Only a few years ago, the Silent Hill name was considered a relic of the horror genre. Its best efforts were its earliest from 20 or more years ago, and it had since lost its way. Lately, though, it's found its footing again, first with Bloober Team's remarkable remake of Silent Hill 2 in 2024, then with 2025's brilliantly rule-breaking Silent Hill f. Now, with Screen Burn's Silent Hill: Townfall, the comeback feels complete. Townfall is the third memorable entry in as many years, reviving a legendary series for a new era.

Like Silent Hill f, Townfall defies tradition and takes the series outside the United States, this time to Scotland. There, an American man named Simon Ordell washes up on the shore of a blue-collar island town, St. Amelia. Right away, Townfall captures the all-important tone of a Silent Hill game. It's more than the fog that's become synonymous with the series: It's the unsettling stillness, the sense of sadness lurking in every shop and down every alleyway that lingers like a harbinger of the dread that will certainly follow. Though it adheres to some of the series' touchstones, it's a fully standalone entry. It works just as well if this is your first Silent Hill game.

As you explore the town, it becomes clear early on that St. Amelia has suffered a tragedy so severe that the community was shuttered almost overnight. Heartfelt memorials in the town square dedicate pictures and words to loved ones taken too soon, and the displays are only matched in number and emotion by the many protest signs demanding accountability. The finer details, of course, aren't yours to understand for a long while. Like the fog and its accompanying melancholy, Silent Hill also serves as the stage for startling truths that only emerge late in a character's journey. 

But if you think you know where it's going, I bet you don't. Screen Burn's founder and Townfall's writer Jon McKellan once ran a fansite dedicated to this series, and that sort of lifelong devotion is clear by the end of Townfall. He and his team understand what Silent Hill has been, but also--and more importantly--what it can be. The rules of this universe are played a bit fast and loose, and it's better for it. Is Silent Hill a physical place, or an idea? Is everyone found there sent to suffer? While some themes re-emerge like somber notes on a mandolin, some of Townfall's best parts are how it toys with expectations, twisting them into new shapes and sometimes rejecting them.

Townfall feels a lot like Silent Hill 2 early on. The original music, as great as it is in its own right, deliberately recalls the series' heyday, and you'll spend some early hours navigating through the roundabout corridors of a hospital and an apartment complex. But this is more than a "fan game" liberally reusing what's worked before. Screen Burn makes it its own.

That's most obvious in how it's played. Townfall is presented in first-person, as few games in the series have been before it, and introduces a new gameplay element that relies on a handheld piece of analog tech--the sort of physical contraption this team made its name on with games like Stories Untold and Observation. Whereas many games in the series use a radio to passively alert you to nearby threats, Townfall's CRTV is closer to Alien Isolation's motion scanner and demands active participation.

With it, Simon can see hazy outlines of the fleshy monsters left shambling around the streets of St. Amelia. As the player, you'll need to tune it often, picking up the signals of these creatures, then swapping between them to carefully track their movements and avoid their gaze. Early encounters made this tech feel like an afterthought, but once Simon is outnumbered three to one--or worse--it proves its usefulness. Combined with the way Simon can lean around corners and over cover, this is certainly the most stealth-driven game in the series.

You can also distract enemies by turning on radios or throwing objects before hiding in places like lockers, waiting for enemies to give you an opening. In some areas where enemies are especially numerous, I found these lockers to be too helpful, but because enemies were best avoided, I used them often, which made those semi-scripted moments lose their effect before long.

Simon's handheld CRTV device acts like an evolution of the series' static on the radio.

But such moments weren't the norm. Much more often, you'll need to carefully pick your openings to sneak past enemies, or else face them head-on. The music bears down on you in those close calls, creating urgency and the right kind of stress befitting any horror story, and when you do get spotted, facing them only piles on that tension. Despite being in first-person, combat in Townfall reminded me a lot of the Silent Hill 2 remake, because each encounter demands focus and well-timed attacks, and it's best avoided whenever possible. It's extremely tense.

Enemies eat a good chunk of your health with each hit, and though enemy design could be more varied, they do express some important differences that make controlling a crowd of even just two of them a breathless fight to the death. I spent more than half the game completely avoiding combat whenever I could, and about three-quarters of it never firing my gun, because doing so runs the risk of alerting more enemies. 

Like the fog and its accompanying melancholy, Silent Hill also serves as the stage for startling truths that only emerge late in a character's journey. 

Townfall's combat is usually soaked in desperation and had me bracing for bad outcomes in all the ways a horror game should. This changed in the latter third of the game, where I was handed more than enough resources in a few different instances, trivializing some encounters. But these moments of empowerment weren't the norm, thankfully, and Townfall maintained its creepy vibe from start to finish.

Another benefit of the first-person view is how much detail it lets Screen Burn pack into Townfall. Approaching desks or shop windows, it's almost always the case that you can read anything on those surfaces. You can find many notes to collect in a way that signifies they're highly plot-relevant, and many even help you solve the game's environmental puzzles, all of which feel right at home for a Silent Hill game, though they are never as convoluted as the series' early era. 

Even more abundant than these plot-relevant collectibles are the smaller details the game doesn't call out. Noticing these details isn't crucial to enjoying Townfall's story, but they're no less engaging, filling in the world's history and teasing snippets of the game's central mystery. Everything is purpose-built, from the particular hue of the Otherworld sections (this time called the "Different") to the design of the monsters, which you can't easily notice before you kill them. I was so worried about Simon's place in the story that I found myself dodging combat not just to save on health kits, but to not earn the ire of the game's hidden ending calculator, and that stemmed from the way this game invites you to take a proverbial microscope to it.

Otherworld sections return, though with a new look owed to important symbols in the story.

As is often the case with Silent Hill, it's only when Townfall's final cards are turned over that much will make sense, and even then you can be sure there are additional endings to chase down in subsequent playthroughs for added context. But even on a first pass, Townfall is able to stand out from the shadow of the series' best games and earn its place beside them. While it doesn't reach the peak this series has previously found, Townfall's story gives me a familiar, welcome headache as I try to piece everything together. 

Thematically, it does well to stand in two universes at once: feeling like an homage to the series' best while still sharing a perspective that is painfully timeless. Townfall is set in 1996, but its expressions of cruelty are alive and well today. At the same time--and maybe this will sound strange once you've played it for yourself--it's also one of the more hopeful entries in the series. It doesn't trade discomfort for hope, by any means. It's still a dark story that expresses some uncomfortable coldness the way this series is known to do, but it finds a way to let just a little light in without tearing out its jet-black heart.

Townfall, like Silent Hill f before it, expresses what I love most about the comeback. As the idea of Silent Hill is uprooted and moved all over the world, we're seeing it through new cultural perspectives in a way we never have before. We spent nearly 30 years discussing and debating what Silent Hill was and is. Even the teams assigned the daunting task of replacing Team Silent seemed intent on doing their best impressions of the earliest and most beloved games. Townfall doesn't just prove that studios like Screen Burn know where Silent Hill comes from; it shows us where Silent Hill can go.

Remedy Entertainment's signature style has often made gameplay feel secondary to story. Games like Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control had fun gameplay hooks, but the depth mostly lived in their narrative puzzle-boxes, where the answer to each strange mystery created three more questions. Control Resonant breaks from tradition magnificently, revealing a whole new side to Remedy. Armed with deep, engaging combat mechanics in a stunning version of Manhattan that is unforgettable, Control Resonant is a confident delivery of Remedy's best gameplay experience ever that never sacrifices the team's unique brand of weirdness. 

Control Resonant takes place seven years after the first game, with the mystical Oldest House still under siege from the Hiss invasion. Now, outside the Oldest House's once-secret doors, a second Altered World Event is threatening Manhattan. With Federal Bureau of Control director Jesse Faden gone AWOL for reasons unknown and much of the bureau dead or displaced, her brother Dylan is released from his holding cell as Plan B. 

If that paragraph of proper nouns leaves your head swimming, I understand. And although Control Resonant doesn't shy away from throwing a lot at you in its story, it does give newcomers a helpful recap of the first game to get them up to speed. The important thing to know is that New York City is under attack from a paranatural threat, and Dylan Faden, once the puppet of the Hiss and blamed for much of the carnage to date, is reluctantly given a chance at redemption.

Whereas Control was a third-person shooter, Control Resonant is a melee-focused action game that winds up feeling like a dark superhero-adjacent adventure akin to Infamous or Prototype. However, Resonant has so much Remedy flair that these comparisons are best understood as suboptimal shorthand for something ultimately deeper and more enjoyable.

Dylan's weapon of choice is the Aberrant, a piece of shape-shifting metal that becomes the basis for intricate combat builds. The Aberrant has several forms ranging from a pair of quick-strike clubs with a chance for critical hits and a larger scythe that does slower but more sweeping damage, to a tweener form that is neither especially fast nor slow but does bonus damage from behind enemies. 

The game encourages you to switch up your build often with respec tokens and a huge tree of upgrades--it's hard to see any of the many options as obviously advantageous, allowing you to experiment without feeling like you're being funneled down a specific path. I loved experimenting with the many different abilities and combinations. Over the course of the 30-40 hour story, you'll fortify the Aberrant and Dylan alike with this treasure trove of combat enhancements, equipping up to six special abilities at a time and combining different sets of them nearly whenever you want to. Each of them gives Dylan a distinctly different feel, but what they have in common is how good they look and feel to use. 

There are shields, telekinetics, friendly summons, and more to pick from the deeper you go. My experience with Resonant may feel very different from yours, and that's partly why it works so well.

Control Resonant's power climb over those hours is supremely satisfying because it invites--and then rewards--thoughtful decisions by the player. For instance, rather than chip away at enemy health bars, you can build their Falter meter. When filled, you can perform finishing moves that give you Dominance, a damage buff that lasts for a short period. Enemies normally drop health refills when killed, while enemies executed from a Falter finisher don't drop health, but empower you with that Dominance, which converts to enemies dropping extra health when dispatched, creating a risk-versus-reward dynamic. With so many enemies often swarming Dylan, each encounter is a fight of quick decisions as you trade health for damage at the right times, keeping Dylan upright and saving the buffs for the right enemies as you see fit. 

Resonant has no parry or blocking mechanic, as the game's combat is built entirely around aggression, including a dodge mechanic that rewards you with at least a perfect-timing window for a counter, and possibly more buffs depending on your build. When played well, Dylan is always on the offensive, dashing around the map to bash ground-based enemies, double-jumping into the air to reach flying enemies, and carefully but decisively managing his powers so that he has the solution to the problems thrown his way in each bout. 

On its default difficulty, Resonant is pretty tough. It's no souls-like, but it'll give some players fits, as it did with me early on. As I learned each enemy's strengths and weaknesses and kept imbuing Dylan with his own remarkable tools for the job, I felt better prepared for what lay ahead. However, if you're coming to this Remedy game for narrative, which is what it's historically done best, and find yourself jumped by the challenge, the game's Assist Mode offers nuanced custom difficulty options, with a few presets you can choose if you don't want to tweak each meter yourself. 

So much happens at once in every battle, and all this chaos sounds like it might hinder performance, especially when you throw in all the visual noise--like the Hiss' wispy shadows, explosions going off in the streets, and all of the various physics and effects the game pours on--but I played this game for 45 hours on PC (RTX 4070, for the record) without a single hitch. As much as the gameplay depth is a novel showcase for Remedy, its in-house Northlight engine shoulders the burden handily and looks dazzling while doing so.

The strong technical performance only gets more obvious the deeper you get into the main story, where Remedy's artistic efforts become more ambitious. This vision of New York is unlike anything I've ever seen, and though trailers have hinted at some of the arresting art design Resonant features, it's truly something special to behold. Scenes of the city folding in on itself à la Inception are merely scratching the surface. Both the world and the enemies, especially the bosses, are nothing short of jaw-dropping. 

In fact, some later areas of the story get so breathtakingly unique that my only gripe with Control Resonant is how often I'd get lost trying to explore some of these more elaborate spaces, especially since the map wouldn't often bail me out of those jams, recalling a similar issue with navigating the original Control. 

But these frustrations ultimately feel like a small price to pay for the kaleidoscopic wonders Remedy has built. I'm writing this before much of the world has had a chance to see what I'm talking about, and it gives me goosebumps to think about living vicariously through the new eyes that will soon experience the marvels of Control Resonant's world design. Building on the already high bar set by Alan Wake 2's aspirations, Remedy aimed even higher and achieved something I've not seen in any medium.

Playing Resonant, I've thought a lot about how such engaging, complex combat design will speak to a new type of player previously not interested in Remedy games. Thankfully, if you're here first and foremost for the weirdness, it still has plenty of that too. Alongside the 30-hour main story, the several zones of the world each have tons to do, and in many cases, these side quests express Remedy's special brand of strange. I spent some time off the golden path chasing an elusive baby stroller across rooftops, singing life-or-death karaoke, siccing a cat on the Hiss, playing Spot the Difference with an extradimensional taxi cab, and investigating a covert surveillance operation that hides out in places like coffee shops and pizza restaurants, to name a few. 

Every side mission I undertook was enjoyable, and I've done nearly all of them, though the map and quest log suggest I have a few more to go in what is a bigger game than I expected. Some missions have been especially strong reminders that, like Alan Wake 2 before it, Control Resonant feels like an experience only Remedy could've possibly made. Even with much more focus on combat, this has all the hallmarks of a Remedy game.

That means a healthy dose of levity, though I love how Resonant finds new depth not just in its gameplay and world design but in its emotional core, too. Remedy games have previously done mystery, action, comedy, and horror very well. But this is the first time a Remedy game has left me feeling choked up. I adored Dylan's story, both in the present--as he works to redeem himself while surrounded mostly by people who loathe him and tell him as much bluntly--and in the past, as I explored his relationship with Jesse and their parents. 

There's a lot more to know about Dylan, and Sean Durrie plays him with an appropriate somberness. It consistently hurt to see him beat himself up because that antagonism is the only way he's ever been treated by anyone but Jesse. Watching his character arc take shape, and even informing it a bit with dialogue options that don't change the story but do change the shading of Dylan's thoughts and actions, was an even more unexpected achievement than Resonant's deep combat design. Despite everything it does so well, Dylan's personal journey is just about my favorite thing in the entire game, second only to the art direction that melted my brain.

Control Resonant

Though I enjoyed the story's way of catching up with characters from the original game and seeing how they've changed, one of my favorite characters is Dylan's handler, Zoe De Vera, a newcomer to the world of Control. She could've been the typical voice on the radio, giving Dylan orders to simply push the story forward, but Remedy pulls her into the spotlight enough to make her an empathetic character, too. As the Altered World Event reshapes reality around them, it's Dylan and Zoe's chemistry, not the New Weird circumstances, that really fuels the narrative intrigue for me.

Alongside the stellar art direction and a surprisingly touching story, Control Resonant's gameplay loop feels more mainstream than anything this team has made since Max Payne. Such intentional smoothing could've been damning if done poorly, but it doesn't feel like Remedy sacrifices any part of itself to chase a wider audience, even as Resonant may well find one anyway. Control Resonant is Remedy's take on a semi-open-world character-action game, and that might sound like an experience you've had before, but at the transdimensional intersection of its impeccable combat design and the studio's signature strangeness stands something unforgettably unique.

Few movies can truly say they hit the ground running, but Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is among them. And that’s a good thing, because after so many Resident Evil movies, every new one needs a running start to have a chance of making it.

We can’t talk about a Resident Evil movie without doing a little bit of table-setting first, though. Resident Evil debuted on PlayStation in 1996 and coined the name for an emerging game genre: Survival Horror. Since then, Paul W.S. Anderson has directed six live-action Resident Evil movies starring his photogenic and acrobatic wife Milla Jovovich. 2021 brought us the Robbie Amell-led Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. That’s not counting the half-dozen CGI Resident Evil movies that more or less act as canonical extensions of the game series. Generally speaking, the Resident Evil movies have been on a downward trend since early into Anderson’s tenure. Now, in 2026, the unkillable movie franchise rises again, this time with Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and Weapons, acting as the head of the monster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNd1gb19A-c

Resident Evil follows medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he drops off a package and argues with his girlfriend over the phone. Instead of going home to talk to her about it, though, Bryan jumps at the chance to take a high-priority delivery to Raccoon City. It needs to get there intact, and without any detours. A perfect way to not talk about any personal problems Bryan might have. Bryan starts questioning his decision when he hits a woman in a nightgown while driving in the dark down a slick road in heavy snow.

That moment marks the point in which Bryan is in over his head and finds himself in a race to survive.

Bryan is not a hero. He is perhaps the least heroic character to lead a Resident Evil movie. And that’s a huge factor in why this disgusting, hilarious, and often frightening movie works. Bryan doesn’t have special forces training, and like so many of us, he’s only ever wielded a gun using a video game controller. 

As he curses and fumbles his way through this horrifying night, he’s easy to sympathize with. He’s a sort of self-insert character for the audience, but not in the usual way we think of. What if you sat down to play Resident Evil for the first time but woke up in that world? The vast majority of us would be stuck in a stumbling run, trying to load the last rounds we have with shaking hands. That’s Bryan–always breathless and on the edge of a panic attack.

But Bryan never stops, and the movie doesn’t, either. Resident Evil runs at a breakneck pace through the film's entire 95-minute runtime. There are no quiet moments to breathe and reflect: It’s a horrible night where one disaster pushes Bryan into the next one. Each time he’s found something resembling safety, he’s yanked right back into the endless nightmare. It’s a marathon movie in the vein of movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Run Lola Run.

As such, Resident Evil is more of a tense movie than a scary one. There are a handful of great jump scares, of course, and tons of viscera just everywhere. It’s also a very funny movie. Cregger cut his teeth on the sketch comedy show Whitest Kids U Know (he’s in good company with Jordan Peele and Curry Barker as sketch comedy alums making some of the best horror flicks around), and he’s said in interviews that he had to cut tons of jokes. Our protagonist copes with his nightmarish surroundings with humor. The jokes land, but they don’t destroy the tension and terror by any means. In fact, some of the best laughs come when we know something very bad is about to happen, and I still found myself backing into my seat when the bad thing came to pass.

Resident Evil fans will find plenty to enjoy here. There are no cameos from any Raccoon Police Department officers or members of STARS, but there are references all over the place. These are things that the average moviegoer might notice, but that only fans will understand. And even the monsters feel like they were created by and for Resident Evil fans.

There aren’t actually that many zombies in this movie, though they certainly do help propel it along. Instead of relying on classic Resident Evil monsters, Cregger treats us to mostly original monsters, but ones that feel like they’re in the lineage of the T-Virus. Masses of arms and legs, tentacles that end in teeth, you name it. I felt right at home watching the movie, but it still surprised me with awesome, gnarly, and nauseating monsters around every corner.

By backing away from the stories and characters of the video games, Cregger dodges the giant bullet of “that’s not my Leon Kennedy” and instead lets us finally experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes. The artifice of a campy action movie is gone, and we’re left with a terrified guy who runs from one set of problems, only to encounter something far worse.

Even for a series known for its sprawling scope, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is ambitious. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems clearly approached this latest entry in the series having learned from its success in Three Houses, its missteps in Engage, and even some of the series' historical oddities. Fortune's Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series.

The structure of Fortune's Weave often feels like a series of concentric circles, constantly broadening and deepening your understanding of its systems and its characters. It's so massive it's hard to even know where to start, so I'll begin where the game does: in the future.

Or at least, in a futuristic, science-fiction setting that is strikingly different from the series' norm. Right from the beginning of Fortune's Weave, your created character, Eshmel, is literally created, birthed by sci-fi-coded magic as the last hope for humanity against the army of the Demon Lord, who is already on the verge of total victory. Fortuna, the Goddess of Fate, is cooperating with the last bastions of humanity and sees an opportunity to turn the tide in your favor. Four instrumental heroes, the legendary Flame Lords, can be recruited to help in the coming fight, so Fortuna sends Eshmel back in time to a key moment in the Flame Lords' lives to guide them. That moment is their participation in the Heroic Games, a sort of gladiatorial and tactical version of the ancient Greek Olympics. 

Right away, this imbues the story, and the Flame Lords' individual stories, with propulsive force. You know from the very beginning that your ultimate destiny is leading toward a major escalation, but you also know these four characters are special, destined for greatness in ways that make them inflection points in history. In many stories like this, you see individual protagonists and slowly come to learn of a mysterious visitor who reveals a greater destiny. In Fortune's Weave, you are the mysterious visitor, and you have hidden knowledge that they don't, creating an interesting dynamic as you watch the events of their lives unfold.

This premise also creates a setting that confidently blends tropes from the Age of Antiquity, smooth futuristic science-fiction, and high fantasy. Regardless of the particular details in your character creation, Eshmel has an otherworldly quality to them that seems distinctly out of place in the nation of Dagda, which is obviously inspired by ancient empires, and both Eshmel and the Flame Lords themselves all regularly interact with actual gods and goddesses. It's a compelling blend of storytelling motifs that feels fresh and new for this series.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Fortuna emphasizes the importance of recruiting the Flame Lords to have any real hope of defeating the Demon King, but you can actually proceed to the endgame at any time. After finishing the prologue you could, technically, proceed to the final battles alone. I wasn't brave enough to attempt this, but I'm sure some impressive Fire Emblem experts will pull it off. For me, simply having the option emphasized a central theme of the game. You constantly have choices about how to approach almost every aspect, even down to the core structure of it. You can play and pivot in whatever manner you choose.

The four Flame Lords can be played in any order, and each has their own motivation for competing in the Heroic Games, in which the winner is promised to be granted a single wish. Cai is a young boy hoping to save his father from a false imprisonment; Dietrich is an expert swordsman looking to prove himself by taking on the toughest opponents; Theodora is a newly crowned warrior queen who wants to clear a historical injustice for her people; and Leda is a dancer and refugee who sees the games as an opportunity to get close enough to her father's killer that she can exact revenge. Each of the stories is a compelling premise, though I only played through Leda and Theodora's stories so far. Each of them is driven to a fault, obsessed and single-minded, even when their motivations are ostensibly just or even noble. 

You spend a lot of time with each hero you choose, gaining insights about their motivations and desires as they navigate the twists of their individual stories. And that's one of the most impressive tricks in Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave--these stories are satisfying on their own as individual narratives, but grow even richer in conversation with each other, and with the larger story of the war against the Demon King. It's a layered narrative that builds upon itself and becomes more compelling the more you explore it.

Leda is going through a lot right now

Once you enter the story of a Flame Lord, you can play it to completion or jump out to dabble in others. Again, you always have choices. But the individual Flame Lord stories themselves have a smooth difficulty ramp, scaling up the challenge as you continuously recruit more forces to your side, upgrade your skills and equipment, and unlock new classes. 

