new interpretation of this almost decade-old formula, Sinner asks some great questions. When we strip away the exploration of the dungeon crawl and the tension of the storytelling, what's the core of Dark Souls? Risky, challenging, and rewarding encounters with larger than life baddies. Sinner may not be the final answer, unfortunately. It's too derivative, both in enemy and environment design. Sinner focused and simple, but over-complicates things with the sacrifice experiment. It's a step in a new and right direction, but it's only a half step at best.
Death's Gambit had such promise. At its core, it is the blueprint to properly take risks and make attempts to improve a game design that we all take for granted. But it's just surrounded with poor quality of life choices, while missing some things it should have absolutely nailed. Weird animations, strange pacing, counter-intuitive combat, and way too many bugs holds this game back from being something truly great.
All in all, Phantom Doctrine is good tactical action game with a great spy culture motif. It's perfect for people who like their spy stories grounded in reality, but also appreciate the subtle approach to world dominating super criminals introduced by modern Bond films like Spectre. CreativeForge succeeds at taking lessons from its previous game, Hard West, and updating the formula. Even if that formula is ultimately a less elegant, less original version of the most popular game in the genre.
Earthfall somewhat succeeds at it's core mission, if it's mission is to try to kickstart the multiplayer subgenre that Turtle Rock started a decade ago. It's biggest failure is convincing people that it is a better alternative to Left 4 Dead 2, which is still very available on limited platforms. There's also Call of Duty's Zombies/Invasion side modes, which are ubiquitous. Not to mention Vermintide, which is a fresh look at the genre. You will absolutely have fun liberating Earth from aliens with a group of your friends – friends make even the most rote experience interesting. But outside of a few sessions with the group, you'll all find something better to do.
At the end of the day, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is a cautionary tale. Jokes are not funny just because you say them. Nor are they funny just because they raised over $450K. But being not funny isn't a cardinal offense for a video game. Being dull and soulless mechanically is.
Pixeljunk Monsters 2 does the original great justice by lifting the core experience and spreading it across a big, bright, three-dimensional playing field. But if feels like a typical tower defense game from the 2007-08 boom.