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After a dozen or so hours in Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, I can safely say that it's the real McCoy. This is not a watered-down port to give Microsoft an easy first-party Xbox Game Pass release. It's the real deal and as feature complete as the PC edition, which is quite an accomplishment. A myriad of quality-of-life improvements makes the original game, while still a classic, very much redundant. The only reason to keep hold of the original is to preserve those big beautiful boxes PC games used to ship in. We're in a new age now, and Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is the perfect example of taking an ancient game and giving it just enough love to make it feel almost new, something that many other remasters and re-releases so often miss the mark on.
Dead Space Remake is damn good fun, with interesting ideas and appreciation of the greater franchise that most remakes lack. This isn’t some studio trying to massively reinvent an IP, but working to fit the best pieces together so it can grow anew. It's a fitting tribute to Visceral's best days - maybe not a perfect rendition, but few cover songs ever are.
Fire Emblem Engage is mostly a streamlined experience that gives you a taste of what the series has to offer, but doesn’t showcase its true potential as a strategy game. It lacks genuine innovation, and doesn’t quite meet the standards set by previous entries or establish a challenging and balanced system that reflects Fire Emblem's core identity.
GRID Legends is a great game. GRID Legends for Meta Quest is not. I'm impressed that Codemasters managed to cram a full console racing game into a VR headset, but the compromises required to do so are too many. For racing fans waiting for a decent native Quest racer, this unfortunately isn't it.
Toy Soldiers HD is a fantastic tower defense game that fans of the genre should definitely play. It's easy to learn, hard to master, and there's a ton of replayability with the lengthy campaign, the extra levels, collectibles, achievements, and survival modes, which I've spent a lot of time playing. The controls for vehicles can be a bit stiff and the lack of co-op multiplayer is a big disappointment, but given how few decent tower-defense games there are on console, it's easy to overlook the very few shortcomings Toy Soldiers HD brings to the table. Now, when are we getting Toy Soldiers Cold War?
Overall, this DLC takes everything that made the base game of Vampire Survivors such a surprise success story and gives you more of the same, but with a more involved map and a theme to bring the whole thing together. If you're one of the many who has been enthralled with the allure of Vampire Survivors, you're going to appreciate the additional content that poncle has thrown in here, and with a price point set at less than $2.00, there's very little reason for any fan to stay away.
If you're a PS Plus Premium subscriber, there's no question that you should download and play Ridge Racer 2. It's simple, fast, and fun, and in the current climate of live services and stupid dancing emotes, there's no racing game quite like it anymore. For a quick nostalgia fix it's highly recommended, and who knows, maybe it's just a toe in the water for Bandai Namco to gauge interest for a potential Ridge Racer revival? Heck, there's the next game's title right there: Ridge Racer Revival. Fingers crossed...
As far as simulators go, it's not the worst. To the game's credit, it does offer the dull, mundane day-to-day routine that a lot of actual police officers call a career. If you want to spend hours writing tickets and slowly progressing in a meaningless career in law enforcement, you can do it here without the risk of being vilified on social media. But it could have been so much more had the systems in play been deeper and more robust, not to mention, fun. Instead, Police Simulator: Patrol Officers is a bit of a buggy mess that feels half-baked and not ready for patrol just yet. Back to the academy with this one.
It’s a little disappointing, and really quite surprising, that River City Girls 2 shows very little impetus to improve on its promising predecessor. The girls have still definitely ‘got it,’ and still make this colourful and characterful journey worth it through some rough patches, but there’s a little too much reliance on the assets of the original to make it feel worth the rather steep asking price. The original game made a fan of me, while the sequel just about manages to sustain my loyalty, though that will definitely be affected by how WayForward deal with its woeful frame rate issue in the coming weeks.
In a world filled to the brim with terrible Warhammer 40K games, the last thing we need is terrible DLC that diminishes the handful of decent titles set in this marvelous universe. Normally, I wouldn’t mind it too much, but the game already had a bad – and frankly, predatory – DLC in the form of the Castellan Champion Upgrade Pack. Duty Eternal certainly brings a lot more to the table, which only serves to highlight how egregiously overpriced the first DLC is, but it’s only a small step in the right direction. If Complex Games really wants players to keep coming back to Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, they need to do a lot better than Duty Eternal. This one feels more like Doody Eternal.
