S-Game, the Chinese studio behind Phantom Blade Zero, clearly understands the core tenets of character-action games. If your melee combat isn't tight, responsive, and oozing cool, then what's the point? Some games might have better combat, but few can match Phantom Blade Zero's style. 

Every moment feels like you're in the middle of a Chinese martial-arts movie, pulling off moves that shouldn't be feasible--moves that go against what we expect from third-person action games--yet are baked into the mechanics. The game is not without issues, and they do hold it back from reaching the genre's upper echelons, but the highs are stratospheric.

Character-action games aren't typically known for telling riveting stories, and Phantom Blade Zero is no different. You play as Soul, a stoic assassin who dies in the game's opening moments when a sword tears through his heart. Soon after, a mysterious figure gives him a chance to come back from the dead, forcing him to choose between two artificial hearts. One will allow him to live but strip away all of his emotions, while the other will let him retain those emotions but only give him 66 days left on this mortal coil. Soul chooses the latter, setting up a 66-day quest to find a cure, unravel a conspiracy, and prove that he was framed for his master's murder.

It's a fairly ridiculous opening, but one that doesn't reflect the rest of the game. Much of Phantom Blade Zero's narrative unfolds through background machinations: in clandestine conversations, hidden notes, and secondhand information. Multiple organizations, people, and malicious schemes are in play, but it doesn't do a particularly good job of filling you in, so I found it tough to keep track of who's who and what's what. Some aspects eventually come into sharper focus toward the end of the game, but this feels like too little, too late.

You're essentially dropped into an established world where even the protagonist knows more than you do, referencing past events and showing familiarity with characters new to you. All you can do is attempt to piece together some kind of understanding through the notes and loading-screen tooltips, but even then you'll still be in the dark for a good chunk of the game's dialogue. 

There are some cool storytelling moments here and there, such as the way it uses hand-drawn watercolor animation whenever it flashes back to Soul's childhood. One sequence also features traditional Chinese shadow puppets (or Piyingxi) to explore a character's backstory. Repeating or explaining plot points during loading screens feels like a concession to its failures elsewhere, though, and ultimately, I found it difficult to latch onto anything that would make me care about the story. 

Unsurprisingly, combat is Phantom Blade Zero's bread and butter. It's also unlike anything else I've played, essentially translating the choreographed action of films like Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to a playable medium. Both movies are known as Wuxia, a Chinese genre of fiction and low fantasy that blends martial arts with fantastical elements. Wuxia fight scenes are known to be incredibly fluid and dynamic: half combat, half choreographed dance, with both sides attacking and defending at the same time, creating a calculated but frenetic spectacle of clashing steel. 

Phantom Blade Zero

The choreography isn't something you can replicate in video games without resorting to quick-time events, but Phantom Blade Zero still makes it look and feel like you're engaged in a cinematic, free-flowing dance to the death. You have light and heavy attacks at your disposal, with combos alternating between the two. The key is that these attacks require no commitment. 

There's never a point where an attack begins and locks you into an animation until it ends. Switching to defense--either to block or parry--is instantaneous, even if you're mid-combo. Some attacks will even deflect incoming strikes automatically, recreating the back-and-forth, simultaneous attack-and-defend action Wuxia is known for. The whole thing is antithetical to the call-and-response philosophy of so many other action games, but it works when enemies test your abilities.

Sometimes, particularly during boss battles, you still need to focus strictly on offense or defense--maybe because you've created an opening to counterattack or need to lock in and parry multiple strikes in quick succession--but the delineation isn't as common as it is elsewhere. Most combat encounters achieve this satisfying flow through speed, aggression, and how combos and parries gracefully intersect. Sure, you could sit back and wait for your opponent to attack, or you could rush in and deal damage while still watching for their attack cues. Every action you take is fast and responsive, and even the biggest, heaviest weapons are swung at a rapid pace.

Much of this fluidity comes from the game's excellent motion capture, which showcases each movement with the smoothness and intent you'd expect from seasoned martial artists. It's also complemented by an eclectic soundtrack that infuses the action with everything from Chinese rap, metal, and pop to somber piano pieces and electronic beats.

There's mechanical depth beyond the surface panache, too. These mechanics are more par for the course, but familiarity is important when trying something new. Sha-Chi, for instance, is Phantom Blade Zero's stamina system. The meter drains when you hold down the block button or perform heavy attacks, but successful parries will severely deplete your opponent's Sha-Chi instead, gradually breaking their guard and leaving them vulnerable to a flurry of offense. Blue and red flash attacks also denote special, telegraphed moves you need to either parry or dodge, with both tightening up the window for you to react.

