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.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have known that Rhythm Heaven was a close cousin to WarioWare, but it never stood out to me as strongly as it did while playing Rhythm Heaven Groove. The sheer unapologetic weirdness of it intertwined with the strict timing-based minigames made this feel like WarioWare, but as a rhythm game. And I feel like a fool for just now discovering that these are two great tastes that go great together.

The influences from WarioWare will be obvious to anyone who has played that long-running gonzo microgame series, but unlike those, the individual games in Rhythm Heaven Groove last much longer than a few seconds. After a short practice round to learn the rhythm and button prompts, you go into the actual performance that mixes together commands to the rhythm of a song. Almost all of your commands are mapped to the A button, but more complicated arrangements add one of the D-pad buttons for a different command. In an early game where you're driving a stunt car for a commercial, for example, the A button accelerates while the D-pad Down hits the brakes, so you need to alternate between them on command to stay aligned with the other stunt cars.

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

The WarioWare spirit shines through in both the art style--an eclectic blend of crude simplicity, chunky cartoonism, and occasional hyper-realism--and also in the gonzo spirit of the games themselves. The stunt car example is one of the more normal ones, but many of the games are downright bizarre. Across the breadth of Rhythm Heaven, you'll have to jump and roll as a cat doll, bounce fruits off your muscles as a bodybuilder, sort delicious pudding from tainted living pudding cups as a factory robot, and jump over windshield wipers during a rainstorm. The game frequently surprises you with new creative applications that all feel different, even if they're mechanically very similar. That sense of surprise meant that even when I didn't like a game as much, I loved seeing the creativity.

In addition to adapting to each game's rhythm, you also often have to contend with distractions in the background. The kitty-hopping game--Hop, Stop, N Roll--transforms the background from a simple wood-paneled design to a kaleidoscopic beach scene, so part of the challenge is keeping your concentration and the beat going while the world changes around you. When you learn to "read" the games, you also start to notice little signs about your performance, like your fellow performer in the umbrella-folding game shooting you a dirty look if your timing was just slightly off. 

Rhythm Heaven Groove

While the WarioWare influence is obvious, my time with Rhythm Heaven Groove also reminded me of another long-lost rhythm game: Elite Beat Agents. While no game has quite substituted for EBA's charm, mixing storytelling with pop songs and rhythmic touch screen taps, Rhythm Heaven Groove is similarly focused on nailing your percussive beats. The sound design has excellent feedback with a sharp, snappy snare that punctuates even harder when you nail a beat perfectly. Sometimes I would simply close my eyes to feel my way through the rhythm, and it worked just as well as watching on-screen. Everything has a sound cue, so this is one game you actually can play blindfolded. 

My absolute favorite aspect of Rhythm Heaven Groove, though, were the Remix stages. Each column consists of four stages, and they all feel varied as you're playing them and climbing the tower. When you reach the top, all four get remixed into one game, sometimes set to a real, credited J-pop song. At this point, all those games that seemed so different feel like different parts of the same whole, and you get to see them coming together. Sometimes a game will even fade into another mid-beat, showing you that you're actually keeping the same rhythm across both. It's a very cool magic trick. 

That said, the mapping of commands onto the D-pad would occasionally trip me up, because it wasn't always the same D-pad button across each game. Since the Remix stages start without any warm-up time, I would sometimes finish a set of stages and come back to do the Remix later, only to discover I had completely forgotten which D-pad button to use. Aside from trial and error, the only solution is to quit out and find the individual minigames, and then redo their practice modes as a reminder. It's not terribly intuitive, and there's not any particular reason the D-pad prompt couldn't just be consistent throughout all of the minigames. Yes it's a little more elegant that D-Pad Left triggers a crab claw and D-Pad Down hits the car brakes, but would it really matter if they were the same? On that one point, the game became less about rhythm and more about memorization, which undermined the fun. 

Rhythm Heaven Groove

And as much fun as it was in handheld, I struggled with playing Rhythm Heaven Groove on my TV. To its credit, the game recognizes when you've hooked it up to your TV for the first time and conducts a quick calibration game in an effort to reduce the effects of lag. But even after going through that, I struggled to hit my marks across several games playing on my TV with a Pro Controller, even in games I had already mastered in handheld mode. The game does note that some TVs just behave differently than others, so your mileage may vary.  

Those same struggles with TV lag may have impacted my multiplayer experience, but not enough to detract from the fun. I dabbled in all the games with my two kids of varying ages, and after some early struggles, we found a handful of favorites that created the kind of raucous party atmosphere that Rhythm Heaven is obviously going for. There's a great mix of competitive and cooperative game types, and unlike the single-player columns that offer different games as you climb, these offer new twists on the games you've already mastered. We were only playing with two players at a time, but it fills in the extra spots with bots regardless of your player count for a total of four. As long as you have at least one buddy, you can play all of the multiplayer games.

So many of the multiplayer games are strong that it's hard to pick favorites, but a few stand out. A virus-busting game shoots a disease through tubes, so you have to pin them with precise timing as they come, and your position in the four quadrants of protection rotates each turn. A tennis game imitates an RPG as you lob balls to defeat approaching enemies and save a prince. Cake Wait revolves around waiting until exactly 3 o'clock to grab the single slice of cake on the table, testing your ability to count down on-tempo. An Arkanoid-like arrow-shooting game has you break bricks protecting a bomb as you race to be the first to hit and detonate it. There is even a card-flipping memory game, but instead of pictures, you're matching particular drum rhythms as displayed by toe-tapping chickens. All of these are delivered with the same goofball spirit as the rest of the game, which makes it disarmingly funny. 

Rhythm Heaven Groove

Still, multiplayer lends itself to the big-screen experience of a TV, and we did occasionally find it hard to master the timing in some minigames. One of the first, in which you pluck hairs from an onion, consistently tripped us up, even after going back to it once we had performed much better on some of the other games. It's hard to say if this was due to TV lag or if that particular game is just surprisingly strict, but it was a noticeable change from the kooky fun of the others to consistently failing out of that one.

Nintendo is one of the biggest and oldest game publishers in the world, so it feels strange to say that something it made carries itself with indie sensibilities. But that's always been true of WarioWare, and by extension, it's true of Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's such a strange, low-fi game that it comes off as if the team is getting away with something while the boss isn't looking. But it's also a genuinely welcome addition to my Switch collection, because it's such an oddity. Whenever I feel the need to tap my toes while feeling the beat of a tadpole march, or invite my friends to compete in a foot race as lucha libre across giant bouncy balls, I'll return to Rhythm Heaven.

There's a reason Nintendo keeps remaking Star Fox 64. The N64 iteration of the rail shooter--at the time, the second Star Fox release--remains the apex of the franchise: a genuinely fantastic game that still holds up and stands the test of time. Subsequent sequels that have attempted to recapture the magic have floundered by comparison. This latest iteration, simply titled "Star Fox" for what I can only assume is meant to be a soft reboot, plays just as great as you remember and looks even better. But if you've already played Star Fox 64 in any iteration, it will be hard to shake the feeling of deja vu. 

For the uninitiated, or perhaps those who just learned about ultra-cool guy Fox McCloud from his spotlight-stealing cameo in the Mario Galaxy movie, Star Fox takes place in a galaxy called the Lylat system, composed of anthropomorphic animals with futuristic space-travel technology. Star Fox is a group of well-funded fighter-jock mercenaries who are regularly called upon by a military general, a dog named Pepper, to assist their space-combat operations. 

As established in an opening cutscene, some years ago Fox's father, James McCloud, was en route to investigate questionable activity on a planet named Venom, when his wingmate Pigma betrayed him to the mad scientist Andross. James was lost, his trusty wingman Peppy escaped, and Andross kept quietly assembling his army for an invasion of the rest of the Lylat system. 

