Cult of the Lamb is a twisted and successful balancing act. Even though its combat lacks some nuance, the game balances its roguelite dungeon crawler and management sim halves quite well.
Cats are not generally known for their heartwarming personalities, but that’s exactly what makes Stray so poignant.
Severed Steel is able to carve its own path, too, using these focused and thorough systems to create a first-person shooter that’s as fast as it is fulfilling.
Bright Memory: Infinite is, ultimately, a demo, one with slick gunplay that deserves to grow into something more than a teaser with a painfully ironic subtitle.
While it is an extra serving of Cuphead that tastes quite familiar, there’s still no other game like it that has the same amount of flair, detailed 2D animation, and difficult bosses designed to make players sweat, all of which are at or around their best here.
It still has an enjoyable enough narrative with likable characters and a decent mystery, but the ways in which it tells that tale are limited by the restrictive, overly familiar choice systems and inconsistent animation.
TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge still hits that slightly lowered target quite well because it is able to effectively channel its nostalgia and become more than a shallow remix that solely leans on fan service. It is the antithesis of 2009’s oft-forgotten TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled, a game that just slapped new paint on the old Party Wagon and failed to fix its rusted engine.
Sniper Elite 5 already aims low by being only a small improvement upon its underwhelming predecessor, but it still manages to fall short of its target.
With such a lackluster suite of systems, samey objectives, awful single-player missions, and underwhelming demon gameplay, Evil Dead: The Game is unlikely to live long enough to get a vacation down to Jacksonville and more likely to be dead by daylight.
Trek to Yomi’s gameplay woes — as well as the stunning lack of a chapter select feature — drag the experience down and mean that its swordplay is not nearly as sharp as its presentation.
Through its thoroughly engaging writing and cutting commentary, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is able to make fun of exactly what it is and get away with it, allowing the game to have its cake and eat it, too.
Ghostwire: Tokyo isn't Bethesda Softworks' best first-person shooter, but it still earns its spot within that publisher's peerless shooter pantheon through the sheer ingenuity found in its mechanics and world.
Dawn of Ragnarök could have righted some of Valhalla’s wrongs, but it mostly inherits and compounds them. The more imaginative setting is betrayed by its mundane and uninspired open-world trappings that focus almost exclusively on the quantity of trivial and all too familiar activities at the expense of discovery.
Project Hel is short, sweet, and satisfying. The expansion isn't just a rehash of the base campaign but a piece of DLC that intuitively builds on it with a more precise and capable character.
Shadow Warrior 3 did take the series back to basics, but a Wang this basic is not always as satisfying as it should be, especially when it isn’t hard enough.
Forbidden West outmatches its predecessor in both quality and scope, elevating itself not only over said predecessor, but also over many of its contemporaries at the same time.
Sifu knocks its players down with little remorse but also makes getting back up and overcoming obstacles immensely rewarding.
Memorable levels, a fascinating art style, a heavy customization system, and a staggering amount of replayability fortify those pristine mechanics and show that OlliOlli World is thorough and consistent with its quality, earning it its place within Gnarvana among the Skate Godz.
Dying Light 2 doesn’t reach its full potential and is partially betrayed by Techland’s inability to ship a game that isn’t riddled with bugs but still manages to fulfill enough of the fantasy associated with being a free-runner during the apocalypse.
Solar Ash is a little more ambitious than Hyper Light Drifter with its jump to 3D, but it has traded ambition for quality. The gameplay puts up the impression that it wants to be a kinetic platformer, yet it’s a shallow imitation of one that repeats a depressing number of times before it hits credits. Like a solar flare, Solar Ash hits players with a sharp burst of energy as it opens with some promising, speedy mechanics. But that energy quickly dissipates as it loses momentum right after its initial explosion as it trudges from level to level and never picks back up.