Failing to do so will eat into your health bar, but depleting your Sha-Chi meter also takes you out of action for a few seconds. To counteract this, switching weapons quickly replenishes your Sha-Chi, letting you maintain the initiative with a different armament. You can equip two primary weapons to alternate between, which not only helps you manage your Sha-Chi, but also gives you more combat options when you consider how varied Phantom Blade Zero's plethora of swords, axes, and spears are.

Each one feels unique when executing your standard light and heavy attacks, and they all have various intricacies that unlock as you level them up. For a good chunk of the game, I used a sword called the Outlaw Warblade. With this two-handed weapon, heavy attacks deal increased damage by eating into your health, which switching to standard attacks then restores. It can be a risky but effective weapon to use, but one I wasn't afraid to equip knowing I could quickly switch to another weapon.

Whether it's a broken blade that transforms into a ranged weapon after drinking--while also making you move like Jackie Chan in Drunken Master--or a pair of swords that summon the power of both wind and thunder, the weapons on offer are incredibly fun to use. They're flexible, too, with an upgrade system that lets you refund and recover the materials you've spent, so you never feel locked into using a particular weapon just because you've spent time upgrading it. You're free to experiment and jump from one completely different arsenal to the next, which is a more than welcome choice.  

Each weapon also has a secondary attack that breaks the non-committal rule. Landing heavy attacks builds Sha-Chi Essence, which you can then spend on weapon-specific techniques called Power Surges. While some of these might enhance your offense for a short time, others unleash devastating combos that you can't cancel out of, forcing you to consider when the opportune time to utilize them is. 

Phantom Blade Zero

The same is true of Phantom Edges: secondary weapons you can use a limited number of times before needing to replenish their stock. These range from heavy axes that can break through shields and armor to ranged weapons, chained sickles, flying guillotines, and a magical bell that can summon puppets to fight by your side. Both Power Surges and Phantom Edges add another layer to Phantom Blade Zero's flashy combat, upping the ante in desperate situations or providing that extra oomph you need to finish off a boss.

Boss battles are where the game's combat truly sings: where spectacle and cinematic action are pushed to the forefront, with free-flowing and thrilling mechanics to back it all up. Whether it's a Lion Dancer that breathes fire and hops between wooden plinths, or a three-faced puppet summoning giant paper snakes from the earth, the bosses are distinct and built on spectacle. It's no surprise that these conflicts represent Phantom Blade Zero at its most challenging. It might not be a soulslike, but From Software's influence is felt here and elsewhere. 

The world, which blends a traditional kung-fu aesthetic with steampunk machinery and body modification, is all S-Game. The studio calls this style "kungfupunk," and it's an accurate descriptor, melding pagodas with industrial iron and billowing smoke. 

There's variety within this conceit, too. At one point, you traverse a once-verdant forest that's now crimson, stained red after a brutal battle, "as though the forest itself were weeping blood." Another area sees you using a steam-powered boat to navigate a vast lake dotted with islands, while you'll also venture into a town whose denizens have been transformed into wooden puppets, and a winding valley with waterfalls and cliffs overlooking its crystal-clear streams. 

It's a strongly realized world, but the level design is distinctly soulslike, with circuitous areas full of branching paths and looping shortcuts. It's one of the strongest examples of this type of level design, making each locale a treat to explore, though it doesn't always feel entirely necessary. 

Soulslike checkpoints let you replenish health and upgrade weapons and items, but crucially, they don't respawn enemies as you would expect. It's an odd choice, especially since enemies stay dead even after you die. This changes the dynamic of enemy encounters, essentially letting you whittle down a group of enemies even if they get the better of you.

This speaks to Phantom Blade Zero's overall leniency, though. Many of its boss battles contain multiple phases, but if you reach the second phase and die, you don't have to repeat the first. I'm a fan of this decision, because if I've already demonstrated I can beat the first phase, forcing me to do so again can be frustrating. 

There are also three difficulty levels to choose from. You can swap between them at any time, which is something I took advantage of to make some of the regular enemy encounters more interesting. This is Phantom Blade Zero's biggest flaw, as even on the hardest difficulty, it's too easy to simply button-mash your way to victory against most enemy types. Groups still gave me trouble on occasion, especially since switching lock-on targets in these instances is overly cumbersome, but as I mentioned earlier, taking out a few enemies is beneficial even if you die. 

As someone who plays these kinds of games a lot, this might not be the same experience for everyone. Yet the bosses still posed enough of a challenge that I had to bump the difficulty back down to medium, so it feels more like a wildly unbalanced swing than anything else.