That sequence establishes one of the major new features of this remake: fully animated cutscenes. And to their credit, these are very well-made sequences. The aerial stunts look cool while staying true to the original spirit where needed, and the voice acting has been updated to facilitate the expanded scope. The more realistic character designs were divisive when shown off earlier this year, but I felt fine with them from the beginning, and after spending some time seeing them animated in cutscenes, I've come to really appreciate the look. Their faces are nicely expressive and textures like fur give them a sense of realism, while still staying in the fantastical world of space animals. The vast majority of the cutscenes take place aboard their docking ship, the Great Fox, as they discuss strategy, but the characters are still given lots of characterization in their movements and gestures to express their perspectives and personalities. For example, Falco rolls his eyes a lot, because he is above all kind of a jerk.

A similarly heightened level of visual fidelity is present in the stages themselves, which look recognizable to their N64 counterparts without feeling too beholden to their jagged edges and geometry. While all of the stages look great, the upgraded style is most impressive when it shows off new flourishes that weren't available in the original, like the lighting effects of your lasers reflecting off of surfaces and illuminating dark caves. Star Fox 64 always excelled at stage variety, but this remake accentuates it by making each stage appear vastly different than the rest. I especially loved revisiting the stages that are major departures from the others, like the water world Aquas, the surface of the sun on Solar, or the wacky and kaleidoscopic Meteos wormhole. 

Star Fox

Revisiting all the areas takes at least a few runs because of how the stage layout has worked since the original. One of the coolest aspects of Star Fox 64, and again here, is the ability to carve your way from one side of the galaxy to another in a relatively freeform fashion, completing optional objectives. In broad terms, you can see the three paths as Easy, Medium, and Hard, but you aren't limited to one track. If you know how to find your way, you can easily hop between paths throughout, so you aren't committed to only staying on one difficulty track. Completing a hidden objective that opens the harder path will always let you switch to the easier one, but if you only complete the easier objective, you can't switch to the harder path.

In the original Star Fox 64, this was presented rather plainly, with a blue, yellow, or red line showing where you can go. In this version, it's given a good deal more panache, thanks again to the new extended cutscenes. Rather than simply present you with a choice of locations for your next mission, each mission starts with General Pepper debriefing from the last mission and explaining the strategic importance of both next possible locations. One might have a suspected bioweapon while the other is an outpost under attack. In each case Pepper outlines why Star Fox is the best or perhaps only available force to complete this mission. And since there's some overlap, as you could approach a planet from different directions, it's particularly impressive how these cutscenes stitch different pieces together without feeling noticeably disjointed. 

These all lead to the same outcome, of course. You're ultimately headed toward Venom no matter what, and it doesn't make a difference in the end whether you went to Sector X or Solar, but it does a good job of tying the journey together and giving each mission an appropriate amount of weight. Sometimes I even felt bad abandoning one planet in need for another, even knowing that it doesn't have any impact.

Star Fox

The extended cutscenes also help define the characters' relationships with each other and with General Pepper. Falco has always been portrayed as a cocky hotshot, but here we get to see him slowly warming to Fox's leadership. Peppy is the assured veteran who trusts Fox will come into his own as a leader. We even get some insight about why the team keeps Slippy around, as the cutscenes sell him as a machinist wunderkind who's always two steps ahead in anticipating their equipment needs. And Fox, for his part, is played as the cool Han Solo type--a mercenary needling General Pepper to pay for their valuable services, even if he's obviously going to do the heroic thing regardless. 

Wayfinding to new paths is a little easier this time around too. Dialogue will drop hints about what to do to open new paths, without being overly on the nose or spelling it out for you. If you miss an optional objective, it's easier to restart a stage from the beginning or from your most recent checkpoint, and doing so doesn't even cost you a life or eliminate your laser upgrades or bombs. You can even entirely complete a stage, see where it leads, and then go back and do it again immediately to try for another way. 

That said, I was surprised that each run through the Lylat system is treated as its own distinct game progression, just like the original. That means that once you finish the game, you'll need to start anew on Corneria and cut your path through from the beginning. This is true to the original, and I don't mind the faithfulness, to a point. But for returning fans who already know their way around, it would have been nice to have the option to track which paths you've already opened and let you jump back to planets, eventually creating a fully filled-out star map.

And while the updated visuals are often gorgeous, they do come with some trade-offs that take getting used to. For one thing, your targets are a lot less obvious with much more happening on-screen, visually, so it's easier to miss a flyer who gets away. In boss battles, weak points are less obvious than the glowing vulnerabilities of the original, and they don't flash as brightly when you land a successful hit to let you know that you're doing damage. And with the higher fidelity making everything look much more like it has weight and bulk, it's a little strange when a capital warship in Area 6 explodes like an empty cardboard box.

Star Fox

The other marquee feature of this release is multiplayer, which adds online play, and GameChat camera integration for animalistic avatars. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try any of the pre-release online multiplayer sessions, so I'll have to reserve my judgments on that aspect until I can try it in a live environment. We'll update this review once we've been able to sufficiently test it out.

Star Fox is a remake, but it also appears to be an attempt at a reset. The franchise has never really found its footing, despite clearly having a lot of love from Nintendo. This story has always felt like a starting point, establishing the characters and hinting at their backstory. So altogether, this remake may be the best possible way to give the series a fresh start. At the same time, the original still holds up very well, and if you have Switch Online with the Expansion Pass, you can already play it. That makes this hard to recommend, which is a shame. If Nintendo means this to be a new beginning for Star Fox, retreading familiar ground undermines the effort.

In a relatively short time, Team Asano at Square Enix has made a name for itself. Between the Bravely and Octopath series, it has become known for taking a fresh look at retro RPGs by experimenting with new ideas and visual styles, creating games that feel both familiar and new. The developer takes a similar approach when it comes to The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, an action-adventure RPG that emulates the feel of a top-down Legend of Zelda or Mana game but uses the studio's signature HD-2D visual style. But while the action and adventuring are well-crafted, a dull story and verbose characters have the unfortunate tendency of deadening the momentum.

The Adventures of Elliot takes place in the fictional kingdom of Philabieldia (try the cheesesteaks!), ruled by a kindly king and under the magical protection of his daughter. The area surrounding the castle grounds is beset by deadly beastmen and the princess' presence carries a passive spell of safety that keeps them at bay. Elliot is an Adventurer, an actual job title that appears to be some mixture of mercenary and wandering odd-job doer, and only Adventurers are known to travel outside the castle walls and brave the beasts. After a sinister duke discovers a method to go back in time to claim a powerful relic, Elliot follows him and thus begins hopping between different eras, going further and further back in his kingdom's history.

In terms of sheer mechanics, The Adventures of Elliot is a modest but welcome step forward for the genre. This HD-2D visual style works so well for a top-down Zelda-style adventure game that you would never know it had been created for turn-based RPGs. The combat is sharp and responsive, and the diorama-like presentation gives you a very clear idea of where the enemy threats are coming from. Elliot gets a wide variety of weapons, ranging from his basic sword to a heavy hammer, boomerang, and consumables like arrows and bombs, along with some less conventional weaponry like a spear or chain scythe. Each weapon has its own advantages and disadvantages in combat and as you find upgraded versions of each, they get stronger, charged effects that can have a big impact on the battlefield. Elliot also has a shield for blocking and parrying enemy attacks, adding a little more defensive nuance, and a dedicated jump, which is used for traversal and light platforming, especially within dungeons, but can also be used offensively depending on your build.

