There can be a hypnotic nature to repetitive tasks, and plenty of games have leaned into that to give otherwise humdrum jobs a surprising allure. Deliver At All Costs goes in the opposite direction and transforms the unforgiving tedium and thankless nature of a courier job into an explosive, slapstick adventure. This makes for some fun and brief thrills, but too often Deliver At All Costs falls into repetitive monotony with an overly cyclical format, a dragging story, and unexciting in-game upgrades.

Narratively, Deliver At All Costs has a fantastically intriguing opening. You play as Winston, an extremely gifted engineer who's late on rent, bereft of friends, and prone to outbursts of anger. He sees visions of a strange fox, someone is spying on his apartment, and he's hiding something about his past. It's all very mysterious and strange, and the setup immediately draws you into the story in hopes of uncovering who Winston truly is and what's going on.

The mystique hangs over the first hour of Deliver At All Costs, which sees Winston take a truck-driving job at We Deliver, a courier service. Every delivery forces Winston, and by extension the player, to contend with a new type of challenging cargo, like surprisingly strong balloons making Winston's truck extremely buoyant and prone to soaring over buildings at the smallest bump, or a statue that attracts a flock of seagulls obsessed with carpet bombing the statue with poop.

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The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are in the midst of, pardon the pun, a video game renaissance. In the last few years alone we've received the excellent retro compilation Cowabunga Collection, the retro-style brawler Shredder's Revenge, and the Hades-inspired roguelike Splintered Fate. Not since their breakout success on Saturday morning cartoons have the turtles been so ubiquitous in games, but this time around, developers are more emboldened to experiment with different game styles. Enter TMNT: Tactical Takedown, a grid-based tactics game that feels both authentically nostalgic and like creative new ground for the heroes. While it suffers slightly from a limited scope, the short adventure is a great time while it lasts.

Tactical Takedown is presented with a clean, bright visual style reminiscent of the old Saturday morning cartoon. The turtles' beaks are rounded just like you drew on your Trapper Keeper during geometry class. But this story takes place well after the original series--Splinter and Shredder are both dead, and the boys' relationship has grown contentious as they've all gone in different directions and coped with the loss. The combination of Saturday morning aesthetics with this new story premise make this feel like a progression of that continuity and an opportunity to show us something new.

It's also the conceit for the game's core mechanic, which limits you to one turtle at a time as you fight your way through legions of Foot Clan goons. Objectives are usually to survive a certain number of turns or to defeat certain starred enemies. The stages are isometric grids like you've seen in lots of tactics games, but limiting you to one character at a time means a lot of focus on prioritization and crowd control. You're always outnumbered, but they're always outmatched. The stages are designed with a particular turtle in mind, which is explained by the story: Donatello is investigating happenings underground, so each of his stages take place in the sewer, while Raphael's take place across the rooftops, and so on. These differences are mostly cosmetic, but some are more substantial. Hopping along rooftops of a Raphael stage requires you to reach the edge of one roof to clear another, for example, and Donatello's sewer stages are rife with toxic waste which is, thankfully, purple.

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Back in September, Capcom fighting game fans had a major wish granted with Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, which bundled the entire collection of 2D Marvel-centric fighting games--and a side-scrolling beat-'em-up to boot--in an all-in-one package. It was what fans of Marvel Vs. Capcom had wanted for years, particularly with Marvel Vs. Capcom 2's inclusion, and it made multiple fighting games seemingly lost to time reappear on the scene in an instant.

Now, Capcom has the unenviable task of following it up with Capcom Fighting Collection 2, the true sequel to the first classic fighting compendium from 2022. This new collection features the same great quality-of-life additions as the others: a "museum" with concept art and design documents, a music player with each game's soundtrack at the ready, rollback netcode, etc. However, there are only so many old fighting games in Capcom's vault to collect, and Capcom Fighting Collection 2 has a few indicators that the well may be drying up.

The "marquee" games in this bundle--based on the key art, at least--are the Capcom Vs. SNK games, which paired fighters from the libraries of both Capcom and SNK in one big battle. Both games utilized the brilliant Ratio system, which lets you change the strength of the characters you choose. Each game implemented this system differently; Capcom Vs. SNK assigned ratio levels, from one to four, to specific characters, while the sequel let you assign the ratios after selecting your character.