It's disappointing because, under the right circumstances, Phantom Blade Zero's combat is spectacular. Its Wuxia-inspired action nails the free-flowing, back-and-forth nature of its kinetic influences with aplomb. Being able to cleave through dozens of enemies who barely put up a fight isn't a fatal flaw, but tedium, and the fact you know how thrilling combat can be makes it a more glaring issue. It's this misstep that holds Phantom Blade Zero back, but it's still a fantastic game that any action aficionado should lap up.

Stupid Never Dies makes a strong, if extremely weird, first impression. Wrapping roguelite progression around the system of an action-RPG and setting that story in an inventive punk-inspired world of monsters is an inviting hook. Plus, it's hard not to feel some affection for the dimwitted hero and his undoubtedly creepy quest to revive the supposed love of his afterlife. But the inventive world and a few neat ideas can only carry this game so far, and I ultimately struggled to look past the repetitive and often imprecise combat. 

The world of Stupid Never Dies has been completely taken over by monsters who emerged from inside the Earth's crust. These monsters are very conspicuously inspired by classic silver screen incarnations and popular B-movies, all filtered through a '90s or '00s pop-punk aesthetic. It's a stylish blend of influences that immediately identifies this game's goofball, self-effacing tone. 

Stupid Never Dies

When these monsters took over the world, they all but wiped out humanity. In the aftermath, a new caste system emerged, with zombies considered to be little more than cannon fodder in the fight for monster supremacy. Zombies who refused to fight in the war are seen as even lower than that--protagonist Davy is one of those, a teenage-looking undead who's more of a lover than a fighter.

In fact, Davy shambles his way into the adventure accidentally. He's just hungry, and happens to eat a weird glowing egg he finds laying around. This turns out to be a Phoenix Egg, giving him the ability to absorb power from other monsters. He doesn't really care to use this newfound power until an associate, Dr. Frank, tells him he may be able to use it to revive a dead girl named Julia who he's been infatuated with. Julia is a random human that Davy found in a freezer, and Davy sets his sights on reviving her solely because he imagines they would be a happy couple. 

This motivation doesn't give Julia any agency--we don't know whether she would even want to date a zombie, let alone Davy specifically, and that creates a problematic vibe for the setup. If the story treated this with any degree of seriousness it would be downright toxic. But this is not a serious game, and Davy is very pointedly presented as a complete dumbass, so I at least think we as the audience are supposed to recognize the obvious folly in his lovelorn puppy act. Still, it's a bit ick. 

Stupid Never Dies

This uncomfortable setup is also just quickly drowned out with lore and jokes. There's a ton of exposition at the very start to introduce you to this world, but a lot of it is delivered with a sort of "just go with it" haste. It seems at once proud of its stylish mash-up and embarrassed by it as a thin pretense for fighting movie monsters. The humor, similarly, is mostly kept just barely on the right side of cringe, though parts of the story occasionally veer over into being too cheesy or silly. 

To have any hope of reviving Julia, Davy has to defeat and absorb the power of KOM, the nickname given to the King of the Monsters. After destroying Earth, most of the monster races burrowed back underground, leaving only the lowly zombies to roam around on the surface. Davy descends into deeper and deeper layers to find new materials in his quest to revive Julia, all leading toward KOM. If he completes a particular boss target or takes a ride back to their home base in an abandoned shopping mall before being defeated, he keeps his gains and can cash them in for power-ups. That's where the roguelite structure comes in.

In the underground combat segments, Davy can move quickly and strike hard, behaving much like a hero in a character-action game. The enemies are nicely differentiated between mobs like lizardmen and skeletons and elites like cyclopes and harpies, offering a good bit of variety, especially since you can absorb the powers of elite enemies. (More on that momentarily). 

Stupid Never Dies

By default, Davy's moves feel floaty--flailing and imprecise. This makes sense, as he is a zombie, but it does mean your core moveset never feels very cool or stylish. Devil May Cry this game isn't. You can also parry enemy strikes--the game insists on exclusively calling this a "stupid parry" for no particular reason--or leap to reach flying enemies or knock them into walls or off the stage. Combat has a fun sense of chaos and momentum to it. 

As you level up, in roguelite fashion, you'll gain new perks to equip and upgrade. Some of these are fairly straightforward, like boosts to your attack or defense, while others are more specialized, like giving you a passive perk for how many enemies you've knocked off the edge of a stage. 

On top of that, Davy has a Bite ability, which you charge up through regular attacks. This functions as both a heal and a finisher, as you can chomp down on enemies to restore some Hit Points, but it's better saved to use as the fatal blow on an elite enemy, since that heals you for a greater amount and grants you a big power boost. A lot of the combat is about managing your bite gauge, building it up for a big enemy, and then chomping into an elite for an impactful heal.