That does mean you have to repeat some easier missions when you begin a new Flame Lord's quest, but the strength of the narrative pulled me through those easier missions. And a series of Notable Deeds grants you currency to spend on things like universal XP boosts, which create a glide path to maintain momentum as you go back to visit other Flame Lords from the beginning.

The structure of the Heroic Games is simple. You climb a bracket of competitors, starting with lower-level recruitable characters and building your way up to more serious opponents, sometimes including the other Flame Lords. The matches are set for specific days on the calendar, giving you downtime between story quests to partake in side quests and paralogues, recruit new units, etc. 

While the Heroic Games take place inside the capital city of Dagsion, there's a massive world map outside of its walls to explore. I found the map movement a little clunky, as you have to select an action (move, wait, search, etc) on map nodes before selecting a direction to move a limited number of spaces, similar to a board game. The idea, though, is that every action you do outside of Dagsion's walls--and some that you do inside--makes time pass. You can't simply farm random encounters to get overpowered for the main quests. You have to manage your time and make use of it wisely to balance the various demands of side quests, leveling up, and making progress on recruiting new team members. It sounds daunting, but I found the system was flexible enough to absorb some time wasted without feeling too punishing. For those who want to take on the toughest challenges with permadeath turned on, however, I expect this system to be a satisfying challenge for meticulous min-maxxers. 

Strategy combat in Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave

Similarly, some activities in Dagsion can only be performed weekly. Those include giving gifts or attending a play--sorry, you can't simply love-bomb a character you want to recruit--or training at the Arena. It also includes performing acts of service at the temples of the gods. Some characters are naturally more pious than others, granting bigger bonuses to your acts of worship. And each god grants you a special benefit that can be used in battle. Fortuna is unlocked from the start, letting you rewind turns, but there are others to be discovered with important passive benefits that can turn the tide of battle.

Exploring the map outside of Dagsion is a must, because it's vital for completing your Flame Lord's individual quests and gaining Renown. Each Flame Lord has their own specialized quests, and those give you much bigger bonuses to Renown points than any other side quests. Theodora, for example, has to scour the world searching for supplies to send back to her nation, while Leda gets tips about taverns in distant cities where she can perform. Those grant you regular rewards like any other side quest, including even unlocking some specialized classes early, but the real reward is Renown.

Renown is an important resource because it's one of two factors that determine who you can recruit. The other is Support, which you gain by improving your Flame Lord's bond with another character via giving gifts or sharing meals. I found progressing this stat fairly slow, so it can take time to win someone over to your side--even as the ticking clock of the game means you may not manage to recruit everyone you had your eye on. Fortunately, there's a good variety of recruitable characters with different level requirements, so as long as you're making a little progress with several at a time, you'll get a decent flow of additional allies.

Sun's out, guns out

Randomized battles also populate the world map, along with dungeons that can be explored in third-person a la Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. Those provide a nice change of pace and a different way to engage with the world, granting you a little experience boost by taking part in more traditional turn-based RPG combat. Once you're sufficiently overleveled for a dungeon, you can farm experience by simply striking an enemy without triggering the combat, making this an even more streamlined way to quickly gain treasures and experience. I never found them very challenging, but they seemed more intended to break up the pace, and they worked well for that purpose.

The best missions, of course, are those involving traditional tactical combat. Fire Emblem is second to none in this regard, and Fortune's Weave manages to improve on it further. The main quests always find ways to add new wrinkles to combat scenarios, forcing you to think differently and staving off the complacency that can come from having a powerful team. 

In one memorable battle, I was being targeted by a long-range attack, requiring careful movement and creative blocking while I slowly advanced. In another, I would lose if any enemy units reached a certain goal line, but their forces were so overwhelming, and reinforcements so frequent, that I quickly realized I had to prioritize cutting my way through to the one enemy unit whose defeat served as a victory condition. Sometimes I needed to keep my forces tightly packed together to take out tougher enemies, while, in others, I had to spread them terrifyingly thin to address dispersed threats. What's so satisfying about these challenges is that the game never explicitly explains how to resolve the puzzle; it just presents you with a scenario and presses you to figure out the solution. My own conclusions certainly aren't the only ones possible.

Dietrich considers his exam options

Aiding you in combat are two types of special abilities: Combat Arts and Blaze Arts. Combat Arts are available to all units as they level up and specialize in skills, letting you perform special actions at the cost of weapon durability, which can then be repaired at a Blacksmith. Blaze Arts are reserved for special characters, letting you sacrifice HP for powerful effects. Theodora, who is imbued with a magical, superpowered prosthetic arm, can grab a hunk of stone from the earth and chuck it great distances, for example, while Dietrich can teleport forward to strike down an enemy before they even see him coming, and Leda has a series of special dances that buff her allies. New Blaze Arts are offered as you take part in the quests to improve Renown, so all of the systems feed into each other nicely. 

However, all this complexity does come at a price. While the battles themselves are snappy and intuitive enough for newcomers to understand, the menu user interface is overstuffed, and at first it was hard to find certain elements. I got accustomed to it well enough after several hours, but there's just a lot going on, and I wished the UI had been easier to navigate.

With four heroes all existing concurrently, sometimes you see the same story beats repeated, but I rarely found this tiring or repetitive. Instead, it was delightful to see a similar scene recontextualized through the lens of the current character's story, adding more color and texture to their own tale by how they've interacted with others. Each of the characters also has their own entourage of close companions, and Fortune's Weave excels at making each of them likable in their own ways. It's a strong ensemble cast, even before you start recruiting a variety of distinct warriors with their own odd designs. 

Your warriors enjoy a Feast

And since this is all happening concurrently, the narratives intertwine in ways that make the whole story richer the more you engage with it. Seeing the events only from Theodora's perspective was interesting enough, but then seeing the same and other contemporaneous events from Leda's perspective filled in a fuller picture. Plus, since each story interacts with the other Flame Lords, you get a sense for the other heroes' stories even if you haven't started their actual quest. This is a narrative with criss-crossing interests and characters, so you're really meant to play through all four Flame Lords to see how all of the puzzle pieces fit together. 

Naturally, after your Flame Lord's individual story resolves, events in the world take a turn for the more dramatic on a global scale. This is very similar to the arc of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where your chosen House then became instrumental in a massive war. This time, though, you aren't forced to pick favorites. You can play through all four Flame Lords' stories, the more the better, and each of them have a part to play in this second arc as you proceed towards the endgame against the Demon King. 

All of this is complemented by an incredible orchestral score, as evidenced by finding myself idly humming the main theme for days at a time, and the voice acting is well-performed. I made a point of playing Fortune's Weave in quiet environments where I could hear everything, because I just didn't want to miss an audio moment. And while Dagsion itself can look a little plain in places, the character designs themselves are universally gorgeous, with incredible detail and flourishes, and class designs that look great and fitting no matter how you spec your characters. The cutscenes, as well, are remarkably cinematic and help accentuate the epic scope of this story about war in an age of antiquity. Fortune's Weave is the best-looking and best-sounding Fire Emblem to date, on top of all of its other excellent traits.

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is a sprawling masterpiece of a strategy RPG, building upon the successes of past Fire Emblem games with new interconnected elements, expertly designed combat puzzles, and an emphasis on flexibility and choice. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have topped themselves, making this the new high point to beat for future entries.

A few hours into Wolverine I found myself asking, “Why did Insomniac Games make this?” There are obvious answers, of course: It has three excellent Spider-Man games under its belt; it's an opportunity to expand its Marvel Universe; and Wolverine presents ample opportunities for a brutal and bloody action game. But none of that explains why Insomniac Games, specifically, made Wolverine.

Spider-Man is an ideal fit for the studio: an energetic and dynamic hero in the hands of a team known for open-worlds that are sprawling jungle gyms, where it can let players loose with thrilling traversal mechanics and varied combat systems for crime fighting fun. Insomniac also excels at crafting narratives that are as earnest as they are dramatic--perfect for the tumultuous lives of Peter Parker and Miles Morales.

Wolverine is much less ideal of a pairing, as was evident throughout my time with the game. Insomniac doesn't make bad games and Wolverine certainly isn't one. It's a solid, cinematic, and occasionally thrilling experience that ticks all the necessary boxes for a decent action game. But it does so in a workman-like fashion and never aspires to much more than the essentials. Wolverine is an action game that serves the character well enough, but it doesn't lean into Insomniac's strengths or leverage its creativity, and the game feels unremarkable because of it.

Straying too far from who Wolverine is and how he operates would no doubt create questions around the authenticity of the adaptation, but only coloring inside the well-defined lines means never offering anything new or exciting. It turns out that the most authentic version of Wolverine, in this case, is also the embodiment of the character action genre at its plainest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Nz-WyUq7o

In a world where pretty much every superhero game subscribes to the Batman: Arkham template of combat design, describing how you fight would belabor how familiar it all is. Suffice it to say: light attack, heavy attack, dodge, parry, a few special abilities, and some attribute modifiers. 

There are very few distinguishing elements of Wolverine's combat system that make it stand out. The closest it comes is a leaping attack, which allows players to launch him across distances to close the gap and begin an assault on unsuspecting enemies. It's an undeniably satisfying tool to keep up the intensity of each skirmish and ensure you're always applying pressure, but loses its luster after a couple of hours when it becomes clear that it can be employed pretty mindlessly.

The other unique element, a mechanic that represents an escalation of power and brutality as Wolverine's rage boils over, has more longevity in how drastically it shifts the dynamic of combat and amps up the satisfaction of it. As players dispatch enemies, an on-screen rage meter builds until the point where Wolverine goes berserk, putting him in a state where you can chain together executions to tear enemies apart in quick succession. In just a few seconds, Wolverine can create piles of brutally mauled bad guys, and there's a feral savagery to the whole thing that is very effective. 

It's a consistently exhilarating moment because, as well as shifting to desaturated visuals to emphasize how unstable and blinded by rage Logan is, these sequences are strong instances of synchronicity between the character and the player. As Wolverine's rage builds, the player needs to be more efficient in dispatching enemies to keep the meter climbing, and when Wolverine finally hits breaking point, the input demands on the player simplify to just pressing two buttons together to eviscerate anything in your path. It is catharsis that comes from Wolverine giving into the monster within and the player embracing that monster in tandem. 

If the appeal of Wolverine for you lies in how visceral its violence is, your virtual bloodlust will be well and truly satiated. Insomniac has spared no expense in lavishing Wolverine's finishes with copious amounts of blood and guts--his executions are exactly that in every sense of the word. The violence never strives for shock value by being grotesque in the way something like Mortal Kombat does, so it never feels gratuitous. Even when he erupts into a berserker rage, the coldness of his violence reinforces the idea that he is an efficient killing machine. Wolverine never revels in it; he just gets it done and moves on.

The main issues with Wolverine's combat are that it often feels like it lacks weight, is missing lethality up until he goes berserk, and never finds rhythm. As a result, I often felt frustrated that the game was undermining the sense of power and ferocity that I wanted to feel as Wolverine. And at the same time, the individual components of the combat doesn't have the connective tissue to create a natural flow that made me feel like I developed a mastery of Wolverine's skills.

The adamantium claws that serve as Wolverine's dealers of death and destruction often felt more like needles than blades. The feedback on each attack always felt just a little lacking, and enemies never responded to being struck in a way that made me feel empowered. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can't count the number of times that I would be mid-combo, clawing away at an enemy, and they'd suddenly ignore incoming damage to clobber me over the head with a rifle or slice me with their own blade. It came off as the game deciding it was the enemy's turn to attack because it needed to put an end to my barrage. It made me feel like an angry cat being bonked on the head to calm down.

Fortunately, the various abilities Wolverine has at his disposal feel like they pack more punch and can swing momentum in your favor. These range from a spinning claw attack that can control space and a leaping knee that interrupts enemies, to a grapple that slams enemies down so that Wolverine can mount and pummel them. There's also a spinning Psycho Crusher-like maneuver that can be chained multiple times, an all-out barrage of powerful strikes, and a recovery ability that focuses Wolverine's rage and uses it to heal, among others. All of these introduce new considerations into the combat, making it feel a little more involved and dynamic. However, since there's no real depth or connectivity to the combo system, their execution feels very rigid and disjointed. 

Everything is on a cooldown, which suggests that timing and strategy is important in how they're used, but in practice, they can be employed thoughtlessly without much consequence. Many of Spider-Man's abilities served as ways to bridge one attack sequence into another; after smacking an enemy around, he could launch them into the air, chase up, smash them back down, zip to another enemy, swing them around to hit others in the vicinity, launch them into the distance, use a web to close that distance, and continue to string physical abilities together or use gadgets to manipulate enemies to his advantage. The point being, there was an if-this-then-that flow to it that, admittedly, is made possible by the character's agility and dynamism.

Wolverine, meanwhile, feels awkward and brutish by comparison--and not in a good, character-appropriate way. Instead, using his various skills is akin to how you'd approach battles in an MMO, where you just let basic attacks fill the time in between cooldowns and then sequentially work through everything on the ability bar. Sure, you can use those abilities in a way that complements each other, but there's no real requirement or incentive to do so beyond your own initiative. 

Defensively, Wolverine suffers similar issues. Tapping the L1 button at the right moment will parry an attack, but the window--even before you use an adaptation to make it more forgiving--is pretty lenient, so it doesn't really take much skill to parry. In fact, I had a few occasions where I was surrounded by enemies all attacking me, sometimes overlapping, and I was able to survive their onslaught and take no damage by spamming the parry button with my eyes closed. That's not hyperbolic--I tested it. Parrying is another part of Wolverine's combat that is functional but unrewarding.

It may be hard to believe but all of that doesn't mean the combat is bad. It is perfectly functional, and I suspect that many people won't think too hard about how it all fits together. The cinematic brutality of it provides enough of a spectacle that everything else may not even register or matter. But as someone who wants to feel engaged and challenged, the vast majority of my time playing Wolverine felt rote. In a couple of stretches, I opted to reduce enemy health to make them easier to kill. Not because they provided any sort of challenge, but because I wasn't engaged enough to care and wanted to hit the next story beat. Being a fan of the character, experienced with intricate combat systems, and knowing how good Insomniac can do combat, this was disappointing.

However, through it all, the care and attention given to visual presentation remained one of the game's strengths. Unlike its open-world Spider-Man games, Wolverine is linear, corralling players from one combat arena to the next by way of streets, up and down elevators, through buildings, onto rooftops, and into the thick of a remote forest or two. Any deviations off the main path are slight and usually to pick up resources used for unlocking new outfits or bottles of whiskey that expand how many adaptations you can equip. 

The most evident benefit of this narrowing in scope is in the fidelity of the visuals. Wolverine is a beautiful game, both artistically and technically. I really appreciate how Insomniac is able to bring together the vibrancy of comic books and a grittier aesthetic that allows the game to feature superheroes wearing bright costumes, while also giving the game a grounded, more realistic vibe befitting of Wolverine. There's an impressive amount of detail in the character models, with Wolverine's stout and muscular physique giving him an imposing presence. When the camera gets up close, you can really see just how hairy he is (can relate), but also the gradation in his skin color, his pores, and the grime that builds up during brawls. 

Environments also have a high degree of destructability, so while I may not have always felt powerful as Wolverine when attacking enemies, watching the world around me crack, crumble, and collapse picked up some of that slack. This high level of visual fidelity pays dividends most in the larger-scale set-pieces, of which there are only a handful, but they're a lot of fun. There are battles against towering enemies (surprise, there are Sentinels) or knockdown-dragout battles against other superpowered characters.

Wolverine serves the character well enough, but doesn’t lean into Insomniac’s strengths or leverage its creativity

There are other parts of the gameplay experience that never outright excel. Everything in between the combat fits into the Uncharted-esque guided platforming mold, so you'll spend a lot of time jumping from handhold to handhold, swinging from branches and poles, or hopping across rooftops. But because Wolverine has very limited mobility and no interesting traversal mechanic to speak of beyond a big jump, the running, jumping, and climbing portions of the game often feel equally uneventful. Similarly, stealth feels like more of an afterthought than a key pillar of gameplay. Again, I know that's not Wolverine's thing. He doesn't swing from buildings like Spidey or barrel across skylines like Hulk, or sneak like Mystique, but the truth of the matter is I didn't find much to get excited about when moving around the world. The only real exceptions come in the rare high-octane escape or desperate climb for survival, in which the circumstances bring the thrills instead of anything I'm actually doing.

Ultimately, it is what it is because it's all Wolverine really has. And that point is driven home in the numerous times that Jean Grey, the ultra-powerful mutant with telepathic and telekinetic abilities, offers to simply fly herself and Logan to the top of a building or across a city, and Wolverine declines repeatedly. Even when the fate of his friends or of the world is on the line, he opts to take the long and arduous way because, I don't know, it makes his tummy hurt, or he doesn't like how it feels or some other contrived excuse. But I know that taking the quick and direct route would trivialize massive portions of the game, so instead we go through the uninteresting but inoffensive motions.

The strongest aspect of Wolverine is its narrative and character development, but even that isn't without its fair share of oddities and pacing issues. Insomniac has done a commendable job of taking touchstones from the history of Marvel and building something a little more original around them, while also trying to explore Logan from a more emotional, human perspective. Logan's story is intertwined with the increasingly threatened existence of mutants, which have fairly recently emerged. 

Although Bolivar Trask is presented as the main threat to mutantkind, the game doesn't waste any time in hinting that a bigger threat may be a little closer to home. The game takes place at a time when the X-Men haven't yet formed and, instead, Wolverine is a member of Team X, a crew also featuring Sabertooth and Mystique. Crucially, Team X was assembled by Nathaniel Essex, better known as the villain Mister Sinister in other Marvel stories. 

What begins as a mission to rescue Essex eventually leads to a battle for mutant survival against Trask and his Sentinels, and then a hunt for a mysterious artifact that could change the future of mutant and humankind forever. Along the way, relationships become strained, hidden motivations emerge, and the state of Insomniac's fledgling X-Men universe rapidly develops in some unexpected directions. There are stellar performances all around, with Liam McIntyre's take on Logan bringing more heart and charm to the character than expected thanks to writing that allows the character to be vulnerable and, on occasion, goofy. 

Krizia Bajos's Jean Grey also has an emotional depth to her that makes the time she spends with Logan meaningful for both characters. She has been finding and rescuing mutants, and has a worn-down, sometimes defeated vibe to her, but is uplifted by the community of mutants she has built around her. The game is very comfortable letting Logan and Jean have their moments of flirtation and bonding, and although it can occasionally feel rushed, the performances make the deepening connection between them believable nevertheless. 

The standout performance, however, is undoubtedly Troy Baker as Nathaniel Essex. Anyone with a bit of X-Men knowledge knows exactly where Essex's story will take him, but the journey is still compelling thanks to the performance. Baker is able to present Essex with the same kind of warmth and conviction that makes him a believable surrogate for Charles Xavier in Insomniac's version of the X-Men universe. But every scene he's in has a line delivered just manipulatively enough to keep the player on edge, waiting for the inevitable turn. The impact Essex has on those around him, especially Mystique and Sabertooth, is also part of the brilliance of his character and Baker's performance. He's able to prey on everyone's vulnerabilities and exploit their nature to his advantage. And Logan is the victim of some of the worst of it. 

The story takes its time getting the pieces in the right place, and there are certainly some pacing issues during this process. The early parts of the game are perhaps a bit too introspective and focused on Wolverine and Jean's relationship, while also including some lengthy sections chasing a macguffin around for a bit too long. But the final third of the game essentially switches from being a Wolverine story to a straight-up X-Men story. That's not a spoiler--you won't suddenly see Cyclops and Gambit appear--but the stakes will become crystal clear and the groundwork is laid for something momentous. As a longtime X-Men fan, I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff and it worked on me.

Wolverine is a difficult game to come to terms with. As I've emphasized repeatedly, there's nothing outright wrong or bad about it. It delivers an authentic, highly playable Wolverine experience. I don't regret my time with it and, in fact, I left hoping there's a sequel that makes good on what the game sets up. But at the same time, that inoffensiveness comes from the fact that it's a barebones third-person action game executed in a no-frills way, with no real surprises.

At best, it's a fun but forgettable experience that'll entertain you for a few hours. At worst, it shows that just because you can make really good superhero games with one character, that doesn't mean you can make really good super hero games with any character. Insomniac is an incredibly talented developer, but it shines with characters that allow it to flex its well-trained design muscles. Wolverine might be the best at what he does, but what he does hasn't let Insomniac's developers be the best at what they do.

NBA 2K has long been the standard-bearer for high-quality sports games. It's the pinnacle that other series like Madden, FC, and even the oft-beloved MLB The Show aspire to emulate in whatever ways their respective sports allow. That's not to say it gets everything right, but it often feels like the team at Visual Concepts is competing against itself. It creates trends; it doesn't chase them.

That's always been most obvious in The City, the series' social PvPvE hub and the lifeblood of the game's community. Though some other parts of the game are more uneven with this year's entry, The City proves that if you only plan to play one sports game this year, NBA 2K27 is the way to go.

The City is where players can meet up for basketball games of varying sweat levels, buy cosmetics, and complete live-service challenges--it is the center of NBA 2K27's solar system. This hub is thoughtfully attached to the single-player MyCareer mode at the proverbial hip, and this pairing offers more enjoyable and immersive things to do as a tandem than most other sports games taken in their totality. 

This year, The City makes several smart changes. At the core of it all is the long-awaited ability to import custom women characters into the mode. Aesthetically, this is a nice change that lets the hub world better reflect real-life streetball communities--it's always been true that women have existed in these spaces in real life, so they should be included in NBA 2K, too. 

However, this positive change does come with a frustrating caveat: The MyCareer mode doesn't account for them, thereby siloing these women avatars into The City exclusively. Plus, this requires anyone who wants to run around in The City as a woman to create a second avatar as a man if they want to go into MyCareer's story mode. So as awesome as this all is to see, it also feels like a frustrating half-step forward.

Finally bringing women avatars into The City makes for a more diverse and dynamic social space.

New landmarks in The City, Casual Corner and Crew HQ, build out the virtual world to be much more inviting and social. In Casual Corner, beginner-friendly pick-up games, including some that are co-op PvE against rather lowly bots, are happening whenever you want to queue for them. Meanwhile, NBA 2K's clan-like "Crews" system gets a big upgrade in Crew HQ, a space for you and your crew to meet up, practice, play crew-only games, and socialize. 

These two additions will better onboard new players and, by being tied to the Learn 2K suite added in recent years, speak to the team's commitment to not feel so dizzying to new players. They also become two more diverse ways to play in a hub world already full of so many different offerings, from ultra-sweaty Proving Grounds games that ditch the shot meter to The Rec's full-length 5v5 games. 

