Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Reviews
Simple, satisfying, vertical and easy to binge on, like a tube of Pringles. Hyakki Castle feels like a generic alternative. It'll fill the gap for a while, but once you pop, stopping might be easier than you'd hope.
You'll have an example off the top of your head, but I'm struggling to think of the last twin-stick shooter that put a big emphasis on downtime between blasting, with NPCs, a decent chunk of story, and an RPG-style upgradeable roster of characters. That's what Tower 57 rather modestly offers, all through very pleasing chunky 16-bit art.
With how difficult it is to both a) learn all the mechanics and b) execute actions with Slade's lumbering movement, it's tempting just to move on, and to leave Outcast in the past.
If you're in desperate need of a historical strategy romp, you could do a lot worse than Empire Divided, and it's the best piece of Rome DLC by quite a large margin, but barely a turn went by without me wishing I was bullying Elves or fighting the hordes of Chaos instead.
If you want a new Lego game to sit down and play with your kids, or indeed by yourself, then this is the one you've been waiting for since 2013.
For those first few hours, Battlefront 2 struck me with gorgeous moment after gorgeous moment that's made me reevaluate what's possible with 2017's technology. It's a shame that the fighting frequently gets bogged down by chokepoints, and any long-term appeal is undermined by a progression system that can't shake the pay to win shadow which continues to loom over the game.
The most bizarre combination of ambition and the complete lack of it in one game. Astonishing, but flat.
Need For Speed Payback is really very terrible indeed
Battlerite takes the best part out of MOBAs, making the joy of teamfights accessible to anyone who's only interested in that element of the genre.
In many ways, I feel the same way about Football Manager 2018 as I do about football in 2018. I love the sport, but I found so much of the talk around it and the personalities involved more than a little bit tiresome.
Already, New Mexico makes ATS significantly different – that much more varied, more of a place to explore, rather than just one to tick tourist traps off the list.
It's a game about raising your own level and mastering one of the finest combat systems ever put on a screen. It might be standing on the shoulders of Souls, but it's got its eyes on a very different destination.
Hand of Fate 2 wisely switches away from Hand Of Fate's purity, which saves it from repetition but discards its trump card in the process.
Given how bad it could have been – hell, was expected to be – it's quite the pleasant, sometimes harrowing, surprise.
Origins handles its creative inheritance more elegantly than some open worlders, not least because unlike, say, the first game's Altair, its protagonist actually feels like he is of this realm rather than merely in it. And if the levelling and to-do list grate, the series has never offered a society and a landscape so worthy of close attention.
In a week that has seen speculation about the future of this type of big budget singleplayer game, for all its flaws, this is a reminder of how powerful and vital they can be.
Engare is definitely too short – more levels would have been very welcome. And it's definitely very simple. It's testament to what a smart and interesting game it is that neither of these things put me off. In fact, it's a game that just kept putting a smile on my face as I solved each level.
If a slick, beautiful shooter is keeping you up at night for a month, isn't that sometimes enough?
Overgrowth feels like a mod created for a wacky physics sandbox where all the openness and experimentation has been pushed to the side, and everything else has been twisted around a forgettable, barely present story and a series of brief and ugly levels. I'm just glad that, at around two to three hours long, it's incredibly short.
This is a game that, despite its derivative nature, manages to delight in the details enough to make me remember why I loved the games that inspired it to begin with.