Stupid Never Dies

Elite enemies also often drop skill cores that you can bite into as long as you have your gauge charged, which lets you add their transformation to a quick select. These are worth using instead of saving, since they expire, but they turn Davy into a super-powerful creature like a werewolf, lich, or snow fairy. Those greatly expand Davy's abilities and make him much more powerful than his standard zombie form. And like the regular upgrades, they also come in different rarities, so it's always exciting to see a legendary monster form that you know will really tear through enemy mobs or that impending boss. 

It all works pretty well, but progression can be achingly slow, and the early battles get repetitive fast. I found the game actually became much more fun in the "Go Nuts" mode, a modifier that makes your level progression much faster to speed you along, especially in the early stages. Stupid Never Dies hits its stride about halfway through each run, I found, so breezing past the early parts to get to the meat of the gameplay was just a better way to play. 

When you get back to base, there are a variety of upgrade systems. You have Bessie, who sells you upgrades you'll be able to find in the dungeons from then on; a nearby monster who gives you achievement rewards for completing milestones; Acelino, a weredog who can swap your body parts to build out Davy with various stat boosts and abilities; Milo's ice cream shop, which lets you trade giblet gelato for ranked skill and stat upgrades; and Julia, who you can give gifts to in order to earn stat upgrades to the Davy Burst, his super-powered ultimate state. In this base, you can also explore to talk with Dr. Frank about your monster dex, view and heart Julia's old social media posts, or change your soundtrack tunes.

Stupid Never Dies

The multitude of systems isn't exactly elegant, and what's worse, Davy always starts in the mall with a slow zombie shamble. You quickly unlock the ability to ride around on a motorized vacuum, but it's just baffling why you have to press the button to board the quicker ride every time. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to actually walk around at his default slow pace, so why force the transition at all?

Other elements are similarly unwieldy. Bessie's upgrades are mostly understandable but sometimes the sheer number of variables just gets confusing, which at best breaks the momentum of a stage when you have to pause to decipher an ability, and at worst just gets so confusing that I'd bypass it altogether. On one recent run I had the option to choose an upgrade for: "Rate decrease for recoverable damage reduction over time +100." This was a good card judging by its rarity, but I honestly couldn't make heads or tails of what the heck it was supposed to do.

Then there's the addition of a timer, as indicated by a TickTock Teddy in the corner of your screen. This incentivizes you to skip some layers strategically since you simply do not have time to play all of them in a single run, and time-extension items give you one more thing to earn while you're choosing which layers to play. But it feels half-baked, since the difficulty of the bosses alone is enough of a friction point, and nothing feels as frustrating as nearly defeating a boss and then being brought down by an arbitrary time restriction. 

Stupid Never Dies

The time pressure also just makes certain aspects of the level design feel bad in unexpected ways. Airborne enemies are a particular pain because they are hard to hit and take longer to defeat, and you can just feel the timer counting down. Randomized stages can sometimes be difficult to navigate, wasting precious time. Even the long approach down a dark corridor to a formidable boss, which could feel properly dramatic and tension-building, instead just made me think of how much time I was burning on the way. 

These caveats and friction points ultimately harm the overall experience. The combat and merchant systems feel just a little too overstuffed and the timer is a frustrating and unnecessary addition that detracts from the overall flow of moving through the world. Stupid Never Dies has some good ideas going for it, including an inventive world, a likable idiot of a protagonist, and some cool combat mechanics like transforming into elite enemies. But it also has a lot of cringey plot points and jokes, repetitive and slow progression, and an awful timer system. I wish I could have enjoyed the positive aspects more, without the other cruft getting in the way.

If Nintendo Switch Sports Resort's sole mission is to make you look and feel stupid and have a ton of fun with friends and family, then Nintendo has accomplished that mission with flying colors (and flailing arms). Considering Nintendo's other outings with its motion-controlled sports games, that shouldn't come as a surprise--nor should the feeling of a sore arm the next morning: a feeling that I consider nostalgic at this point.

Switch Sports Resort delivers the best showcase of sports and modes, making it feel like a complete experience and the most cohesive package in the series to date.

For the nostalgic-driven players, it's easy to notice which sports from previous games aren't included among the 12 here, like Chambara, Badminton, and Disc Golf. But in place of those missing games are what I consider to be the greatest hits of the series, joined by welcome additions like the tension-fest competition of Thumb Wrestling.

