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A fast-paced and easy-to-navigate game, there is never a dull moment in Headland. Levels don’t take forever to clear. Rewards are not impossible to earn, and death and failure are forgivable. Headland has a simple plot with a fearless protagonist. It features quick battles without requiring players to think deeply about their actions and choices. Though it may not have a memorable story, Headland provides more than a momentary enjoyment for would-be adventurers.
Monster Hunter Rise is probably the best game in the series. It isn’t quite as accessible as World, but long term it offers much more varied combat and a richer experience. Its world and gameplay are insanely engaging and fun. Technically, the port to PC results in solid, smooth gameplay and marginally better visuals. If you have a choice, it’s definitely the way to play, the best and most complete version of one of 2021’s standout games.
If you don’t own any PlayStation consoles and this is your first chance to play God of War, then this is your call to action. It’s worth it: there’s a reason everyone was obsessed with this game. God of War lives up to the hype, and it hasn’t aged since its release. All the reasons God of War was so good the first time around haven’t gone anywhere.
Like the previous DLC for Dead Cells, The Queen and the Sea adds a lot of new content. It isn’t free, but the new weapons, outfits, biomes, and bosses are varied and fun. If you’ve bounced off of Dead Cells’ style or combat, Queen and the Sea won’t change your mind. Heck, you might never even see it, though it’s sure worth the effort. But for fans of the game, and especially for those wanting to wrap up some loose story ends, this is a must-have expansion. It’s a great coda to a now-classic game.
Prison Tycoon: Under New Management checks off the basics of a building and sim game. There’s even some low-key, pleasant, mindless fun to be had for a while. Pretty quickly, though, the game’s absence of creativity and simplistic approach start to overshadow the experience. The lack of a real story or more than one mode further restricts the game’s depth and longevity. It’s not that prison games have to be about violence and punishment but in a sim, drama or interesting incident have to come from somewhere. Ideally, it’s from giving the player the tools to create it or emergent systems that allow it. Prison Tycoon: Under New Management locks them up.
Praey for the Gods excels in some aspects but is hampered by a number of tedious mechanics. The boss battles are truly impressive in terms of design and execution and will please fans of SOTC. However, the dated controls make traversal and combat cumbersome. In an attempt to broaden the gameplay, No Matter Studios has added a survival system that is detrimental to the enjoyment. This, along with other needless mechanics, hampers the game. Rather than a tailored, focused adventure, the Praey for the Gods combines too many elements that make this a convoluted experience.
Despite some frustrating moments and annoying glitches, I thoroughly enjoyed FNAF Security Breach.
Of course, the whole point is to have a good time trying something new. One Hand Clapping is fun for singers and non-singers alike so I’m sure everyone will enjoy this creative experience. You can use it as an excuse to warm up your voice if you’re going out for Christmas caroling, or you can just sing to your heart’s content while actually making progress in a video game. And who knows, maybe you’ll find out you actually have a knack for singing.
The Letter: A Horror Visual Novel is a very good story, with an excellent focus on character relationships. The story uses the structure of the visual novel genre to deepen its quality. This is what a visual novel should be. It doesn’t have the originality of genre classics like 428: Shibuya Scramble, Danganronpa, or the Ace Attorney series. But it is an easy recommendation for fans of the genre, who are looking for more.
Despite the limitations of the PSVR tech and the three-year-old game design, Windlands 2 is still worth a try, especially if you have a couple of friends to play with.
The Gunk is a competent product, but it feels very risk-adverse and derivative. You’ve seen and played elements of this game before. It can be fun for a while, but you soon realize that The Gunk has a limited vocabulary and spends too much of its time amicably repeating itself. Instead of being the foundation for something grander, The Gunk is satisfied to make its exploration and simple mechanics the entire game. As a Game Pass product, however, it’s not hard to cautiously recommend The Gunk as a pleasant enough diversion.
If you were unimpressed by Terminator: Resistance, your mind will not be changed by Annihilation Line. For better or worse, it is more of the same. The cast mostly carries over, as do the mission types, enemies, and weapons. It’s a little more challenging, perhaps, and the pace is faster. Annihilation can’t compare to the best recent shooters, but it does have an audience. The ideal player might be a diehard Terminator fan eager for a compact few hours in their favorite sci-fi universe. Players who really liked the main game will enjoy the DLC as well. For everyone else, it’s probably a pass.
For PC gamers who have not played the console version of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, it’s an easy game to recommend despite the potential technical issues. There is simply too much good. The Remake is one of the best re-imagined games ever made, and the original is demonstrably a masterpiece. We would have liked more options, better optimization, and a lower price tag to be sure, but on PC, Final Fantasy VII Remake looks fantastic and the story, characters, and gameplay deserve every gamer’s time.
I’m a big fan of Happy’s Humble Burger Farm. Its atmosphere, high-stakes management, and foreboding sense of doom come together in a perfectly palatable throwback that anyone can enjoy. Plus – without giving anything away – there’s plenty of room for a sequel that doesn’t necessarily need to be about a restaurant. If Scythe Dev Team wants to flip the switch on that, I’ll be there.
Overall, Hextech Mayhem is a good step for Riot to continue letting other developers experiment with their IP. The difficulty can spike unfairly at times and the rarer items require a bit too much trial and error to get behind, but it’s a solid diversion at its price point.
There is a lot of content contained in this little game that makes it really hard to put down. You can have a quiet evening and gather items to make new outfits, fish at the lake to collect bubbles, or change your hairdo at Minnie’s salon. Or you can opt to have a productive evening by mining with the Seven Dwarves, warding off ghosts in Hawaii, or ensuring your cafe is fully stocked with food and beverages at all times. Regardless of your mood and what you want to achieve, Disney Magical World 2 was able to satiate my cravings for a good simulation game mixed with some ghost busting and a little bit of side hustling. It can take a while to get to the good and creative parts, but it is definitely worth the wait.
Playing Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass can be fun. It’s also clear that the franchise is at a crossroads. It wants to steal from other AAA shooters, to have believable characters, NPCs, and a story. At the same time, it goes all-in with a lame-joke cracking juvenile in a man suit and gameplay that is rote, lacks creativity and is repetitive. Long load times and framerate issues don’t help, either. Twenty years on, Sam isn’t edgy, goofy or ironic. Sam’s schtick, and the gameplay that goes with him, are seriously due for a makeover.
Wytchwood isn’t a bad game because it’s easier than Dark Souls. Difficulty is not the only reason to play a game. But Wytchwood does let the player down with such a vague and uninteresting story. A game needs a hook, and this story ain’t it. Crafting games make me uniquely aware of how much time I am wasting by playing them. But in the end, I like to look back at the little work of art I made by building a house, or a city, or a space station. In Wytchwood I am just collecting ingredients because the game told me to collect those ingredients. It’s an attractive enough game, but it needs something else substantial.
There’re solid game ideas here, and I hope that Serenity Forge’s next title will bring all these elements together. But for now, while Date Night Bowling isn’t rolling complete gutterballs, it’s not bowling any strikes, either.
The Disney Classic Games Collection is very thorough and fantastic. If you have any nostalgic love for these games, then this collection is the best way to play them, and if you’re a younger gamer, who is at all curious as to why some of us adults have a special place in our hearts for 90s 2D platformers, then this collection would be an excellent place to find out. Hopefully this release leads to future Disney Collections. My fingers are crossed for a Mickey Mouse bundle featuring the Magical Quest trilogy, Mickey Mania, the Castle and World of Illusion games, and the Japanese-only Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibōken game. A kid can dream, right?