True to its classic inspirations, Elliot only features a relatively small pool of enemies, with palette swaps representing stronger variants with new abilities. But it manages to offer a good variety of fast-paced combat encounters as these enemy types are mixed together. Combat scenarios are quick and snappy so even though I could run past them when I was in a rush, I would usually stop to fight just for the fun of taking down some monsters. That's the mark of a strong combat system.

Shortly after beginning on his quest, Elliot is joined by Faie, a squeaky-voiced little fairy that only he can see and hear. She's his constant companion throughout the rest of the game, offering her own commentary and being a sounding-board for Elliot to think through his next steps. She also gains a number of magical powers, letting her light torches, teleport Elliot across gaps, and more. You can freely move Faie around within a certain radius of Elliot with the right stick, which makes her feel like a natural extension of Elliot's, and thus your, power set. Most of her powers aren't necessary to complete dungeons, but it's so much fun to "cheat" through puzzles with them, incentivizing you to explore the specially marked ruins that upgrade her powers. 

During the mirror dungeon, for example, I pulled a mirror to reflect a laser in a way necessary to solve a puzzle, only to discover that I trapped myself in a corner with a gap. However, thanks to Faie, I was able to teleport my way out of the problem. That may not have been the way I was meant to solve the puzzle, but it was nice that I had the opportunity to find my own way.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

The dungeon design throughout the game is well-crafted, even if most of them don't feel particularly distinct. This whole game is homage to classics like the 2D Zelda games, and you can particularly sense that in the dungeons. They iterate with ideas like the aforementioned laser-mirror reflection dungeon, or a dungeon in which I had to raise and lower water levels. In each of these dungeons, the addition of Faie's ability set gives you more room for creative experimentation and finding clever solutions that may not have been exactly intended. 

Elliot can also enhance his abilities with Magicite, a very flexible upgrade system. Equipped Magicite can enhance your attack power, give passive bonuses (like increased hammer knockback), or change weapon properties (like giving you piercing arrows or a second boomerang to throw while the first one is still out). Each piece of equipment has its own Magicite box with a certain amount of slots, and you can both find pieces of Magicite in the world or turn in fragments to get random ones, gacha-style. After you've upgraded enough, your total level goes up and you get even better Magicite, so it's always worth it to be on the lookout for fragments. You can really get into the nitty-gritty of managing Magicite to optimize your build, but if you don't want to worry about it, there's also a quick-command option to let Faie create a build for you, which she does decently well to make a balanced set.

There are also accessory slots, which can change your style in even more meaningful ways. Accessories can provide several different perks, such as preventing you from getting stunned, creating a shockwave that stuns enemies whenever you land from a jump, or turning every tossable object into a bomb. I found one that gave Elliot a hovering effect on his regular jump and kept it equipped for the entire game because it was so helpful to the dungeon platforming.

And then there are just thoughtful convenience features that help modernize and sand off the rough edges. Sidequests are clearly marked with a visual indicator and a dedicated menu showing the character it centers around, and you're given ample warning if the next step in a story quest chain will nullify an ongoing sidequest. As you discover more eras, you'll often have to jump back and forth between them, which is easy because there are guideposts littered throughout the map in every era. And while waypointing can be a little difficult due to winding pathways, the overall map layout remains relatively similar in each era, which helps you to keep your bearings.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

As I've been playing The Adventures of Elliot, though, I've been thinking a lot about the trope of the silent protagonist. Classics like The Legend of Zelda have been known for their hero being remarkably quiet while the action occurs around them. Much has been said about this particular odd remnant of early video games, but in Elliot we can see an example of what it's like to have that type of character written with a voice. 

Elliot is remarkably earnest, even hokey, and everyone who knows or encounters him comes away feeling that he's just a swell guy. His personality often borders on feeling cloying and treacly. But at the same time, a character like this almost has to be written this way, because how else do you justify his status as a wandering do-gooder? Sometimes other characters hint at Elliot being a mercenary and taking payments, but it's clear that he does most of his work pro bono, or accepts whatever people can offer. So instead of a Link-like character who accepts his fated quest with quiet dignity--onto which we as the player can map whatever internal motivations we want--we have to stop and listen to exhaustive explanations that don't add much interesting shading or texture to the character. What does Elliot want? To be a helpful, great guy. What does everyone think of him? That he's a helpful, great guy. This type of character is mostly a cipher, so they make him utterly good-natured and well-liked and wise, instead of simply silent.

But it's not just Elliot. Faie is equally chatty and her tone is even more sickly sweet than Elliot,  though you can toggle an option to make her chime in less during your exploration. And almost every quest-giver you encounter explains their motivations and their own stories in exhaustive detail. The classics that inspired Adventures of Elliot were forced into an economy of language and would get their points across with a few sentences or a paragraph at most. Without those limiters in place, these cutscenes feel overlong and overexplained. They also often stop to slowly pan over to show a point-of-interest nearby. Checking in to advance the story between dungeons just slows the pace to a crawl. 

Adventures of Elliot also struggles to really capitalize on its time-hopping premise, largely because its different time periods are so nebulous. The concept appears visually and thematically inspired by Chrono Trigger. But one element that made Chrono Trigger's era-spanning story work so well is that it mapped more-or-less recognizably onto actual historical periods. You begin in a pastiche of rural modernism with burgeoning machines, travel back to something like the Dark Ages, and forward into the archetypal post-apocalyptic future. Those were marked with years to give us a sense of space and change--only 400 years passed between the dark ages and the modern era, but 1,300 years between the modern era and the apocalyptic future. When you travel to the age of primal humans and dinosaurs, it's millions of years instead of hundreds. The variance helped to establish the profound differences in time periods.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales

Adventures of Elliot's time periods are more vague. We explore four time periods in total that help us understand the essential sequence of historical events in this world as we travel further backward. There was a great magical society that collapsed into ruination. The modern (default) era from which Elliot hails has recovered largely due to the influence of a great king, but none of the periods map cleanly onto real-world history, and they aren't separated by clearly defined spans of time. The map remains largely the same, which is helpful for navigation, but it also makes it feel like not much has changed in this world over long stretches of time.

There are moments where the idea of an adventure spanning generations shines through. One side quest showed a bar owner treating his employees poorly until I went back in time and accidentally taught his ancestor about basic kindness, and then I got to see that lesson passed down through the generations and impact the future. Moments like that, and occasional story beats that I won't spoil, did remind me of how you could see your actions echo through time in video games like Chrono Trigger. The Adventures of Elliot just doesn't reach quite the same heights.

The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a surprisingly strong first attempt at reaching into this genre from a studio not known for it. The combat is snappy and fun, with loads of build customization and ability tailoring to your style. The dungeon designs are well-crafted homages that allow room for creative problem solving, and the HD-2D visual style is lovely for this type of game. I was left wanting for a story I cared more about, with characters that were more three-dimensional, in a world that felt alive and took better advantage of its time-travel concept. Those factors make the game fall short, but it creates a foundation that I hope Square Enix builds upon.

If you're going to take on a juggernaut like NBA 2K, you'd better have a strong gameplan. Built from the cherished streetball memories of yesteryear and the charismatic vibes of today, NBA The Run is Play by Play Studios' debut effort and the team's attempt to squeeze into basketball fandom's gaming timeshare. As soon as you see it, it's clear this is a very different take on the sport than the true-to-life simulation that is NBA 2K, but doing something different isn't enough on its own. The team has to do it well, too. Thankfully, NBA The Run scores on most of its attempts, earning it a place in the rotation.

NBA The Run is essentially a modern take on NBA Street and the colorful, exaggerated arcade sports games we don't often see anymore. The team at Play by Play includes some former EA Sports developers, and they've brought their experience to this new endeavor: rekindling the magic of streetball games from decades past while modernizing the experience in clever ways.