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For as much as change can be scary, it can be all the lonelier to remain stagnant while the world and the people in it continue moving on without you. That's the crux of Old Skies, a point-and-click adventure game in which you play as Fia Quinn, a professional time traveler immune to the effects of the shifting timeline. On the surface, Old Skies first appears to be your typical time-travel story about the pitfalls of affecting time, but the story surprises in how it instead delves into the negatives of not influencing the flow of time, of being someone that no one remembers, regardless of what you accomplish. It makes for an incredibly affecting tale, one that has stuck with me since the credits rolled.

As Fia Quinn, you're tasked with traversing the timeline through a handful of moments in New York's history, ranging from the Gilded Age to the morning of September 11, 2001 to an impactful afternoon in 2042. Fia works for ChronoZen, an agency that takes wealthy clients back in time to relive moments of the past, solve their long-forgotten mysteries, or change minor details about their life that they regret. The work rarely goes as planned, forcing Fia to adapt on the fly and deduce the best way to get the client what they want without affecting aspects of history that the algorithm-following higher-ups have decreed must remain unchanged.

Old Skies' opening mission does not pull any punches and sets the tone right away.

For better and worse, Old Skies is extremely linear, with only one solution to each of the problems that Fia comes up against. In terms of narrative theming, I like this a lot--it reinforces that Fia's fate in this story is unyieldingly static and that the timeline in general must follow a set series of events. But this structure hurts the gameplay, too. There were times when I thought of a way to solve the problem at hand, and it didn't work--forcing me to guess a bunch of random solutions instead--and if the right answer was nonsensical, I'd grow irritated, especially if the solution I'd presented utilized a throughline of logic the game had already established in an earlier puzzle. If I have to use cash for Fia to bribe someone in the very first mission, using money to bribe people should be a valid way of collecting information later when speaking to people who are clearly looking for cash. And yet, I don't think I could bribe a single other person for the rest of the story, despite money appearing in Fia's pocket with every time jump--a constant reminder of an item I could not use and was foolish for thinking otherwise.

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As far as sequels with the word "Revenge" in the title go, Revenge of the Savage Planet is far from the dark second act the naming convention is known for. This follow-up to 2020's Journey to the Savage Planet amplifies its predecessor's zaniness and scale, with four lush alien planets to explore as you go about cataloging every plant and creature on the way to unfurling the game's many secrets. It's an impressive mishmash of genres, too. While predominantly a pulpy sci-fi action-adventure with metroidvania stylings, Revenge of the Savage Planet also incorporates elements of puzzle-solving, survival-crafting, creature-capturing, and even Animal Crossing-style decorating to its eclectic mix. Much like the first game, combat is still a glaring weakness, but this is a sequel that improves upon the original by almost every other metric.

In what would be a humorous twist if the situation weren't so common, Revenge of the Savage Planet's narrative is clearly influenced by the circumstances that led to the game's creation. Typhoon Studios, the developer behind Journey to the Savage Planet, was acquired by Google in 2019, just a few short months before the game's release. The Canadian studio was purchased to create games for Google's cloud-based platform, Stadia, but was unceremoniously shuttered when the short-lived platform failed. Much of the team formed a new studio called Raccoon Logic and managed to secure the Savage Planet IP, leading to the creation of Revenge of the Savage Planet and its story of familiar corporate incompetence.

You play as a nameless intergalactic colonizer who, after emerging from a 100-year cryosleep, discovers that they're now a member of Alta Interglobal, a holdings company that acquired your former employer, Kindred Aerospace, while you were sleeping. Oh, and you've also been made redundant, as Alta laid off all the ex-Kindred staff immediately following the acquisition. Sound familiar? Now marooned in an unfamiliar galaxy, your ultimate goal is to exact revenge on your former employer and return home by any means possible.

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Doom Eternal built upon the strong foundations that the series' 2016 reboot established, evolving the classic and frenetic first-person action by introducing a complex layer of strategy and quick decision-making. It was a change that, while popular, did alienate some players looking for something akin to its more straightforward predecessor, with its emphasis on consistent movement, resource juggling, and frequent weapon switching, all of which could detract from the core principles of gratuitous demon slaying. As a response to that, Doom: The Dark Ages doesn't retreat backwards, but instead threads the needle by reestablishing an engrossing power fantasy with simple but satisfying mechanics that push its combat into uncharted territory for the series.