There's always The Park too, where some players spend the entire year building out their in-game legend and dominating on a particular court as though they actually live in the neighborhood. In more than one corner of the game's social world, these various modes feel big enough to allow you to commit to any of them exclusively and still find a lot to love.

My favorite of The City's modes, Street Kings, is akin to Mortal Kombat's Towers: PvE games against boss-type ballers that escalate in challenge with every match, and where a hype man and an energetic crowd of NPCs cheer you on like a classic And 1 game. Since it first appeared in the series two years ago, it's become my favorite way to play multiplayer in NBA 2K because it allows me and my brother to make lots of progress in The City's various progress bars, like player and season XP, without bumping into players who disrupt the more casual vibe we're aiming for.

Of course, every year I'm compelled to shine a spotlight once more on the over-monetized aspects of The City. Visual Concepts is extremely adept at partnering with authentic-feeling brands that create aspirational cosmetics to purchase and unlock in The City, and that's fine with me, even in its abundance. Personally, I loved getting to walk around in a Portland Fire jersey for the first time, as my home city recently rejoined the WNBA. 

It's past time for returning players to keep their in-game cosmetics year to year.

But I will forever hate that players can spend money to improve their players right away. Paying past the grind that begins with players rated 60 overall (OVR) has long been an additional surcharge on players in the game's marquee mode. 

It's also true that avatar intricacies like skill badges, takeover abilities, and cap breakers all mean that initial pay-to-win buff is less effective than it may sound. Paying to bring my 60 OVR player to 79 OVR as soon as he steps into The City isn't as big a leap as grinding him to 99 OVR with multiple cap breakers and gold badges.

Still, it essentially means NBA 2K is not a $70 game, but closer to a $100 game for anyone planning to play online with their friends. Attributes shouldn't be available with the same universal currency that also buys me my Rose City hat and a pair of virtual Jordans. I'll say it every year, even as it seems this is very much a feature for parent company Take-Two, not a bug.

This year's game accidentally shines a light on a related topic, too. With The City taking on the same look (albeit with some added landmarks) as last year's, it serves as a more overt reminder that your purchases don't carry over, even if the virtual world's layout does. I really liked my avatar's Celtics hoodie last year, but seeing it in the shop again for a price, rather than just being available to me for free, felt especially annoying this year. The scenery is nearly identical, but the hoodie was apparently just a rental. There's so much for sale and new things are added frequently; it feels like it's time for NBA 2K to go the way of Fortnite and just let me keep my in-game purchases forever.

The City is normally the social aspect of the custom avatar you'll build in the game, with MyCareer being the solo portion, but this year's game has built co-op into the MyCareer experience. However, it's a half-measure for now, and not as exciting as I once hoped when it was revealed. The narrative of MyCareer is much longer than usual this year, and the co-op portion of play only becomes available after several hours. At that time, the G League team you've landed with in the game's branching saga introduces a new teammate of yours in Trace Miller, a fake player invented for the story and meant to be the Player 2 of the story mode. 

This leaves your co-op friend feeling side-saddled. You can create your own avatar with your own intricately designed player build, even using your own face, but Miller is who he is, for the most part. Though you can choose his starting size and position, the build design tools are much simpler from there. The best version of co-op MyCareer would let both players fully customize their athletes, rather than leaving one feeling like merely the sidekick unlocked after many hours, as this first iteration does. 

Building your custom player is a richly detailed experience that many in the community treat like a science.

The good thing is NBA 2K has long been great at taking an idea and building on it over time, rather than scrapping it if the first year or two don't satisfy players. It's an attribute that has separated this series from some other sports games, and I expect that North Star may affect this mode soon, hopefully for the better.

There's a third way to live out the life of your avatar this year: MyCareer Eras. Borrowing the same remarkably deep Eras feature from the team-based MyNBA mode, MyCareer Eras lets you drop your fake player into any decade from the 1980s Bird vs. Magic era onward, thereby time-traveling to the NBA of yesteryear. In any era, you'll see period-specific presentation elements, rules, uniforms, rosters, and even audience attire.

Eras were introduced in NBA 2K a few years ago, and they remain the coolest way to play Franchise-style. Though you could drop your avatar into MyNBA Eras last year, that was the extent of it. You were just a player on a team like any other. This year's version is a bespoke narrative experience that puts the spotlight on your player in a bygone era, full of challenges and emergent stories. 

Taking my avatar to the early 1990s and seeking to paint over the Jordan dynasty is an incredibly fun thing to do, and just like The City--or MyNBA, which, admittedly, takes a backseat in terms of sweeping changes of its own this year--MyCareer Eras is a mode I could enjoy for hundreds of hours.

Though MyNBA doesn't get much of a look this year, it at least has received major overhauls in recent years. That's more than I can say for the game's suite of WNBA modes. Over the past three seasons and 2K sequels, my emotional investment in the WNBA has grown a lot, and with a local team making its grand reopening this year, I've been so excited to play as them in 2K. But having grown more attached to the league has led me to see some of 2K's shortcomings when it comes to the WNBA.

Even with several deep modes on offer, I hope the WNBA modes get more attention soon.

For one, The W, its solo avatar analog to MyCareer, doesn't allow you to import your woman avatar from The City, which, like the lack of a truly customizable Player 2 in MyCareer, feels like a half-measure. But in MyWNBA mode, where you take on seasons of a single team, there's a lack of the same care the men's league gets.

I'm sure the WNBA modes are played less, but I've always found it commendable how NBA 2K is a hub for all things basketball; only now I'm better able to see some of what's missing, like a robust halftime show and arena-specific ceremonies, the likes of which do exist in the real WNBA but only exist in the 2K version of the NBA.

I'm hopeful that, as the league continues to grow, 2K's WNBA modes can grow with it. It's great to see women in the game more, like in The City or in MyTeam, where they first arrived last year, but in their own bespoke game modes, some of the details this studio is otherwise so great at building into the experience are lacking.

I've spent a lot of words on not talking about gameplay, which might seem weird, but it's because this year's game feels the most year-over-year familiar to me of any game of recent memory. That's not exactly a bad thing. NBA 2K is a lot of fun on the court. It has been, so it is again. And it's not that the game adds nothing. In particular, I really like the new step-through finishing moves, used to finish a shot after you've lost your dribble. Like other aspects of on-court animations, lots of these are modeled after real players' go-to moves.

Visual Concepts has been using ProPlay, its in-house tech that transposes real NBA footage into gameplay animations, in ways that are hard to specifically attribute from outside the confines of the studio, but if ProPlay is why the game looks and feels so good, I'll take it. Combined with the game's continuing efforts to teach newcomers how to play 2K, as well as changes in The City, it feels like the series has never been more approachable.

While playing online can bring out any number of cheesy players who seek to break the game in their favor, this is true of all sports games and is usually improved upon if you stick to specific modes, like Rec games, where the crowded court of 5v5 gameplay minimizes any cheesehead's worst intentions. In games against the computer, I continue to be amazed by how different players and teams--even those spanning different eras--have their own playstyles. 

Playing the Celtics, you'll get a heavy dose of Mazzulla Ball, while the Spurs rightly center everything around the unique size and talents of Wemby. This is a fun basketball game not just because of the depth and breadth of its modes, but also because its foundational gameplay is easy to enjoy and closely resembles watching the real thing.

Taking on different eras of the league and the legends who made them memorable remains the coolest mode in sports games.

Overall though, if NBA 2K is truly competing against itself, this year's game is a slight step back. While the addition of co-op to MyCareer and women to The City are great first drafts of ideas, they each come with caveats for now that keep them from being as fun as they could've been--and reasonably should've been. On the court itself, NBA 2K is still a lot of fun, but it has seemingly settled into a groove for now, iterating in smaller ways after previous years' bigger leaps. There's room to grow in the WNBA side of the game, though with The City, MyCareer, and Eras modes, it's not short on deeply immersive experiences already. 

I have enough fun with NBA 2K each year that I tend to delete it from my console after the new year; otherwise, I risk never playing anything else. It can be that good. But just as I was ready to commit to the game for the full year, with my heightened fandom in tow, it's given me an installment I feel more comfortable walking away from--right after I delete the Jordan dynasty and beat all the Street Kings.

Among horror royalty, there is perhaps no greater icon than Michael Myers. First appearing in 1978, the slasher helped ignite a trend of similar movie monsters that defined the next decade and beyond of the horror landscape.

Halloween: The Game displays a keen understanding of his special place in that lineage, and IllFonic has brought his unique sense of unrelenting menace to video games in a way I can't get enough of.

Halloween: The Game is a 4v1 asymmetrical horror game from a team that has established its brand on similar projects. From Friday the 13th and Predator: Hunting Grounds to Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, IllFonic has spent the last decade becoming synonymous with this genre, and yet it's never made the same game twice. That's true again here, as one of Halloween's best attributes is that it plays quite unlike any other, be it from this team or the others also making games in this realm. The studio didn't reskin something we've seen before in a blue jumpsuit. This is the real deal.

Though games of this sort have used a 4v1 setup before, most famously in the genre's king of the hill, Dead by Daylight, Halloween adds a unique wrinkle in the form of NPCs. Across the various maps of Haddonfield, Illinois, residents go about their day-to-day lives, and it's up to the team of four player-controlled survivors to warn them of the threat Myers poses, protect them, and eventually escort them off the map or hide them until the round's timer expires.

I love this new approach to the genre for two big reasons. For one, it dims the spotlight on the human survivors. In a game of Dead by Daylight, for example, one or two people dying early will likely doom the entire round. But in Halloween, your group of four is joined by a handful of other potential survivors, and the game's scoring system, like Killer Klowns' before it, is not built on a binary pass/fail. You could die in a round, but if your team helps a handful of residents flee to safety, you may have won the round anyway. It feels like less pressure is on your shoulders.

Fundamentally, this gives the entire game a feel unlike anything that's come before it. You're not just trying to escape or wait out the timer to win, as you did in Friday the 13th. You actively need to outrun and outsmart Michael Myers, creatively using the limited time you have before he appears in stabbing range. Staying stealthy, locking doors behind you, and pre-planning an exit strategy--like jumping out a window when he's swarmed the house you're in--are vital.

But there's another big reason this novel setup works so well: It authentically captures the spirit of the movies, particularly that timeless first one from 1978. This is especially true when you're playing as Michael himself. His key ability, the Shape Jump, allows him to quickly and invisibly float around the map, reappearing anywhere so long as it's dark and no survivor is too near, mimicking his way of almost supernaturally being where you least expect him. 

But simply spawning on survivors to quickly gut them only awards the killer a measly score for his gory efforts. Instead, you're encouraged by the scoring system to stalk your prey, watching from a distance, building up your stalking meter, before ultimately moving in for the kill. The higher your stalking meter, the more environmental kills you can unlock, too, which don't just add even more score, but also sell the horror-movie vibe--Michael isn't merely slashing everyone with his butcher knife. He's throwing them through TVs, into fireplaces, or leaving them propped up on fences like twisted lawn decorations.

Halloween is certainly Illfonic's best-looking game yet.

After a kill, you're also encouraged to admire your work, staring at it in the same first-person view you use to stalk people in order to build up a Bloodthirst meter that makes Michael more powerful for subsequent kills. 

This loop of stalking and killing residents, both user-controlled and NPCs, gives Halloween its special ingredient. I found myself role-playing as Michael in ways I didn't see coming, peeking out from bushes just enough to stealthily build my stalking meter on unsuspecting victims, practically recreating some of the film's most memorable imagery. Staring into people's living rooms as they gabbed on the phone or leisurely watched TV was so immersive, I'd even creep myself out at times. It felt like I was playing a home-invasion simulator. It was unsettling, but true to the film. 

With a lot of games in this space, the community is often obsessed with playing as the killer, and that'll likely happen here, too. But playing Halloween as a survivor has been my most enjoyable experience on that side of the asymmetry since Friday the 13th. The objective of getting people out alive is fresh, but even when it's your neck Michael is breathing down, it's well-balanced. After a few matches as Michael, I thought he was overpowered, but as I played more and people came to understand how to operate as survivors, it became clearer that those survivors have a lot of strength in numbers.

Banding together to arm NPCs, escorting them to escape routes, and disrupting Michael's restless pursuit with flashlights, firecrackers, guns, and melee weapons are best done with your friends nearby. If you're grabbed, you can pry yourself free rather easily with a pocket knife, or with more effort using a quick-time event that lets you escape his clutches if you're fast enough. When Michael closes the distance, it's possible and could even be likely that you down him with a gang attack. Though he can't seemingly be killed like Jason once could, when he's downed, his Bloodthirst meter takes a major hit, before he sits up like The Undertaker (okay, to be fair, The Undertaker stole that move from him), and continues his pursuit. 

Little moments like that will be rarer, but in between, the period-specific cars, kitchens, garages, and TV shows soak you in the time and place of the film, while the front porches lined with jack-o'-lanterns, as vibes-rich as they already are, feel destined to be even more appreciated every October. I love the fall season, and that's partly because I love horror so much. It feels so good to live in the world of the film, faithfully brought to life in every would-be-quaint home turned into a crime scene, aglow in the lights of both pumpkins and police cars.

Yes, Laurie Strode is playable and sometimes even an NPC--and, as an added plot twist, she might even die first.

It's not only the NPCs that make Halloween stand out from the pack of asymmetrical horror multiplayer games. There's also a single-player campaign, though it's not the draw here. Across six missions and only about two hours total for a single playthrough, you'll play entirely as Michael Myers, re-enacting some of the movie's scenes while also adding to the canon. The premise is that you're playing as him, starting with his escape from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and up through Halloween Eve, essentially filling a gap in time when we otherwise don't see what he's up to. 

It functions more than anything as a tutorial. With various icons on the screen, cooldown abilities, and lots of mechanics to manage, from killing the electricity, phone lines, or, of course, the many people around town, the campaign does its job at teaching you the basics, though it should be noted there's no survivor equivalent. For that side of the game, you really just learn by doing. I didn't mind that since it meant things like repairing getaway cars, calling the cops, or unlocking the emergency bunker weren't so clearly understood, heightening the horror of my earliest rounds.

The campaign also has more to do than just see each mission once, as it includes a set of challenges to complete that award items such as player banners, clothing, and other cosmetics for its several survivor characters and Michael himself. I had more fun with the campaign when chasing these rewards than I did on the first pass when I was playing it simply for its own sake. The solo mode isn't much to get excited about on its own.

Each map envelops you in the place and time of the original film.

Halloween also continues a long trend for IllFonic games, and it's one I wish all other games of this sort would copy: You lose nothing for playing in private matches. You enjoy the same XP rates; you can unlock all the same rewards; there's nothing gated behind matchmaking versus playing in a private lobby. Though it's easy to load into a multiplayer game with your friends anyway, I know firsthand that sometimes you want to keep it more casual or private in a game for just you and your buddies. I can see why other games, particularly the ultra-competitive Dead by Daylight, aren't as willing to tear down that barrier, but IllFonic has never punished players for playing in private matches, even if they choose to never step foot into a public lobby, and I love that.

I had a ton of fun with Halloween, so much, in fact, that I was willing to forgive what was a messy experience during many rounds. Bugs in the game ranged from cosmetic blemishes, like misaligned kill animations and floating police cars appearing on the map, to more serious issues, like players losing the ability to move or frame-rate slowdowns. 

Lots of these issues were cleaned up over time; I've been playing the game for a few weeks now and have seen several patches come through. Still, with more planned patches on the way, my expectation is early adopters will experience some janky aspects of their own, even if they may be less common or different than the ones I named here. If there's one consistent mark against this studio, it's a lack of polish out of the gate.

Though the launch-day patch may provide a cleaner experience than I had, I'd be surprised if Halloween is entirely free of the issues I ran into.

These issues slightly tempered my enjoyment of Halloween, though I'm generally not easily frustrated by bugs if the core experience is good enough. If you tend to be more bothered by them, you may want to see how the broader community reacts in the early days after launch. For me, though, I had so much fun and only didn't play more than my 20+ hours because it's hard to coordinate multiplayer sessions when only a few people in the world are playing before launch. 

People often like to stack up every asymmetrical horror game to Dead by Daylight. I've never felt that makes sense. Games like Halloween aren't trying to replace that genre titan; they're seeking to live alongside it. To do that, they need a distinct and exciting gameplay loop and to capture the tone of their source material. Halloween achieves both of these things, giving players a vibes-heavy experience befitting the timeless film while also offering a unique hook that keeps the game from feeling like a rehash of the many horror multiplayer games that came before it. Games like Halloween don't make me think the landscape is oversaturated. It makes me excited to see what teams that love horror the way IllFonic does will do next, because here, with Halloween, they nailed it.

"Fighting is everything" is a phrase protagonist Miyamoto Musashi uses to explain his ethos, but it's an ideology that doubles as an accurate description of Onimusha: Way of the Sword, too. After a disappointing 20-year hiatus, Capcom's samurai series returns in fine form, ditching the fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds of its forebears for a modern reinvention where combat is king. 

The fifth mainline entry in the series still maintains key aspects of Onimusha's distinct identity, mixing Japanese history and mythology with the studio's penchant for inventive creature design, but infuses these aspects with layered melee skirmishes shaped by the past 20 years of action games. The shift to a semi-open-world structure is a stumbling block, but Way of the Sword still marks an excellent return for the long-dormant series by evolving its swordplay with captivating aplomb.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbikE6l6nU0

Musashi himself is, of course, known for his combat prowess: a legendary samurai from Japanese history who's widely regarded as the greatest swordsman who ever lived. Much like previous protagonist Samanosuke Akechi–who's loosely based on the Sengoku period's Akechi Hidemitsu–Capcom was influenced by the fables, legends, and real stories of Musashi when creating the character. 

While he's only in his early 20s in Way of the Sword, the cockiness, confidence, and swagger of someone who would eventually go undefeated in 62 sword duels is immediately apparent. There's a Harrison Ford-esque roguishness about him that's easy to fall in love with, and this is aided immensely by not just Yoshimasa Hosoya's voice performance–I played the Japanese-language version–but also the game's excellent facial-capture animation. Every subtle raise of an eyebrow, smirk of the mouth, and clench of the jaw is evident and lends Masashi a ton of character even when he's not speaking. 

It also helps that he's modeled after the late, great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, best known for his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa on films such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, and who also played Musashi in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy.

Onimusha has a long history of using the likenesses of real actors, including Yusaku Matsuda and Jean Reno, but the leap in quality over the past 20 years is undeniable in Way of the Sword. I'm not overly familiar with Mifune's earlier work, yet his mannerisms shine through both in cutscenes and gameplay, from his wide-eyed intensity to the way he shrugs his shoulders and scratches the back of his neck. 

At the beginning of the game, Musashi arrives in Edo-era Kyoto, looking to prove himself as a warrior without equal. After defeating a clan leader in a fierce duel, he's set upon by an invading force of demonic Genma and is only able to fight back after being granted an Oni gauntlet by a mysterious figure. 

Unlike previous protagonists such as Samanosuke and Jubei Yagyu, who wanted to use their Oni powers to save the world, Musashi wants to rid himself of the gauntlet. The way of the sword is traversed on one's own strength, so Musashi feels having these powers at his disposal is essentially cheating and doesn't represent his true skill as a swordsman. 

Watching Musashi navigate this stance while newfound allies are relying on him to save Kyoto is one of the more compelling aspects of the game's narrative. Musashi has his own ethos, but he's also not the kind of samurai who adheres to a strict bushido code. When it's a matter of life or death, he'll break the rules, which feels very human and fits his rogueish attitude. 

The rest of the story is fairly straightforward, with some comically evil villains adding entertainment value and impetus to the game's many battles. It's standard popcorn fare–not quite as corny as Resident Evil, and there are some killer lines, but it's not something you'll remember for long outside of some of its performances. There are some pacing issues early on, too. Control is frequently wrestled away from you during the first couple of hours as you're dragged from one exposition-heavy cutscene to the next. It's not a great first impression but does eventually relent, settling into a decent groove with conflict at the forefront.

Any action game worth its salt lives and dies on how good its combat feels, and in this regard, Way of the Sword positively thrives. It's not a combo-laden action game like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, nor is it as punishing and methodical as the many souls-likes that have emerged since Onimusha last appeared. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle.

You've got your standard light and heavy attacks, and transitioning between them to create various combos is seamless and feels suitably hefty. Musashi moves like a regular person–you can clearly see him swinging his katana like he has to put some muscle behind each strike–and this makes his swordplay very deliberate, emphasizing defense as the ultimate key to unlocking your full offensive arsenal. 

You can block and parry almost any attack, with the latter opening up your opponents for swift retribution. You can also deflect attacks, which doesn't create the same opportunity to counter but does take a decent chunk out of the enemy's stamina meter. Once this is fully depleted, your foes enter an exhausted state where you're able to deal significant damage–even slowing down time so you can select a specific body part to target during boss fights, such as a pesky tail that you can slice off to prevent certain attacks, or a limb that grants a confluence of souls for you to absorb.

You can dodge attacks, too, performing a stylish Reflex Dodge if you evade an unarmed enemy strike at just the right time. This is also the only way to reverse grab attacks, just as deflecting is the only way to counter unavoidable attacks. Way of the Sword's combat is built around reading and reacting to the enemy's various tells and then responding in devastating fashion. Button mashing is quickly punished, but once you've got a handle on its slower cadence, there are stylish thrills to be had in each and every battle. 

If you're feeling particularly brave, you can even utilize an Onimusha mainstay: the Issen attack. By striking just before an enemy attack lands, you'll hit back with a deadly counter that instantly kills most regular enemies. The timing on this is much more precise than either parries, deflects, or Reflex Dodges, but the reward is much greater, especially once you've unlocked the ability to chain multiple Issen attacks in a row by rhythmically timing your button presses. 

All of this feels incredibly satisfying in action, mixing nuanced depth with some of the best animation work in the genre. As someone who loves parries, Way of the Sword executes them like no other game I can recall. Rather than enemy attacks simply bouncing off Musashi's katana, you lock weapons with a palpable heft, sending a barrage of sparks flying as they slide against each other before Musashi uses the enemy's momentum to reposition them. It's very much coded in classic samurai cinema, producing these dramatic sword clashes within the flow of combat. 

Chaining together parries and deflects also builds a meter that activates Blazing State, coating Musashi's katana in a blue flame that boosts your attack power and causes enemies to drop more souls when they die, such as yellow ones that replenish your health and blue ones that power your Oni Armaments. While the younger Musashi hasn't yet created the Niten Ichi-ryu style of dual-wielding he's famous for, his familiarity with multiple weapon types is well realized. 

You gradually gain access to more Oni Armaments throughout the course of the game, letting you unleash temporary attacks with a varied pool of weapons. The Two Celestials , for instance, are a pair of blades that deal straight damage and extract yellow souls from the Genma, while the Wind-Whipper is a naginata that conjures whirlwinds to wipe out groups of enemies. Elsewhere, the Earth-Shaker hammers excel at inflicting significant stamina damage, and the Firebird Flute summons flaming birds when played, allowing you to launch them at enemies. 