Beyond that though, the only thing Blacktail has against it is that it calls for patient, curious players. If you’re the sort who insists on only following a dotted line and ignoring everything off to the sides, you’ll miss out on some of the best moments in Blacktail, like saving a mushroom spymaster’s best agent, or spelunking through gorgeously lit caverns. Blacktail is a game to be savored, peeling away its world a little more at a time. If you meet it halfway, you’ll be left with a breath of fresh air rarely seen in the industry these days: a well paced game that only tries to be what it wants to be and never compromises that vision. A beautiful, touching piece of work that’s bound to stick with you long after you finish it, Blacktail is a world worth getting lost in.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Midnight Suns. It's Marvel meets XCOM meets Fire Emblem, which isn't something I knew I wanted, but now I have it, I want the hell out of it. Firaxis deserve a lot of respect for taking risks and trying something new, especially with such a high-profile property. The dialogue and a few technical hiccups mean Midnight Suns doesn't quite stick the landing, but the rock-solid core gameplay and fun character moments more than makeup for it.
A bland sad protagonist with all the charisma of a rock with a frowny face, a mystery box-style narrative that only ends with more mystery boxes, a combat system that wants to be multiple entirely different games. The Callisto Protocol might function, and it’ll certainly have its launch issues patched out in due time, but in no way can I recommend it to anyone but the most morbidly curious. Everything was stacked in this game’s favor, and it still wasn’t enough. We didn’t need Dead Space 2.0 - we just needed a cohesive, focused game. Instead, it's an oddly soulless concoction of unfocused ambitions, poor planning, and inconceivably amateurish design. Whether you're winning or losing, Callisto Protocol never feels right.
Once you get down into the dilapidated yet impressive levels of the Hive and start swinging, Darktide is as great a swarm shooter experience as any, but it needs to improve much of the surrounding infrastructure to make that core combat experience feel rewarding and meaningful. Who knows? I may even come back in a year to re-review the game (which is something that should generally happen with more game reviews), but in the meantime it’s a simmering cauldron of potential that still feels a little raw.
Ultimately, these games were the result of Game Freak and Nintendo taking a risk and giving the fans something they've been begging for over a long while. It tries to mix Legends: Arceus with the main series, and it half-succeeds. Some things brought innovative and fun changes, while we learned others were better off they way they were before. If Pokémon fans can look past the obvious flaws and limitations, there's so much to appreciate here.
For all its superficial swagger, it'd be remiss to call Evil West a case of style over substance, because there's a deceptive amount of substance to its combat system and the vibrant world its set in–just the amount you'd want in such a game. It's a good game for a good while, before its relentless pace runs of steam in the final third when repetitive, tiresome battles highlight the limitations of a mostly solid combat system. With the ability to play the entirety of the campaign in co-op however (with appropriately scaled enemies), I wonder whether spreading the relentless heat between two players could actually be the best way to play Evil West, and I plan on finding out soon.
Jurassic World Aftermath's VR heritage looms large in this Switch port. Sections that no doubt feel thrilling in the confined space of a VR headset feel repetitive and dull on a flat screen. As a result, Jurassic World Aftermath feels like a walking-sim with some survival horror sections. The lack of enemy variety, the overly simplistic puzzles, and some frustrating stealth sections prevent Aftermath from staking its claim as the apex predator of its genre.
Pentiment is a shining example of committing fully to an idea without worrying about where it fits in today's gaming market. The result? One of the best games of the year, narrative and otherwise.
It was a bold move for the devs to try and move this traditionally 2D style of game into this hybrid 3D space, but I can’t help but feel that Jumpship would have been better off leaving it in 2D, because that extra dimension ends up just weighing the game down. It’s weirdly apt that right at the end of the game, when I’d got two different endings but was trying to unlock what I’d imagine was the ‘good’ ending, I experienced a massive bug that for a moment seemed like a creative decision, as I fell through the world, was reunited with my family on a grey platform in some empty void, then jumped off again to go into an infinite fall. In the end, Somerville’s admirable artistic vision and technical issues merged into one, poignantly showing that these two aspects of a game can’t ultimately be separated.
Stay away from Serious Fun Football. Seriously, it’s not fun, and it’s certainly not football.