Doom: The Dark Ages puts a big emphasis on standing your ground in a fight, rather than moving around it. To do this, you're permanently equipped with a shield that lets you parry enemy attacks and block incoming damage. It's a versatile tool that soaks up damage or redirects it with timely blocks and parries, giving you the ability to go toe-to-toe with far more enemies than before. In typical Doom fashion though, the best defense is often also an incredibly aggressive offense. Your shield is far more than a means to defend yourself--it's a weapon in every sense of the word. When you're not slicing a demon's head off with its chainsaw edges, you can bounce it between enemies or shatter armor that has been super-heated by your bullets. It's a great tool for closing distance, too, since it substitutes Eternal's air dash for a long-reaching shield bash that comes in handy across the larger battlefields. The shield locks onto distant targets and at the press of a button the Slayer launches towards enemies and obliterates them with devastating effect. For a series so hyper focused on its array of weaponry, it's curious to have the biggest change come in the form of a defensive addition. But with the variety the shield alone adds to the existing formula, it's an addition that will be difficult to move on from.

Doom: The Dark Ages

You'll still have to manage how you kill demons in order to keep your health and ammo topped up, but the importance of this has been de-emphasised when compared to Doom Eternal. Instead, that focus shifts towards a rhythm that arises from balancing parries and melee attacks in equal measure. You're given powerful attacks that you can deliver routinely with your fists and other melee weapons, all of which are tied to refresh timers that you can shorten by parrying incoming attacks. It's deeply satisfying to rush into the face of a towering demon with a shield bash, parry a string of attacks, and then deliver a flurry of your own in their dazed state. Each reverberating parry and subsequent crushing counter-attack pauses the action ever so slightly to emphasize the impact of your actions, giving each skirmish a crunchy feel that never gets old.

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The immersive sim is arguably gaming's worst-named genre, as it really doesn't tell you much. Aren't most video games designed to immerse you, and aren't they all, in a sense, simulating something? Trying to define what makes an "immersive sim" has long been a running bit among creators and players. I've previously joked that it's a game in which you can flush the toilets, due to how oddly ubiquitous that feature is in games like Prey, BioShock, and other genre standouts. Sincerely, though, I think of immersive sims as games that give you a puzzle box with a multitude of solutions, and it's up to you how you solve it. In that sense, Skin Deep is a great immersive sim.

In the sci-fi comedy Skin Deep, you play Nina Pasadena, an Insurance Commando whose job is to save cats who have been kidnapped by space pirates--so long as their coverage is active. One crew, The Numb Bunch, is causing all sorts of havoc, commandeering a number of ships and keeping Nina busy saving her feline policyholders. If the setup sounds ridiculous, that's on purpose. Eschewing the dystopian darkness and unflinching seriousness of many, if not most, "im-sims," Skin Deep is reliably laugh-out-loud funny, whether it's the quips enemies grunt as you sneak around various spaceships, or the emails you read from rescued cats in between missions.

Each time you save a cat, they launch out of their crates with an emphatic and goofy-sounding meowwww!

Played in first-person, Skin Deep flexes its im-sim muscles in levels that feel excitingly open-ended and demand careful planning, while still asking you to improvise on-the-fly when things go awry. Each mission has a number of locked-up cats to save and enemies to evade or eliminate, and there's no one right way to complete these objectives. A cat's lockbox needs a key, for example, and you can find those by pickpocketing guards, reading memos and tracking one down some place, finding a Duper--a ranged device that instantly duplicates whatever item you've shot at--and doubling an otherwise hard-to-reach key, or via other methods I won't spoil.

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Yes, the original version of Oblivion did not have any scruff in sight. No beards in the character creator and not a single mustache can be found in the enormous province of Cyrodiil. Adding beards to a handful of NPCs throughout the world doesn't change Oblivion's core experience. In fact, even with the facial hair and improved graphics, half of the characters I met during my adventure still looked unsettling. To some, this may be off-putting--especially when juxtaposed with the remaster's otherwise astounding visuals--but for me, Oblivion isn't Oblivion without some truly uncomfortable character models. It's all part of that "charm" that game director Todd Howard mentioned in the reveal stream.

