Even with its many imperfections, SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated ultimately succeeds as an attempt to spruce up a 17-year old game. It doesn't stand alongside the 3D platforming greats, but it's a fantastic, humour-filled tribute to a beloved show. People less familiar with the yellow sea sponge's exploits will find it harder to overlook the creaky, PlayStation 2-era quirks. It looks better, but that doesn't mean it plays better than it did 17 years ago.
Project Warlock wears its 90s first-person shooter influence on its sleeve. It's fast, violent and perfectly paced—a must play, whether you harbour fond memories of its inspiration or not. Besides some minor setbacks caused by level design quirks, Project Warlock was pure, unadulterated fun from start to finish.
Atomicrops is frenetic, challenging and addicting in the way that all the best roguelike/lites are, with a silly streak that helps give the title its own identity. A lack of content does harm the game's longevity.
In the gameplay department, Cloudpunk simulates the boredom of a minimum wage job a little too well. Looking back, I'm happy to have played Cloudpunk, but I never want to sit through it again.
With a simple but engaging upgrade system; enough weapons and gadgets to make James Bond blush; and a great parrying mechanic that brings an unexpected rhythmic element to combat, this is one title that warrants a purchase even without any fancy VR setup. Repetition with enemy variety and level structure may mar the experience for some players, but it's easy to overlook these faults when the core game has so much to offer.
A would-be bland, but harmless kids' platformer that, due to insulting levels of gameplay padding, crosses over into dreadful territory. Truly, it's hard to imagine anyone enjoying this tedious, personality-devoid bore of a game.
There's nothing novel with this release; much like the droning ten-note melody that punctuates the menus and all too much of the gameplay, it's repetitious and bland. Memories of Mars asks for too much player commitment and offers too little in return. Whatever this game does well is done better elsewhere.
Dezatopia is a spectacle that gets more impressive the better it's played. With the most satisfying-to-use weapons this side of DOOM and a seemingly endless variety of enemies to use them on, there aren't many stronger cases to be made for the return of the 2D scrolling shooter.
Ego Protocol: Remastered is a tile-sliding Lemmings-like that offers about as much excitement as a geriatric knitting club. Outside of some temperamental controls and poor use of its sci-fi theme however, there's not much to highlight as a real issue. It's not offensive enough to incite mass riots but it still feels like a chore every step of the way.
An improvement on its predecessors in just about every conceivable way. Zombie Army 4: Dead War offers one of the 'gamiest', most carefree and satisfying shooting experiences of recent years. Technical bugs and a lacklustre horde mode prevent this from reaching its full potential, but it's just so hard to stay mad at a game that's this much fun.