Of those 12 events, there are three "Leisure Sports" (game modes that don't require the player to be standing or exerting the use of a limb to flail), which include Prop Plane, Skateboarding, and Power Cruising. With the exception of Thumb Wrestling, the other eight more traditional sports will require you standing up in front of your TV, Joy-Cons in hand, and using physical gestures to mimic the act of playing the sport. You'll swing your whole arm for Tennis as if wielding a racket; raise your arm back and then swing forward to bowl; or, in the case of Archery, hold a Joy-Con in each hand, raising one arm forward and pulling back with the other to simulate drawing a bow--it all still feels awesome, just as it has since the original game. The Switch 2's HD Rumble is used well to enhance the experience with better feedback. In archery, for example, the controllers simulate the tension of the bowstring.

Like playing actual sports, your enjoyment mileage will vary. If I'm not good at a real-life sport, then clearly something is wrong with the sport and its in-game version. This was the case while playing Switch Sports Resort's rendition of Table Tennis against friends. I was terrible at it and therefore I blamed the game. However, someone I was playing with was doing well and seemed skilled in what they were doing. While I refused to believe that I'm the problem and that it isn't a skill issue, that experience proved to me that it is, indeed, a skill issue, and I just suck at Table Tennis. And it's fine!

This scenario captures the essence of playing this game with friends: the natural banter that comes with the playful competition in sports. Because while this particular player was able to beat me at Table Tennis, I absolutely destroyed them at regular ol' Tennis--a legacy sport in the series, and one I've loved since the original 2006 game. "Friendly" competition or showboating skills aside, each sport achieves what matters most: They're all fun to play.

Some sports are easier to engage with than others. Tennis, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing are the most pick-up-and-play friendly, but that doesn't dismiss the depth of skill that can be learned and applied. Golf takes advantage of the Joy-Con's position, so newcomers will need to pay attention to the angle of your swing, while experienced players will naturally consider how much the Joy-Con is tilted. In both cases, it feels intuitive. Golf remains one of the more chill sports to give your arms a bit of a rest and offers a wide variety of courses with varying difficulties.

Among the don't-fix-what-ain't-broke sports is bowling, which returns with a mode that features obstacles to bowl around and simultaneous bowl, so you and your friends don't have to wait to take turns. 100 Pin Bowling from the original Wii Sports Resort returns too, and, as before, few things are as satisfying as getting a 100-pin strike on your first frame.

I sorely missed Boxing in Switch Sports, and now my arms are sore from its return--I love it. Boxing can feel like you're just swinging wildly until your opponent is down, but Resort makes the addition of a stamina gauge (despite having my own real-life stamina gauge) for added strategy, incentivizing you to be more deliberate and methodical in your approach with your dodges, blocks, and left-and-right hooks. I can't say I was either deliberate or methodical in the matches I played because I was having too much fun just punching the air with all my might. Did I lose? Yes, and I don't care. 

Each sport offers its own distinct use of the Joy-Con, with sports like Volleyball and Basketball featuring a rotation of more complex movesets rather than the usual swinging and punching. As a result, these sports' tutorials are more cumbersome. When playing with a group of people, this can be a speed bump for the uninitiated, but it's worth having a little patience for the end result.

The complexities of Volleyball and Basketball are largely in the extra steps when learning about positioning for you and your teammates. Volleyball plays more like a choreographed dance as you change positions from passing, to setting up a shot, to blocking an incoming ball, all of which require the physical motion of raising your arms at just the right time. Basketball involves a few extra moves depending on your position. It took my friends and I a moment to fully grasp how to play it, but once I locked in with my teammate--leaning on communication and fighting off the urge to run in for a shot--a careful passing took place that, when done skillfully, felt satisfying. (It also helps that we won.)

Thankfully, both Volleyball and Basketball offer pick-up-and-play modes, which alleviate the more cumbersome nature of learning all the moves. For this, Basketball features several modes that focus on just shooting hoops against opponents, and Volleyball narrows down gameplay to a rhythm game where you are tasked with timing your ball bumps on a beat. They're both fun bite-sized helpings of each sport, with Basketball's Five-Streak Battle being a standout thanks to its tension to land five consecutive shots while three other opponents shoot for hoops simultaneously.