The Run is played in games of 3v3, whether you're playing in solo mode, teaming up with friends, or matchmaking with other players online. No game is played as a standalone exhibition. Instead, you're always chasing championships in its tournament structure. Inspired by Fall Guys, The Run pits you and your teammates in a tourney that can be won by coming out on top in four consecutive games. Like March Madness, these are one-game, survive-and-advance showdowns, not series like in the NBA playoffs. Lose, and you're sent back to the start of a new tourney the next time you play. Win, and you're one step closer to glory.

This tournament structure is so simple yet so effective. Games are quick, at about two to five minutes per matchup, meaning winning a trophy takes only 15-20 minutes, or roughly as long as winning a round of Fortnite. Each round, a spinner randomly lands on a new rule set. In one round, you might be playing first to 18, with dunks counting as three-pointers, while other shots net you just one point each. In the next round, you might be playing for speed, with unlimited stamina and a first-to-11 scoring cap. Each round is unpredictable, making each tournament as a whole feel fresh. 

The swiftness with which you move through tourneys also feels like a secret weapon working in The Run's favor. Title wins feel prestigious, with a trophy presentation and stats summary that cements your championship as hard-fought--you can even emote and show off your total number of trophies--but losing before you get to the championship podium doesn't sting too much, because matchmaking is fast, your time investment is never steep, and the next tourney is just seconds away if you want it to be. This PvP structure respects your time, both by not asking you for much of it in the first place and by giving you a fun game to play when you do decide to sit down and play it. 

It's a smart way to bring arcade basketball into the present, but The Run doesn't want to merely port those older games into 2026. Things like NBA Street and NBA Jam always felt heavily skewed toward offense. Excitingly, everyone in The Run is overpowered, but that's true on defense as much as on offense. Shooting is done by simply timing the release at the height of your jump shot, and with an open look, it's likely to go in--provided your chosen player is skilled from the given range. But getting in the player's face can be enough to disrupt the shot's timing, and if you go for a steal or a block while using a player skilled in those areas, you may just wind up with the ball, saving your team the trouble of fighting for a rebound.

Unlocking new dunk animations means finding new ways to express yourself and stand out on the court.

Possessing the ball feels forever threatened, because steals or straight-up shoves into the asphalt are as reliable as a Curry three-pointer in The Run. You'll need to work with your teammates and use the whole control scheme to dish the ball around, find the open looks, and keep pace with your opponent--or even leave them trailing behind, if you can lock down on D. 

Once I felt like I had a grasp on the game's speed and strategic elements, I found I could unleash especially flashy moves, like alley-oops to my teammate, passes to myself off the backboard, or even bouncing the ball off my opponent's head. There are levels to just how cool you can look on the court in The Run. By default, everyone is cool to start, but for those who want to go deeper, you can really show off like the players in an And 1 tournament you may have seen on ESPN 2 back in the day.

The roster of players stands just shy of 40 at launch, with the game handpicking the best of the best from the NBA, plus a few original characters and real-life streetball legend, DJ, and former NBA Street commentator, Bobbito Garcia. If your favorite NBA player is arguably in the top 30 of current stars, it's likely he's in The Run. That includes shoo-ins like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, as well as slightly deeper cuts like Scottie Barnes and Devin Booker. It's been a ton of fun in my time with the game to get to grips with each athlete and find my favorites--it's Giannis, by the way.

The best thing about The Run's on-court foundation is how attributes clearly matter. Wemby's blocking skills are among the best in the game, so he feels like a constant roadblock if his user is playing him correctly. Speedy players, like Damien Lillard, can hustle to a loose ball or race ahead on a fast break for a clean look from wherever he wants--probably from the arc, given his abilities there. Each player is a monster, yes, but the differences in their skills do matter, and you can see these deltas influence every game you play. Some players are just noticeably more monstrous than others in certain contexts. 

This varied roster mixes well with the tournament structure because team composition tends to matter so much. If you and your friends take three bigs into the tourney, only to be faced with a rule set in round one that doles out extra points for buckets from long range, you may be sent back to the menus quickly. It pays to consider a team that can cover weaknesses and fortify strengths, because you won't know until you get there what each round will have in store for you, or what team is waiting on the other side. 

No one player can do everything perfectly, so it becomes a game that bestows upon all players these tremendous, even superheroic talents, but then demands you have the self-discipline to not step too far out of your lane. Wemby can shoot, sure, but he's not Curry. Jayson Tatum is a playmaker, but he's not a big-bodied bully like Nikola Jokic. Knowing what you bring to the team is a principle that's emphasized without the game ever saying it so plainly. You'll learn it soon enough on the court.

The Run wisely leans into an art style that looks very different from 2K, but also one that will age well over the years.

The brightly colored, comic-book stylings of the game look awesome, with each character resembling a somewhat exaggerated version of themselves, yet their likenesses match very well, even in this pen-and-ink aesthetic. Courts are similarly stylish, with the game taking players on a world tour of courts inspired by real-life locations, such as Venice Beach, a Philly schoolyard, and tenements in the Philippines. All the while, the commentator provides additional flavor as the league's hype man, often sounding like he's leaping out of his chair when you do something cool. While some sports games still feel very "fellow kids," despite years of trying to capture the right vibe, NBA The Run enjoys an air of authenticity from the moment you step onto the court.

While The Run is doing a lot right, it's not without weaknesses. Foremost among them is how you can't practice with your co-op partners. There's an option called Shootaround that acts as a practice mode, but it's a purely solo experience, which makes it very hard to gel with your teammates before the games start. And because every single game is part of a tournament, the games always matter.

It's surely a hard problem to solve, but your experience in The Run can vary greatly based on who you get as teammates in matchmaking. If you're randomly assigned a ballhog, or a player who's gone AFK, or someone who hasn't yet learned how vulnerable the offense is to having the ball stolen, it's going to be a headache and a quick exit from the tournament for you. Getting matched with such players can and will happen in The Run, at least some of the time. I once played with a person who used Steph Curry and ran to the basket for layups whenever he had the ball, only to get blocked each time. Confoundingly, he never took a single shot from behind the arc. If ever a teammate leaves, they're replaced with a lousy CPU bot that will, in all likelihood, leave you feeling hopeless. They just can't keep up with the human players--though I think a bot might have been better than that stubborn Curry user.

The other gripe I have with The Run is how slow progression is. Right now, there are 50 levels to climb through, each with cosmetic rewards, and playing games also gives you Cred--in-game currency to spend on things like playercard banners, new dunks, and alternate jerseys for your players. Both Cred and XP feel too slow to come by, with the game hardly giving you anything unless you get to the third round or better. Winning a championship gives a decent chunk, but the lesser runs your team goes on should feel better rewarded, too.

These issues are all somewhat softened with the panacea of playing with friends, though. Like perhaps all co-op games, NBA The Run is very obviously better with friends. If you hop into games with random players, you'll have fun at least some of the time, because the core basketball gameplay is enjoyable, the world is full of style, and you'll occasionally be able to rely on your teammates. But jumping in with two buddies and chasing championships is much more fun, likely to result in deeper, more rewarding runs, and allows you to establish a cohesive team composition and strategy. While anything less than that is more prone to headaches and heartaches, if you've got the squad for the optimal setup, NBA The Run is an obvious winner.

With Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games has cemented itself as one of the premiere independent studios in the industry today. Its breakout hit, Shovel Knight, was a retro-throwback platformer that merged classic 8-bit-style action with some modern touches. Mina the Hollower looked similarly old-school, with a look and feel that obviously pays tribute to the Zelda Game Boy spin-offs. But this time, the fusion of newer souls-like design sensibilities makes it more than a freshened-up homage. It resembles those Zelda games, but it's so densely packed with secrets and intertwining cause-and-effect outcomes that at times it feels more like Elden Ring than Link's Awakening.