Choosing which Oni Armament to utilize for each situation becomes a key part of your approach to combat, although Musashi isn't opposed to using unconventional means either. Tables can be flipped and deployed as large shields before being booted at enemies, food carts can be rammed into startled mobs, and you can parry Genma into standing torches, setting them on fire in the process.

Unfortunately, the sheer excellence of Way of the Sword's combat is also the only thing keeping the game afloat when mired in its disappointing structure. Eastern Kyoto is established early as a semi-open-world hub, and while there are traditional levels, a large chunk of the game takes place within this open area. You'll find side quests, collectibles, and upgrade materials, and while the map starts small and gradually opens up, it's never particularly large. This works in the game's favor, however, as the side quests therein are dull and uninspired. 

A subset of optional missions called "Mysteries of Kyoto" has you helping citizens and relaying their stories to Murasaki Shikibu, the historical author of The Tale of Genji. These yarns are rooted in Japanese mythology, covering the likes of the Three Worms, the Faceless, and the Night Parade, but calling them mysteries is a glaring misnomer. 

The culprit is always just another Genma you need to kill, and the same rings true in the rest of the game's side quests as well. Someone asks for your help, so you head to a location and dispatch every enemy you can find. The worst of these is a series of archery quests where you return to previous locations to shoot down specific Genma using your bow. You're rewarded with upgrade materials for completing these quests, so skipping them puts you at a huge disadvantage. The one saving grace is that there aren't many side quests, and engaging in more combat isn't inherently bad, but Way of the Sword's optional excursions are still incredibly formulaic and make the entire hub feel superfluous. 

The game's traditional levels are much better, often evoking a specific mood or atmosphere. One sees you venture into an underground lab where a particularly twisted Genma is conducting experiments, fusing humans, animals, and her own kind together to create unsettling monstrosities. Here, Capcom leans into its horror tendencies, casting shadows across the lab's shoji to highlight the mutations happening just out of sight, while kimonos hang from the rafters as evidence of the people who were kidnapped and brought to this malevolent place. It's an eerie and atmospheric location to explore.

Elsewhere, you'll make the gradual trek up the slopes of Mount Oe during twilight, fighting through smaller forts and dodging giant, rolling logs to reach the palatial castle nestled at the top. If the whole game was just more levels like these, I would have very few complaints. Way of the Sword's combat is exceptional, and it features some of the best boss fights I've ever seen, but there's always this nagging feeling that it could've been even better.

It feels odd to be disappointed by a game with so many moments I absolutely adore, but that's what happens when the potential to be greater is so obvious. The uninspired semi-open-world is a misstep that doesn't justify its existence, yet Way of the Sword is still a fantastic and welcome return for the series, led by outstanding combat that firmly places it in the upper echelon of modern action games. Fighting is everything, after all, and there's nothing else quite like Musashi's brand of calculated violence.

Very few of the many stories you'll encounter in The Blood of Dawnwalker end happily. It seems foolish to expect anything else from a dark, medieval action-RPG about a secluded valley ruled over by vampires who demand blood and subservience from its human populace. While hoping for anyone to get out unscathed is perhaps naive, it's impressive that developer Rebel Wolves manages to give just about every story enough depth and nuance to keep all that death and tragedy compelling all the way through.

Dawnwalker is composed of what feels like a ridiculous number of quests. Due to its structure, they seem haphazardly constructed at first, with no dedicated throughline; only a story you construct by taking on whatever tasks you think are worth your limited time. What's shocking is that these quests, from the intricate stories of rebels fighting to free the valley and vampires following shadowy agendas, to the momentary tidbits of setup from a group of soldiers by the side of the road before you start hacking them apart with your sword, are so well-written. To the game's credit, there's a good chance you'll want to do everything in Dawnwalker. The fact that you can't is part of what makes it so compelling.

https://youtu.be/947maH4t22E

Dawnwalker's story is built on a ticking clock, and that feature is among the game's best ideas. You play as Coen, a human who loses his family to Brencis, the valley's vampire sovereign. Coen quickly comes to realize that Brencis is set to host a feast in 30 in-game days, so you have that long to make preparations and storm the castle to free the captured humans, doing whatever you can to strengthen yourself, gather allies, and figure out a plan before time runs out.

Time advances when you take on or complete quests and activities. Each of these takes an allotted amount of time, so you're always weighing whether you want to dedicate time to one quest over another. Dilly dallying with other activities while a quest is active can change the situation or even cause it to end in failure, so stacking up 50 things to do is a bad idea. While you have enough time on your hands that you're not forced to consider every single hour you spend along the way, the sense that the clock is against you gives everything you do in Dawnwalker the feeling of weight and importance. It also might make you think twice about stopping to lend a hand to a minor character you meet, or choosing a merciful but time-consuming option over a more expedient but harmful one.

Time also dictates the way that you address quests. At the end of the tutorial section, Coen is forcibly turned into a vampire, but thanks to this world's supernatural rules, he unexpectedly becomes a Dawnwalker--he transforms into a vampire when night falls but reverts to a human under the sun. During the day, the human Coen can do things like interact with shopkeepers or make his way into occupied settlements, looking like any other person; if he gets into a fight with Brencis's soldiers, he does it with a sword. At night, Coen is more deadly in a fight, but often more noticeable, and enemies tend to attack on sight. An area might be public during the day and off limits at night, so when you decide to solve a problem can change how you do so. And of course, some events only take place during the day, while others only happen at night.

The smartest way time is deployed against you is in Dawnwalker's progression system. Leveling happens passively as you gain experience points for completing quests and defeating enemies, kicking up your overall stats, but to unlock new abilities in combat or enhance elements like your life total and stamina bar, you need to do more. To add skills for the human Coen, you'll need to find and read books and manuals; for the vampire Coen, your skills unlock as you consume the blood of humans, animals, and other vampires. And unlocking perks costs points you'll earn from leveling, as well as time. 

This means that making yourself stronger forces tradeoffs. Do you want to power yourself up at the risk of failing or delaying a quest? I found that I was always sitting on perk points in Dawnwalker, waiting for when I was sure they wouldn't cost me key opportunities. As a result, sometimes I undertook quests without maximizing my capabilities. That push and pull makes leveling up a deliberate and important decision about how it might impact Coen's overall goal.

Where this leveling system falls down is in what it actually offers. Coen has three different skill trees from which you can purchase perks, each keyed to a different part of his character. Coen's a gifted swordsman and can use his claws as a vampire, while he gets access to witchcraft powers when he's human. 

The system presents you with a lot of options, many of which can be upgraded several times, and it feels purposely designed to create choice paralysis. Since you probably aren't investing in everything due to the time it'll cost, you're forced to think about what upgrades are going to matter most to you, and whether you're leaning too hard on one set of perks over the others, which might leave you vulnerable during certain times of day.

The trouble is that the trees are filled with upgrades that don't always feel meaningful. Part of the weakness is that abilities are equipped into slots in your menu, and in order to equip more of them, you have to also unlock new slots by spending perk points and time. The limitation can incentivize you to equip a couple of active and passive abilities and never change them, effectively making the ones you don't equip dead spots on the tree. And since, for most abilities, you need to first find books to unlock them, you might be barred from a perk forever, or long enough that it doesn't matter enough to pursue it. 

Requiring so much thought about how you build Coen makes it easy to disregard a lot of your options, not out of purposefully constructing a character, but because of the quests you might choose arbitrarily throughout the game. I never did much with his witchcraft abilities, for instance, since they required me to spend health it often felt like Human Coen couldn't spare, and because their books weren't as easily available. I spent perk points on witchcraft abilities I never actually used much, and in the end wound up ignoring a lot of that skill tree in favor of the more practical sword skills.

And while you'll unlock some fun combat abilities, the fact that you might only use a couple of them for huge swathes of the game weakens Dawnwalker somewhat, because you'll be doing a ton of fighting. Brencis's soldiers dominate the valley, and while you'll talk your way through a lot of situations, combat is the main thrust of Dawnwalker's gameplay, so the rhythm of using the same few abilities can get stale.

Dawnwalker's combat is pretty good nevertheless, bolstered by its focus on being directional. Coen swings his attacks in a particular direction, depending on where you hold the left analog stick, and the idea is that you want to beat an enemy's guard by swinging to avoid their blocks. In practice, directional swings are more haphazard and tough to use well, but also don't really matter. Where the directional combat really shines is in your defense--if you push the analog stick in the direction your opponent is swinging from and hit the block button at the right time, you can parry their blow and counterattack. 

How you fight is dictated by a stamina meter, and you use stamina for attacks, dodges, and Coen's "omniblock," which deflects any incoming blow. Blocking directionally, however, uses no stamina and actually kicks off its recovery, so in order to keep up the speed of a fight you need to be executing skillful blocks, lest you run out of stamina and get overwhelmed. Enemies often come at Coen in groups, too, so you have to watch out for people coming from the sides, who you can deflect away and hit briefly before returning to your main target.

It's a great system that gives fights the rhythm of a duel, with the back-and-forth between you and your opponent requiring quick reactions on your part, and all happening fast enough that you're rarely waiting for an attack to parry. With multiple enemies, you have to pay close attention, and I genuinely felt like a world-class swordsman as I turned away opponent after opponent. Trading blows and parries builds up "activation points" that can be spent on special abilities like stunning enemies or hitting several at a time. And even though you'll play through hundreds of battles, the focus on quick reactions and executing on openings keeps them exciting, even when you're facing groups of soldiers who have been fighting more or less the same way for 40 hours.

What irritations derive from combat come from the fact that you do so much of it, and how it feels is mostly dictated by the kinds of enemies coming for you. The directional combat approach is engaging, but it also means that fighting as Human Coen and Vampire Coen are very similar in function, despite their differences. As a vampire, Coen can fight with his claws, but they deflect blows from soldiers and monsters the same way a sword does. The major differences come from which special abilities you can use, which are often unblockable or interrupt enemy attacks. That fact can downgrade their use from being a tactical deployment at a key moment, to something you hit as soon as an activation point pops up and a move's cooldown runs out. Even though the human and vampire are intended to feel different, one more calculated and the other more aggressive, they wind up playing more or less the same way, especially over a long time.

Another big difference in the two sides of combat comes from how you manage health. Vampire Coen has a bunch of perks that increase his survivability. You start with an ability that lets you briefly chomp on an enemy's neck to suck some of their blood and restore your health, which is a huge boon in the early game. The vampire side also has some extremely powerful perks like passive health regeneration, as well as ones that give health back when you parry and when you attack with your claws. You also get bonuses from weapons and armor that passively boost a bunch of traits, including health. By the end of the game, I felt functionally unkillable as a vampire as my health often regenerated faster than enemies could damage me.

As a human, fights are much more harrowing, since your healing options are limited to eating food between fights and using items equipped to quick slots during combat. You can't refill your quick slots while fighting, so you have to manage them carefully, and food is less effective in combat, pushing you to rely on medicines you can craft. Where you can restore health through combat abilities reliably as a vampire all game, as a human, you have to wait for openings to use a medicine, and make sure you pack enough to stay alive. This makes fighting as a human tough and active in interesting ways, but also incentivizes you to take on whatever battles you can with your safer and more powerful vampire abilities.

Dawnwalker does include a decently granular difficulty system that you can adjust throughout the game, and it's definitely something you should mess with. You can separately adjust combat difficulty, dictating things like parry windows and the damage enemies inflict, and RPG difficulty, which governs elements like Coen's stamina costs and healing. At the default difficulty settings, it felt easy for the balance to get thrown off, so adjusting both was useful to keep Dawnwalker from getting frustratingly difficult or feeling too easy.

While they don't always fire on all cylinders, what's notable about all these systems is how intricate and deliberate they are, how much the game wants you to think about the ways you interact with them, and how many cool swings they take. It's fun to think so deeply about how and when to level up, what armor and weapon bonuses are most important to your build, and what preparations you're going to need for a fight before you undertake it. Those elements give Dawnwalker's RPG systems a lot more depth and thoughtfulness than games in the genre often have.

Holding it all together are the many, many cool stories you'll find along the way. The valley is absolutely littered with quests, and to their credit, they all feel like they're worth doing. What's more, you have a ton of freedom about what you actually get up to as you push toward your goal of saving people, and you won't always know how a quest might provide you with friends who can help you later, or unlock new information and further steps. But the fact that they so often do helps stop most quests from seeming like detours, and instead, weaves them together to tell Coen's story through your very specific path through the game. Everything has an air of being consequential, especially because Coen and others are constantly mentioning important tidbits gleaned from other quests, or the consequences of past actions.

Writing and voice acting is also strong throughout the game, making so much of what might otherwise be mundane open-world content unexpectedly compelling. Brencis has three lieutenants who run his operations in the valley, doing things like recruiting soldiers, gathering the blood of peasants, and keeping the masses entertained and docile. Disrupting those operations can eventually draw them out, triggering quests that give you opportunities to kill them so you won't have to face Brencis at full strength. And even a lot of these activities, which are ostensibly of the base-clearing variety, throw in interesting little stories. You might run into a mother trying to convince her soldier son to desert, and then get the choice to try to talk him into it through reasoning, intimidation, or bribery, lowering the difficulty of the battle against his remaining squad. Or you might find that, after clearing a few camps where peasants are paid to gather leeches to help store blood for the vampires, the commoners you're ostensibly trying to help at the remaining camps have taken up arms to help defend their livelihoods against you.

The quests tied to each of Brencis's lieutenants are some of the best in the game, giving you opportunities to catch each one when they're vulnerable, and giving you a deep look into who they are. They're also full of tough, interesting choices, like when you're approached by a vassal of one lieutenant who wants to help you win a duel against him by poisoning the blood he drinks--which means poisoning an innocent person. How you deal with situations has material consequences and creates some great, small-scale dramas. A lot of the quests in Dawnwalker are still sticking with me days later, and I want to dive back in to follow the many plot threads that I missed or cut short.

Dawnwalker also throws in a very good idea to mess with the formula of giving you all these tough choices to make: the fact that you're a vampire. Often when talking to people, you'll see an option on your list of responses: "Give in to the hunger." As your health gets lower and you get hungrier, that option becomes more prevalent. It might hop around the list to try to trick you into selecting it, and other options might briefly change into the hunger option. If your health is low enough, you might not get the choice at all--the hunger will take over and your murderous nature will take out that character.

It's a great idea that creates interesting and serious consequences. Killing someone, either on purpose or by accident, might wall off a quest you needed that person to complete, or change its circumstances. At the very least, people who would have played a larger part in the story won't be around later if they're dead. It injects a fun, unexpected drama into a game where you're already constantly choosing how you want to deal with people and what you're willing to do to achieve your goals.

What's disappointing about the idea is that it's so easy to circumvent. I experienced Coen losing control during a Dawnwalker preview event, but playing it for review, it never happened again. The game puts up plenty of guard rails to help you avoid being forced into that situation, whether it's animals or other people you can briefly feed on, health bar enhancements that make it tougher to fall so low you can't stop yourself, or passive healing that lessens the risk. So I never got challenged by my vampire nature in a way that was out of my hands. It's a shame, because being forced to balance your health or perform well in a fight because of the risk you might pose to regular people is a great idea, and I wish Dawnwalker leaned into it more.

The game can also be a bit technically shaky, although its issues never reached above minor frustrations for me. Objects and textures pop in frequently, animations can hitch in conversations, some platforming sections see Coen slipping off walls or falling through the ground haphazardly, and hit boxes are occasionally a little finicky in combat. The limitations mostly result in briefly irritating sections, but they happen often enough to be notable, if not dealbreaking. Rebel Wolves has already patched out a lot of issues and plans a Day One update that should help things even more, but it's worth noting that you're going to see some jank that will affect the experience, so save often.

Overall, The Blood of Dawnwalker is an incredibly ambitious, deeply interesting first game from Rebel Wolves. Not every good idea lands and not every envelope is pushed as far as it could be, but the potential of the game is vast, and there's a huge amount to lean into and love. And it's all bolstered by excellent writing that makes for one of the deepest and most interesting game worlds I've run across in some time. The Blood of Dawnwalker is the kind of RPG that feels great to get lost in, that digs into your mind and stays there, and which is worth scouring and savoring.

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy faces a difficult balancing act. Can it move away from its predecessors' terrifying waves of rats and still deliver a supernatural terror that ties into rewarding environmental puzzles? Can it ditch the series' sibling protagonists and still tell a moving story focused on two people learning to lean on one another? And can it add fierce, frenetic combat to the franchise's formula as a new gameplay pillar without abandoning its core identity as a puzzle game? At times, Resonance succeeds--especially during its stronger first half--but it too often loses its footing. And as the game increasingly misses the mark, it further distances itself from what worked so well in the first two A Plague Tale games without adding anything to make up for the loss.

Set in 1334, about 15 years prior to the first two A Plague Tale games, Resonance follows Sophia instead of series protagonist Amicia de Rune. As a young girl, Sophia was forcibly injected with blood that causes her to have visions of a long-lost civilization. Wanting to cure her of these visions, her father eventually finds and travels to the island that she has seen in her visions, but in his attempts to uncover the island's history, he is killed by a mysterious and terrifying beast. Wanting to discover what her visions mean and learn about what truly happened to her dad, Sophia travels to the island with her best friend, Leni, in tow. 

The story, especially in the first half, is very good. This series has consistently done a fantastic job of quickly building up characters or situations in its introductions to be narrative buy-ins that are solely there to be destroyed or yanked away early on and create emotional stakes: Amicia's happy family life in the first game, the hope that Amicia's life had returned to some degree of normalcy in the second game. Resonance does the same. You actually spend quite a bit of time getting to know Sophia in Europe and the fairly happy life she has with the adopted family of smugglers she grew up with before a tragic event forces Sophia to go to the island. There's a real sense of desperation in her tale, and the stakes of what may happen to her or Leni if she were to return to her allies empty-handed and without answers are abundantly apparent.

Leni and Sophia have an odd dynamic. Narratively, it's pretty good. There's some angst beneath the playful banter of the two friends that implies there could be romantic feelings pushing the two together, and the two play off one another in cutscenes incredibly well with their very different skill sets--Sophia is a fighter who can muscle through problems that require strength, and Leni is a pickpocket who is adept at getting in and out of places she doesn't belong.

But that's never reflected in the gameplay. Leni can hold her own in a fight just as well as Sophia can (she even one-shots whichever enemy she's dealing with as soon as you handle the second-to-last foe) and regularly helps out with pushing open heavy doors and moving partially stuck levers. And at the same time, Sophia can squeeze into any spot Leni can and is usually the lead on how to solve puzzles (because she's you, the player!). The story does a great job of framing that these two are only succeeding because they have one another, but then this framing is repeatedly struck down whenever the cutscene ends and control returns to you. Again, it all feels very odd, like Resonance is holding onto its partnership framing for no other reason than that the first two games used it.

The mysterious, newly discovered island that Sophia and Leni find themselves on is quickly revealed to be Crete, what was once home to Minoan society and, if the myths are to be believed, a minotaur-inhabited labyrinth. The characters don't know that--it's 1334, so all of those stories have yet to be uncovered again.

This is a terrific framing for a puzzle game. As Sophia, you carry a book loaded with drawings from your childhood visions, your dad's early attempts to explore the island, and all the follow-up expeditions that the smuggling gang undertook after his passing. There's no writing--it's all a series of drawings. And using those drawings, you have to figure out how to retrace the steps of those who came before, while also finding your own way forward when unexpected roadblocks pop up. 

To aid in her and Leni's exploration, Sophia possesses an artifact that dates back to the Minoan society that once lived on the island. The sphere can redirect light to reveal hidden symbols left behind with invisible paint, and also open doorways that require lining up beams of light to hit certain points on a wall. These puzzles centered around the use of light are rarely complicated, but contribute to the feeling of Sophia and Leni being intelligent dungeon delvers who are uncovering long-lost history. 

The process feels as I imagine archaeology to be--I don't believe Sophia's journey is in any way accurate to uncovering forgotten ruins and unraveling ancient mysteries, but the idealized fantasy of it is well represented here.

Crete is also a beautiful place to explore. The island is brightly lit and full of vibrant greens, reds, and blues, while the faded bronze of statues, broken weapons, and simple machinery mark Minoan society. Resonance also has the best soundtrack of the series, sticking to strings to frame most of Sophia's journey as a grand adventure or odyssey, and crucially plucking at the tension once the supernatural terror begins to rear its head.

It takes Resonance longer than any other A Plague Tale game to reveal its monster, but once it does, any semblance that this will be a fun couples adventure for Sophia and Leni is gone. The beast is creepy, slinking through the darkness of the island's underbelly in search of any and all life. In these darkened areas, Sophia becomes covered in softly glowing blue lights, and she leaves a trail of luminescent tracks whenever she's not crouch-walking. The beast can use these trails to track her, but it also will pause to take a hauntingly raspy sniff of the air--if Sophia is not behind cover when this happens, the beast will sniff out the blue lights on her and pursue her. The beast's only weakness is light. It burns away upon touching any light source, and so encounters with the beast are a series of tense stealth sections as you bravely venture into the dark to reach the next source of light.

These sections are terrifying, especially the first one as the beast is introduced and you finally get to see what killed Sophia's father. These moments stay pretty consistently creepy too, with the sound design of the beast's methodical movements and desperate breathing creating a tense and frantic atmosphere whenever it shows up. And Resonance continues to raise the bar with each encounter, adding new types of obstacles to consider (like how to find safety in areas where the beast can dim the light, or there's no light whatsoever) and more types of enemy terrors for Sophia to encounter in the dark. It's certainly the most memorable take I've ever seen of Crete's infamous minotaur.

Figuring out what the beast is and its motivations becomes the biggest driving mystery of Resonance. As Sophia ventures closer to the minotaur's lair, she encounters more and more that is unfamiliar to her but very much understood for us as the player, but the game's reframing of these long-familiar myths is an enticing draw. Sophia soon starts having visions of being Theseus, the Greek hero who we know slayed the minotaur, but their story feels quite different from the tale we know. They don't seem to be a divine adventurer, but are instead a gladiator who rose to fame by participating in some sort of competition; and they have a secret agreement with Daedalus, the famed inventor of the labyrinth. 

These visions are beautiful, reimagining what Minoan society might have looked like at the height of the Bronze Age. They're also wonderful power fantasies as Theseus is a far stronger warrior than Sophia.