As is the case with playing any real-life sport, it's par for the course to get a little worn out while playing, and that's where Sports Resort's Leisure Sports come in. Leisure Sports are a standout, with each sport offering a much-appreciated change-up from the usual arm flailing. In Prop Plane, you control a plane by holding the Joy-Con like how you'd hold a paper plane, guiding it around the game's open world; Skateboarding takes advantage of the Joy-Con's mouse features, sliding it back on the surface to simulate pushing a skateboard; and Power Cruising has you control a jet ski by holding a Joy-Con in each hand, steering as if they were handlebars and twisting the right one to trigger a boost (with an optional solo Joy-Con control scheme, too). Each of these sports triggered a deep sense of nostalgia in me, being reminiscent of playing with toys as a kid, with the Joy-Cons becoming an extension of that feeling. In this case, the game itself simulates my imagination and it's just pure joy.

Each Leisure Sport has its own chill sightseeing mode that allows you to explore the Resort's island from land, water, and air, but, on the opposite end, they also have competitive modes. Competing in each one is very fun in its own right, and this is especially true for Skateboarding and Power Cruising, both of which have whispers of Mario Kart-style intro sequences. There's a wide array of courses that increase in difficulty and introduce speed boosts, tight turns, and some genuinely thrilling course-specific moments, like skateboarding down a mountain on a narrow path, neck-and-neck with my opponent, for example. They're so fun that it feels like a glaring misstep to not include the ability to compete against CPUs in this format. Compounding the problem, none of the Leisure Sports can be played online, which isn't the case for the other nine sports. 

Although Leisure Sports stumbles in their lack of CPU opponents, the other sports avoid the same pitfall with Island Crown, an in-game tournament-like mode where you can move up the ranks as you take on increasingly difficult CPU opponents. Three sports that are part of Island Crown can be played in co-op (Tennis, Volleyball, and Basketball), should you want to involve friends. Island Crown also showcases a large part of Resort's distinct personality, with each sport featuring its own ultimate opponent who you're moving up the ranks to take on. They’re colored with their own quips and share tips as you push through match after match. Ranking number one and taking down these pretty-faced athletes rewards you more accessories and items to customize your avatar with.

If you played Switch Sports, you'll be familiar with Resort's avatars and range of customization. They haven't evolved much from that game, nor did they need to. I mean, hey, I never thought it needed to evolve past the original Wii's Miis, and thankfully Nintendo continues to support them in this game too. So my dead-eyed Mii can still face-off against the new pretty-faced avatars. Additionally, there's an option to make all the CPU opponents Miis, which are populated from both Miis you've created on your console to randomly generated ones. The moment I realized this option was available, I changed it. Long live Miis.

The novelty of motion controls may be gone as motion-based functionality has been part of every Nintendo console for the last 20 years. What prevails, however, is the unabashed fun that ensues when gathering folks together to move and act silly in the name of virtual sports. Beyond that, Resort still manages to spark imagination with its Leisure Sports and showcases that there's still wonder in motion-controlled games, like when performing plane tricks with nothing but the motion of your hand.

As someone who played the original Wii Sports when it first released, and was awed by the rudimentary real-life movements being mimicked on screen, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort allowed me to feel that all over again as an adult. And it's a feeling best felt surrounded by friends. Whether you're a jaded 36-year-old man with no children (like me), a parent, a grandparent, or a kid, it's hard to imagine even the most calloused-hearted person not having fun with the game. Get your family together, get your friends, heck--invite your neighbors over, break out the party essentials, and have fun.

If Nintendo Switch Sports Resort's sole mission is to make you look and feel stupid and have a ton of fun with friends and family, then Nintendo has accomplished that mission with flying colors (and flailing arms). Considering Nintendo's other outings with its motion-controlled sports games, that shouldn't come as a surprise--nor should the feeling of a sore arm the next morning: a feeling that I consider nostalgic at this point.

Switch Sports Resort delivers the best showcase of sports and modes, making it feel like a complete experience and the most cohesive package in the series to date.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tX12iFeM88

For the nostalgic-driven players, it's easy to notice which sports from previous games aren't included among the 12 here, like Chambara, Badminton, and Disc Golf. But in place of those missing games are what I consider to be the greatest hits of the series, joined by welcome additions like the tension-fest competition of Thumb Wrestling.

Of those 12 events, there are three "Leisure Sports" (game modes that don't require the player to be standing or exerting the use of a limb to flail), which include Prop Plane, Skateboarding, and Power Cruising. With the exception of Thumb Wrestling, the other eight more traditional sports will require you standing up in front of your TV, Joy-Cons in hand, and using physical gestures to mimic the act of playing the sport. You'll swing your whole arm for Tennis as if wielding a racket; raise your arm back and then swing forward to bowl; or, in the case of Archery, hold a Joy-Con in each hand, raising one arm forward and pulling back with the other to simulate drawing a bow--it all still feels awesome, just as it has since the original game. The Switch 2's HD Rumble is used well to enhance the experience with better feedback. In archery, for example, the controllers simulate the tension of the bowstring.