The comparisons to Link's Awakening, and Game Boy Color games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, are visually obvious. Mina has a similar color palette, the sprite artwork is familiar, and it uses an overhead camera. But whereas those games were relatively simple iterations on the template set by the classic Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past, Mina the Hollower is much darker, much denser, and much more difficult. The challenge level can be brutal and unforgiving, and there are elements of gothic horror, body horror, and gruesome violence--at least, as expressed through cute pixelated animals.

The Baron Lionel gathers his subjects in Mina the Hollower.

The story starts when Mina gets a letter from Baron Lionel, the leader of Tenebrous Isle, who requests her help with the island's power generators. Mina is a Hollower, which in this world essentially means a sort of structural engineer and earth scientist. Mina is the best of them, having invented the spark technology that powers the generators, which in turn makes all of the modern technological wonders of Tenebrous possible. But the generators have been breaking down, so Mina is asked to come see to the problem. 

After her boat to Tenebrous is attacked by a monster, Mina chooses her weapon. You're presented with just three at the start, and already, this feels like a statement of intent. Link's trusty sword has always seen him through, and Mina's twin daggers, Whisper and Vesper, offer a very similar play-feel. But this time you could also select the Nightstar, a whip-like morningstar with longer reach, or the Blaststrike Maul, a massive bludgeoning hammer. The message, which becomes even clearer as you play, is that this is a game that wants you to take combat seriously. And you'll need to.

Once you make landfall and enter the city of Ossex, you start to gain a better idea of what's going on. The generators have been sabotaged by an eco-terrorist named Thorne. Lionel tasks Mina with going to repair the six main generators surrounding the city, and you're vaguely pointed in a handful of directions to pursue. Immediately as you head out, though, you realize that this world does not spoonfeed its structure to you. It's not immediately clear where to go. The city itself is massive and bustling, loaded with named characters who all drop meaningful bits of information, though the game doesn't log these for you. What you do with that information is up to you--whether you commit it to memory, write it down, or chase a lead immediately. Like the open world of Elden Ring, the freedom initially feels overwhelming. A city newspaper points you in the direction of a dungeon, but the fact is that you can do them in almost any order.

Mina the Hollower's overworld of Tenebrous Isle.

The dungeons themselves are unique--not only as compared to a game in this template, but in relation to each other. Rather than enter into a bespoke dungeon area, they are built into the structure of the world itself. You might weave your way through crypts or caves or swamps while exploring, but there is no clear delineation between the open world and a dungeon. It's all part of the same cohesive, connected reality. There are often shortcuts and secret passageways connecting pieces of the world together, making it feel even more part of a whole. 

Even so, the parts of the world have their own distinct personalities that each feel inventive and fresh. My first quest was to Queensbury Crypt to the east, a creepy graveyard full of tombs and statues, complete with a macabre meta-puzzle that led to a boss battle with an implied tragic story at its core. Next I headed to Nox's Bayou, a poisonous swamp that tested my ability to make tricky leaps across waterways. Then I went to Septemburg, a personal favorite, a harvest-themed farm town being terrorized by a spooky monster that the local youth call the Carving Man. The Carving Man ends up stalking you, introducing a surprising survival-horror element akin to Resident Evil's Mr. X or Nemesis. Every dungeon is just packed with these kinds of surprising touches that make them feel distinct.

Unlike a traditional Zelda game, though, you aren't obtaining new items in each dungeon that help you solve puzzles. At first I missed this element, but I found that Mina the Hollower didn't need it. Items in Zelda games help to facilitate new types of puzzle or platforming challenges, but Mina manages to maintain such a constant pace of fresh reinvention without items. The world and dungeon design itself kept the same pacing by themselves. Progress isn't gated behind keys, but rather, behind skill. If you can reach from one end of a room to the other, you can proceed. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fx0aJCRRpE

That is made all the more impressive by how absolutely dense the world is. Every screen is packed with interconnected secrets and things to uncover, many of which you may not even realize are there the first time you trod past them. I've completed the game and I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface. Playing alongside others on staff, we would frequently find ourselves surprising each other with small details we found and character interactions we uncovered. There are moments that I triggered that other players didn't, and vice-versa, and we still have no clear idea why. The world is so complex and intertwining that I suspect players will be experimenting and discovering new things for some time.

Combat is similarly nuanced. In addition to the three starter weapons, you have access to more that can be found or bought. Each one can be upgraded, and all of them have their own intricacies. I preferred the twin daggers because it felt most familiar to me with its quick short-ranged strikes, but I also had to adjust to its rhythm of two quick stabs in succession. The Nightstar has reach and flexibility, but it also means you have to commit to an attack. A gun-like weapon gives you long range but with very limited ammo. You won't need to master all of them, but they each feel precise enough to accommodate someone's playstyle.

In addition to your main weapon, you'll find Sidearms, which deplete a mana pool upon use. Those could be a heavy axe that you can toss a la Castlevania, an umbrella that blocks enemy attacks and then can be thrown, a boomerang-like throwing disc, a pet beast that follows you around on a leash, and more. There are tons of Sidearms, and it's always exciting to find a new one and see how it mixes up gameplay and adds to your combat options.

The Underlab is Mina's base of operations.

Combat is one area, and the only one, where Mina the Hollower's ambition mildly exceeds its grasp. This game admirably iterates on the form and function of classic Game Boy Zelda games, but those were never built for complex combat. Mina succeeds in giving this structure style a much higher skill ceiling, but it isn't flawless. With a flattened 2D perspective, it's not always clear when enemies are in the air, requiring a jump-attack to make contact. Many enemies charge directly at you, which makes the lack of a dodge or backstep command stand out. Instead, you can jump, or jump into a burrow and dig underground. Both of those do in a pinch--and you'll need to master their timing to withstand the combat challenges--but it does feel like combat is just slightly straining against the limitations of its homage.

On that note, Mina the Hollower is brutally difficult at times. Boss battles can be especially tricky, but even a handful of regular enemies can take you down if you're not careful. Mina is just a vulnerable little mouse, after all. Your safe spot is the Underlab, an underground base you burrow into where you can heal and swap equipment. Sometimes Underlabs are spread very thin, and you'll be desperate to find the next one because you're on the verge of death. Runbacks between Underlabs and bosses can be unforgiving and require several tries. You can crack a vial to restore your health, but you need to defeat enemies to extend the amount it will restore, and you have a limited number of uses. Dying means losing your spark, after which you have one chance (by default) to regain it before you lose all your currency.

The difficulty is certainly an intentional choice, and slight reservations about the combat's limitations aside, it does feel great to have your skills tested and slowly feel yourself improving. Like any other game in the souls-like genre, you do actually need to get good.

Unlike a souls-like game, though, you actually can make the game easier on yourself. Mina the Hollower has loads of optional modifiers--reducing damage, adding more Underlab save points, adjusting the world speed, and so on. It's generous enough to let you turn on as many or as few as you'd like, tweaking the game difficulty to your liking. You can even make it harder if you're looking for additional challenge after mastering the mechanics. And even more are added after game completion, giving you a massive array of different things to try that will either add limitations or even more freedom.

Mina faces off against Thorne in Mina the Hollower.

Bones (which are their money) accrue by defeating enemies and exploring. After you've gathered enough, you can buy stacking upgrades to strength, defense, or Sidearm mana, or you can convert your pool into Bonestone, which is kept safe in your Underlab and therefore can't be lost when you die. Bones can also be used to buy a variety of permanent upgrades for Mina, or weapons, upgrades, various items, or Trinkets. 