The folks at Virtuous seem to understand that trademark Oblivion "charm," too, because the remaster keeps the best of the Bethesda jank intact while gently reworking some of Oblivion's more dated mechanics. Purists will certainly find things to nitpick, and first-timers may scratch their heads at some of the jank that was left in, but Oblivion Remastered feels like the most logical compromise. The visuals have been entirely recreated to take advantage of Unreal Engine 5, but the characters still don't look quite right. The attack animations have been redone, but the combat is still generally bad. The streamlined leveling mechanics retain the class system, but it's much harder to get soft-locked. The UI and menus have been consolidated and refreshed, but Oblivion's iconic map screen is identical to the original. For the most part, Oblivion Remastered manages to walk that thin line of familiarity and freshness.

The biggest surprise is its presentation. Oblivion Remastered looks stunning. Virtuous and Bethesda Game Studios have taken advantage of Unreal Engine 5 and it is without a doubt the most technically impressive game Bethesda Game Studios has ever released. The dynamic lighting, vibrant skyboxes, broader color palette, and hyper-realistic textures give the remaster that current-gen AAA sheen that players expect. These enhancements extend to the character models as well, as NPCs are lavishly detailed. You can see the strands of hair on their freshly grown beards and the pores on their faces, but they're still a little uncanny. In most cases, the NPCs look even stranger when they open their mouths. There's a bizarre disconnect between the hyper-realistic visuals and the weird faces and dated facial animations. The thing is, that awkwardness is part of what makes Oblivion so special, and there's plenty of it in this remaster.

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Everybody dies. It's the one thing we all have in common. Most of us won't know when it will happen, but that's not the reality for those living with a terminal diagnosis. Though the estimated timeframe isn't exact, that doesn't really matter when faced with a death sentence. Over the past year, I've become all too familiar with terminal illness and its inevitable conclusion. It's an odd thing to live through; on one hand, I was essentially grieving for someone who was still alive, while on the other, I was trying to stay positive and act as if everything was normal for their sake, savoring each and every moment I still had left with them. Because of this experience, I instantly resonated with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and its unusual premise. Developed by French studio Sandfall, this turn-based RPG introduces a world where humanity faces a collective terminal diagnosis, of sorts. It's a moving tale, complemented by engaging combat that blends aspects of traditional JRPGs with reactive, parry-heavy action.

The origins of Clair Obscur's premise begin 67 years prior to the start of the game's story, when a cataclysmic event known as the Fracture destroyed the Continent and shattered the land into pieces. One of those pieces is the city of Lumière, a surreal facsimile of Belle Époque era Paris, where landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe have been twisted, warped, and broken by the fantastical effects of the Fracture. The last remaining humans reside in Lumière, but with each passing year, humanity edges closer to extinction due to an ominous entity called the Paintress. Each year, this embodiment of death carves a new number into the monolithic structure looming on the horizon, and then a year later, everyone of that age dies. For 67 years, she's been counting down. Clair Obscur's prologue concludes with every 34-year-old disintegrating into dust and crimson petals as the Paintress moves onto number 33.

There's almost no one alive in Lumière who hasn't been touched by death in some way. The city's orphanages are overflowing with children, as couples debate whether to have kids of their own to keep humanity going or choose not to bring new life into such a bleak world. Some are at ease with death and content to live out their days managing market stalls or creating art on canvases and with musical instruments. Others dedicate their lives to researching new technologies and weapons to aid the expeditions that venture onto the Continent each year with the goal of killing the Paintress and preventing extinction. For those with one year left to live, joining an expedition is an appealing choice. The success rate might stand at 0%, with all previous expeditions failing to stop the Paintress or even return home, but what else do they have to lose?

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Though the names Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat certainly aren't new, the newest installments in each franchise has reinvented the tenured fighting series' in different ways--one with a fresh coat of hip-hop-infused paint, the other with a total reboot of its lore.

Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves, then, might be expected to try and reinvent its wheel with a similar kind of wild ambition, but it doesn't stray too far from its Garou roots. At the core of the experience is a mechanically sound fighting system in which skill rises above luck and the thrills of gameplay are heightened by the new REV System, which I find to be one of the most balanced ideas in recent fighting games. That said, the limited ways to explore this new system, coupled with some baffling decisions regarding its roster, makes City Of The Wolves lose some of its bite.

At the core of this new Fatal Fury is the aforementioned REV System, a risk/reward mechanic that can completely change the flow of a match in an instant and leads to some exciting finishes against CPU and human opponents alike. A small, semi-circular meter called the REV Gauge will build up as players use specific moves and abilities, like REV Arts or REV Accel, as well as every time you block.