Like playing actual sports, your enjoyment mileage will vary. If I'm not good at a real-life sport, then clearly something is wrong with the sport and its in-game version. This was the case while playing Switch Sports Resort's rendition of Table Tennis against friends. I was terrible at it and therefore I blamed the game. However, someone I was playing with was doing well and seemed skilled in what they were doing. While I refused to believe that I'm the problem and that it isn't a skill issue, that experience proved to me that it is, indeed, a skill issue, and I just suck at Table Tennis. And it's fine!

This scenario captures the essence of playing this game with friends: the natural banter that comes with the playful competition in sports. Because while this particular player was able to beat me at Table Tennis, I absolutely destroyed them at regular ol' Tennis--a legacy sport in the series, and one I've loved since the original 2006 game. "Friendly" competition or showboating skills aside, each sport achieves what matters most: They're all fun to play.

Some sports are easier to engage with than others. Tennis, Bowling, Golf, and Boxing are the most pick-up-and-play friendly, but that doesn't dismiss the depth of skill that can be learned and applied. Golf takes advantage of the Joy-Con's position, so newcomers will need to pay attention to the angle of your swing, while experienced players will naturally consider how much the Joy-Con is tilted. In both cases, it feels intuitive. Golf remains one of the more chill sports to give your arms a bit of a rest and offers a wide variety of courses with varying difficulties.

Among the don't-fix-what-ain't-broke sports is bowling, which returns with a mode that features obstacles to bowl around and simultaneous bowl, so you and your friends don't have to wait to take turns. 100 Pin Bowling from the original Wii Sports Resort returns too, and, as before, few things are as satisfying as getting a 100-pin strike on your first frame.

I sorely missed Boxing in Switch Sports, and now my arms are sore from its return--I love it. Boxing can feel like you're just swinging wildly until your opponent is down, but Resort makes the addition of a stamina gauge (despite having my own real-life stamina gauge) for added strategy, incentivizing you to be more deliberate and methodical in your approach with your dodges, blocks, and left-and-right hooks. I can't say I was either deliberate or methodical in the matches I played because I was having too much fun just punching the air with all my might. Did I lose? Yes, and I don't care. 

Each sport offers its own distinct use of the Joy-Con, with sports like Volleyball and Basketball featuring a rotation of more complex movesets rather than the usual swinging and punching. As a result, these sports' tutorials are more cumbersome. When playing with a group of people, this can be a speed bump for the uninitiated, but it's worth having a little patience for the end result.

The complexities of Volleyball and Basketball are largely in the extra steps when learning about positioning for you and your teammates. Volleyball plays more like a choreographed dance as you change positions from passing, to setting up a shot, to blocking an incoming ball, all of which require the physical motion of raising your arms at just the right time. Basketball involves a few extra moves depending on your position. It took my friends and I a moment to fully grasp how to play it, but once I locked in with my teammate--leaning on communication and fighting off the urge to run in for a shot--a careful passing took place that, when done skillfully, felt satisfying. (It also helps that we won.)

Thankfully, both Volleyball and Basketball offer pick-up-and-play modes, which alleviate the more cumbersome nature of learning all the moves. For this, Basketball features several modes that focus on just shooting hoops against opponents, and Volleyball narrows down gameplay to a rhythm game where you are tasked with timing your ball bumps on a beat. They're both fun bite-sized helpings of each sport, with Basketball's Five-Streak Battle being a standout thanks to its tension to land five consecutive shots while three other opponents shoot for hoops simultaneously.

As is the case with playing any real-life sport, it's par for the course to get a little worn out while playing, and that's where Sports Resort's Leisure Sports come in. Leisure Sports are a standout, with each sport offering a much-appreciated change-up from the usual arm flailing. In Prop Plane, you control a plane by holding the Joy-Con like how you'd hold a paper plane, guiding it around the game's open world; Skateboarding takes advantage of the Joy-Con's mouse features, sliding it back on the surface to simulate pushing a skateboard; and Power Cruising has you control a jet ski by holding a Joy-Con in each hand, steering as if they were handlebars and twisting the right one to trigger a boost (with an optional solo Joy-Con control scheme, too). Each of these sports triggered a deep sense of nostalgia in me, being reminiscent of playing with toys as a kid, with the Joy-Cons becoming an extension of that feeling. In this case, the game itself simulates my imagination and it's just pure joy.

