Prodeus travels down well-worn territory but does so covered in substantially more red (and blue) goo. Its mix of modern effects and retro visuals coalesce well and give it enough of its own identity that’s bolstered by its buckets of blood.
Metal: Hellsinger’s leanness isn’t wholly damning since it is an impeccably paced shooter that cuts everything down to its essentials and hones in on its musical gunplay, which is what matters.
The Last of Us has already endured for almost a decade and this thorough and loving restoration ensures that it will survive even longer.
Midnight Fight Express needed more focus to realize its potential. Constantly throwing out different hazards and enemy types at a dizzying pace doesn’t work if the foundation is rocky, and confusing variety for quality is one of its structural problems.
Destroy All Humans 2 - Reprobed is better than the first remake on paper, but Reprobed’s advancements are severely diminished because of its repetitive nature.
Much like its cursed chibi protagonist, Cursed to Golf is stuck in a sort of purgatory. Its unique mix of golf and roguelike mechanics, sublime soundtrack, and charming style ram up against its brutal difficulty and handful of questionable design decisions.
Rollerdrome doesn’t completely nail every trick, but it’s still a smooth shooter with more style than most other entries in the genre.
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.