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Sunderfolk feels at its best when you're playing together with friends on the couch during what would have otherwise been an uneventful weekend afternoon. The game embodies two of my favorite aspects of tabletop RPGs: strategic teamwork and memorable anecdotes. It does struggle to be fun when you're playing solo, but that feels like it's clearly the wrong way to play the tabletop-inspired, turn-based tactical RPG, which really only comes together when different minds are working together to coordinate their respective perks and customized deck of card-based abilities to strategically accomplish the task at hand.

In Sunderfolk, each player takes control of one of six anthropomorphic heroes: an arcanist crow, a pyromancer axolotl, a ranger goat, a bard bat, a berserker polar bear, or a rogue weasel. After proving themselves capable bouncers in a tavern, the heroes band together to protect their home village, Arden, from a series of escalating threats and try to find a way to prevent the growing corruption of the magical tree that keeps everyone safe from the coming darkness. It's your typical run-of-the-mill fantasy setup, with would-be heroes rising to heed the call of adventure when no one else will, and for the first few hours, Sunderfolk doesn't do much to differentiate itself from contemporary stories.

You can play as the spellcasting arcanist, supportive bard, high-damaging ranger, bulky berserker, sneaky rogue, or explosive pyromancer.

But then you get to really know the NPCs, and Sunderfolk's story starts to make its mark with its varied cast of characters, all of whom are voiced by actor Anjali Bhimani to replicate the experience of playing a tabletop adventure with a Game Master who is portraying all the non-hero characters. Bhimani does an incredible job adjusting the pitch, tone, accent, and speed of her voice to add a distinct flavor to every character, injecting a feeling of life into the narrative that makes it easy to love the heroes' allies and effortless to hate the villains. My friends and I were far more invested in saving the village and discovering what was going on upon meeting an adorable, one-armed penguin orphan named Amaia who was doing her best to keep Arden's mines running, especially once her cruel and lying uncle was introduced. We vowed to do everything to save the little bird (and desperately hoped her uncle would be revealed as the true big bad so that we'd have a chance to destroy him), and much of that emotional investment, as well as our feelings about the other characters, was derived from Bhimani's portrayal.

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Imagine a piece of complex origami. You want to understand how it works, so you start looking for a place to begin unfolding it. With each corner of the paper you peel back, you notice an even more intricate structure underneath. So you unfold that too, and find even more fine detail underneath yet again. You start to wonder how many layers it can have, and marvel at the intricacy. You remember at the start, when you already thought it was complex, but you had no idea how elaborate it really was. That is the experience of playing Blue Prince.

It can be difficult to describe a game like this, in which so much of the design is about curiosity and discovery. But at its most basic level, Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game built around exploring a shapeshifting manor house. The executor of the Mount Holly estate has left it to you, but it will only become yours if you reach the mysterious Room 46. You cannot spend the night inside the house, so you set up camp just outside the grounds. After each day, the rooms reset and all of the doors close again. The exact layout of the manor is never the same twice. It takes place in first-person, making it an unfolding puzzle box that you live inside.

You start each day at the entrance, the bottom-center square of a 5x9 grid, faced with three doors. Each time you interact with a door, you're faced with three choices of which room to "draft" on the other side. Some rooms are dead ends, others are straight pathways, others only bend, and so on. You have a limited number of steps, and crossing the threshold into a new room ticks down one of them. From the start, you understand the objective to be that carving a pathway using these interlocking pieces, without expending too many steps, will successfully lead to the top of the 5x9 grid, to the Antechamber where there sits the entrance to Room 46. At this point, Blue Prince feels very much like a prestige board game, complete with a grid and tiles to place.

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In April 2019, my life fell apart. Despite enduring what felt like month-long panic attacks leading up to this ordeal, I only realized how bad everything had gotten when I woke up in the hospital, body draped in a violently purple hospital gown that I still have no recollection of putting on. I spent a couple days and a thousand or so dollars in that hospital room, an uncomfortable combination of dazed and defeated, mostly. But I also remember feeling absurdly grateful. I was in a space where nothing was expected of me. I had been completely removed from the rest of the living, breathing, working population. It was as if I didn't exist. And it's terrifying to think about how desperately I wanted that back then.

Prior to my rejoining society, I was given a choice: I could seek further treatment and attempt to address my various ailments, or I could walk out those doors largely unchanged (apart from being hundreds of dollars poorer). Treatment meant time and money: two things I never felt I had enough of. But as I considered my next steps, the psychiatrist across from me set down her clipboard and told me something I'll never forget.

