Mirror Forge will creep you out and make you uncomfortable with its superb Silent Hill inspired environments. The gameplay is unthreatening and the story is predictable, but there’s something about this indie horror game that’ll have you soaking in its grim and disgusting dimension-hopping universe.
The Saints have come marching in once again and while Santo Ileso offers a fun playground for these reborn renegades, it’s somewhat marred by a wealth of graphical issues, some underwhelming gunplay and a predictable narrative. Having said all that, you can customise your character into an orange, hurl yourself into traffic to make money and throw a self-propelled football at enemies to send them into space. It’s Saints Row as you remember, for better or worse, with a new coat of paint and refurbished for modern times.
Before We Leave is a comforting and accessible city building simulator that will entice and equally challenge you. The momentum occasionally stutters and micro-managing your ever-expanding cities can be a pain at times, but your Peeps will never cease to entice you back in. Helping this fledging society of tiny cute figures colonise islands and planets from neanderthal to fully-developed modern society is a fundamentally lovely experience. Saving them from space whales is certainly tough, but it’s also a wholesome, worthwhile endeavour.
Loopmancer has all the hallmarks for a phenomenal game, but is just let down by some mechanical issues and a middling story. It’s stellar visual design will reel you into its Cyberpunk world and its fast-paced combat will hook you into trying out even more outlandish varieties of weapons. Unlike most dystopian cities, the rot only occurs at the top and in patches, leaving a healthy and exciting core to explore for a few loops. Just don’t look at the faces, even Dredd couldn’t make them any more hideous.
SpellForce 3: Reforced is a valiant effort to mesh RTS and RPG into a functional package on console. In theory, it shouldn’t work at all, but for the most part it succeeds more than it fails. There’s plenty of issues, whether it be the shallowness of the tactics for success, the visual oddities that plague your journey or the overabundance of burdening dialogue to cut through, but the essence of this fantasy game is good enough to shine through.
Guild of Dungeoneering: Ultimate Edition is a remaster done right. All new animations, effects, bug fixes and nice surprises are stuffed in alongside all of the DLC content to make a complete package. The handcrafted art style is lovely, the card-based exploration and combat mostly satisfying and easy to get into. While it may lack a bit of depth to keep the dungeon raiding at full throttle, it has enough in the tank for a good few hours of monster slaying.
Edge of Eternity is a passion project with a hell of a lot of heart. The art direction is phenomenal, the combat satisfying and the content positively bursting with hours of enjoyment. Poor performance, less interesting side content and a mediocre story keep it from greatness, but the heart of this package deserves its praise and to be revered into the future.
A turn-based strategy game with remarkably solid, pretty and entertaining foundations, Reverie Knights Tactics is a good if unspectacular entry into the genre. Its gameplay and design could have benefitted from additional depth, but this compact package offers a pleasantly enjoyable romp with even more hope for future entries. Completely usurp other tactics games it likely won’t, but there’s enough here to have you entering your own reverie in this tale.
Combining the awkward unforgiving nature of space with a short and focused puzzle exploration game, Heavenly Bodies succeeds in what it sets out to achieve. It’ll frustrate you, impress you, drive you mad and blow you away with its mechanics and 70s aesthetic. You might not always have fun playing it, but this is a Zero-G trip worth embarking on, smashed controllers and all.
Boasting an incredibly unique, creative and gorgeous aesthetic with an exceptionally intriguing, well-told narrative, The Eternal Cylinder manages to still be rewarding even when its gameplay and mechanics become tedious and uninteresting. You’ll certainly be tired outrunning this circular vortex of death, but the tale is worth seeing through for the sights along the way.
If you have a squad of like-minded buddies ready to lose many an evening to slaying some zombie infested hordes, Back 4 Blood will provide you plenty to satisfy that urge. It doesn’t quite capture the greatness of its forebears and it stumbles over itself with its erratic difficulty curve and repetitive nature, but Back 4 Blood has immensely satisfying, if simplistic, gameplay mechanic. This is a veteran, war-torn survivor who’s maybe danced this bloody dance once too many times, but it knows damn well how to deliver that co-op fun.
Phoenix Point is a game I desperately wanted to love. It has exceptionally complex and deep mechanics, solid turn-based combat systems and fun global strategy gameplay, coupled with a decent story and some decent new additions to provide it its own identity. It is also, however, riddled with technical problems, inconsistent mechanics and frustrating difficulty spikes. Like a true phoenix, it can rise with glory when it wants to, I only wish it didn’t thud back down to ashes so frequently.
As a regular game, this title would likely have underwhelmed me somewhat with its basic gameplay and simplistic puzzle-exploration nature. The story is intriguing and hits its stride in the second half, but follows some usual tropes, doesn’t land all of its more complex themes and is relatively predictable. As a VR title though, the atmosphere of the forest, the foreboding sense of dread and the feeling of unease is ever present and amplified from the immersion of the headset and excellent audio design. It’s a great experience in VR and worth having a go with if you love all things horror or psychological thriller, just don’t expect to be scared to death or for anything deep gameplay-wise.
OTXO comes alive when you hit the Zen-like moment of blowing apart enemies, dodging out of fire, booting in doors and stressfully defeating that encroaching foe with your last round of the magazine. It suffers from some repetitive procedural design and relies a little too much on its slo-mo mechanic to get by, but its as close to a Crank movie you’re ever likely to get, and what a time that is.
The King’s Dilemma: Chronicles is a wonderfully adept video game adaption of the 2019 board game. Excellent writing, buttery presentation and with ethical dilemmas galore, it offers a huge amount of potential replayability. Aside from minor mechanical issues that don’t translate quite as smoothly and the fact this is for a niche audience, this is a realm well worth setting out to save or doom.
Wildboy Studios’ Norse-inspired rhythm combat RPG is captivating thanks to a bright art style juxtoposed against a dark, deep and loss-filled narrative. While fun, the combat, puzzling and exploration don’t quite reach the same levels, but have more than enough to be worthy of your time. No atonement required, Estra’s journey needs no redemption to be recommended.
Crisis Core -Final Fantasy 7- Reunion is a prime example of how remasters should be handled. A massive graphical overhaul, streamlined and satisfying gameplay mechanics and wonderfully remastered soundtrack outweigh the 2007 originals flaws in bloated side-content and repetitive structure. Square Enix have kept their honour and given Zack Fair the hero treatment he deserves.
Back 4 Blood Expansion 3: Rivers of Blood finally delivers some of the potential we’ve been waiting on. A much more appealing act of missions, wonderfully integrated new mode and some engaging new content means Turtle Rock Studios are, at long last, confidently realising Back 4 Blood’s ambition. Here’s to more Ridden-slaying in future.
Smashing your way through hordes of vampires in a style reminiscent of Gears of War and Godhand, Evil West is a limb-tearing, frenetically great time. It's a ridiculously over-the-top title with intentionally garish dialogue, balance issues and some questionable decision choices, but when you're mashing a 10-punch combo into a bloodsucker's deservingly battered face, you'll forget all about logic in favour of a rip-roaring good time.
Somerville is a bleak, threatening and intimidating world to survive as you struggle to save your family. Its mix of surprisingly in-depth gameplay puzzling, beautiful art direction and genuinely heartfelt narrative glimpses of hope help it overcome what could have been burgeoning control and technical issues. You’ll struggle with more than just the invaders on occasion, but you’ll persevere willingly to take in more of this utterly compelling world.