This trilogy of somewhat forgotten 90’s platformers are certainly a bit hit and miss – outdated but still often effective humor, a unique but often somewhat clunky gameplay, with even some unexpected narratives and lots of voiceovers and cameos to boot.
Rooftops & Alleys: The Parkour Game is a simple, yet quite effective parkour title. With 6 open-ended maps to explore, do challenges on and play minigames with online folks with, the game’s intuitive yet challenging parkour and combo systems reward mechanical prowess and courage.
F1 25 is a quite small upgrade over F1 24, but the presence of Braking Point 3, content from the F1 movie and improved career options ensure more unique race experiences, especially for solo players who want to do a full immersion of the Formula 1 experience.
I’m torn on Knock on the Coffin Lid. When all elements align, it’s an audiovisually striking turn-based card game with an interesting lore, good player agency, and an addictive combat loop, one that’s easy to understand but hard to master. Yet, a series of difficulty spikes, an obtuse build system,m and a massive amount of repetition ensure that most of the hours spent in the game are wasted behind trial and error and replaying through many times seen before content, with even a handful design oddities that would need a quality-of-life patch or two.
A fun ride that I enjoyed from start to finish, with the end credits rolling before the game's limited scope could start hurting the experience. Fans of old-school GTA should keep an eye out for this one.
Despelote is one of the year’s most fascinating indie games, one I can recommend without much hesitation.
MotoGP 25 is the biggest update the series has seen in years, and it’s pretty much all for the better. Maybe it lacks a little bit of that extra coating that characterizes some of the finest 4-wheel racers on the market, but rest assured: if you want to race bikes on traditional circuits, MotoGP 25 is the place to be.
Monster Energy Supercross 25 makes quite the noticeable upgrade to this franchise, as the switch to Unreal Engine 5 gives us better looks, better physics, with even various AI and customization improvements that turn this year’s game the best one in the series yet. With the 2025 roster already in place and various promised new content updates throughout the year, AMA Supercross fans should have their hands full – albeit newcomers might still find this peculiar racing style and some of the jank a bit tough to swallow.
It is however a package that is nice for hardcore fans of the franchise, but also those who want to rediscover the most advanced classic Tomb Raider (IV, that is), the bizarre piece of gaming history that is Angel of Darkness… and also Tomb Raider V, I guess. Sometimes, even missable games are worth a solid remaster.
My advice is: come for the gorgeous psychedelic artstyle and stay for the second half of the game, even if it means muscling through the relatively stale early hours. It may not be the most satisfying metroidvania around, but it certainly is a unique experience that I recommend to fans of the genre.
Dreamcore nails most of its goals. It’s an audiovisually captivating journey through liminal spaces, a dream-like experience that masters the concept like few other videogames before. Personally, I absolutely can not wait to play the upcoming levels, because Dreamcore is already an amazing and unique ride. This is one dream I won’t immediately forget.
I ultimately have to wonder – with these flaws, will the playerbase stay big enough to give enough time for developers to fix what’s wrong, and perhaps make SYNDUALITY Echo of Ada truly one of the greats? As with a lot of game-as-a-service titles: time will tell.
Arm yourself with patience, however, as many game mechanics are a bit undercooked and unprecise, with a lot of bizarre level designs and features that didn’t quite receive the polish they needed, and that this remaster hardly really improved upon. As a quite minimal upgrade to a forgotten but solid game, clearly this one’s for the hardcore fans, who can jump back to the similarly flawed but enjoyable prequel trilogy’s beginnings.
Eventually, the game evolved to a point that I could say I was having a decent amount of fun. But unless you’re a hardcore idle game fan and need a fix, you can likely this one out, as the first 10-20 hours of this game are easily the least enjoyable part of an otherwise quite okay game.
If you’re familiar with the movies, you know that the whole point is not making any noise, and the nail-biting tension of having to open every door slowly, walking on sand where available or having to take detours because the most logical path would be too noisy are the pillars of the experience. Does it make for a compelling videogame? Despite a few shortcomings, I feel that it does, as the game’s excellent graphics and tense atmosphere put a nice little ribbon on the package. But this isn’t a game for everyone.
It lacks the depth or variety of most Monster Truck games on console, and in particular the lack of any race modes is a bit disappointing, but the focus on younger audiences and a forgiving difficulty should make for a decent Hot Wheels experience, for those that seek such a game. The lack of almost any multiplayer, aside from the 2-player local play is a big bummer for the longevity of the game, but if you want an enjoyable solo romp to run through, it’s a good time.
enjoyed the first videogame of the Unknown 9 universe, and I sure hope it won't be the last, as I wanna keep going back to this vast fictional world.
The addition of 2-player modes and various improvements make a lot of sense, and do improve the Aaero formula a good bunch, but at the end of the day it’s hardly a hugely transformative sequel. Still, I fail to see that as a devastating flaw. Aaero2 brings us more awesome tracks to ride rails and shoot alien creatures on to the beat of the rhythm. Sure, it could have been a slightly more ambitious sequel in terms of game mechanics, progression and variety. Yet, even so, Aaero2 is one of the most interesting music-based games in recent memory, one that will have my grinding rails while banging my head back and forth for quite some time.
At the end of the day, I had a fun time with Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports. Sure it is a bit janky, its progression for unlocking new content is odd, and the lack of online multiplayer is a bit of a stinger. Yet, its simple arcade recreations of popular sports brings me back the simple days of mascot sports games of old, and it brought me a good couple hours of Looney Tunes-themed fun with my partner as well.
With a great technical background, too, what's a bit lacking is the inventive in the single player campaign, with merely a largely repetitive sequence of events to beat with little reason or rhyme - one that even shows how little variety the game itself has, as of now, before all DLC or eventual sequels arrive. Personally, that's a prospect I really look forward to, because Monster Jam Showdown's base gameplay is really good, so I'd really love to see the format get expanded upon from here on.