Trinkets are one of the most important aspects to customizing Mina to your playstyle. These have strong effects like extending your burrow time, letting you carry extra health vials, or even giving you a one-time emergency revive. None of these are strictly necessary for completion like items in a Zelda game, but many of them are extremely useful, and combining them as you find new ones is part of the joy of learning and earning your own safe path through this dangerous world. 

And again, this world feels dangerous and unstable. Even in areas where you'd ordinarily feel safe, like wandering through the streets of the central city, you may be surprised to find yourself violently grabbed by a giant shopkeeper who pulls you into his store and orders you to buy his wares. I once wandered into a boss fight in the city without even realizing it, thinking I was in a safe space, and had to fight my way out by the skin of my teeth or risk losing my precious bones. Everything about the world accentuates the feeling that it is treacherous and unpredictable.

As impressed as I was throughout, Mina the Hollower finishes especially strong with a pair of final dungeons that are somehow even more bursting with creativity. Whereas every dungeon up to that point had its own distinct flavor and personality, the last few hours packed multiple ideas and puzzle types into single dungeons, making them a feast of creative level design that honestly, at some points, felt like Yacht Club was just showing off.

Each time you finish a dungeon, you play an extended platforming sequence with a neat effect that reminded me of Mode 7 on the Super NES. The generator towers themselves are cylindrical, and you can fully run around them while climbing upward, all while avoiding a trail of electrical current coming after you. It's an exciting way to cap off the dungeon after fighting a memorable boss, and like the environments themselves, each one has its own distinct flavor that matches the dungeon's themes.

Upon restoring each generator, you find a letter--most of them from Thorne, the eco-terrorist who is always one step ahead of you in sabotaging the generators. Thorne describes his reasoning and implores you to rethink helping Lionel. For a generation raised by eco-tainment like Fern Gully and Captain Planet (RIP Ted Turner), it was clear from the start where all of this was going. However, the execution found room for surprising turns. This is a fable about environmentalism, but it's not clean or preachy. Fixing the generators has positive effects on the world, but Thorne's destruction of them does too. It seems like this world is stuck in a devil's bargain where they've become too reliant on technology to stop now without incurring heavy costs, but they can't safely continue either. Any path leads to pain. It certainly resonates.

I am awed by what Yacht Club Games has created here. Mina the Hollower is so ambitious and dense and sprawling that it is hard to believe that it is contained in such a modest presentation. It surpasses the boundaries of mere homage or retro throwback to become something new, fresh, inventive, and exciting. Shovel Knight was a well-deserved successful debut for Yacht Club. Mina the Hollower may be its masterpiece.

When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it's where those two experiences would need to be different that had me most intrigued. A 007 game can't just be a Hitman game with different hair. Thankfully, IO's first foray into the James Bond world proves the team knows this and leans into it, delivering a thrilling Bond experience worthy of the character, while also applying lessons learned from the studio's own international man of mystery.

Though it isn't the first to tell an original story, 007 First Light is IO's very own take on Ian Fleming's iconic spy himself. With a new leading man in Patrick Gibson, and a story that takes Bond back to the age of 26, when he's still serving in the military sans any ties to MI6, it's a natural on-ramp for people who may not be familiar with Bond or who have been waiting since 2021's No Time to Die for the next reboot. This is a fresh start, and the team makes it their own.

In First Light, the Bond we meet is younger than ever, and this invites a more stubborn, mistake-prone version of the character, whom I quickly found myself interested in. Recruited to MI6's soon-to-be-rebooted 00 program, Bond can't catch a break, making enemies of his fellow recruits and his irritable supervisor, John Greenway, played by The Walking Dead's Lennie James, who shines in his newfound role in the Bond universe. 

In the movies, I loved how Daniel Craig's take on the hero often saw him receive his fair share of beatings. I strongly prefer that to an untouchable good guy who can do no wrong. That aspect of Bond feels ramped up even more in First Light, with a version of the spy who is hardly out of the figurative cradle at the intelligence agency. James Bond is a headstrong young man, and his tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is both his best and worst attribute in the eyes of his superiors.

Before long, Bond is on assignment, using his tricks of social engineering and stealth to infiltrate a lavish hotel, where the agency believes a disgruntled ex-00 agent is plotting something. While this plot thread initially sounds a bit too much like Skyfall, it quickly finds its own path forward, eventually erasing my concerns that the 20-hour story would lean too much on things I've already seen. It's also during this early mission that First Light starts to reveal its familial ties to Hitman, so to speak. Like IO's flagship game, you'll be dropped into a massive gala full of NPCs, some of whom are guardians of certain areas of the hotel. And like IO's bald assassin, Bond will need to trick, sneak past, or otherwise dispatch the security to get where he needs to be. 

Hello 47--err, I mean 007.

While the game rightly doesn't have the same level of dark humor as Hitman, many of the ways you'll move about the world feel plucked right out of it. You can distract guards, then sneak from cover to cover when they look away, shimmy across hand-holds and pipes outside the building, eavesdrop on conversations to get crucial information, and lie to people to get what you need--be it a keycard, the whereabouts of a particular person, or for them to simply step aside and let you pass, which First Light gamifies as the Bluff mechanic. It won't work on everyone, but some enemies will simply take you at your word, as Bond is a charming young man good at acting like he belongs somewhere he doesn't. Once in a while, you'll even don a disguise. In these moments, First Light and Hitman share a lot in common.

When things break down--maybe your cover has been blown, or you were spotted by enemies who don't fall for your charms--the game's very best attribute kicks into high gear. Combat in First Light is incredibly fun, especially the melee combat. Some of its systems are tried and true, like enemy attacks that must be blocked or dodged with good timing, but the things First Light does best are those that feel the most Bond-like. 

For example, you can slide over surfaces to stagger enemies, kicking their guns from their hands, catching them, then shooting your foe in the leg to cause them to kneel for a quick finisher. Alternatively, you can rush them and toss them into a computer desk, where things like a monitor and keyboard fly into the air as you buy some time with a handful of other armed villains behind you. Environments are awesomely reactive. If you throw a guy into a railing, you can then toss him over it. If you throw him into an electrical board, you'll see him get zapped and take heavy damage. Weaving in and out of combos against a group of enemies looks and feels awesome, whether you're perfectly nailing every hit and dodging every attack or you're just scraping by in fist fights that feel like trying to win an eye-gouging contest. 

Your options for stealth and social engineering are numerous in 007 First Light.

Gunplay is fun too, and though I preferred to use my fists because I felt it fit the character better at times, I love how First Light's guns never have much ammo in them, demanding you frequently change what you're armed with by taking them off defeated enemies--you can even chuck your gun at their heads when it's out of ammo. Combined with a slow-motion focus-aim mechanic, enemies who effectively flank you, and lots of destructibility, the end result makes for frenetic shootouts of precision headshots and creative explosions every time you've been given the license to kill. The exciting setpieces, once starring Connery, Brosnan, Craig, and the others, are faithfully captured in First Light, but what makes them even better is how often these moments aren't scripted. They're a result of my own improvisational input, navigating a complex battlefield and using every tool at my disposal to capture the specific biorhythms of a Bond movie.

Speaking of tools, it's funny how well a Bond story maps onto video games. Not only do you trot around the globe in a way that suits distinct missions, but Bond is always aided by Q and his Q-Lab spy gadgets. With his nearly ever-present Q-Watch, Bond can scan an area for enemies and interaction points, even through walls, using the sort of "detective vision" mechanic that Arkham Asylum popularized in 2009. Bond can also hack electronics with that same watch; he can make people feel queasy and move them off their spot using a fake phone that shoots poison darts, and he can blow stuff up with a fake pen, among several other gadgets at his disposal. 