Combat is merely fine in Resonance. Sophia can strike, block, dodge, and parry, and also has a grappling hook to grab and yank enemies toward her. The soldiers that followed Sophia and Leni to the island come in your typical variety of standard, nimble, shield-bearing, spear-wielding, and heavy enemy types, each of which has a singular tried-and-true method of taking them down. The challenge of combat comes down to crowd management, ducking and weaving and parrying long enough for an opening to present itself. Sophia (and Theseus) can take two hits before the third kills them, and health is only regained by executing an enemy, encouraging you to fight aggressively and end conflicts swiftly or to keep a weaker enemy alive for an easy stab-and-heal while whittling away at a much stronger foe. 

These brief and violent dances are a fun break from the puzzle-solving in the first half of the game, but in the latter half--especially the final few hours--Resonance starts throwing huge groups of enemies at you, and that's when the combat system falls apart. Resonance doesn't have a lock-on feature, so dealing with especially large groups of enemies clumped together is a pain, and I found myself frustratingly dying often because I was trying to attack a specific enemy I had just stunned, only for Sophia to wail against the impenetrable shield of a healthy target instead. 

The ending of Resonance is also just far weaker than the first half. Sofia either travels alone or with a far less interesting NPC. The decision to have her travel solo I can understand--it ups the tension during moments when the beast is hunting Sophia, and also ensures that those tense moments aren't ruined by the companion messing up and breaking stealth. That would have probably sucked. But Sophia's other companion is a poor tradeoff for moments when Leni isn't there--the game does such a good job of villainizing this other character up to that point in the story, that for Sophia to then be forced to work with them for several chapters feels off-putting. 

The decision to make Sophia travel with a companion at all, again, feels like the lingering ghost of the older games dictating what the formula needs to be. The moments where Sophia is traveling solo clearly showcase that she can carry a game on her own, but if we had to have her talk out loud to someone else to progress the story, I'm baffled that the dev team didn't go for the far more intriguing choice of somehow making the ghost of Theseus work.  

Resonance also starts going a little too far into the physical trauma porn in the end, even giving Lara Croft from the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy a run for her money. There comes a point where seeing a character survive getting tossed around, beaten, and bloodied makes you start to wonder if the character is superhuman. When that occurs, the fantasy of this being a story of an ordinary woman grappling with the ramifications of discovering a supernatural power begins to crack, and you stop worrying about a protagonist once you've seen them survive a near-death experience half a dozen times.

Perhaps worst of all, the final moments of Resonance have a lore problem. If you've played these games, you'll be able to start piecing together what's going on in the latter half of the story, and the final big reveal will ultimately hit you like a freight train. If you know the ramifications of Resonance's mystery and absolutely awesome conclusion, it might be the best finale in the series. But if you have no idea what, as an example, the Prima Macula is, the last five hours of this game's story will make very little sense to you and the finale will probably be a confusing dud. You'll still get the emotional payoff of Sophia having acquired the answers she was seeking, but the game doesn't provide the necessary context to fully understand what those answers mean.

So, as strange as it is to say, if you want to play Resonance and you haven't played both of the previous A Plague Tale games, you have homework. This is not a prequel that tells a story that can stand on its own, nor is it an ideal on-ramp for the series.

Overall, I liked Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. I think it adds a valuable chapter to the overall mythos of the series, and manages to carve out its own identity in several places without continuing to rely on fan-favorite Amicia or the terror of contending with waves of rats. But you have to be such a fan of the series already to enjoy it to the same extent as I did, and even then, shortcomings in combat and the companion system hold the game back, especially in a latter half that seems to drag as you get closer to the conclusion. I want people to play Resonance, but I can't ignore that any game that requires doing homework beforehand to enjoy is a bit lacking. If you do that homework though, Resonance easily stands besides the other A Plague Tale games as a great AA, story-driven experience.

Star Wars has been inspiring video games practically since video games have existed, but unlike the trailblazing film series, it has mostly been content to follow the leader. As a result, we've gotten all sorts of Star Wars video games molded after familiar templates, from first-person shooters to racing games. Those have been enjoyable enough, but they're very much defined as: "genre, but Star Wars." It's rare, but not unheard of, for a Star Wars game to push a genre forward with a combination of new ideas and great execution. Star Wars Zero Company is one such case.

At first glance, it's easy to underestimate Zero Company, though. By all appearances this is simply XCOM, set in the world of Star Wars. You have a similar overhead perspective, commanding a small squad of commandos in turn-based combat as they take cover, flank and maneuver, and work together to take down formidable armies. And while that isn't inaccurate as shorthand, it would also sell the game short. Partly by capitalizing on the rich world of Star Wars itself, Zero Company finds ways to iterate further on XCOM, rather than merely imitate it.

Burn, baby, burn

First, some table-setting. Zero Company is set during the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, the tumultuous time seen in the prequel trilogy when the Republic was just on the verge of collapse into the Galactic Empire. Your player character, Hawks, is a down-and-out former Republic commander who started their own mercenary outfit after a disastrous mission gone wrong ruined their military career. The mercenaries, called Zero Company, are having money problems and struggling to find work, when a young Republic officer named Bennic offers steady, not-technically-Republic wet work in exchange for settling your debts. 

It would be easy to make Bennic sinister or conniving, dangling cash to desperate mercs, but this is one area where Zero Company excels. The characters are well-rounded and feel alive with humanity. Bennic is actually an honest broker for the Republic--a true believer who quickly folds himself into Zero Company and acts as the Republic's emissary. At first he seems like an assigned babysitter, but the friendship between Bennic and Hawks grows and changes in believable ways. The same could be said for the other members of Zero Company, like the decommissioned clone Trick or the grizzled old boxer Kabb Uppercut. 

The one slight exception is Cly, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who presents herself out of the blue to Zero Company as an asset they can't afford to refuse. Her story is the thinnest of all the named characters, and while it ultimately gets mildly more interesting, her inclusion felt perfunctory. Mandalorians are a popular piece of the Star Wars franchise, and her power set makes her a great inclusion to the tactical combat, so it makes sense to represent the Mando clan. I just wish her individual story and characterization were as strong as the rest.

You might say this is a Trick shot

As the adventure progresses, Zero Company finds itself facing a crisis flying just below the Republic's radar--a strange cult called the Coil that inducts new members with superhuman abilities, all rallied under the banner of a leader named Fathom. Bennic helps the team prioritize this threat, which feels appropriately sized for this story. In this era of Star Wars, the threat needs to be small enough that it doesn't attract much attention from the Jedi or the Grand Army of the Republic, but frightening enough that it could snowball if it isn't contained. Zero Company is punching above its weight taking on a galactic threat like this, and that gives the story real stakes while still retaining a sense of belonging in the Star Wars universe.

For me, the named characters were the stars of Zero Company, and I used them almost exclusively. Like an XCOM game, though, you can also recruit randomized soldiers to your army and develop them on their own, modeling them after your friends or your favorite Star Wars OCs. And as the story develops, you slowly open new options for the types of operators you can recruit, eventually gaining the ability to recruit droids and clones, which have their own specializations. Those specializations, and especially the ones for the named Zero Company characters, are really the secret sauce that makes Zero Company stand out from other tactics games.

As it happens, Star Wars is an especially fertile ground to have lots of differentiated power sets, so you aren't just limited to the usual archetypes like soldiers, heavies, and medics. By the time you finish Zero Company, you'll have access to clones, droids, a Mandalorian, a Jedi, an Umbaran, and whatever the heck a Kabb is. Each of them has their own attributes and most have abilities that are specially tailored to their unique identity in Star Wars lore. 

The diverse cast of Star Wars Zero Company

Take Cly, for example. She has the Mando's signature jet pack, making her an especially nimble operator who can cross great distances easily and ignore many height restrictions. If she lands in the middle of a set of enemies, she'll even knock them back and inflict burn damage, and by default her weapon is a pistol with three shots. It just feels so perfectly Mandalorian to rocket-drop into a scrum of weakened enemies and pick them all off with three quick blaster bolts. 

Your Jedi, meanwhile, excels at up-close melee combat, dealing heavy damage with her lightsaber, pushing and pulling enemies with the Force, and then dropping into a defensive stance that blocks many blaster bolts. And true to their Star Wars identity, droids are an incredibly useful support tool, able to grant your teammates extra moves and carry more equipment than anyone else. They're all so fun to play with. I often wished the squads were bigger so I could bring more of them along on missions, and picking and choosing which ones to make my core crew was difficult. 

Most of these abilities cost Action Points--three per character, per turn--which are well-tuned to balance your movement and attack abilities. My Hawks was a sniper, for instance, so I quickly had to internalize that since her main attack cost 2 AP, her movement was severely limited compared to the rest. She had just enough to reposition slightly, but couldn't move across the map like the others. And if I were already in an advantageous position, I could fire off a shot and then use her extra-long Overwatch ability to restrict enemy movement. Jae or Cly, meanwhile, could move much more effectively, but were much less accurate and powerful. Successful actions also build up a shared pool of Advantage (ADV), which enables extra-powerful moves like Trick's Rocket Strike, which does a ton of explosive damage in a concentrated location. I got in the habit of saving that little beauty for when enemy reinforcements showed up and crowded around an entry point. But ADV also has a lot of utility for giving you occasional access to moves with specialized use-cases, like Cly's aforementioned jetpack.

Your Jedi companion is great at controlling the space

Each combat encounter also has a rotating backup ability, which alternates between the members of your squad randomly each turn. Selecting your backup before starting your attack action will let another member of the squad take a shot too, doubling your effectiveness. But that also means you need to carefully position your squadmates and consider which ones have a clear line of sight before you choose a backup partner, adding another tactical wrinkle to combat. And it awards Bond XP between operators as well--more on that in a bit.

You use these abilities on a wide range of enemies, from regular humanoids to Clone Wars-era battle droids, including deadly droidekas, to the cultist Coil. The Coil is not quite a hivemind, since it doesn't have one shared consciousness. Instead, its fanatical followers all work individually but collaboratively toward a goal in perfect unison. (If you've seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, you'll have the general idea.) It's unnerving from a story standpoint and has neat applications in gameplay. Since the Coil are all linked, defeating one will often empower the next-closest Coil member with some special ability like extra defense or even cloaking. That adds yet another dynamic element, forcing you to carefully plan which ones to pick off and in which order to maximize your advantage over the rest, knowing that they'll be steadily ramping up in difficulty as you do.

And those Coil advantages are partially influenced by the mission briefs, where you'll sometimes be given a choice of which Coil upgrade to stop. There's no way to prevent both--the Coil abilities will get stronger in some way no matter what--but these decisions let you shape the types of challenges you'll face in the tactical missions. Your home base is where you'll spend mission cash on upgrades that apply to your whole team and black-market gear for your individual units. You'll also be able to upgrade your team's bonds, which start to unlock powerful upgrades across both operators when they reach the highest levels, manage their ability loadouts with unlimited free refunds to toy with different builds, adjust equipment and weapon mods, and more.

Well that's going to hurt

If that description hasn't made it clear, there are choices upon choices upon choices in Zero Company, but it never feels overwhelming or obtuse. Everything is digestible and clear, which is quite a feat for such a dense tactical game with so many options. I always felt fully in control of my decisions and knew exactly what I was doing.

While there was a great variety of abilities, enemies, and satisfying tactical choices, though, some of the missions did start to feel very familiar over my 30-hour playtime. I attribute this to similar objectives, which made many missions play very similarly. You often have to wipe the battlefield of all enemies, of course, but missions would often then end with getting to an extraction point, usually after a dose of reinforcements. The tactical combat itself is very fun, so it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of variety in mission objectives stood out as a weak spot.

While Zero Company uses cameos sparingly, the ones it does include are effective. Anakin Skywalker shows up briefly, so you can be completely overpowered for a handful of missions, and in the context of the Clone Wars cartoon, this is believably just another mission he was tangentially attached to for a little while before jetting off to other Jedi missions. I wasn't too sorry to see him go, because by that point I was developing such affection for my squad that I wanted to spend more time with them anyway. That's what makes the story so effective. The story of the Coil cult is a somewhat typical sci-fi threat, but I wanted to overcome it with my squad, as I had shaped and gotten to know them. We built bonds as a game mechanic, but I built bonds with them myself too. 

Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM, but it is more than just an XCOM-like. Developer Bit Reactor set higher ambitions than simply slapping a Star Wars skin on a template. Star Wars is a rich playground for games, with loads of differentiated hero and enemy types and powers baked in, and Zero Company takes full advantage of that to make an excellent tactics game in its own right. In doing so, it has made the next great evolution of the genre.

For as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed zombie fiction. I've always figured it's because I saw Romero's classics at way too young an age, but I've never wavered in my enthusiasm for the undead, be they in movies, TV shows, books, or video games. By now, I feel like I've seen, read, and played nearly all of them.

It's that familiarity with the genre that has had me so excited for No More Room in Hell 2 over the past few years, even through some early-access growing pains, and why I'm glad to see the 1.0 release stick the landing.

It's been a long journey to this 1.0 build for Torn Banner, the team behind the PvP medieval combat series Chivalry. I've been playing No More Room in Hell 2 for about two years now in early access and have watched as its studio tried to strike a chord with the community, which at times seemed fed up with the sequel and preferred its under-the-radar original. Balancing issues, bugs, and overall design issues got in the way at times, but I feel as though most have been washed away in its current form.

No More Room in Hell 2 is a first-person zombie-survival game designed for teams of eight. Right away, that's a pretty cool feature, as zombie games tend to be made for massive lobbies of dozens, like DayZ; smaller co-op teams, like Left 4 Dead; or solo experiences, like Days Gone. The novelty of eight players is a boon to the game, but it wouldn't mean much if, ultimately, that's all it had going for it. Thankfully, it has a lot else that works well in its favor. 

In its purposely slower-paced story missions, you'll move through campaigns set on large maps in Pennsylvania with a lot of lateral space to explore, taking you from the woods to residential neighborhoods to downtown areas and more, completing objectives as a group and hopefully escaping with the same number of beating hearts you arrived with.

No More Room in Hell 2 clearly draws on timeless zombie-fiction imagery, with the undead springing from caskets, banging on doors and windows until they break their seals, and shambling through graveyards like someone should warn Barbara. While the new console version naturally doesn't look as nice as the PC edition I've been playing for the past two years, the game has a strong sense of atmosphere no matter where you're playing it.

No More Room In Hell 2 takes players to a wide range of locations that feel like classic zombie-fiction set dressing.

In some campaigns, you'll start alone and must find each other through exploration. These missions are my favorites, as they feel especially desolate and dangerous, and that's always been what I look for in zombie games. Throughout early access, this was always meant to be a slow-burning, Romero-esque walk through hell, and it excels by achieving that vision.

Though nearly all zombies in the game are of the classic slow-moving type, even just one of them can spell trouble. They're relentless. In fact, on higher difficulties, there may even be too many, offering not enough breathing room for the highs to feel as high as they should. But on normal difficulty, the game finds a sweet spot. 

Killing just one of them often takes four or more swipes with a melee weapon, and that's if you're diligently hitting them in the head, chipping away at their skulls as their brains flop out like someone's stepped on a tube of toothpaste. Body blows will only serve to tire you faster than it will take out the restless ghouls--unless you happen to have a sharp weapon and cut off enough of their limbs to halt them. Letting them into your personal space is a tense affair, as it's important to let them get just close enough for you to hit them, but not close enough that they slash or bite at you. Learning to measure them up correctly is an early hurdle that will decide who lives or dies.

Managing stamina is a thoughtful and near-constant exercise in survival. A powerful kick ability allows you to gain some vital breathing space when you're being surrounded, but it also eats away a big chunk of your stamina. The same is true of running. Very early on, I learned to stay aware of my surroundings, because while running from the horde behind you may seem absolutely crucial, you may be heading straight toward another and won't stand to survive if you're exhausted when you get there.

Further demonstrating how seriously this game takes its zombie fiction, you can get infected mid-mission, and if you're not careful, you'll not only turn into one of them, but you'll become a speedier variant, losing control of your character as you're left to torment your fellow survivors from beyond the grave.

You can help your infected teammates, or you can wait for them to turn and then lop off their limbs.

This element is No More Room in Hell 2's coolest, because it allows for some really fascinating social dynamics. Pills will temporarily keep the infection at bay, and anyone infected will give away their illness by coughing every once in a while. But what if you don't have pills, or what if no one is willing to share theirs? They're not abundant enough to go around, so I've seen some people choose not to share, opting to take their chances with the fast ghoul who will soon come charging toward whoever is nearby. 

On the flipside, the infected person could distance themselves and try to hide their illness, just like the selfish guy in any zombie movie's group of survivors. This may buy them time to find a cure, or just escape with infected status while keeping their character alive. If they're more altruistic, they can instead sacrifice themselves just before they turn--provided they have any ammo--sparing their fellow survivors from dealing with the mess.

It's a hard decision to make in either case when you're playing on difficulties higher than beginner, because permadeath is a part of the experience. Characters are re-rolled randomly, applying some basic stats and a backstory, and you can customize their clothing if you'd like. From there, you'll level them with each successful campaign, unlocking skills of your choosing at regular intervals that help you lean into particular builds. Knowing I had no plans to use guns all that much, I often grabbed skills that buffed my stamina and melee damage, and it's really satisfying to see a character come together over many hours. 

But should they die, they're lost for good. 

The stakes feel so high. Taking my level 20+ character into a round that quickly went into the gutter was nerve-racking. Thankfully, these lengthy campaign missions that typically take anywhere from 30-60 minutes offer a few early exits on your travels. If you're determined to just get out alive, you can extract early, even as an individual, at the cost of any character XP gains. But hey, at least you'll be leaving with your life.

While heavy, weighted melee combat helps sell this immersive experience even more, gunplay on controller leaves something to be desired. The aim assist isn't reliable enough, as it's quite sticky but then doesn't track zombie heads well, meaning you'll often waste ammo hitting them in the chest, while trying to correct for it feels hard to pinpoint, too. It's serviceable at closer range, but only barely, and partly because the zombies are attracted to noise, and you ought not be firing loud weapons unless it's the only thing keeping you alive in any given moment. 

This means you can, and probably will, get through some missions without ever using guns. I do wish my co-op partners understood that better so we could keep the hordes off our backs more often, but even these teammate frustrations feel authentic to what living in a zombie world might feel like. 

While you should stick to beginner difficulty for a few early rounds, the game is at its best when permadeath is in play on higher difficulties.

The teamwork required in this game is intense, and some would-be-selfish players must find themselves banding together at times, because the deeper you get into a mission, the harder it becomes, and you don't want to fight off that final horde with a deficit in your team size. There are plenty of times where you or a teammate could be totally gassed and about to be swarmed, only for an ally to save the day. But in this world, there's little time to celebrate, as the next horde likely isn't far off.

Another issue the game's newly implemented controller support suffers from is strangely janky menus. Exploring options screens or even different overlays in the main menu, like moving from character upgrades to the in-game store to the challenge system, often feels clunky; my cursor would disappear, and I'd need to guess where I'm clicking. 

It's merely an annoyance in the main menu but can become a bigger issue on missions, like if you have a teammate playing music that his headset is picking up and you can't easily get to the mute button. No More Room in Hell 2 doesn't let you stop and breathe very often, so when this happened to me, I didn't have time to fumble around in the social menu. Instead, I found myself wishing that guy would just get bitten. I'm not proud of it. It's sad what these apocalyptic times make of us.

Outside of the main campaign-style "Objective" mode, there's also a wave-based survival mode. I've never been nearly as interested in wave-based zombie modes--it's why I don't even bother playing Call of Duty Zombies these days--but I like No More Room in Hell 2's survival mode just fine as a shorter alternative to the lengthy missions. They're good for farming weekly challenges and leveling characters faster than the real attraction allows, but I'd sooner just decide to play when I have the time for the game's best version of itself.

Though No More Room in Hell 2 clearly leans into decades of zombie history, it feels, most of all, like a great mash-up of two of my favorite zombie games: It has the dread-inducing, life-or-death stakes of State of Decay wrapped in a tight co-op experience reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. Though some subpar shooting mechanics keep it from being as enjoyable as either of those, that's also a very high bar in my mind, and No More Room in Hell 2 still accomplishes a hell of a lot.

For my entire life, sports games have lived under the shadow of a particular criticism: "same game, different year." It was never literally true, of course, but has often reasonably captured the sentiments of millions of players who jump into annualized sports sims year after year. EA's NFL sim Madden may be the most common target of this flavor of feedback.

There have been years when I, too, was very disappointed with Madden. It was taking the sport I love most and fumbling it every August. But for five years now, it's felt less true, and at this point, with Madden NFL 27, we just have to admit Madden is good again.

To be fair, I had even higher praise for Madden 26 than you'll find in this Madden 27 review, which takes a slight step back in some ways, but none of those shortcomings can be found on the virtual field itself. It's the continued gameplay improvements that keep Madden from succumbing once more to formerly reliable memes and criticisms. The Tiburon team has been building and iterating on its foundational gameplay in clear and beneficial ways on a timeline that, to my mind, began with Madden 23. It culminates with this year's game, which feels better than ever when you step onto the gridiron.

Defense is the key. Despite my career-high praise of last year's game, something shook it to its core a month or two after launch, breaking the pass rush for the duration of the game's time in the sun. It resulted in a Madden experience where games routinely went over 90 total points scored. In my competitive Madden league, I even saw some players score upwards of 70+ several times. Defense was sickly. Madden 27 is medicine. 

This year's game focuses intensely on giving players more control over their players and improving things like zone coverage and pass rushing, in particular. In last year's game, it felt like you needed a sixth sense as the user on D to make a stop. With smarter zone coverage, you can rely on AI defenders. Players won't spectate from the middle of their zone anymore, as they now "look for work," diagnosing a play's progression and playing proactively rather than reactively. Along with new tools to play conservatively, aggressively, or their ultra variants, you can now better prepare for what you think you know before the ball is snapped. 

These new shoulder-button commands are part of a complete remap of the pre-play adjustments. These take some getting used to, as they reconfigure years of muscle memory for longtime Madden players, but it's a worthy learning curve to run down, because the end result gives you not just more options, but options that are much quicker to activate. 

Things that may have taken four or five button presses in past games now take just two, and with new custom adjustments, you can create your own macro adjustments, bundling a set of would-be individual changes all in one go. For example, if you think you know what play your opponent is running, you can quickly activate a macro that adjusts your defensive line spacing, cornerback shading, and LB zone depth in ways that you feel counter that play correctly, all with the press of two buttons.

Macro adjustments and a streamlined controller remap are changes made for the diehards, and I love them.

It's truly revolutionary and speaks to Madden's renewed energy spent on serving the diehard community first and foremost. Even if macros sound too sweaty, you can use those provided by default, never having to jump into the game's menus to create your own. It's not as sexy a feature as the awesome new holiday game presentation, but in my mind, these new tools are the defining feature of Madden 27.

