While Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness sports an excellent art direction and adapts the early part of the series' story quite well, it unfortunately fails to provide an enjoyable gameplay experience.
Splatoon 3 is a well-crafted game that provides a highly enjoyable experience for both fans and newcomers to the franchise. While the campaign isn’t long at about 8-10 hours, it still sports a good amount of varied content with a multiplayer mode that’ll keep you engaged for hours on end.
Negatives aside, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is a wonderful remaster with great visuals and aesthetics, smooth gameplay, and tons of content that JoJo fans will especially appreciate. And while the game is mainly tailored toward series fans, I believe it still offers an experience most fighting game fans will enjoy as long as they don’t play online or expect any cohesive narrative or story mode based on the franchise.
Overall, Saints Row consist of both good and bad parts, but the bad parts leave more of an impression on the player. It's also a shame that while there is some genuine fun to be had with the game, as some effort was clearly put in trying to imitate many aspects of the original series, it still doesn't live up to even the worst of what the series had to offer.
Soul Hackers 2 takes inspiration from both the Persona and the mainline Shin Megami Tensei series while including new things into the mix to varying degrees of success. As a result, it is best to not compare it to any other title in the franchise.
All in all, Midnight Fight Express is a nice adrenaline-fuelled ride that offers players simple but challenging gameplay, great backgrounds, and more. While it has a few gameplay issues and isn't too long to beat at about 8 hours, the game still provides a great experience beat 'em up fans will especially enjoy.
Performance-wise, the game runs smoothly on PS5. The graphics are crisp, and I didn't encounter gameplay issues or frame rate dips. Overall, Rollerdrome is a well-rounded, incredibly fun, and immensely challenging but rewarding game. While the gameplay relies on being grindy and some of the narrative elements fall short, it still offers a highly enjoyable experience, especially for fans of action games.
All in all, despite some of its flaws, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a highly unique, incredibly entertaining JRPG that provides players with hours of enjoyable content, from its engaging story and endearing characters to its fun, in-depth gameplay mechanics.
While Lost Epic sports nice visuals, a great soundtrack and engaging, challenging gameplay, it’s also incredibly tedious to progress with many of its mechanics left unexplained, and a story that is incredibly dull and forgettable.
Overall, Stray surprised me in how well it wears its features and themes on its sleeve and how well crafted said features are. It's a game created for cat lovers by cat lovers, but with features and mechanics everyone can enjoy irrespective of age or pet preference. It's just too bad that the journey you'll go on, while memorable, is incredibly short, at only about eight hours long.
While feeling a tad bare bones, DNF Duel still manages to be a highly entertaining 2D fighting game among many coming out this year.
Despite having dull gameplay mechanics, As Dusk Falls is a thrilling narrative drama with an endearing cast.
Overall, AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative is a superior game compared to its predecessor in almost every aspect. While some of the puzzle segments are a bit long-winded and can be quite complicated, the experiences they provide alone are incredibly worth it, and the characters make the game so fun to play. Additionally, as the game has different routes, some mysteries and twists are intense and can be incredibly unexpected. As a result, I can't help but recommend the game to anyone looking for a refreshing murder mystery game that will both challenge and shock them, and to visual novel fans in general especially as the game can be experienced by new and returning players.
All in all, I believe Supermassive Games did a great job with The Quarry. While it doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay, the story and characters are by far the best it's been in some of the developer's recent titles and provide an experience that can even rival the spiritual predecessor, Until Dawn.
All in all, Paradise Killer offers a highly unique experience with interesting characters and a heavily detailed mystery to follow. However, its needlessly convoluted story and writing may deter some players from diving in.
All in all, Martha is Dead, despite struggling to hold my attention at times, is a well crafted game, with incredibly detailed visuals and models, an interesting cast of characters, and an unsettling but highly intriguing story to tell. If you're a fan of psychological thrillers and horrors, then Martha is Dead will undoubtedly be your cup of tea.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed still provides a highly entertaining experience despite its few issues, and the Switch port does a great job of bringing the stellar title to newer audiences.
Death Stranding: Director's Cut provides the best Strand experience without changing too much. This version offers new content and features making an overall good experience even better.
Persona 4 Arena Ultimax's modern port is the definitive version of the game as it provides a good amount of quality content Die-hard Persona fans and fighting game fans will undoubtedly enjoy.
All in all, while Babylon's Fall had several good ideas and had a lot of potential, it shot itself in the foot with its intrusive live service model and its painfully obvious lack of polish, making it that much harder to recommend to anyone, especially at the ludicrous price of $60.