On many missions, you'll pick which two or more of these you want, leaving you with many answers to the same question: how to get from A to B when the space between is littered with villains. I found it hard to pick which gadgets I wanted on any mission because they all had their uses. It was very common for me to get into a mission, thankful I had a particular gadget but also longing for another I had left behind, depending on the situation. A few late-game changes to how gadgets are used also shake up this system in two distinctly different but enjoyable ways.

These gadgets ensure the spirit of the Bond character is alive, and the game is rich with other true-to-form touches, like a well-rounded cast of characters, such as MI6 boss M, workplace ally Moneypenny, and a memorable villain whose quest is an interesting dark reflection of Bond himself. He's also the type of bad guy who feels plucked right out of the headlines. A Bond story is essentially a superhero story, but the best of them ground themselves in reality by speaking to the social and political context in which they've arrived, and First Light shines in this regard. 

Several missions in First Light would feel right at home in Hitman.

Watching the Bond movies recently for the first time, my wife jokingly wondered if the "Bond Girl" is always going to betray him, given how often it happens. I was glad to see First Light toy with this expectation a lot during its runtime. As for 007 himself, Patrick Gibson did so well to become the hero in my mind that, while I used to think of him as the actor who plays the title role on Dexter: First Blood, by the end of the game, he'd become James Bond first and foremost. It's hard to see him any other way.

Of all the boxes IO had to check to make First Light feel authentic, the only area where the team noticeably falters is driving sections. It's not really a Bond story without some car chases, and though First Light uses several different vehicles in several different ways, most of them feel like you're rather rigidly barreling down something close to a straight line. Nearly feeling on-rails, these flashy scenes of Aston Martins and speedboats still look and sound cool, but they're best for moving Bond from one shootout to another, while the driving sections themselves don't add much.

Another issue that stems from telling a 20-hour Bond story is that you, perhaps necessarily, lose some of the supreme pacing the best of the movies have to offer. I enjoyed seeing Bond in his MI6-provided apartment with other recruits. That felt like the sort of downtime a movie wouldn't allow for, which managed to add layers to these new versions of old characters. But there are a couple of other sections later where you're meant to solve puzzles, usually involving locked doors, and in these sections, the pacing can grind to a halt, pulling me out of the otherwise-exciting story. 

That's a hard problem to solve, given how a game necessarily differs from a movie. One area in which the pacing doesn't suffer is First Light's secondary mode, TacSim (short for Tactical Simulation). The in-universe excuse for this challenge mode is that it's Bond's way of staying frosty, beating up virtual bad guys in virtual kitchens, villas, and military installments. What this amounts to for you is a highly replayable mode that gets right down to the game's best bits: its combat. Across many levels, you can attempt to complete dozens of challenges, which is something this studio has designed very well before.

Vehicle sections look flashy, but they don't amount to much other than driving nearly in a straight line.

I like this mode out of the gate, though the rewards feel lacking for now, with some lukewarm weapon skins and outfits on offer. IO plans to support TacSim with updates, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. But for those who wondered if this could be the equivalent of Hitman's incredible Freelancer mode, it's far from that as of now. 

In the end, IO's take on James Bond was actually more like Hitman than I expected, but that's not to say it's simply Hitman by another name. As someone who has loved that series for nearly 25 years, it's fascinating to see IO apply everything it's learned. 007: First Light wisely repurposes what works in both universes but isn't afraid to reimagine or ditch those parts that don't. Though some aspects of the game do hinder the pacing, so much else feels authentic and riveting. As Hollywood seems uncertain about where to take Bond next, IO Interactive's debut effort is supremely confident. "James Bond will return," the movies always like to say. If and when IO's Bond returns, it'll have a great first act to follow.

Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant.

You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things.

https://youtu.be/1d7IdzUK2MM?si=_8yC48jkJYyAqeXC

It's surprising how well this works. Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some pre-defined, especially significant discovery. For a set of flowers called ​​Crazee Dayzees, for example, it's using them to grow large flower buds. For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots. For Casterway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking in the water below. I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you towards your goals when no two goals are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well. You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to. The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often just led me to the right conclusion.

Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls feel natural and fluid. You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left stick for aiming. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both its differentiated goals, and its myriad strange creatures. A Snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks. Meanwhile, a Slugarang, a bug shaped like a boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries. Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety. And as you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with other, earlier ones you had already discovered. You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in a previous area if you want to see them all.

I should say here, by the way, that each of these creatures can be named however you wish. You're the archeologist discovering them, so Mr. E lets you name them. I didn't use this functionality much, preferring to hear their canonical names per Mr. E's suggestion, but it's a cute touch that I'm sure kids will enjoy.

The story is light to the point of being almost non-existent. Somehow, Bowser Jr. and Kamek have found themselves in the titular book as well and they're searching for a rare species. You restore the pages of the book to unlock new areas, and naturally that means you're on their trail, but you aren't given any particular motivation otherwise.

That said, the main story culminates in a plot twist, of sorts, that is so bizarre and left-field that you really need to see it to believe it. The story was too bare-bones to evoke a strong emotional reaction from me, but I was still amused that such a cute game had such a dark idea lurking inside it.

Speaking of seeing and believing, the visual style in Mysterious Book is gorgeous. Inside the book, the whole game has a visual layer that makes it look like illustrations on a page, with a colored pencil aesthetic and skipped frames to accent the effect. Especially when played in TV mode, Yoshi is full of expressive reactions to everything he sees, and in particular, everything he tastes. These playful cartoon expressions help to even further accentuate its appeal for younger players.

This clear targeting of younger gamers has its drawbacks, though. Most notably, while this is a game that seems aimed at early- or pre-readers, it's absolutely chock full of text to read, and there is no voice acting or spoken dialogue to make the experience more accessible to the audience that will likely be enjoying this game most. Mr. E speaks in simlish-like vocalizing but the dialogue has to be read. Discoveries pop up as text as well. The hint system is all text too. A younger player without strong reading skills might be able to play with the systems and make discoveries, but it may be hard for them to progress without someone around to interpret the text for them.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book

For older players, there is a little more complexity hidden behind the first ending. It's actually one of the coolest features the game has to offer, which makes it strange to rope it behind game completion. Once you finish the main story you open up a modular UI, with "Exploration Tools" that can be bought in exchange for the Smiley Flowers you've been gathering throughout the journey and then mapped to a grid overlay. These tools are unlocked in a particular order so you can't select which ones you want, but a few of them include a Bioscanner to track nearby creatures, thermometers to track temperature, and more. There's even a lifebar for Yoshi, which confusingly doesn't seem to do anything since you can't die--but when Yoshi gets low enough in health he visibly reacts. Presumably this system was running under the hood the whole time but I never even noticed until unlocking the tool.

Those tools can be applied to extra biomes that open up after the first ending as well. That extends the adventure into new areas with new creatures, as well as allowing you to discover how those creatures and your new Exploration Tools interact with all the ones you've already found.

How much mileage you get out of those extra stages, and in fact out of the entire game, relies largely on your level of curiosity. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fundamentally a game about poking and prodding at the world and seeing what happens. It won't test your precision platforming skills, but it serves as a gentle introduction for novices, and an experiment for even experienced gamers to see an audacious, expanded idea of what a platformer can be.

Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant.

You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things.

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Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh.

The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me.

Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be.

https://youtu.be/DfJaUpW_P00?si=E7H8uGwVttzcUqkR

Legacy of the Dark Knight tells an original story, kind of, cobbled together and reassembled from the stories of various other Batman media. Most often these are pulled directly from the myriad movie adaptations and reboots, but it's also informed by stray influences from well-known comic arcs and at least one very notable video game influence. And since characters have crossed multiple movie adaptations and interpretations, there's some loose justifications put in to explain how the characters change over time. Jack Napier starts as a member of a regular gang, before donning the Red Hood and falling into a vat of chemicals, but he was always a sadist who liked to taunt his victims, and in this telling he even had the plan to poison people with Smilex before he succumbed to its effects himself. The Penguin is a low-level thug a la The Batman universe before he transitions to a mayoral candidate with animalistic habits as seen in Batman Returns. There are lots of other surprising developments that I'll let you discover on your own.

By imitating and remixing so many classic movie moments, though, it does invite direct comparisons to the originals. It's simply strange to hear iconic moments with new voices. Jack Nicholson's lines as the Joker are especially seared into my mind, so it sounds just slightly off to hear him imitated by a voice that is meant to be a broader take on the character, to facilitate his various transformations. It feels unfair to lay that at the feet of the actor, who does a fine job with the material, but telling any actor to do an exact re-take of some of the most famous lines in superhero cinema history is a rough assignment. Similarly, the story can sometimes feel a little shaggy, briskly connecting two movie plots that weren't ever meant to connect. Usually this is played for laughs, so it works well enough since it gives the impression that the writing is in on the joke.

Through all of these vignettes, the story mostly focuses on building the Bat-family, suggesting that's really the most important part of his legacy. Each chapter focuses primarily on befriending a new crime-fighter like Robin or Batgirl and learning their unique mechanics for battles and puzzle-solving. You're always playing as Batman alongside one ally, though your secondary character can be switched at will most of the time. This focus keeps the characters selection relatively small, a marked change from the sprawling roster in most Lego games that has led to sorting them into character types. Jim Gordon has a pair of special guns--one that fires sticky goo and another that fires a ricochet bulb--and he's the only one with that particular set of skills. Batgirl is the only one who can hack computers, Robin can pry open cracks with his bo staff, and so on.

Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

Lego games are always collect-a-thons, and this one is no exception. But rather than a humongous roster, you're collecting currency to unlock new looks for your core crew, color modifiers that can be applied to any outfit, upgrade material, and trophies for your headquarters. It all feeds into itself very nicely, and I would often make a point of visiting the in-game shop to unlock new costumes. As both a Batman and Lego fan, it's just endlessly cool to see how different suits have been visualized in this style, and there are tons of extremely specific references to particular comic arcs alongside suits representing every movie and TV adaptation you can think of. I never cared much about unlocking every Droid in a Lego Star Wars game, but I want to see every single deep-cut Bat-suit this game has to offer.

Legacy of the Dark Knight also pays homage to Rocksteady's Arkham universe, most notably as the foundation of its gameplay. The rightly praised Arkham combat makes a return here, with the same basic cadence of punches, dodges, and parries, augmented with gadgets as you upgrade your gear. It's a little slower-paced, but as the enemy count and combo meter increases it almost feels like an Arkham game with a Lego visual overhaul mod. It lacks some of the brutality and precision of the Arkham games, especially with more limited gear and gadget upgrades, but it very accurately recaptures the spirit of Arkham's rhythmic combat style.

I don't want to oversell the Arkham connections, because the combat in Lego Batman doesn't reach that level of finesse. This is more Arkham Lite than a true successor to the Rocksteady games. However, the injection of even just some Arkham DNA does make combat much more satisfying than it has been in traditional Lego games, showing that even a little bit of that secret sauce goes a long way toward making a game feel more engaging.

Similarly, traversal throughout the open world of Gotham feels almost a match for the traditional Arkham games. You have access anytime to your choice of Batmobile from across the spectrum of Batman's iconic car. For the most part these feel very similar, with the ability to quickly accelerate across straightaways as well as navigate hairpin turns. They do differ where it makes sense, though. The Tumbler from the Nolan movies feels much heavier and tank-like compared to the light and nimble Batman 89 version, for example. Most of the time, though, it's quicker and easier to simply grapple up to the nearest, highest point and leap, using your natural glide to cover long distances. Again, this doesn't quite match the balletic grace of the Arkham games, but it's remarkably close.

Alright everyone, chill.

The one spot where the Arkham comparisons fall short, though, is the stealth. The Arkham games were notable for living the fantasy of Batman, turning you into the predator and criminals--a cowardly and superstitious lot--into the prey. Stealth in Legacy of the Dark Knight is passable but unremarkable. You can sneak up on enemies for an instant takedown, but you have fewer tools to inspire fear in a room full of enemies or disappear if you're spotted. Instead of clearing a full room, I would often take out a couple enemies, get spotted, and finish off the rest with traditional combat. It's an unfortunate weak spot in a game that is otherwise extremely effective at emulating what are widely regarded as the best Batman games.

And within those strong underpinnings, Legacy of the Dark Knight thrives on variety without feeling bloated or overstuffed with half-baked characters and mechanics. The open world of Gotham has tons of caches to find, Riddler and Cluemaster puzzle challenges, AR combat and racing challenges, crimes to stop, and even short environmental puzzles to unlock fast-travel points. Even within an individual mission you're never doing one thing for too long, as you'll transition from combat to puzzle to platforming challenge and back again. The story campaign itself moves at a brisk pace with lots to do, but you can also just get lost in Gotham finding things to unlock and empower your Bat-family.

With so many options at my fingertips between multiple allies, I appreciated the addition of a sonar ping similar to Arkham's Detective Vision that would highlight objects of interest. Sometimes this would be necessary to scan a clue or follow footprints, but you can also use it to show the way forward. I have felt incredibly stupid at times playing past Lego games, knowing that I'm overlooking something obvious that's gating my progress forward. I never struggled with that in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, because the ping system was always there to highlight objects of interest. Most of the level gating involves breaking apart certain objects and then building them into some prop to move forward, so in a pinch this helped me identify which objects to break or even which ones were breakable.

Adding another wrinkle of strategy is a stud-multiplier system that, if it has been in other Lego games, it must have been one that passed me by. Other Lego games have featured multipliers as unlockable bonuses, but in Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's a meter you build that then slowly drains. This actually adds a layer of decision-making to your wanton destruction, since it's best to build up a multiplier before going after a particularly high-value stud. It's just another way this game adds a tiny bit of extra depth--not enough to be overwhelming or feel out of place in a Lego game, but enough to keep it engaging for adults.

And on that note, this is certainly a game aimed at adult Batman fans who are familiar with the character's rich history in cinema. Batman himself is portrayed with his trademark stoicism, but he's also a puckish, Bugs Bunny-style mischief maker. Nested within the reference-laiden story are individual references to influences as diverse as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Street Fighter 2. The writing is sharp and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This game in particular shows off a knack for timing and sight gags with cinematic flair.

The extended Bat-family plays a prominent role in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight

Silly as it often is, this is a game that makes a point to show the passage of time. Bruce gets visibly older as the story proceeds and enters different phases of his life and his relationships with his allies. The iconic Bat Cave itself slowly develops from a natural rock formation with a handful of computer consoles to a sprawling technological marvel that documents your accomplishments and unlocks and allows you to customize many parts of it to your liking.

In a larger sense, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is fundamentally about time and the changes that come with it. It's been more than 20 years since Lego games hit it big with Lego Star Wars, and for a while, it felt like it had lost its way and become a whirring franchise-printing machine. Legacy of the Dark Knight rights the ship by getting back to fundamentals with deeper focus, razor-sharp writing, and just the right amount of mechanical complexity. For the first time in a long time, this is a return to form for the Lego series. It's still simple, but not quite as simple, it's bursting with even more secrets, and it's another playful take on a mythology that I love. It's the most fun I've had with a Lego game since 2005, and a template for how Lego games can rebuild into something greater, piece by piece.