"If you don't make time to take care of yourself, your body will make time for you--and you probably won't like when or how it does."

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South of Midnight is a remarkable celebration of the myths, sounds, culture, and language of the American Deep South, using the framework of a 3D action-platformer to spin a yarn about contending with pain and the strength necessary to rise above it. Developed by Compulsion Games--the team behind Contrast and We Happy Few--South of Midnight builds on the Canadian studio's strengths: intriguing narrative concepts, perturbing atmosphere, and memorable characters. Much like Contrast and We Happy Few, South of Midnight's gameplay pales in comparison to its narrative elements, but Compulsion Games' latest effort is its strongest game by far, delving into a setting and lore rarely seen in major video games to tell an incredible story.

In South of Midnight, you play as Hazel, a teenage track star who lives in Prospero, a town in the American Deep South. After a hurricane sweeps her home away with her mother inside, Hazel vows to track down and save her. However, she soon discovers that the storm has not only transformed the rural town and surrounding swampland into a dangerous jungle gym but also knocked loose a lot of lingering dark magic, making this journey all the more perilous. Hazel quickly learns that she is a weaver, a person born with the innate ability to see the underlying strands that tie the world together and can also knot into terrifying monstrosities in places where powerful negative emotions like grief, rage, and fear gather. Armed with surprisingly sharp textile-spinning tools, Hazel's search for her mom sees her stumble across numerous legendary spirits inspired by real-world myths, which she can help by uncovering the trauma that created them and doing her best to capture those feelings in magical bottles so that they can be taken away. To whom or where? That's just another mystery to solve.

Huggin' Molly's theme is my favorite song in the entire game.

It's a strong story that dips into Southern Gothic themes and cultivates a sense of dread that you cannot fully dismiss, for each of its tales exists in that unnerving middle ground of clearly being fantastical whilst pulling from real-world terrors like bigotry and child abuse. And when confronted with absurd displays of evil cruelty or agonizing tragedy in these stories, you can't easily discern where exactly reality ends and the myth begins--the pain in these gothic tales cling to you, much as they do to Hazel, and keep South of Midnight emotionally compelling all the way through.

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Atomfall is not Fallout. The comparison has been a popular one, but the developers wanted to make it clear that this new IP from the creators of Sniper Elite is "its own thing for sure," and they're right. It is. But there are times when the similarities jump off the screen. Both focus on a post-apocalyptic world full of mutants, warring factions, and--most relatable of all--they both feature a sprawling locked bunker at the heart of their stories. But where the inciting incident in most Fallout games is escaping that bunker, Atomfall asks you to get inside its mysterious facility, The Interchange. It's in that simply stated objective that Atomfall's open-ended world design elevates the game to be something different and interesting in its own right, even as things like stealth and combat drag it down at times.

Just as Atomfall's major brushstrokes are derivative of Fallout and other post-apocalyptic fiction, its story starts with a similar penchant for the cliche. You awaken as an amnesiac in a 1950s-set British countryside. A nearby phone booth rings, and the voice on the other side demands you destroy someone or something called "Oberon." That same voice will call back nearly each time you approach a phone booth in the wild. The cryptic messages don't make a bit of sense, but it does swiftly push you toward your objective: Find and get inside The Interchange, a locked-down facility of some sort that seems to have been the site of a science experiment gone wrong. In there, Oberon can perish, if you so choose.

The region's people have been left to put the pieces back together following this event, and it's resulted in the forming of several opposing groups, such as the military force that claims authority, roaming bandits who use the chaos as an invitation to resort to lawlessness, and a cult of pagans who believe the catastrophe was good, actually. These territorial factions are often isolated to their own regions, which are experienced as a series of open-world maps that can be explored without limitations as soon as you start the game.

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Juan Soto hopped on the subway and swapped one New York borough for another to become the highest-paid player in baseball. The Japanese phenom, Roki Sasaki, reunited with the growing list of his compatriots in Dodgers blue, making the World Series champions an even more formidable outfit. Corbin Burnes headed to the Arizona desert, the Cubs swung a trade for Kyle Tucker, and the Red Sox beefed up their rotation by acquiring ace Garrett Crotchet. It was an offseason of typical upheaval that even saw the Oakland Athletics leave their 57-year-old home for a temporary stay in Sacramento. But as the weather warms and spring training draws to a close, the return of the MLB season is just a few days away, which can only mean it's also time for the newest iteration of MLB The Show. While last year's game was one of minor iterations, MLB The Show 25 takes a few steps in the right direction by introducing a few long overdue changes to modes like Road to the Show and Franchise.

