Weird, gory and surprisingly moving - Sony's long-delayed slasher tribute is a flawed but memorable step forwards for "interactive movies".
The makers of Amnesia ease back on the horror, ramp up the philosophy and strike a satisfying balance between narrative and gameplay.
A thrilling twist on Left 4 Dead's co-operative action, but minor balancing issues can make it hard to warm to at first.
A bombastically endearing tribute to classic action movie excess that is occasionally too chaotic for its own good.
Visual improvement is usually the only real reason to pick up remastered versions of old games, but Unfolded goes one better. The fact it looks better is merely an attractive bonus. Even if you've already played the original game through to completion, it's absolutely worth playing it again in this incarnation.
Lego Dimensions is an inventive, delightful and hilarious take on "toys to life", but deep pockets are needed to appreciate it fully.
A vast and frequently brilliant return to Bethesda's atomic sandbox, but constant technical issues are a frustration.
The gameplay is good, and very often great, but we knew that already. It's a known quantity. As a Batman story, this is something else. It dares to tackle not just the surface details of the character, but explores his psyche. It portrays him as, frankly, kind of a dick and also as a man of unflinching honour. The Batman of Arkham Knight is a complex, contradictory figure, a hero with real depth and dimension, and we get to wear the iconic cowl for one last mind-boggling night of mayhem. Miss out on that? You must be joking.
Lush appearance and polished mechanics are not to be sniffed at, of course, and even if the game's long term appeal never quite reaches the dizzying heights its first impressions hint at, the difference is barely worth quibbling over. It's no exaggeration to say that Ori and the Blind Forest is still arguably the best Microsoft console exclusive of the last six months.
All of which makes PlanetSide 2 a real outlier at a time when major console releases are either utterly broken or blandly efficient. This is a game with some fairly major problems, but the rewards are so unique, so thrilling and occasionally thought provoking that even dropped frames, obtuse direction and dumb players can't diminish it for long. This is a game that will not appeal to everyone. Many will fall by the wayside when it fails to play like a normal FPS in the long term. Others will drift away, wearied by the endless churn of battle. That's why the game's free-to-play status is a good thing - those players will have lost nothing for their trouble. For those who click with PlanetSide's cold relentless vision of mass warfare, it can easily become an ongoing obsession. The only way to find out is to sign up and see for yourself.
Basically, the game asks a lot of you, and demands that you pay close attention to every decision you make. While that makes for a steep learning curve, requiring deep thought is hardly the worst sin a strategy game can commit. Slyly funny, satisfyingly deep and yet slick and simple to play, Massive Chalice is a huge return to form for a studio that is overdue a comeback.
It may have its minor frustrations but there's nothing here that really spoils what is an otherwise delightful and endlessly surprising game. It won't be for everyone, especially those who are unwilling to meet the game halfway and learn through trial and error, but those who welcome its open-ended challenge will find that a long stretch inside proves surprisingly enjoyable.
It's just a shame that given the obvious talent and passion involved, it doesn't really have much of its own to add to the Metroidvania template. As charmed and delighted as I often was with its smartly paced escalation, its perpetually teasing construction, I kept waiting for some new element to appear, a eureka moment that either hadn't been thought of in 1986, or that could only be done today. It never quite happens. Axiom Verge seems content to be a homage, rather than a revival or reinvention. That's fine, since there's already plenty to justify your interest, but it feels like Happ has more to contribute than he's showing here.
A ridiculously generous and thoughtfully presented compilation packed with bona fide classics and obscure gems.
This lack of direction is an especially ironic failing for a character who was once defined by his single-minded forward momentum. The time is clearly long overdue for Sonic to take a well-earned rest, get his breath back and only return once Sega has worked out where he's supposed to be going. It pains me to say it, but Sonic Boom needs to be the last noise we hear from the blue hedgehog for a very long time.
Maybe we've simply done everything there is to do with Spider-Man in a video game and all that's left is diminishing returns. And that kills me. It really does. Even in the worst of recent Spidey games there was always that fragment - that little sputtering flame of childlike excitement - that could kick in once you swan-dived off a skyscraper, clad in iconic red and blue. It's gone. Sullied by lacklustre gameplay and trampled by technical shoddiness, this time Spidey hasn't been done in by the Sinister Six, but reduced to a Terrible Two.
If all you want is a way to run around and shoot things without troubling your wallet or imagination, that may be enough to justify the time it takes Warframe to download. It's hard, though, to shake the feeling that the only reason this game is free to play is that nobody would pay money for something so scrappy and generic.
It would have been nice to report that the underdog turns out to be a unstoppable champion, but that was never realistically on the cards. So instead we get this: a cheesy, silly, mindless romp in which hordes of identical bad guys get turned to sticky red paste under the furious gaze of your twitching gun barrel. It's certainly not a good game, but it is a game with zero irony.
Concursion is a little too shaggy, a little too loose in control, to reach that level. An interesting game, then, and sometimes a brilliant game, but one that demands a little too much patience and forgiveness to fully appreciate.
There's plenty to like in Firefall, but not much to love - and that's the passion it needs to evoke in order to get you spending on those Red Beans that will open up the game's more interesting tools and let you progress faster, both upwards through the levels and through the world itself.