Arizona Sunshine is a decent take on the zombie shooter, hardly revolutionary, but using its tech to good effect.
It's hard to fully recommend a game with inconsistent controls, but The Swindle is awfully close to being excellent. There are a huge number of enemies with different behaviors and the randomized level generator is more than happy to put multiple kinds together in ways that require different strategies to handle.
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.
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.
JumpJet Rex should be a resounding success. It's got all the elements there but they don't quite fit together right.
While not exactly a top-tier shooter/RPG hybrid, The Weaponographist is still enjoyable. The humor running throughout its dungeons made it fun to see what the next monster would be, and while it would have been nice to see more than the twenty regular enemy types and eight magical ones, that's because of the inventiveness in their abilities.
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.
[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.
The problem with reviving such an excellent series is that comparing it to past games is both completely fair and also a bad idea. It's easy to look at all the things Geometry Wars 3 leaves behind while neglecting that it's a still a fun, challenging shooter.
It would have been nice if Planet Crafter had gotten the AAA budget and polish, but the game as it exists nails all the important parts in ways that can make multi-hour gaming sessions fly on by in minutes. It's a dead cold rocky ball without a hint of life when you get there, but each new crafted item is another step closer to the terraformed paradise it can become.
Outcast - A New Beginning is an excellent sequel with a lot of great gameplay elements that go a long way to make up for its need for further polish. Bugs are common, from an outpost with the robots stuck in the floor to breakable helidium crystals floating several feet above the ground they should be poking out of, and the conversation trees are in desperate need of re-ordering. Despite this, though, it's almost impossible to resist seeing what the next villager is up to and their relation to the rest of the world, following the dialogue and fishing out quests as an excuse to see and do more. The world is also beautifully designed, with each village having its own architecture and style while the world map is covered in points of interest and different biomes, providing gorgeous views from just about any spot in the landscape. Combat is also great fun, especially when stumbling on a particularly effective gun combination or figuring out how the latest upgrade fits into the flow of the next hostile encounter. It took over twenty-four years for Cutter Slade to return to Adelpha, but the wait has paid off with an epic adventure on an alien world.
What makes While the Iron's Hot work is a combination of a pleasant series of tasks and quirky, entertaining characters in every new town and point of interest.
Tevi is an exceptionally strong metroidvania-RPG, with a detailed combat system and a large number of enemies with varying attack patterns to use it against in intricate levels filled with hidden goodies.
The ambition of the game design makes it easy to overlook Wildmender's technical flaws.
Disney Illusion Island is a great all-ages platform-adventure that works hard to appeal to players of any skill level.
Nova Lands isn't the deepest automation game around, but it's also not trying to be Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Project so doesn't need to be.
Up until the Dread Lords, Doomblade is easily one of the best metroidvanias I've played in a long time.
Lunark is a strong cinematic platformer, more than good enough to hang with the classics of its genre.
Once the controls are sorted out, Akka Arrh reveals itself as an absolutely fantastic shooter that plays like nothing else out there.
Sonic Frontiers is a hugely ambitious new direction for the series that comes close to hitting on all cylinders.