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Observer was a fine game three-plus years ago, but this re-make is head and shoulders above the original thanks to an awesome presentation, three new side missions, and a price that’s hard to pass up when compared to many games being more than twice as expensive. While we all look forward to Bloober Team’s next one, The Medium, you can’t go wrong with Observer: System Redux if you’re looking for a captivating cyberpunk mystery thriller.
Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a rousing success. The timing is excellent, too. It’s the dawn of a new console generation and it’s an exciting time for this storied franchise to turn a new page. As far as launch games go, this is one of the best, for several reasons. It offers some presentation ‘wows,’ but even more importantly it offers a deep, long, compelling story with memorable moments and characters, with strong gameplay and lots to do. It’s built off of the success of the previous fifteen years of Yakuza, but Like A Dragon blazes its own path, too — you need not have played any of the previous games to fully enjoy this one, yet I appreciate that this game honors the past while forging its own future. PS5 owners have something great to look forward to in March, but if you’re lucky enough to have the new Xbox, this is a great game that is also very well priced right now at just $50.
Decarnation is not about the gameplay, but about the journey. And that journey is wrought with existentialism, Lovecraftian horror, and psychological quandaries that may be trigger inducing. It will grip you, refuse to let go, and entrap you until the end of its story. Should you play Decarnation, you will be opting into experiencing horror through the eyes of a protagonist you may, or may not, empathize with. Should you play Decarnation, you should also avoid sharing its execution of horrors that should remain unspeakable. In other words, avoid spoiling whenever possible.
Tesla Force is one of the few rogue-lite games I have ever played, and I also rarely play twin stick shooters. I found the experience a little chaffing at times, in how I had to restart a chapter of random stages after dying, but there is a lot of satisfaction derived from unlocking better and better weapons, abilities, and perks and laying waste to the monsters. Best played with a friend or three, Tesla Force is pretty cool and reasonably priced for the experience it offers overall.
Thy Creature is a beautifully woven horror show with a balanced puzzle and bullet hell component. The addition of an unsettling narrative brings it together to make for a more robust bullet hell experience. While more hardcore fans of bullet hell games might find this an easy go around, the less seasoned gamers will get right into the game’s balanced design quickly and without much fuss.
Overcooked! All You Can Eat is a wonderful cooperative gaming experience that is fun for the entire family. There is no shortage of fun in this definitive edition of the Overcooked series. Even if it can get a little heated in the kitchen.
I have had some friends lament some frustration over how monetized MK11 is, and I absolutely see where they’re coming from. It’s not a business practice I like to see because we’re used to games having a final, all inclusive edition released and we just don’t have that with MK11. Maybe we’ll see a Komplete Edition like there was with MK9. Regardless, you can’t really go wrong with MK11U if you’re looking for a superb fighting game on current or next-gen.
At $20, Fatesworn offers a strong enough great to bland ratio for me to recommend. I thought the DLC felt a little formulaic, with a lot of boxes checked and not a lot of fresh creativity and inspiration, but, I adore Kingdoms of Amalur and was happy to dive into a new area with new content. Fatesworn will provide a solid ten hours, if not more, depending on the difficulty you’re playing on, your skill, and just how thorough you want to be. Given that you have to have completed the original (long) game to access this new content, Fatesworn is clearly for fans who enjoyed the original gameplay loop and want more of the same. If that’s you, like it was me, Fatesworn was worth the wait. Here’s hoping THQ Nordic keeps Amalur in their future plans.
Ori Mees did a superb job with Blake: The Visual Novel. The story is compelling, the choices feel real, and the consequences will have you trying the game again once it’s done.
SaGa Frontier Remastered has great upgrades that positively add to the original gameplay experience, especially if you loved this title back in the late 90s. If you have never played this, it might seem like an overwhelmingly difficult game with a mess of great ideas that had not been completely sorted out. It was certainly ahead of its time and groundbreaking in some areas of gameplay.
Foregone is a whirring pastiche of ideas that came to define the last decade of side-scrolling action games. There remains an artful satisfaction to cutting through hordes of exquisitely fashioned monsters across splendid vistas but, without a thought to call its own, Foregone's performance will be consigned to oblivion the moment its player puts down their controller. It's a beautiful, sterile wasteland.
Madden NFL 22 has some good parts to it, mainly the usual suspects, but falls flat with Face of the Franchise. I know Face of the Franchise is a key part of Madden's success and what fans look forward to as a main piece of the Madden pie each year, but honestly, it has so many glitches in it that at times it is unplayable. Could these be fixed, and this year's title saved? Most definitely, but as it stands at launch, the game has issues that need rectifying.
The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos is a great tactical RPG from Artefacts Studio. It has everything you want from a tactical RPG, adds a sprinkle of difference with some of its design elements, and brings it all together with a solid bit of wacky humor and fun personalities.
Anyhow, outside of my own struggles with the controls that happens in every Japanese fighting game, I liked what KOF XV had to offer in terms of special moves and mechanics.
Guayota contains a great deal of difficulty and tested my patience quite well. I loved how it implemented puzzles in a way that isolated puzzles on a per-dungeon basis. However, I wanted a bigger payoff from completing its more difficult-levels, and I wanted the light version of the levels to have something to ease the difficulty. That said, Guayota was a great test of my logic and reasoning skills in the few hours I spent in-game. I loved the aesthetic, design, and general level construction, so it's worth playing if you're interested in an indie gem with unique puzzles for an afternoon playthrough.
Golden Force is a fun, retro, side-scrolling experience not for the faint of heart. Full of challenging battles and pixelated fun, this run-n-gun will keep you on your toes.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II continues the pace of Infinity Ward's 2019 reboot. An adrenaline-fueled campaign tackles present day threats but also takes a backseat to a gun-centric multiplayer experience that goes against the grain in surprising ways, allowing players a chance to fine-tune their operators.
I would have liked to have seen shorter load times and a revised inventory management system so that players can more easily avoid spending so much time in their inventory, but these are things that could very well be addressed with patching. Those two gripes aside, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning is an awesome game and a wonderful experience to sink into.
Moon's commentary on the nature of its hero, expressed not only through its narrative but also its entire suite of mechanics, is its toolbox for deconstructing the template of the JRPG. Learning it's a long-lost game from 1997, operating with the inescapable sentimentality and eccentricity of the modern indie scene, underscores how long it took the rest of the world to reach places Moon had already been. Even with its anachronisms, Moon is a surprising novelty.
Running around taking down the undead, racing through the streets, and mowing down creatures is honestly all you could ask.