As deep as these new tools go to help defense, many of them work on both sides of the ball, and the offense actually gets an exclusive new toy, too. Timing-based catching came to both of EA's American football games this summer, and Madden has the benefit of learning from College Football's launch-week struggles. Similarly to timing your NBA 2K shot release in the green zone, timing-based catching asks Madden players to snag the ball at the moment it hits your hands. I've taken about two weeks to make up my mind on this optional new mechanic, which you can toggle off. I was skeptical and worried at first, but I've settled on using it. It adds more player input to plays, removing some of the Madden Math--as those in my league like to call it when the game's attributes algorithm calculates who wins or loses any scuffle on a play.

My only concern right now is that finding the sweet spot will be a months-long quest for the studio, as it reacts to players saying it's too powerful or not powerful enough. I hope it can settle into something predictable and reliable. If it does, I believe we'll see the team iterate on the feature in welcome ways for years to come. If it never quite lands right with the wider community, it may go the way of QB Vision: quickly swept out of the game. But for me, and for now, I like it.

For many, including me, Franchise is the destination mode, and for the second straight year, the mode actually delivers some big changes that I enjoy. The marquee addition here is the Persona Engine, which assigns every player a number of personality traits, then makes dealing with them on your roster an interpersonal minigame. Players may have a team-first mindset, or they may be driven by money over all things. They may be quick to annoy or helpfully patient. They may be near the end of their career and seeking to close it out with a title, or they might demand a trade because you didn't offer them a contract that they felt respected their efforts. 

Something like this has been in Madden in recent years, but it's only been relevant during free agency, and even then, hasn't been very influential. This year, it's actually a big deal and will undoubtedly reshape your roster in unpredictable ways. A football team is 53 players, and for the first time ever, you'll feel like you're coaching 53 unique individuals. 

Every negotiation is its own experience.

This is made better by an overhaul to how contracts are offered. For a long time, Madden's deals would reflect only one format: year-over-year pay increases. That might sound typical at your job, but it's not nearly true of the NFL, and now Madden captures these nuances. You can negotiate to add void years, rearrange the salary versus bonus money, apply no-trade clauses, and a number of other options that dynamically become available during contract talks, which now happen all throughout the season, rather than having a bunch of guys ready to discuss contracts in Week 3 like the old way Madden did deal-making.

It's important to note that, though I didn't see many head-scratching deals in my Franchise sessions, social media has featured several in the first few days since Madden's release. Computer-controlled teams are signing too many players at one position, re-signing much of their roster for mega-deals that would break the salary cap, and doing other things that suggest Madden's new Persona Engine logic is causing some headaches. It's a tricky thing for me, as I didn't see them myself, so it can't color my firsthand experience--and playing in a 32-player league means I'll be insulated from CPU tomfoolery such as this--but I see these stories and ingest them like headlines of viruses somewhere else in the world. For now, I'm apparently safe, but I'm mindful that such dangers are lurking elsewhere.

Kids would call this next part of my review a vibe shift. While the on-field and Franchise additions are great, if you're most interested in other modes, you'll be left wanting. Despite some fun in the custom-avatar career mode, Superstar, it was a frustrating experience overall. I played my career as a free safety, one of the new positions you can take on. But the play-by-play scoring system--a load-bearing pillar of this mode--is routinely faulty. When I'd make a tackle, it would score me as having made a tackle assist. When I'd engage in a block, it would downgrade me for having been pancaked, even as I remained upright. Even weirder, it would get game results wrong. With the Chargers, I beat the Rams to go 6-1, but after the game it said we were 5-2. Then next week, when I lost to the Texans, it gave me a win. 

Off the field, Superstar is still a fatigue-inducing affair of menus, corny brand inserts, and false choices. Often, dialogue options let me choose what to say in a text message or to the media, and the difference in outcomes is negligible. This mode also gets to something that is becoming worse in Madden, and probably only going to get even worse once the long-rumored PvPvE social mode, akin to NBA 2K's The City, finally arrives. Monetization is everywhere, and it's affecting gameplay.

You can buy levels to improve your avatar faster than playing, but you can also buy a Superstar Pass, which is just a battle-pass-style system that gives you even more skill points for leveling up. Neither precludes you from the other, and in fact EA seems all too happy to let you double-dip, since progression is slow either way, and especially painful if you try to play for free, even if you stick to the single-player story. 

You could play Superstar without buying anything extra, but the game really prefers you spend money.

The blowback NBA 2K gets over similar tactics hasn't really hit Madden yet because its half-measure of a social mode, Superstar Showdown, is largely ignored by the game's diehard players, whereas in NBA 2K, The City is the point for most players. But if predatory progression slowdowns like this still exist when that mode finally arrives, it'll be EA willfully stepping on a rake after having surely heard about these issues for years beforehand. At the very least, NBA 2K charges players a lot but delivers a fun game mode. For EA to both ask for so much of your money after the initial $70 (or even $150) and still not offer something enjoyable in exchange is mind-boggling.

All that spending doesn't even account for the mode-agnostic Team Pass, which is another $10 every few weeks if you want it. Like last year's game, the Team Pass includes some recycled rewards from the previous Madden, which is frustrating for paid content anyway, but especially bad when it means my Tennessee Titans cosmetics include the team's outdated branding, since they overhauled their logo and uniforms last winter.

Of course, you can't talk about overly monetized design without speaking to Ultimate Team, the decades-long undisputed champion of pay-to-win tactics in a fully priced game. For what it's worth, Ultimate Team (MUT) doesn't get much focus in Madden 27, which is what many Franchise and Superstar fans always hope for, as they feel it means more resources went to their preferred landing spots instead. 

What MUT does add this year is a bit more flexibility in how player cards crystallize, with "Evo" cards allowing you to over-level cards, change their archetypes, and more. To my eyes, this mode is a chore each year that demands you spend your free time playing nothing but MUT. I don't find that fun or rewarding and probably never will, so long as they keep throwing me into games against credit-card warriors who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to shred people online using the same small handful of glitched plays that emerge every year. Hard pass.

On top of the awesome holiday presentation packages that decorate broadcast-style elements to fit Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, Madden 27's presentation adds a few other welcome touches. This includes more numerous and detailed alternate field designs that are rolled out to match throwback and alternate jerseys whenever the home team equips them. The weekly recap and halftime shows go deeper than before, adding a Player of the Week segment. It's all still handled by Scott Hanson, too, who brings authenticity and electricity to each instance. 

The holiday broadcasts are a relatively small addition that go a long way toward improving the game.

With all of these new bells and whistles over the past two Maddens, I do wish players in PvP could opt into what the game calls "full" presentation. By default, if you're playing someone online, the game skips a lot of these awesome displays, like pre-game run-outs and highlights that mimic fading to commercial. These go a long way toward giving the game a more authentic feel, and it's too bad I rarely get to see them once my review sessions are over and the rest of my games are played in PvP league games.

Presentation is right up there with gameplay and Franchise as the three key pillars that determine whether I enjoy a Madden installment. While the gains here have been smaller than those on the field, in particular, they are still very noticeable, very appreciated, and very cool.

Madden 27 is the fifth consecutive year in which the on-field experience has been foundationally sound and improves on its predecessor. It's a heartening trajectory for a series I've spent my life playing, through both good and bad eras. Despite the still-glaring issues in arenas like Superstar and MUT, Madden feels cool again. It's past time we stopped applying outdated perspectives to a game that has evolved significantly over the past half-decade. Madden will continue to frustrate at times, patches will sometimes be slow to arrive, and monetization is still way too intrusive and seems likely to get worse. But if you stick to Franchise and take advantage of the many new tools at your disposal on the field, there's a game worth celebrating here.

Mortal Shell 2 features most of the familiar hallmarks of the souls-like genre: It's set in a dark fantasy world and incorporates gothic, medieval, and otherworldly themes into its aesthetic. Its combat is deep, challenging, satisfyingly hard-hitting, and will punish you for being overzealous. There are bonfires (called beacons) where you can rest and recover lost health at the expense of respawning enemies, and you also drop the level-up currency each time you die, forcing you to retrieve it in the next life or lose it completely. 

On the surface, Mortal Shell 2 might sound like your standard run-of-the-mill souls-like–quite possibly too derivative for its own good–yet developer Cold Symmetry's sequel is more than just a safe and simple copycat. It manages to stand out in an overcrowded genre by taking familiar aspects and transforming them in a multitude of meaningful ways. 

As someone who quickly bounced off the first game, I came into Mortal Shell 2 with no expectations and was left constantly thrilled by its unique approach, which essentially deconstructs core elements of the souls-like experience to make them feel fresh and exciting.

The most immediately obvious of these is the absence of a stamina meter. You're free to attack and dodge as many times as you want without needing to stop, catch your breath, and wait for a meter to replenish. This gives Mortal Shell 2's combat an aggressive cadence, whether you're on the attack or defending for your life. Rather than backing off after avoiding a flurry of enemy attacks, you can instantly launch into a barrage of offensive strikes yourself, or carve through weaker enemy mobs without gasping for air halfway through. 

This doesn't mean it's a mindless hack-and-slasher either. You can't cancel out of any attack animations, so each forward strike needs to be deliberate and considered to avoid overcommitting and leaving yourself wide open, especially when using slower weapons like the Great Martyr's Blade or Obsidian Hammer. 

The decision to forgo stamina makes a dynamic difference and is one of the most notable ways Mortal Shell 2 improves upon its predecessor's combat–which was often marred by gratingly sluggish battles. It's still not particularly fast-paced by any stretch, but the combat animations are much snappier without losing a sense of weight and visceral brutality.

The minutiae of stabbing, slicing, and bashing enemies to death with various melee weapons can best be described as "meaty," creating a satisfying crunch as you cleave through flesh and lop off heads, limbs, and non-human body parts amidst a torrent of crimson rain. It's great stuff, bolstered by a diverse variety of weapons and enemy types. From a large scythe and rangy spear to dual katanas that transform into an axe, each weapon type feels distinct, and there's plenty of joy to be found alternating between light and heavy attacks to fluidly launch into different combos. 

I only wish it were feasible to experiment with more weapons as your growing arsenal gradually expands. By the midway point in the game, I was drowning in upgrade materials but only ever had enough money to fully upgrade a single weapon. It would've been nice to use some of the others beyond just testing them out, but trading a weapon with multiple upgrades for one without any made no sense when I was never going to be able to improve it as much.

You're also equipped with a sidearm, starting out with a short-range shotgun before moving on to more experimental armaments, such as a miniature Gatling gun and a lute that causes enemies to fight amongst themselves after a forceful strum. Each shot costs Resolve, which is replenished by connecting with melee attacks, so sidearms are an intrinsic part of combat, adding to its dynamism with another gratifying way to dismantle enemies. 

Meanwhile, the enemies you'll face come in all shapes and sizes. There are armored knights–wielding either a sword or spear–fleet-footed assassins, religious fanatics, large bearded human skulls that scuttle around on four legs, insect-like creatures with deadly pincers, rock-throwing giants, and everything else in between. 

This variety does plateau a tad during the game's second half, as it introduces more variants of familiar enemies rather than entirely new ones, but there are so many different opponents to fight that repetition rarely rears its ugly head. They're not just visually distinct, either. Each enemy type is meaningfully diverse in how they approach you, typically mixing things up with multiple attack patterns and feints to throw you off. 

While you can always dodge incoming strikes, Mortal Shell 2 also gives you access to a few unique defensive maneuvers to suit different playstyles. The Harden mechanic from the first game returns–letting you calcify to absorb an enemy attack–only now it's tied to a specific Seal. Seals are new items in Mortal Shell 2; you can only equip one at a time, and each one contains what would normally be a standard souls-like mechanic.

Blocking, for instance, is tied to a Seal that also lets you parry, dealing break damage to eventually make them vulnerable to a powerful riposte. Another Seal removes the ability to block but tightens the parry window, introducing greater risk for a greater reward by dishing out more break damage if your timing is perfect.             

This opens up the game's build variety, especially when combined with the titular Mortal Shells. Similar to the first game, you play as a faceless husk known as the Harbinger, a relatively weak entity that has the power to inhabit fallen warriors. There are eight Shells in total, and each one can be found at their character's final resting place, whether that's hunched over and impaled on a greatsword, hastily stuffed into a shallow grave, or displayed in a mausoleum beneath the Royal Keep. 

Every Shell adheres to a rigid character archetype with predetermined stats that can be upgraded but not changed. This might sound restrictive, but it allows for tangible differences in how each Shell plays–especially when factoring in their unique abilities–with variety coming from your choice of weapons, Seals, and Tarstones. 

I mostly played as Eredrim, a knight with the ability to lunge at enemies with a devastating shoulder bash that deals significant break damage. He also has a passive ability aptly named Executioner, allowing you to instantly execute enemies who are at low health. By performing ripostes, this ability also stacks, with each stack raising the low-health threshold at which enemies can be executed. If you like playing on the front foot, Eredrim is particularly satisfying to use, but the other Shells are no less interesting. 

Tiel is a thief who can turn invisible for a short duration, lunging out of the shadows to strike with a dagger. While any Shell can equip the relevant Seal to parry attacks, Tiel excels as a nimble character, with perfectly timed dodges turning you invisible and dealing stagger damage to the enemy. 

Sariel, on the other hand, fires parasitic thorns that hunt down nearby foes, nullifying their next melee attack while also inflicting Pain on Sariel himself. Pain affects your health bar, adding a grey portion that can be lost in a single hit or cured by dishing out melee damage. When Sariel has no Pain, a huge 50% of incoming damage becomes Pain. However, reaching the Pain limit lets you dodge faster, putting you in the role of a masochistic character who excels when it hurts the most.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQXkfdhk7E

Tarstones add another layer to the development of your build, unlocking everything from specific buffs to powerful special attacks. They can be found by exploring the world, completing dungeons, and defeating bosses, so once I had discovered enough, I eventually geared mine towards dishing out as much melee damage as humanly possible. With each Tarstone fully maxed out and upgraded, I increased my critical damage by 100%, raised my critical chance probability to 18%, and was guaranteed a critical hit every five attacks. It's an incredibly flexible system, creating a greater discrepancy between the usual strength or dexterity options and ensuring that build variety remains at the forefront of the game's ethos.

With so many tools at your disposal, Mortal Shell 2 still manages to strike a decent balance with regard to its difficulty. For the most part, it's a challenging game, but one that hits the souls-like sweet spot where it rarely feels unfair. Deaths are typically your own fault, and there's always room to improve, both as a player and by upgrading your character. 

There are a couple of difficulty modifiers you can utilize as well, with a specific Seal making things easier at the cost of disabling Achievements, and another item that lets you increase the difficulty while also opening up a few areas that are otherwise locked. The fact that this isn't just a binary difficulty choice fits the genre, though disabling Achievements feels egregious, even if most of its contemporaries refuse to offer an easier alternative.

The game's default challenge comes saddled with a few caveats, too. While it mostly feels fair, falling to your death is too common for my tastes. The entire open-world map is suspended in the air, so there are numerous areas where you can slip off the map, particularly when a lot of attacks will knock you several feet backward. I can place some of the blame for this misfortune at my own feet, but there were still dozens of situations where toppling off the side of a cliff felt cheap and frustrating. Dying more to fall damage than the game's own bosses is a travesty.

This is partly due to the game's level design and partly because some of the bosses are overly simplistic in their attack patterns. It's a problem that afflicts mini-bosses more frequently than the game's headline foes, but it also doesn't help that the basic parry window is exceedingly generous. When you're fighting regular enemies, and typically dealing with more than one, this isn't much of an issue. It's just much more prominent when facing a mini-boss that's too predictable to be compelling.

Aside from the abundance of dangerous ledges, Mortal Shell 2's open world is a fascinating place to explore. It's not as expansive as something like Elden Ring's The Lands Between–you won't find any vast open fields, for instance–but it's densely packed. Each area feels like a dedicated level from a more linear game, except they're all interconnected with more than one way in and out. 

Its castles and murky swamps can feel a tad derivative, but there are typically more than a few visual flourishes that stand out in even the most familiar locales. There's an abbey where the colors are muted to the point of looking almost monochrome, yet the red leaves wrapping around its cold, stone walls create this striking burst of color. Elsewhere, you'll find unsettling human teeth carved into cave walls, monolithic structures that punctuate the horizon, and what was once a picturesque village now plagued by rabid cultists. Material rewards are available for those who deign to explore, but the sights themselves are often a reward of their own.

Mortal Shell 2 constantly surprised me, whether it was the mechanics behind a newly discovered Shell, the layered improvements to combat, a bulbous monstrosity of a boss fight that was more mouth than anything else, or the ways you can tinker with a build and make it wholly your own. It stumbles at times and could use some fine-tuning to really hone its balance issues, but even if it can be irritating or too simplistic at times, these moments are overshadowed by its unmistakable strengths.

For many fighting game fans, It's impossible to look at Marvel Tokon and not think of Marvel Vs. Capcom. 

The crossover series defined the crossover tag genre, from X-Men Vs. Street Fighter in 1996 to Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 in 2011. For some who didn't read comics as a kid, myself included, these games were the introduction to the X-Men, Avengers, and other Marvel faces that fought alongside Capcom's top characters.

With MvC dormant outside of a recent collection, Arc System Works has swooped in with Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, its own take on the Marvel tag fighter idea. The result is a wonderful fighting system and flashy new look that quickly establishes its own identity, one that is worthy of standing with the giants of the past--although the PC version isn't as super as the heroes in the game.

Fantastic four

Marvel Tokon's four-on-four gameplay is its most radical change to the tag format, but not for the reasons I first expected. Previous experience would suggest that each player would choose four fighters, each with their own life bar, and the first player to knock out all four of the opposing player's team members would win. That's not how Tokon works; instead, each of the four heroes shares a single life bar, and the first player to win three-out-of-five rounds takes the match. 

This is a fundamental and ingenious shift in how the player interacts with their team; one player could choose to keep their best fighter on point and select their assisting heroes to fit that fighter's style, or they could decide to learn four characters and incorporate tags into their strategy. It allows newer fighting game players to ease into the tag format, while entrenched players can immediately lean into the more advanced elements of the system. For a genre that sometimes struggles to find the balance in catering to new and veteran players alike, Arc System Works nailed it with Tokon's fighting scheme.

Marvel Tokon

Both approaches are impacted by another interesting design choice. Though you choose four fighters before a match, you only start the match with two active: a point character and one assist character. The other two assists have to be unlocked during the match, either by initiating a wall break (a move which slams an opponent into the boundary, "breaking" it and sending the character to another arena) and "assembling" your fighters in other parts of the stage, or by losing a round and gaining a hero as the next round begins. 

While "not having access to all selected fighters" sounds like it could be detrimental to the experience, Tokon once again exceeds my expectations. Limiting heroes is a form of balancing each match; Round 3 could start with one player up 2-0 with only two characters and the other down 0-2 with a full team. Giving the 0-2 player access to all four assists allows them to be more versatile in their approach and perhaps stage a comeback. However, in doing so, that player with the early lead slowly assembles their team, and if the match becomes 2-2, it's a full-strength slugfest in the final round. Every match is different, yet equally thrilling; I am astounded at what Arc was able to do here. 

Controlling each fighter is simplified too, as executing special moves adapts the Super Smash Bros. "button press and directional input" approach. There are some more advanced inputs for those who care to learn them, but the first time you pick up a controller, two buttons will let you perform a unique move. 

Assists work the same way, but by holding L2 when the assist emerges, you can switch to that character immediately and continue the combo. I feel like the words "easy to learn, hard to master" were plastered all over Arc System Works's Yokohama office, because that's the prevailing sense I get from every aspect of Tokon's approach, and it's tremendously successful at it. 

Choose your fighter

The initial roster features 20 characters, which is small by tag fighter standards--Ultimate Marvel 3, for example, had 50 playable fighters out of the box--but it's a number that further contributes to that aforementioned balance. New players have a more manageable pool of character matchups to learn, while veteran players can find their favorites more quickly and move on to honing their skills. 

The roster is a mix of expected fan favorites and few interesting pulls, though I would say very few of the selections are truly unexpected. Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Magneto, and Doctor Doom are all here, while Carnage, Star-Lord, Blade, and Loki make their Marvel fighting game debut. The most obscure pull, if I had to choose, is Danger--I didn't even know the X-Men's training facility became sentient, so Marvel fighting games continue to introduce me to new characters. 

Deadpool deserves a paragraph all to himself. While his inclusion is not a surprise due to his massive popularity, the way Arc System Works has incorporated his fourth-wall-breaking nature is a master class. The character is a tribute to fighting game history in character form, and every match has me pointing at the screen like a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood meme. Some of the references are obvious--yes, that's Scorpion's spear from Mortal Kombat, everyone knows that--but I was amazed at just how deep the well of references goes. I doubt many newer players know what Kaiser Knuckle is, but if they see that one Deadpool pose and look it up, then mission accomplished, Arc System Works. 

My personal favorite characters are Peni Parker, as I really enjoy her ability to fill the arena with drones as a distraction before moving in for big damage, and Ms. Marvel, whose Dhalsim-like stretchy appendages mean that my opponent is never truly safe anywhere on the screen. Black Panther (the Shuri version this time; sorry, T'Challa) has also proven to be fun, but the one fighter I can't figure out is Green Goblin; I know the glider is a big part of his approach, but I haven't yet unlocked the best ways to do that. I suspect I'll learn the hard way from some player online soon enough. 

Rules of battle

Tokon offers a lot of ways to play, in both single-player and online multiplayer, and while mode selection at first seems a bit limited, Arc System Works once again avoids a regular fighting game pitfall by packing these modes with enough activities that they don't feel shallow. Episodes mode tells five different stories, one for each of the four teams featured in Tokon's trailers, and each one animated by a different artist. I didn't need more than an hour to complete each one, and they tell the overarching story of Tokon in fun ways. 

The other main single-player offering is All-Star Arena, which is split into two sections: Arena and Survival. Arena is the closest Tokon gets to offering a traditional "arcade" experience: You'll choose a team, choose a path, and then battle against random teams before getting to the end of your chosen path. Survival is a gauntlet of up to 100 battles, with health regeneration between each match and superpowered "boss" fighters at certain milestones. Both of these are fine ways to hone your skills against CPU teams of varying difficulty, but there isn't anything here that reinvents the wheel. 

Marvel Tokon

Arcadia Rumble takes a different approach, as it mixes standard matches with a small arena-style challenge where players roam around a small area, collecting items to earn points and power up their characters for normal battles, and whoever has the most points wins. It's enjoyable enough in small bursts, and it makes for a cool party-style experience when a group wants something different from the ordinary online experience, but it didn't grab me as much as I'd hoped. I'd rather skip right to the fighting; the item-searching part just feels extraneous. 

