James Cunningham
Lichdom: Battlemage is a big, complicated, awesome beast of an FPS. When you've got a system down and are tearing through enemies you feel like magic incarnate, wielding the secrets of the universe to eviscerate all in your path.
[I]f all you need is an excellent golfing engine to use on a functionally-infinite number of courses then The Golf Club is unbeatable.
Lovely Planet looks great on paper. Flat-shaded polygons, whimsical level structure, dozens and dozens of challenging little levels and a fun sountrack should have made for a great round of enjoyably strange FPS action.
The important thing is that what's available now is really good, utilizing a fighting engine that rewards creativity in using its moves and set in a dungeon loaded with replayability. The art nouveau style is more apparent in the 2D character portraits than the polygonal graphics but still give the game a unique tone, like playing a Grateful Dead album cover.
What Monochroma gets right, however, is tone and gameplay. The puzzle platforming is fun to solve once you get the feel for character movement, there's a lot of variety in puzzle design, and some very clever level layout ties everything together.
Life Goes On could use a last pass in a aspects of its controls, but the puzzle design is what makes the game work so well. Spiked conveyor belts carry bodies to pressure switches, but only if you can figure out how to turn off the flamethrowers to avoid incineration.
It's hard to wholeheartedly recommend Fract OSC, because while technically it does everything well, something in it doesn't quite gel in the way one would hope. It's a beautiful game with a unique art style, a nicely intricate world to explore, and some good puzzles to solve, but somehow it also ends up being a bit aimless and sterile.
Don't Starve is a fantastic, huge, deadly ball of entertainingly gothic survival. It requires a self-motivated player to get the most from it, but once you start to learn its systems, each game lasts a bit longer than the previous one, and the ability to experience more of the world reveals more secrets and avenues of exploration.
Making it a bit easier on the gaming budget, Flower is also cross-buy, so if you've already got it on PS3 or Vita, then the PS4 version is free. There's no gameplay updates, no level tweaks or new areas, but it runs at a better framerate and the 1080p is noticeably sharper than the original if you put them side-by-side.
Super Motherload is just about long enough for what it is, wrapping up before getting tedious while still providing plenty of gem and mineral harvesting action. There's no real reason for it to be on PS4 versus any other system, of course, but that doesn't prevent it from being a fun bit of digging with an excellent soundtrack.
Deadfall Adventures isn't actually a terrible game. The dialogue is dumb, AI companions have an unnerving tendency to teleport behind you, it's far glitchier than it should be, but somehow it's also not unlikeable.
Rogue Legacy is just about as close to perfect as a randomized action platformer could hope to be. The constantly changing challenge, and character to face it with, make every game feel different.