James Cunningham
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a solid throwback FPS that makes up for being too generous with the resources by its excellent weapon, monster and level design.
The Knight Witch is excellent in a lot of ways despite its forbidding difficulty, the kind of game you'll be glad to have beaten even if the journey to completion is sometimes a bit much.
Even with the story not living up to previous entries, Yomawari: Lost in the Dark does a good job continuing the unique horror series.
The basics of TombStar are well done, with nicely-frantic action that keeps the bullets flowing at a good pace.
While I found my playtime kneecapped by the physical hardware, Loud has nice tunes playing in sync to plenty of fun note tracks. Astrid’s tale isn’t particularly deep (what happened to her band?), but she’s a likeable character who grows into her music over the three years of the story. The twelve tracks have plenty of replayability thanks to the multiple difficulty levels, and there’s even an extra-hard bonus tune awarded in the free-play mode after game completion. Loud is a capable little music game with a lot of heart, but be aware you need either small hands or maybe a Pro Controller to get the most from it.
Skeleton Crew is currently broken in a way that makes it hard to recommend.
There's a lot to love about The Gunk even if the core gameplay rarely rises above being pretty OK. It's a good adventure through a unique and pretty alien world, filled with character and life.
While Asteroids: Recharged is a decent update of the classic game and is a welcome return for the series, it's also not as effective at tugging on the nostalgia strings as the previous Recharged games.
Among Trees is a game that ends up being more pretty than good, but then again it's incredibly pretty so that's a high bar to clear.
Even with the annoyance of the narrator being so utterly clueless, there's no question that Maquette is effective at illustrating the pain of a good relationship gone bad.
Solas 128 is an intricate sprawling mass of puzzles, slowly building in intricacy from managing a single beam to untangling multiple colors and filters with only a handful of reflectors.
Hotshot Racing is a refreshing blast of retro-arcade racing action.
Hellbound may not be great but it's a short, sweet thrill ride while it lasts.
I'm hoping Panzer Paladin gets ironed out post-release because despite the above paragraph, the game is a huge amount of fun when it works.
Minecraft Dungeons is a capable all-ages dungeon crawl that, while doesn't use its license to anything like its full potential (see Dragon Quest Builders 2 for how to do it right), is still good fun once it gets moving.
Despite this, as mentioned right up front, I absolutely loved playing Indivisible. The combat being fairly easy just means the story has to carry the weight and the well-designed and animated cast is more than up to the job.
There was a huge expectation put on Cube World since its alpha, and while things have changed significantly since then the resulting game is almost exactly as promised: a big open adventure to explore at your leisure, with no pressure beyond what you bring to it.
Despite all that One Piece World Seeker can't do, it's still a solid B game.
You need to come up with a strategy on the fly and then stick with it, carrying it off to perfection to earn a decent score. That’s Scintillatron 4096’s biggest strength and harshest weakness, because there’s no recovering a level from a single mistake.
Black Bird is a wonderful, sad, strange, funny, cute and bizarre shooter that can't quite make its gameplay match the quality of everything else.