Road to the Show (RTTS) has grown stale over the past couple of years, with little to no improvements and an irritating connection to the card-collecting mode, Diamond Dynasty. This isn't the case in The Show 25, as it severs that link and completely overhauls the opening few hours of your career with the addition of amateur baseball. Now, you begin your journey to the Major Leagues as a fresh-faced high school student. By playing well in the three available games, potentially winning a high school championship, and showcasing your talents at the MLB combine, you'll garner interest from both MLB teams and the eight different college programs included in the game, such as Vanderbilt, LSU, UCLA, and Texas. You can opt to sign with an MLB team straight out of high school as an 18-year-old--like previous years' games--or head to college for four years to further improve your attributes and, ideally, increase your draft stock.

Each college has a rating from one to five stars in "exposure," which impacts your draft status and rating among scouts, and "skill development," which determines how many upgrade tokens you'll earn to improve your ballplayer. Once you've chosen a college that fits your needs, the game fast-forwards to your senior year as you prepare to compete in the College Baseball World Series in Omaha, Nebraska. Depending on the outcome of each game, you can potentially play in all four on the way to winning the national championship, which will significantly boost your standing in the draft if you also play well enough. After signing for an MLB team, you can expect to be fast-tracked through the minor leagues, as opposed to spending more time in AA and AAA if you decided to skip college, so there are some impactful choices to consider.

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The First Berserker: Khazan has all the familiar hallmarks of a souls-like--from a bonfire-esque checkpoint system that respawns enemies to XP you can lose upon death--yet its primary influences might not be what you would expect. While its parry-heavy combat is immediately reminiscent of From Software's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, its level-based structure, weapon skills, and approach to gear are clearly inspired by Team Ninja's Nioh. Developer Neople has some ideas of its own, too, including a multifaceted progression system and cel-shaded art style that makes The First Berserker visually distinct from most of its contemporaries. As a result, this souls-like manages to feel familiar while also carving out an identity of its own, delivering a challenging yet rewarding experience that's anchored by a hard-hitting defensive style of combat and a degree of freedom in how you choose to play.

In terms of story, you play as the eponymous Khazan. Once a legendary general famed for saving the empire from the fearsome Berserk Dragon, he's falsely branded a traitor at the game's outset. After being mercilessly tortured--with the tendons in both of his arms severed--and exiled to a mountainous, snowy tundra, our hero manages to escape and forms an unlikely alliance with a mysterious entity known as Blade Phantom, who grants Khazan otherworldly powers in his quest for revenge.

What follows from here is a fairly boilerplate tale that's relatively light on story despite its ties to a broader world. The First Berserker is set in the Dungeon & Fighter universe--known for the MMO Dungeon Fighter Online and, most recently, the fighting game DNF Duel--so those familiar with the eclectic series might appreciate Khazan's origins. Those unfamiliar won't feel lost without this additional knowledge, but The First Berserker also gives you little reason to care about its narrative or dark fantasy world. Paper-thin characters anchor a forgettable tale that often tries to elicit emotion from characters you know next to nothing about. At least Ben Starr adds some gravitas in his role as the gruff protagonist.

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Reviewing InZoi without mentioning The Sims, which is easily its most direct influence, comparison, and competitor is, quite simply, a fool's errand. There was a part of me--a very naive part, mind you--that thought it might be a bit fun to see how long I could go without making mention of the game in this review as a sort of challenge for myself. Clearly, I have already failed.

However, the context in which InZoi exists matters. Whereas the world is filled with cozy games, life sims, and plenty of other titles that reside somewhere between the two, extremely few play quite like The Sims. It goes without saying that Maxis created something extremely special back in 2000--something so creative, charming, innovative, and intricately designed that seemingly no other game studio has even attempted to put an end to its quarter-century long reign over the life-sim genre. There is no denying that the franchise's reputation has taken some hits over the years, primarily due to its perceived stagnation and parent company EA's predatory monetization tactics. As this discontent has grown, so too has the number of people looking for a viable competitor. And now, thanks to InZoi, we have a fresh-faced and utterly gorgeous new challenger.

