There’s a sense of wonder and silliness that not many other games share, and it’s enough to suck you in and keep you entertained right up to the end of the closing credits.
If you go in expecting a terrible game – say, one of the worst games of the year – then you may be pleasantly surprised. For all its flaws, it’s actually kind of fun.
As someone who misses the old Sony and the way they’d try weird things (and not just go for big and cinematic with every one of their games), it feels weird to criticize them for a game where they try something different. But the problem is that God of War: Sons of Sparta isn’t particularly fun. It’s a perfectly adequate metroidvania at a time when there are plenty of very good metroidvanias that are more worth your time, so unless you desperately want a Kratos: The Very Early Years game you can safely skip this one.
As a single-player game, it’s solid enough, but add in some friends and multiplayer, and you’ve got the makings of a party classic.
Of Ash and Steel brings to mind games like Risen or Gothic – you know, janky RPGs that were objectively kind of terrible but that sort of had their own charm, even if you had to look hard to see it.
If I managed to enjoy Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator despite the stressfulness, that means everyone else should absolutely love it. It’s completely nuts, but it’s got enough imagination that if you like betting it all on the role of a die, you’re guaranteed to get addicted to it.
As someone approaching Painkiller with a fresh set of eyes and no preconceived ideas of what it should be, I can’t say that I found it that much better. I mean, I didn’t loathe it, but I certainly can’t recommend it to anyone, either.
Beneath is pretty terrible.
It’s hard to say that The Outer Worlds 2 is a bad game, or one that doesn’t offer players plenty to do. It’s undeniably a well-made game. But that doesn’t make it particularly compelling.
The problem is that Saborus is a stealth puzzle-platformer where the stealth sections aren’t that interesting, the puzzles aren’t difficult, and the platforming is a mess.
The competition today is a lot more fierce than it was a decade ago – and yet, even with that tougher playing field, Yooka-Replaylee still manages to stand out as being one of the better 3D platformers you’re likely to come across.
Sometimes, all you want is a game that provides a quick blast of action, and Clawpunk delivers that in spades. If you just want to cause mayhem and blast away enemies for a few hours, there are worse ways to pass the time than with this game.
In any other year it would stand head and shoulders above the competition. But in a year like this, where we can compare and contrast CrossWorlds with Mario Kart World so easily, its faults seem a lot more glaring. As it stands, it’s a very solid kart racer that has the misfortune of being compared to one that’s just more enjoyable.
It’s absurdly easy to pick up, and it only sucks you in more and more as you see your accumulated wealth get bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s not likely to replace Balatro (or whatever your deckbuilder of choice may be), but if you want something that gives you a quick hit of adrenaline without being too demanding, you should probably check it out.
Hitman: Absolution represents the series’ awkward, stumbling growth period. Play it you want to see where some of the ideas in the World of Assassination trilogy got their start, but don’t expect the game to reach anywhere near the same heights.
If you have a Smash Bros. hole in your life and can’t wait for SSB Ultimate’s official successor, you should definitely give Kirby Air Riders. You may just love what you discover.
SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide is kind of like comfort food for 3D platforming fans. Even if you aren’t a fan of the TV series, it still delivers the kind of action you want with a minimum of fuss, and it’s not like you need to know the show very well to keep up with what’s going on. It wraps all that up in a solidly competent package, which means that if you’re a fan of the genre, you could do a lot worse than picking this up.
I wish I could say that everyone wins in the end when playing Jackbox Party Pack 11…but they really don’t. It’s certainly a step up from last year’s Naughty Pack, but the games on offer here are too inconsistent to be worth your while. As always, a good group of friends can always probably make anything fun, but it’ll take a lot more effort here than you’d like.
No matter how cute and whimsical Dog Witch may be, you still need to play it in the end – and that’s where it doesn’t quite measure up, in no small part because the field is so incredibly crowded right now. Still, it gets all kinds of bonus points for effort, and if you want a bit of adorableness injected into your roguelike deckbuilders, you’ll get that in spades here.
You’d have hoped that after ten years trying to recapture the brilliance of Burnout, Three Fields Entertainment would be further along than this. Wreckreation is better than anything they’ve done so far, true, but it’s still very far from the kind of racing game that anyone will want to play.