Despite fumbles with its new melee combat and difficulty balancing, Control Resonant's storytelling, world, and bizarre quests kept me eager to explore its distorted New York.
Simon Ordell’s journey through the Scottish town of St. Amelia in 1996 is not without its shortcomings, but the experience is an affecting one buoyed by the first-person perspective.
Building on the already-great remake of the first game, Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter masterfully updates the gameplay and timeless story, adding up to what is now the Trails series’ defining entry, and one of the best RPGs of the year.
While far from a one-to-one remake, Contra: Operation Galuga effectively captures the spirit of the original game while modernizing just enough to make for an exciting, albeit short, adventure.
2K's yearly WWE offering may not bowl over diehard players in the broad sense, but its incremental updates and continued polish make it the strongest contender since the franchise's comeback.
Skull and Bones impresses with the breadth of its world, opportunities for illicit trade, and explosive naval battles, but several features wear thin over time.
Helldivers 2 swaps the top-down perspective for third-person while maintaining the frenetic, ballistic loop of crash-landing on hostile planets, completing difficult missions, and extracting against all odds.
Even with some outdated and repetitive elements inherited through the 18-year-old structure of the original, Persona 3 Reload is one of the best entries in one of the most acclaimed modern role-playing franchises in video games.
As a package, Tekken 8 doesn’t reach the heights of recent rivals, but when the match begins, and you’re exploiting openings to unleash flashy combo strings and air juggles, it remains a thrilling, if very familiar, one-on-one experience.
SteamWorld Build is a unique hybrid that entertains for a time. Unfortunately, despite a solid foundation, it struggles to maintain an engaging experience throughout its campaign.
The Talos Principle II is a thoughtful and well-made puzzler with fascinating social, artistic, and scientific ideas that we’ll be thinking about long after the solution to its final riddle has faded from memory.
Longtime Phantom Thieves can look forward to an enjoyable side adventure with Persona 5 Tactica, but its uneven pacing and low enemy variety hold it back from being a true revolution.