The online experience also checks the usual boxes, with ranked matches, casual matches, and custom private lobbies all on offer. There's also an Open Lobby, where you explore a chibi-style version of Tokon's world with customizable avatars and arcade machines where you challenge other players. Exploring the open lobby is neat, as there are some little minigames to find outside of the normal Tokon matches, but the real thrill is matching up with another player and throwing down on one of the open arcade machines. Technically, all of the machines could fill up, but I have yet to see that myself. 

I played a handful of matches in each offering, joining up with some friends in a custom room, challenged random players in ranked and casual matches, and explored the Open Lobby. Online connections were strong thanks to the rollback netcode under the hood, and I rarely saw any technical hiccups at all while playing on PlayStation 5. 

It's here where the PC version of Tokon must be mentioned, as its launch has been, to put it lightly, disastrous. Connection issues, choppy play both online and offline, and other issues have plagued PC players since the game's launch, and while patches have been released that are beginning to alleviate the issues, the troubles they experienced cannot be discounted. As mentioned, I reviewed the game on PS5, so I did not experience those problems for myself, but until those issues are fully resolved, PC players will continue to have a much different experience than I did. If Arc System Works can turn it around, the wait will have been worth it. 

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls feels like a homecoming. Marvel heroes and villains are once again beating each other up in tag-based battles, and I am loving the experience of jumping in and figuring out new strategies. Rather than lean on old tropes, Arc System Works elected to put its own spin on the idea, and what they've cooked up sets a new bar for future tag fighters. Once the technical issues for PC are ironed out, there's a bright future ahead. With Marvel Tokon, Arc System Works has created the next foundational title for modern fighting games.

When you start a new game in Game Freak’s Beast of Reincarnation, a prompt asks if you’d like to play in cinematic mode. This locks the cutscene frame rate to 24 frames per second, but, understandably, leaves the gameplay as is. When I first saw this during my 90-minute preview session last month, it felt like a bold statement from Game Freak. Pokemon, Game Freak’s multigenerational smash-hit, can be described as many things, but cinematic it certainly is not. Unfortunately, aside from its flashy combat and a few cutscenes, Beast of Reincarnation isn't really cinematic, either. Flat performances and robotic animations undermine its fascinating story, bland environments sour its beautiful art direction, and an overall lack of polish hampers its intense combat. Though there are aspects of Beast of Reincarnation that I adored, for each one of them there’s always something that holds it back.

Beast of Reincarnation takes place exactly 2,000 years in the future, in 4026. After civilization was nearly wiped out by a phenomenon called The Blight, an infection that causes humans and animals alike to sprout vegetation, humanity transferred their souls into machines called golems to quell the spread. This inadvertently conquered death, but the relocated souls eventually deteriorated, leaving corrupted golems in their wake. The wildlife didn’t fare much better. Infected beasts called Malefacts wander the ruins of Japan attacking everything and everyone in their path. There’s a captivating history here that weaves together multiple science-fiction subgenres to create an intriguing world. The creatures that wander the wasteland feel biopunk-inspired, the aforementioned golem backstory is pulled from the cyberpunk genre, and the landscapes and architecture would feel at home in solarpunk fiction. Despite its many inspirations, Beast of Reincarnation’s world feels distinct.

https://youtu.be/erQ4lIW4Yo8?si=tohRNx3gTrRzvey2

This, in part, is due to the art direction. The futuristic technology juxtaposed alongside the overgrown ruins of Japan creates some memorable vistas that reflect the world’s alluring history. Emma, Beast of Reincarnation’s stoic protagonist, represents that fusion of technology and nature succinctly with her design. Her angular monochrome outfit is punctuated by a braid adorned with flowers that grows longer as she becomes stronger. It’s a nice touch that reflects your progress in her character design.

The plot centers around Emma and her dog Koo as they travel across Japan to reach the capital and hunt down the titular Beast of Reincarnation. Emma and Koo’s journey is frequently halted as they’re tasked with taking down a Nushi in each area--powerful Malefacts that spread The Blight. Each of these semi-open areas share a similar structure: You arrive, battle your way through the area, explore a little, and fight the boss. There are optional enemies to dispatch and loot to find, but these locales start to blend together after a while. Most of them consist of open fields with tall, green grass. As you get closer to the capital, those fields will be replaced with dry deserts. There are some interesting nooks hidden around each map, but it feels like a lot of wasted space.

There’s really not much to say about Emma. She’s a vessel, meaning she can absorb the power from enemies she’s defeated, but she is devoid of personality. She’s been told to fight and that’s exactly what she does. There are lore reasons for her languid disposition, but it doesn’t change the fact that nearly every interaction she has falls flat. In one scene, she robotically asks one of her traveling companions what love is. Her companion dryly explains that love is what happens when you miss people. This is made worse by deadpan voice work, static animations, and awkward editing that often leaves seconds of dead air between dialogue. The actors' performances are a little easier to stomach in Japanese, but the characters never escape what's largely dull writing.

Emma sprints through explosions as she chases down an enemy.

This isn’t relegated to a few scenes, either. The entire script lacks subtext and nuance. Frequently, you return to your mobile base of operations, called a Cleanse Walker, to chat with your teammates. A young girl named Kagura who Emma saves early in the story tends to your base by cooking meals and managing resources. She happens to be just as dull as Emma, making their shared conversations painful to witness as the two emotionlessly talk about food or journals. There’s no energy behind their performances, the camera work lacks any creative direction, and they are always confined to the grey walls of the Cleanse Walker.

Ironically, the best character in the game doesn’t talk. Koo, Emma’s canine companion, is fierce and adorable. In one moment he’s lovingly looking up at Emma as they explore the world, and in the next he’s ripping out the titanium throat of a golem. He whimpers, barks, and even collects items for Emma. He’s an endearing companion with some charming animations, but Emma and Koo’s relationship never really develops throughout the game. We get some backstory here and there, but I never felt like they were forging a bond. Emma just doesn’t seem all that interested in Koo for most of the game. In one scene, a character suggests that Emma do something nice for Koo and after some consideration, she suggests petting him. Once again, there are lore reasons for her listlessness, which I won’t spoil, but it doesn’t change the fact that these scenes are so dull.

Emma staring at the floor with blood and dirt on her face.

If there’s anything in Beast of Reincarnation that can be described as “cinematic,” it’s the combat. The parry-heavy skirmishes are fantastic. Enemies are deadly and aggressive, and can cut Emma down in a few hits. While it isn’t nearly as hard as something like From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Neowiz’s Lies of P, Beast of Reincarnation can be tough–especially if you aren’t using the full range of Emma and Koo’s abilities.

The fundamentals are there. Emma’s slashes feel weighty, the clang of parrying a attack is gratifying, and her lethal blows are vicious. Like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, enemies have a health bar and a stagger bar. Deflecting attacks and pressuring enemies will fill up the stagger bar. Once it’s full, Emma can unleash a powerful attack that instantly kills a basic enemy. There is a dodge and a block too, but mastering the parry window is far more rewarding. 

Alongside Emma’s basic attacks, she has unlockable skills that can be deployed mid-combo for dazzling effect. These skills are themed around different blossoms and successfully pulling off one of these moves results in massive flowers blooming on the battlefield. Generally, these combos do significantly more damage than basic attacks, but they require some windup and leave Emma vulnerable. This means you need to study an enemy's patterns to find an opening. Combat, especially later in the game, is a spectacle. Flowers and trees spring up around Emma as she cuts down foes with style.

Emma taking down a boss with a flame katana.

What separates Beast of Reincarnation’s combat from similar action games is Koo. By pressing Y or Triangle, time stops, and Emma can issue commands. These commands cost FP, which is accumulated by successfully parrying attacks. In order to efficiently take down tougher enemies and bosses, you need to be aggressive with Emma while juggling Koo’s FP and commands. Some of these moves may also synergize with Emma’s skills. For example, Koo has a command that can bind or stun some enemies for a brief period of time, giving Emma just enough time to follow up with one of her powerful combos.

The near-constant stream of new combos, abilities, commands, and weapons kept the combat fresh throughout my entire playthrough. It’s almost a little overwhelming as Emma and Koo’s individual skill trees grow larger and larger throughout the story, but I never felt compelled to unlock everything. Each branch and root within Emma and Koo’s skill trees supports a different playstyle, and part of the fun is mixing and matching these different abilities to fit into your playstyle. While the parry-first combat is at the center of every approach, there are dozens of ancillary strategies that you can lean into. For example, I heavily invested skill points into Emma’s Sakura Blade Art, which happens to be one of the longest combos in the game. Given its windup, I prioritized Koo commands that would bind enemies. Max Blumenthal, a video producer on staff, focused more on Emma’s Kiku Blade Art, which has a much shorter windup and more range. He also invested more heavily in Koo’s commands, finding ways to chain his attacks to great effect. 

Emma and Koo hiding from a Nushi.

This all comes together during boss fights. These special Malefacts, known as Nushi, tower over Emma and Koo. They are based on real-world animals that have been infected by the Blight. Root tendrils hang off of them and giant flowers sprout from their body. They are beautiful and terrifying. Most of these bosses have two phases, and pushed me to conserve resources and tap into both Emma and Koo’s many abilities. There’s an engaging back and forth of reacting to the boss’s attacks and applying pressure whenever you find an opening. Sprinkling in commands from Koo can extend those openings or exploit a weakness. Some bosses are tricky but none felt insurmountable thanks to Emma and Koo’s wide array of skills and commands.

The problem is that most of these bosses are reused in the second half of the game. They are a higher level, but their attack patterns are nearly identical. This makes most of the high stakes encounters in later areas a cake walk. I don’t necessarily mind refighting bosses, but it robs these fights of any tension and opportunity for further experimentation. I know which attacks to counter and when to use one of Emma’s skill arts before the introductory cutscene has finished.

As stylish as the combat is, it lacks the polish of its inspirations. The camera can be unruly, timing perfect dodges feels inconsistent, and Emma’s traversal maneuvers can lead to some awkward situations. Where the camera struggles the most is against large bosses. In order to pressure a Nushi, you need to get in close, but when you’re stuck under their legs, it’s tough to tell when they are swinging and if they will even hit you. Occasionally they’ll fire off an attack that can only be dodged, and if you time your dodge right, time will slow down, allowing you to counter attack. Nailing this timing feels good, but it didn’t always behave consistently. Sometimes I’d dodge well before an attack and it would trigger the slowdown, and other times I would time it right before an attack and I’d still get hit. 

Koo standing in a patch of sunlight.

You can also get around enemy attacks with Emma’s hair. By holding the jump button or right trigger, you can extend Emma’s root-like hair to reach new heights and cross gaps. These abilities can be used to close the distance between an enemy, get out of harm's way, or kick off aerial combos and attacks. It’s fun to weave these traversal skills into her moves, but they don’t always work as intended. At times her hair wouldn’t extend all the way, and other times I wouldn’t be able to grapple onto the endpoint to pull her forward. These issues are minor, but they add up and leave the combat feeling messy at times. 

Part of that messiness stems from Beast of Reincarnation’s inconsistent performance and visual bugs. I played a majority of the game on a PC equipped with an RTX 4080, and I noticed some micro-stutters and hitches at 1080p and 1440p. I can’t say how well it fares at higher resolutions, because it wouldn’t let me change resolution settings unless I set it to full screen--a setting that doesn’t seem to exist for me in the current build. Based on our testing, the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro seems to be the best option while the Xbox Series X has severe frame rate issues that Game Freak is aware of and intends to address before its release.

Beast of Reincarnation is an ambitious game that often overextends itself. The lack of polish taints its versatile combat, the mundane performances and wearisome dialogue suffocate its tantalizing story, and the uninteresting areas drag down strong art direction. That isn’t to say Beast of Reincarnation is a total miss, though. The combat, despite my nitpicks, feels and looks great when you’re chaining together combos and deflecting ferocious attacks. And aside from the cutscenes, my 25-hour adventure didn’t feel like a slog--I was eager to improve Emma and Koo’s skills to take down tougher enemies. But everything surrounding that core loop falls flat. Despite Beast of Reincarnation’s enticing mix of high-quality inspirations, it fails to reach the same heights as those experiences.

In the three years since Big Walk was announced, I've heard it referred to as a co-op walking sim, a puzzle-adventure game, and friendslop. After spending 20+ hours in the world of the Australian Outback-inspired game, it's no easier to succinctly define it, because it's not actually like anything else. By inventively stripping down the medium to its most essential parts, it invites novices and experts alike to build it back up from scratch, coloring in its mysterious world with their friends by their side. We need a new word for whatever kind of game Big Walk really is, but here's one for now: unforgettable. 

Big Walk is a game about walking and talking with friends, played in first-person for groups of 2-12 players. Embodying vaguely humanoid characters--think multicolored snowmen with long noses and noodly appendages--you and your friends will trek across a vast and open island, hunting down nameless MacGuffins by way of solving an abundance of inventive puzzles together. This intentionally basic setup belies the depth you'll discover the more time you spend on its island.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWfg9iLq55c&pp=0gcJCaMLAYcqIYzv

Before you head off, you'll convene in a starting area that looks a bit like a playground or a children's gym, full of buttons to push; vibrant, sometimes bouncy objects to pick up and kick; and climbable surfaces. It's here where you'll learn most everything you need to know about what you can do, like all the gestures you can make with your body, how to use proximity chat to your aid, and how to deal with the physics of the world. For example, you may note how falling a great distance doesn't mean taking fall damage, but it may mean you drop what you were holding and lose it in a forest until the sun comes up. 

The first four puzzles act as a tutorial. In a more limited section of the island, you'll seek them out deep in the woods, high atop hills, or along beaches, work together to solve them, and unlock their corresponding MacGuffins, then place them in a console that unlocks virtually the entire rest of the island all at once. From there, it's your group's call to make, and your path through the world won't be the same as any other. 

Unlike Peak, which the game has often been compared to, Big Walk's island is handcrafted, not randomly generated, and it shows. Every inch of the world feels intentional, from the switchbacks down the mountainsides meant to give you the hint of a far-off landmark, to the radio stations you can come across, each of them playing their own special song that you can carry with you if you're in the mood for some music on your journey. Because there are so many puzzles, sometimes you'll even take aspects of one puzzle to solve others, and the game offers clever environmental hints when this is required.

In small ways, puzzles change depending on your group size. The host maintains the save data across sessions, allowing players to join or drop when they may need to, but different versions of the island exist for parties of two, three, or four-plus, with slight tweaks to each puzzle to accommodate the number of people in a group.

No matter your team size, Big Walk adjusts to give you an appropriate challenge.

Some puzzles will be a bit easier with more people putting their heads together, while others will be much more chaotic; one of the first puzzles my group found was basically a basketball hoop with big bouncy lights as the ball, and if you don't easily tame a group of a dozen players, you'll all be knocking each other's shots away from the basket until someone takes command and establishes a turn order. 

There's a remarkable clarity to the visual language in Big Walk that's conveyed right at the start, but everything else there is to know about it is built on a foundation you make together with your friends, establishing your own vocabulary and body language in such an effortlessly cool, intuitive way that so many other games seem afraid of. Playing with two of my kids, we took to calling the dozens of MacGuffins "eggy things" because of their somewhat egg-like shape, and we called our characters "walklings."

As the hazy semblance of a story unfolded, we made sense of it in our own words. Big Walk clearly hopes each group does this. That's why it fills its world with fundamental video game objects and objectives, like puzzles and their rewards, but adds nothing definitive beyond that.

Big Walk's world speaks for itself. There are no quest markers or on-screen prompts, and no stamina or health bars to manage. Every aspect of the game is diegetic, and every discovery is of your own making. There's no lore dump or explainer as to who you are or why you're solving puzzles on an island that only your group seems to inhabit. Across its realistic-looking landscape are many more cartoonishly colored structures of all shapes and sizes that stick out by contrast, and developer House House trusts each friend group to carve out their own adventure through the world, letting their curiosity guide them and building on shared learning hour after hour.

Getting a bird's-eye view of the island reveals just how much there is to see and do.

Some puzzles demand you work closely together side by side, timing your actions just right or fidgeting with buttons and points of view, while others demand you split up, sometimes for long stretches at a time and across great distances. In those instances, finding each other afterward is its own sort of puzzle to solve. Many puzzles will inhibit your ability to communicate, like one where a player is locked behind soundproof glass and must relay information to the others that only the lone walkling has. There are probably only about six to eight core concepts the game focuses on, but each time House House returns to an idea, it adds clever new wrinkles. 

In one of the game's most devilishly designed puzzles, I was forced to wear a helmet that blinded me, leaving my group to guide me across a treacherous obstacle course with only their vocal callouts. Hours later on our journey, this same dastardly helmet showed up again, but with new rules that demanded I, as the helmet-wearer again, carry the right objects to their intended corners of an area, which meant our group needed to figure out which were the right objects in the first place, before I could even begin to follow their vocal instructions.

I can think of a few puzzles that were quite daunting, especially with a seven-year-old in the group, but none frustrated us. Often, we'd climb to a mountaintop to get a lay of the land, head off toward some vibrant structure in the middle of a wooded area, and fidget with its movable parts until we got a sense of what we needed to do. Through clear collaboration and our own invented language, we'd achieve success--sometimes quickly, in just a few minutes, but other times after much more head-scratching for puzzles that took us 20 or more minutes to solve. Every time we'd solve a puzzle, my kids and I would rejoice with a chant: "Egg-y thing! Egg-y thing!" while throwing our walklings' hands into the air together. 

Though the game is light on traditional story, it feels like describing many of its amazing puzzles is a type of spoiler. The ritual of genuine discovery, followed by cooperative experimentation, and finally, shared elation, is the magic of Big Walk, doled out with the completion of each puzzle, but even more often in the in-between moments when you're just chatting as you explore the outback. For a few hours every night, for about two weeks, this was our beloved ceremony together. We helped each other get our bearings, found each other when we'd gotten lost and separated, and commended each other when one of us would crack the solution to a puzzle wide open. 

The way Big Walk nudges players to work together in tight-knit ways is a recurring bit of genius.

Big Walk has a defined ending and isn't meant to be played forever, though with a different group of friends, it does retain some appeal. When we weren't playing it, we were talking about it, trying to solve some puzzles we'd set aside if they'd stumped us for too long, or crafting theories about the massive black orb that waited beyond a wall we couldn't (yet?) access. It's a game of few words, opting instead to give players a massive canvas on which to create their own story together. For a handful of special evenings, the island was our home away from home. 

With every few puzzles, major new rewards become available, like a train that moves around the island or a giant map room to help plot your travels. You may also stumble upon totally missable shortcuts, reinforcing that your triumphs are yours to celebrate and not based on any HUD arrow you've followed. You'll come upon helpful handheld items, like walkie-talkies, flashlights, and megaphones, but as best I can recall, such items tend to make some puzzles easier, but they're rarely required, so it becomes a question of, for example, leaving the puzzle to find a pair of walkie-talkies or solving a puzzle without them even if it would clearly help a lot.

Inventory space is limited to what you can carry in your hands, on your belt, or in your backpack, and anything you're not holding can't even be accessed on your own. You'll need a buddy to take that backpack off of you if you want to consult the paper map you may have stashed inside of it. This seemingly small design decision really speaks to Big Walk's main idea. First imagined during the COVID pandemic, House House sought to make a game that brings people closer to one another, to get them talking and having meaningful interactions. For me, it worked wonders. 

It's not often my kids and I can all play a game together with the same enthusiasm, as the taste preferences among a 37-, 13-, and seven-year-old don't tend to align. But Big Walk offers a gameplay loop that feels universal in its appeal. It deconstructs video games into their most foundational verbs: discover, experiment, prevail. The context of a mysterious island and the silly-looking characters you play as surely enhance the experience, but it's the simplistic gameplay loop taken to a depth that is exciting but never so involved as to leave some players behind that makes it so easily beloved. 

Though it's not as slapstick-funny as some games with shared DNA, Big Walk definitely has a comedic side.

Though it leaves room for goofing off, Big Walk doesn't have the cadence of a friendslop game, where the purposely janky sabotage of your friends' best intentions is much of the fun. Some failures can be amusing, and the game as a whole definitely has an understated comedic tone befitting of its Australian dev studio, but the true highlight is the shared joys of exploring the world and overcoming its obstacles through thoughtful communication and teamwork.

There's a lot more stopping and thinking in Big Walk than perhaps its title suggests. You'll do plenty of walking, but you'll do even more talking, and if you're playing with friends or family you love and appreciate, it's bound to be a deeply rewarding experience.

It's also a well-polished game, with the only bug I encountered serving as an accidentally hilarious moment--when my daughter's walkling got stuck in a folding chair and we carried her around for a while like she was Cleopatra. 

The only noticeable knock on the game is one that demands some self-policing. Without using Big Walk's proximity chat, you'd turn its magic off like flipping a switch. Using Steam or Discord chat, for example, would act like a cheat code, circumventing a puzzle's intentional friction, such as when proximity chat is intended to fail at times, blocking you from easily talking to your group. So it's really on you to choose not to do that, or else accept that you've opted to make the game worse for yourself.

This is where it shares the most in common with more typical friendslop games like Peak and Lethal Company. The element of proximity chat does a lot of heavy lifting to make Big Walk shine brightly, so refusing to engage with that feature would be like playing a horror game with the lights on; you can still enjoy it, but you'll be holding it back from reaching the height of its powers.

The journey each group goes on will feature similar puzzles, but very different experiences overall.

Big Walk's incredible focus culminates in a final stretch of puzzles that encapsulates everything you'll have seen and done until that point in a genuinely mind-blowing way. My kids and I spent over a dozen hours together solving many difficult puzzles and inventing a language which we often relied on, only for the final iteration of the game's core concepts to be so slight in its adjustments yet so awesomely rewarding in its execution. It dared us to put together everything we've taught each other, recalling our entire journey.

I was utterly floored by the way this area masterfully fuses the game's repeated actions of experimenting and exploring with the undercurrent of its emotional beats that purposely rise to the surface toward the very end of the game. I loved every second of Big Walk, and this final act cemented it as one of the best co-op games I've played in years. 

As if that weren't enough to land Big Walk as an obvious Game of the Year contender, the very last scene of the game sneak-attacked me with a surprisingly bittersweet moment that left me glossy-eyed. I wouldn't dare spoil this part for you, but I'm sure it'll have a similar effect even if you're not playing with your kids. Big Walk takes fundamental and timeless video game concepts--obstacles and incentives for clearing them--and, through an intensely focused co-op experience, shapes them into something singularly rewarding, supremely mysterious, and totally unforgettable.

There's something that almost feels sacrilegious about playing Halo on a PlayStation console. The sci-fi shooter franchise feels quintessentially Xbox, and while you've been able to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC with a DualSense controller, there's something extra odd with playing a version of Halo covered in a PlayStation-oriented UI and seeing PlayStation Trophies pop with every completed in-game accomplishment. 