Four Zois meet up to have a chat in Bliss Bay

Considering its good looks were among the first of many things that made InZoi such a highly anticipated title, I'll start by saying that it is just as mind-blowing to look at as it seems. From its UI to its city streets to its pouty-lipped, pop star-esque characters, everything about InZoi is visually remarkable. Vast amounts of customization options, an immersive and ever-changing open world, and an intense focus on making things feel true-to-life yet just slightly more grand further polish this gem. And I was relieved that, despite all its luster, the game ran perfectly fine on my less-than-great gaming PC (AMD Ryzen 5 3600/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super). And yet, I was ultimately forced to reckon with the fact that, in my 20 or so hours with InZoi, I missed out on something incredibly important: having fun. Though InZoi is impressive, immersive, and brimming with potential, in its current state there is a sterility and lifelessness that is hard to move past. This paired with stale gameplay ultimately made InZoi a game I desperately wanted to enjoy, but seldom did.

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It felt good to see Assassin's Creed Shadows protagonist Naoe's face nearly healed after the 50-hour journey through 16th-century Japan. The wound that had once marred her face was mostly gone, with only a thin, barely discernible scar left behind. Naoe's face slowly heals over the course of Shadows' story and the changing of the in-game seasons, providing a visual metaphor for the game's thematic journey through the ugliness of revenge, the healing process of forgiveness and moving beyond tragedy with enough time and support. It's a story that has incredible moments between Naoe and fellow protagonist Yasuke but largely feels listless during its muddled second act. And although Naoe's shinobi fantasy is the best Assassin's Creed has been in ages and remains fun to play for the entire game, it makes Yasuke's samurai gameplay feel subpar in comparison.

Naoe feels like the intended protagonist of Shadows. Save for a brief hour as Yasuke, the first 12 or so hours are spent solely playing as the shinobi. Even once Yasuke returns to the story, it's in service to Naoe's goal to kill a dozen masked individuals and steal back a mysterious box that she has to recover.

Shadows is Naoe's story. Yasuke is just here for the ride.

But even ignoring his narrative shortcomings as a secondary protagonist, Yasuke is not fun to play. Assassin's Creed has never been a series where its individual gameplay components have surpassed those in other games. Its combat has never been as good as what's available in other action games, other titles have stronger parkour mechanics, and the series always feels a step behind when it comes to stealth. The best part about Assassin's Creed has always been that it brings those three styles of gameplay together in one cohesive package--a combination you don't often see at the level of quality Ubisoft has managed to achieve with Assassin's Creed. Naoe perfectly embodies that trifecta, even possessing new mechanics that make the stealth part of Assassin's Creed a lot better than recent entries. Yasuke, on the other hand, doesn't. Though he's able to fight, Yasuke cannot use parkour, nor can he really rely on stealth. He's only one-third of Assassin's Creed. Although the idea of making an Assassin's Creed protagonist who solely specializes in open warfare sounds cool, in practice it feels awful because that aspect of the franchise is still not up to snuff with dedicated action games.

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Pro wrestling is a variety show. Spend a few weeks with WWE and you'll see how many tastes the product caters to. Segments can lean into different genres, such as drama, action, comedy, or even horror. Matches themselves are meant to capture a broad spectrum of styles, from Luchadors hitting highspots, to grueling submission matches to storybook endings by way of title matches that took years to build toward. The idea is to offer different styles and flavors to different segments of the audience. WWE 2K25 translates all of this variety very well, offering up many game modes, most of them worthwhile and often attracting different types of players. There are some flops on the card, but overall, this remains another main event-level display.

WWE 2K25 is a great game in its own right and feels like the culmination of several years of effort to fix the series by the Visual Concepts team. WWE 2K20 was so bad and went so viral for that reason that the following year, the game didn't launch a new version--that's virtually unheard of in the world of annualized sports (and sports entertainment) games. It clearly helped. Since then, it's been slowly and steadily improving year over year, making WWE 2K25 the best game in the series.

In the ring, the biggest change is the addition of intergender matches. In the indie wrestling world, it's very common to have men and women wrestle each other without any added drama or lampshading. Promotions simply depict the competitors as equals--save for someone working heel who might call attention to it, of course. But WWE has long avoided similar matchups. This year, the studio finally got the go-ahead from the wrestling behemoth, so you can now, in one surely popular example, play as Rhea Ripley and squash Dominik Mysterio ad nauseam. It's great to see WWE becoming more comfortable with this idea and breaking down that needless barrier in its video game.

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