And yet, despite how weird it is to be playing Halo on a PlayStation 5, it's still Halo. And so it's really fun.

Not to be confused with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Campaign Evolved (because why would they make the title acronyms different and make things easier for me?) is a remake of the very first Halo, and it's also the first Halo game to be playable on one of Sony's consoles. Unlike the 2011 remaster Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary--which provided a graphical upgrade and added co-op gameplay and brand-new collectibles like lore-filled terminals and gameplay-modifying skulls--Campaign Evolved is a much more drastic transformation.

In the first Halo game, protagonist John-117, aka the Master Chief, awakens aboard a starship after it's been attacked by an alien alliance known as the Covenant. As a super-soldier called a Spartan, Master Chief is tasked with escaping the doomed ship with its artificial intelligence, Cortana, to a nearby moon-sized ring that humanity has never seen before. Cortana quickly learns that this ring, referred to as Halo, is important to the Covenant, and Master Chief sets out to learn what it is and why the Covenant want it, while also helping the various human survivors who made it to the ring's surface and are contending with Covenant forces.

Developed in Unreal Engine 5, Campaign Evolved's visuals are a huge jump from 2001's Combat Evolved. And as the name suggests, the actual story campaign has changed too. There are three brand-new missions that take place one year prior to the events of the main story, the levels in the main story have been redesigned in certain sections in terms of both layout and mission objective, and brand-new cutscenes further flesh out the characters and stories with references that longtime fans will recognize are now early teasers for Halo 2. 

The gameplay has been overhauled too, implementing changes to make the first Halo play more like Master Chief's later adventures. Some of these changes radically alter how it feels to play the first Halo--like the ability to sprint, or aim down sights on all weapons--while others feel much smaller. A mechanic like vehicle hijacking was not added to Halo until the second game in the series, so its addition in Campaign Evolved is technically new, for example. But vehicle hijacking doesn't feel like an extraordinary game-changer because the number of times you have the opportunity to use it are few and far between.

While the much larger (and visually gorgeous) environments, grander firefight arenas, and newly added "hold-the-line" encounters make for an altogether longer game to both explore and fight through, playing Campaign Evolved feels like the memory I have of playing Combat Evolved. The changes to the story and gameplay are noticeable to anyone who has familiarity with the first Halo, but the remake's adjustments don't feel like a complete departure from its source material. 

If anything, Campaign Evolved makes the story of Combat Evolved feel more in line with the lore and overall story developed in the games, books, and animated series that were released after the first Halo. Everything is just better connected--bringing the Brutes into Halo 1 erases the confusion as to why they're in Halo Reach and Halo 2, but not the game that canonically takes place in between them, for instance. And Captain Keyes' daughter, Miranda, is also now mentioned multiple times, setting up her in-game introduction in Halo 2. The original Combat Evolved doesn't acknowledge her existence because she didn't exist when that game was made. But she's now a major part of Halo 2 and Halo 3 (as well as several books) so it makes sense that her dad would at least talk about her in Halo 1.

Are any of these details crucial to the story told in the first Halo? No. Do these changes make the overall story of Master Chief's first game better flow into the second? Yes.

The changes are so much better that Campaign Evolved feels like the new gold standard for playing through the first Halo--I'd recommend this over Combat Evolved Anniversary. Every change feels like an improvement on what came before.

While the three new prequel missions don't rise to the same dramatic highs that make the main story of Combat Evolved so memorable, their inclusion does improve the overall experience and I recommend anyone who picks up Campaign Evolved play these new missions first (the game counts them as a separate story that you can choose to play at any point). 

These new missions see Master Chief and fan-favorite Sergeant Johnson infiltrate a Covenant ship in an effort to find intel on the alien threat's main base of operations. The duo have fantastic back-and-forth that builds up their relationship in a way that Combat Evolved's story simply doesn't have time for because they're split up almost immediately, and even when they do reunite, they then both go off on their separate missions. Combat Evolved's story is a largely solo affair of Chief doing his best to help his human allies as he moves from place to place across the Halo ring, and Campaign Evolved remains faithful to that lonely-feeling journey despite supporting co-op. 

So having a chance to see Chief interact with a friend does a lot of the heavy lifting in characterizing him as an actual person. You see that he has a sense of humor and is fiercely loyal to others (aspects that aren't really explored until Halo 2). And seeing just how, daresay, shy he is with marines he doesn't really know brings the whole psychological toll of being a Spartan to the forefront of his character. That's something you don't really get at all unless you read the books, watch the intro or closing cinematics of Halo 4, or play Halo Infinite. 

These three prequel missions also just have a very Halo Reach feel (there's even a mission in space that isn't all that great in comparison to other sci-fi space battle games, but plays well enough to be a good time). The horrifying threat of the Flood, the mystique of the Forerunners, and the drama of AI rampancy feel so far away. In these missions, it's all about the ongoing galactic war between humanity's scrappiness and an alien threat's technological superiority. As Chief and Johnson do their best to keep each other motivated, navigate a Covenant nature preserve in which the aliens hunt human prisoners for sport, and gaze down upon a planet that has been transformed into glass after undergoing an orbital plasma cannon bombardment, you can just feel it: Humanity is losing. And unless they get a miracle, they'll go extinct. 

These missions lead so well into the main story of Campaign Evolved, establishing that humanity is on the backfoot. My one major qualm with these new prequel missions is that they introduce two new characters: a new Covenant prophet and a new human fireteam leader. Neither are very fleshed out, beyond "evil scientist is evil" and "rough and tough marine," and that feels like such a missed opportunity. Chief meets several prophets across the Halo games, and fights alongside tons of humanity's soldiers. Given how well these prequel missions flesh out Chief and Johnson's relationship, they could have done the same for Chief and an existing prophet or human ally. Instead they introduce new characters but don't have the time to give either one enough time to breath and evolve into nuanced individuals. 

These two characters are not so bad that they ruin the story of these prequel missions, but they both feel like sci-fi tropes. Admittedly, Halo is filled with sci-fi tropes, but it also has some fantastic characters. So whenever a couple of duds pop up, they really stick out for how poorly characterized they are.

Additionally, Campaign Evolved doesn't quite figure out checkpoints. The game's automatic checkpoints seem to trigger for a variety of reasons: reaching a specific spot in a level, killing a certain number of enemies in an area, leaving combat entirely, or some combination of the three. The logic for what counts and what doesn't isn't super consistent and seems to shift parameters moment-to-moment, leading to irritating setbacks--when it's not abundantly clear why getting defeated in one lengthy fight sends you all the way back to the beginning of it, while a defeat in the fight that had just occurred prior only sent you back a few seconds, it can feel like the checkpoint system is finicky at best and unfair at worst. This is a problem in both the main story and the new prequel missions, though I noticed it a lot more in the latter than the former. It's not so bad that I ever wanted to put the game down in frustration, but it's certainly annoying whenever it happens to pop up, especially if you're playing on one of the more challenging difficulties, like Heroic or Legendary.

These issues aside, however, Halo: Campaign Evolved is awesome. And that's not surprising, simply because Halo: Combat Evolved is a fantastic game. There's a reason this story is a classic. Its explosive opening chapter plunges immediately into a series of desperate, high-action firefights that repeatedly reward your precise aim and strategic battle awareness with the sensation of being a heroic super-soldier. Humanity's weapons punch through flesh, while the Covenant's alien firearms and explosives satisfyingly melt enemy shields and paint the walls and floors with purple-blue plasma. For lack of a better word, the orchestral score is perfect, and I envy you if this will be your first time hearing it. And the main story's abrupt shift from a straightforward war between two civilizations into a desperate race by both sides to escape and contain a terrifying new threat that neither can handle is still as tense as it was back in 2001.

It's still an odd sensation to be playing a Halo game on a PlayStation console. If you had asked teenage Jordan--the one who spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours laughing alongside their friends in Halo 3 and Halo Reach online multiplayer--whether Halo would ever make its way to a Sony console, they'd have told you it was impossible. Yet, here we are. And 25 years later, Halo: Combat Evolved's story is still really, really good.

Splatoon is a Nintendo series that I've enjoyed well enough, but fleetingly. Even with solid shooting mechanics and a playful gimmick revolving around quickly traversing paint-soaked battlefields, the competitive multiplayer often failed to hold my interest beyond a few weeks. Splatoon Raiders isn't the first time the series has attempted single-player, as each previous game would have a brief story campaign. But it is the first time Nintendo has built a whole game around single-player, and the looter shooter approach works so well that I hope it marks a new beginning for Splatoon that can live alongside the multiplayer games.

In a lot of ways, it's easy to imagine how Splatoon Raiders came together. It uses a lot of the basic structure of a regular Splatoon game, like varied weapon types and Salmonid enemies. Even its main heroes, the members of the band Deep Cut, hail from Splatoon 3. Yet Splatoon Raiders rearranges all these familiar parts into a new shape that is best summarized by a quote found near the beginning of the game:  "All that matters now is the loot!" 

Splatoon Raiders

Instead of splatting your fellow squid kids and competing to get the most ink coverage, you're taking on a series of PvE challenges. Some of these involve quickly gathering Power Eggs on a timer while others have you roaming a map gathering crystals to power your drilling machine, but the core goal remains the same: defeat Salmonids and get loot. It's simple but it works. Instead of competing to cover the ground with ink, your own ink color (and custom character accents) changes from stage to stage, while your Salmonid enemies are consistently spewing a sickly yellow-green goo.

Returning Splatoon fans will find a lot of familiarity here. Your core weapons, like shooters, splatanas, and dualies, are all here, as well as some weapons that make less sense in this format. The roller was my mainstay in traditional competitive Splatoon games, when I would try to help my team with maximum ink coverage, but it's much less useful while fighting off hordes of superpowered fish. I mostly stuck with rapid-fire weapons like shooters and dualies, but occasionally changed it up with a shotgun-like slosher. The weapons you find have numbered levels that generally match your current experience level, so sometimes Raiders will gently push you to try something new. If you haven't found a new version of your preferred weapon type for a while, of course you'll try out a stronger but less familiar weapon. 

The real game-changer is the array of Gadgets. You have three Tank types--Speed, Power, and Tactical--which mostly define your Gadget selection. The Speed tank gives you access to the Booyarang, a spinning weapon that squirts some ink in a small radius, while the Power tank gives you Splatellites that circle around you, and the Tactical tank gives you the Shot Pot auto-turret. Each of the gadgets feel very different from each other, and you're able to develop new Gadgets as you progress through the game. I stuck mostly to the Power Tank and my favorite Gadget, the Splatellite, all throughout.

Big Man pilots the digger in Splatoon Raiders

The game again encourages experimentation with Sampler Dungeons, short trial dungeons that let you test out with a Gadget you may not have tried, and rewards your curiosity with a bonus Skill Point. They're always worth doing because of the bonus, and the curated nature of the stages allows the game to walk you through a lot of the clever applications of the Gadgets.

To get even more creative, each Gadget can also be modified by equipping parts. This is one of the aspects you can upgrade with your Skill Points and it's almost always worth it to do, as enhancing your Gadgets is a major part of finding your own strategy to take on the increasingly tough waves of Salmonids. The Gadget parts offer fairly simple upgrades initially, like enhancing their power or area of effect. But as you find and create more, you can add special effects like scorch damage for the Splatellites, or increased damage the further you fall for your ground-striking Meteor Mitt. 

The array of options leads to creative applications that I was still discovering late in the game. The Splatellites are primarily a defensive weapon, but eventually I had reduced their cooldown so much they could be used almost indefinitely, and they created such a large area of effect that they essentially laid down a track of swimmable ink in front of me while I was in squid form. That made it much easier to quickly traverse the battlefield without having to pause to shoot a swimming path. If I saw, say, a turret tower in the distance, I could just activate my Gadget and swim straight over to make quick work of it. That's just one application, and it feels like I could find many more for each piece of gear. 

Splatellites circle you in Splatoon Raiders

For emergencies, you also get to equip one Showstopper ability that is paired to which member of Deep Cut you bring along on your voyages. Those power up as well, but recharge much more slowly than your Gadgets, and fill with eggs from defeated enemies instead of a cooldown. However, these Showstoppers make up for their lengthier wait period by packing a serious punch and the ability to completely change the way a match is going. Shiver's ability, which spawns a massive shark to cut across the battlefield, bailed me out more than a few times. 

In both the case of the Power Tank and Showstopper, though, I eventually hit max level and plateaued. It's clear that Splatoon Raiders wants you to swap between them to power them up, but the stages kept ramping up in difficulty and I would feel underpowered when I tried switching to another. So rather than gain valuable experience for the Speed or Tactical Tank, or for the other two Showstoppers, I was just gaining useless experience points toward skills I had already mastered. It would have been nice if I could have applied this spillover experience to my lesser-used Tanks and Showstoppers to speed up their leveling, but instead I was forced to gain functionally nothing unless I wanted to feel underpowered. 

Keeping up with the level requirements of the stages was a must, because the array of Salmonids gets pretty tough. Like the weapons, these are mostly recognizable from past Splatoon games, but they're given new life here. Many of them are given overpowered "Seasoned" forms, identifiable by a thick layer of salt covering them that makes them extra-tough. Raiders gets a shocking amount of mileage out of rearranging the enemies across different compositions and battlefields, and near the end it starts to get incredibly hectic. Managing the battlefield and prioritizing threats is a harried thrill that never gets old, especially with the promise of sweet loot. 

Shiver rides a shark in Splatoon Raiders

The stages are usually around 10 minutes, which feels like the ideal length for a casual looter shooter like this. It's just enough time to hop in, take down some enemies, then go back to base to check out your new gear and ready-up to go again. But in the stages that required some level of crystal completion, I would often just hang around and keep taking down Salmonids even after fulfilling the requirement, simply because I was enjoying the satisfaction of taking down enemies. That feels like the mark of a great gameplay loop.

Splatoon Raiders isn't entirely absent of multiplayer. You can group up and take part in co-op raids with enemies that scale up in difficulty, and you'll still get loot and experience from your co-op raids. It's a nice-to-have feature that worked well in my limited pre-release experience, but it's really not the focus here. You could play through the entirety of Splatoon Raiders as a single-player shooter, and it's better for it.

I would be surprised if Splatoon Raiders supplants the main Splatoon titles. The series is a big success for Nintendo, so clearly the competitive ink-splattering multiplayer has found an audience. But Splatoon Raiders shows a new degree of flexibility for the franchise, with a single-player campaign that's much more satisfying than its past attempts to inject a story campaign into the main games. I hope this new looter shooter sub-series gets to live alongside the main series, because it's loads of fun already, and the concept could be pushed even further.

I've been conflicted about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced since it was announced. The original 2013 pirate action-adventure is one of my favorite games ever, so my immediate reaction to hearing it was getting a remake for current-era consoles was excitement. In that very first announcement video, Ubisoft said that Resynced would not reinvent protagonist Edward Kenway's tale, but that there would be large changes to combat, parkour, stealth, and the structure of the overall story. And while changes like that fall within the framework of what a remake is, I couldn't tell if these adjustments would mean Resynced still felt faithful to the original game. And regardless of whether or not it was, there was also the bigger question of if this remake would be better than Black Flag.

Having now played Resynced, I don't think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed series, and Resynced doesn't change so much that that's no longer the case. The issue is that for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem.

If you asked me what Black Flag is, I'd tell you it was a treasure hunt. You play as a normal employee of an entertainment company in the 21st century who is scrubbing through the memories of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate trying to make his fortune in the 18th century, via a machine called an Animus. Your mission is initially just to capture footage of Edward's life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward's memories draws the attention of your bosses. Turns out, Edward stumbled across someone who knew of a site called the Observatory during this period of his life, and your bosses want to know whether Edward ever found it himself. They task you with spending more and more time reliving Edward's life in hopes of finding where it's hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. 

You don't know what the Observatory really is or why you're looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars--and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character's life to Edward's is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what's an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it's one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series--only the first two Assassin's Creed games do it better.

Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you're experiencing a simulation of Edward's life via the Animus but doesn't provide any reasoning up front as to why you're doing it. The original game's modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt.

Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion. But you won't get this framing if you just play Resynced's story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional.

Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin's Creed Shadows, not Assassin's Creed III like the original Black Flag. It continues the story of Animus users who have awakened as Travelers to fight against Ego, an artificial intelligence created by the Templars that is now training itself to become the perfect overlord of the human race. If you go out of your way to find them (like really out of your way--the game does not make it easy for you), you can find rifts that allow you to temporarily enter what I can only surmise is the Black Room, where Ego shows you how it would use details of Edward, Blackbeard, and Mary Read's lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. 

Ego theorizes that if these three pirates' stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king's pardon, and an Assassin who left the Brotherhood, and all three were ultimately rewarded with wealth and happiness for choosing to live as good little sheep, then perhaps more Animus users like you would be inspired to fall in line rather than embrace a chaotic life and seek out personal fame, fortune, and freedom. In Ego's eyes, the best way to guide humanity into a better future is if the ugliness of the past is erased and replaced with something that is safe and sober, but robbed of all reason and sapped of all spirit.

This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that's not easy to find because it's not even marked on the in-game map. You just have to know where to look for these four rifts or spend hours scouring every corner of the Caribbean. And hopefully you've also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and Eagle are fighting Ego, who the Guide and Eagle even are (it is a whole thing, let me tell you), and what it means for you to be one of the Travelers. 

This bizarre mishandling of the framing device for Resynced's story encapsulates the remake's failings. It does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn't use that cool stuff very effectively. It's so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled. 

I adore what Resynced does for Anne Bonny, for example, a character who takes on an important role in the final chapters of Black Flag but is largely absent for most of the story. Resynced has Anne introduced as soon as Edward returns to Nassau at the very beginning of the game, and she regularly pops up in the story after that in reimagined cutscenes and brand-new missions that further flesh out her importance to Edward. It makes all of the already-great scenes involving her in the later chapters hit even harder. The same is true for Ed Thatch and Stede Bonnet, both of whom also get more screen time and brand-new missions that continue their storylines after their departure from Black Flag's story and give them a more fulfilling end.

So why then does Resynced bother to add brand-new characters who have very little screentime and unrewarding finales to their arcs that leaves them feeling separated from Edward's tale? The remake is fixing the problem of Black Flag's old characters and then adding new characters who have the flaws that were just fixed in the original characters, preserving one of the original problems of Black Flag.

Resynced's other issues aren't nearly as severe, but they all add up and needle at you throughout the experience. Most are a result of trying to fit Black Flag into a new game engine. What the various teams across Ubisoft have been able to accomplish with Ubisoft Anvil is to be commended (Mirage and Resynced feel so much better to play than Origins), but it's still clearly an engine designed for an action-RPG, not a stealth-driven action-adventure. Edward's freerunning is better than the likes of Origins' Bayek or Odyssey's Kassandra, but both the mechanical depth and the feeling of his freerunning still fall behind Unity's Arno and the protagonists who preceded him. 

And while combat does at times feel like a modern take on the counter-heavy combat of Black Flag, the use of pistols, the rope dart, the sweeping kick, and the forward kick is clearly just a cleverly hidden version of the battle abilities from the RPG-style Assassin's Creed games--there's a bit more strategy to using these equipment and skills in Resynced, but not enough to keep combat exciting across a 30-hour story given the poor enemy variety. 

The new animations and voicelines are hit-or-miss too. Many of Edward's new lines add excellent insight to his character during scenes where there previously was none, while some of the new lines--especially his extremely pro-Assassin, anti-Templar one-liners that he spouts with every Assassin Contract--feel like a mischaracterization that makes him oddly heroic during a portion of the game where he has to be a scumbag for the story to work. Brand-new cutscenes add more story, but at the cost of poor facial animations that look like wooden puppets talking to each other. Some of the cutscenes that were in the original game are also somehow worse, with strange facial hiccups (at least on Xbox Series X) distorting the longing glances, winks, smirks, scowls, and contemplative sighs that carried so much narrative weight in the original Black Flag.

Resynced also gives Edward the ability to quietly crouch walk and slink behind cover anywhere, not just stalker zones, and incorporates some of Shadows' uses of weather and darkness to add new considerations to stealth, but the remake's outright removal of all tailing missions (which, admittedly were a pain point in the original game) means these improvements don't have much use. Social stealth is also back in Resynced (great!) but almost every mission that relied on those mechanics has been removed or changed, meaning there's little chance to engage with it (bad!). 

In fact, when it comes to the mass deletion of all mandatory tailing missions and changing almost every social stealth mission so that they no longer rely on stealth mechanics, Resynced feels like too big of a swing in the other direction, recreating Black Flag into a game like the action-packed adventures of Kassandra or Eivor. And that makes sense--all of these games are made in the same engine.

The issue is that, unlike those games, Resynced isn't an RPG--there are no ways for Edward to talk his way through problems, disguise himself, or create clever opportunities. He can only engage through the action part of the action-RPG formula. So instead of having missions with a wide variety and breadth of structure, you're still mostly doing the same thing over and over. Resynced might have been a stronger experience if only half of the social stealth-driven tailing missions were removed, as changing pretty much all of them and moving Edward's story in a more action-oriented direction simply shifts one problem into another. 

Weird camera cuts and dramatic perspective shifts during assassination takedowns and chain kills also make it irritatingly tricky to keep track of enemies in enclosed spaces, like caves or the decks of smaller ships--it's totally fine to have this in the wide-open locales of Origins' Egypt or Odyssey's Greece, but it clashes with Black Flag's structure. The game hasn't changed enough to fit the new game engine, which leads me to wonder why this wasn't just a brand-new pirate adventure during this time period that followed a new protagonist. Edward meets so many other Assassins! We didn't need to stick to the rigidity of his story again if it doesn't really fit the mechanics of this new game engine.

I could go on but the point remains: There are plenty of great changes in Resynced, but equally a ton of pain points in trying to force the Black Flag structure to fit into an engine designed for a very different type of Assassin's Creed. This makes Resynced less of a new gold standard for Edward's adventure, and more of a bizzaro-world variation of the original Black Flag. If you haven't played Black Flag (or at least don't revisit it often), you should play Resynced, because even though it doesn't feel like a faithful remake to me, it is still remaking a game that's already critically acclaimed. But if you have played Black Flag, I'm not sure if Resynced will hit you as hard emotionally as you're hoping for.

All said, I regard Resynced with the exact same sentiments as Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Resynced goes beyond the scope of a traditional remaster and adjusts the content of Black Flag to make improvements to the experience (what you'd expect for a remake). But the downside to these fixes is that it highlights problems that weren't fixed or, even worse, new problems that didn't even exist in the original game. Resynced is a half-step toward something truly fantastic. If you play it, you will see the strengths of Black Flag. You will see why the original game was the de facto pirate video game for years. But you will also find a remake that doesn't manage to take the crown from the very game that it's remaking.