Each Leisure Sport has its own chill sightseeing mode that allows you to explore the Resort's island from land, water, and air, but, on the opposite end, they also have competitive modes. Competing in each one is very fun in its own right, and this is especially true for Skateboarding and Power Cruising, both of which have whispers of Mario Kart-style intro sequences. There's a wide array of courses that increase in difficulty and introduce speed boosts, tight turns, and some genuinely thrilling course-specific moments, like skateboarding down a mountain on a narrow path, neck-and-neck with my opponent, for example. They're so fun that it feels like a glaring misstep to not include the ability to compete against CPUs in this format. Compounding the problem, none of the Leisure Sports can be played online, which isn't the case for the other nine sports. 

Although Leisure Sports stumbles in their lack of CPU opponents, the other sports avoid the same pitfall with Island Crown, an in-game tournament-like mode where you can move up the ranks as you take on increasingly difficult CPU opponents. Three sports that are part of Island Crown can be played in co-op (Tennis, Volleyball, and Basketball), should you want to involve friends. Island Crown also showcases a large part of Resort's distinct personality, with each sport featuring its own ultimate opponent who you're moving up the ranks to take on. They’re colored with their own quips and share tips as you push through match after match. Ranking number one and taking down these pretty-faced athletes rewards you more accessories and items to customize your avatar with.

If you played Switch Sports, you'll be familiar with Resort's avatars and range of customization. They haven't evolved much from that game, nor did they need to. I mean, hey, I never thought it needed to evolve past the original Wii's Miis, and thankfully Nintendo continues to support them in this game too. So my dead-eyed Mii can still face-off against the new pretty-faced avatars. Additionally, there's an option to make all the CPU opponents Miis, which are populated from both Miis you've created on your console to randomly generated ones. The moment I realized this option was available, I changed it. Long live Miis.

The novelty of motion controls may be gone as motion-based functionality has been part of every Nintendo console for the last 20 years. What prevails, however, is the unabashed fun that ensues when gathering folks together to move and act silly in the name of virtual sports. Beyond that, Resort still manages to spark imagination with its Leisure Sports and showcases that there's still wonder in motion-controlled games, like when performing plane tricks with nothing but the motion of your hand.

As someone who played the original Wii Sports when it first released, and was awed by the rudimentary real-life movements being mimicked on screen, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort allowed me to feel that all over again as an adult. And it's a feeling best felt surrounded by friends. Whether you're a jaded 36-year-old man with no children (like me), a parent, a grandparent, or a kid, it's hard to imagine even the most calloused-hearted person not having fun with the game. Get your family together, get your friends, heck--invite your neighbors over, break out the party essentials, and have fun.

It's not often that a live-service game gets any sort of attention after the servers have shut down, but there was something special about Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. It was more than just a mediocre gacha-based RPG with Final Fantasy branding slapped on it--it featured a fully original story with unique characters, a fully fleshed-out setting, and plenty of that unmistakable Final Fantasy flavor. So when Square-Enix announced Final Fantasy Resonance--a full-fledged single-player remake of part of Brave Exvius's story--there was excitement. Former Brave Exvius players could revisit the setting they loved, and those who hadn't played could enjoy the story without all of the gacha baggage.

Retooling a live-service, gacha-monetized game into a single-player experience is no easy task, however, but Square-Enix clearly felt that the legacy of Brave Exvius was worth the effort. And while Final Fantasy Resonance succeeds admirably in retelling the saga of Rain and the battle against the Veritas, it does have a handful of shortcomings that keep it from becoming the next great Final Fantasy epic.

Resonance brings us to the world of Lapis, where adopted brothers Rain and Laswell are doing routine tasks for the Grandshelt Knights. Things quickly escalate, however: The pair encounter a mysterious armor-clad warrior, who's powerful enough to shatter the kingdom's Earth crystal before setting the kingdom's castle ablaze. One near-death encounter and mysterious-young-girl rescue later, Rain and Laswell learn that more armored sentinels are seeking to destroy the remaining crystals that maintain the world to settle a long-simmering grudge. Thus begins a grand adventure with twists, turns, mysteries, revelations, and an ever-growing party of traveling companions--the classic FF formula we've come to love. For the most part, it hews close to the original narrative of Brave Exvius, with some detours and extra exposition along the way. 

In many ways, Final Fantasy Resonance feels engineered as a callback to the olden days of the series. Story- and progression-wise, Resonance feels more in line with the 16-bit Final Fantasy games: mostly linear with some side trekking you can do if you feel so inclined. The narrative pacing is brisk, though it does take time to savor individual character arcs, like Rain and Lasswell’s rivalry, Nichol’s sense of familial duty, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rain’s father, Raegen. There are some fun little additions, too, like side quests that offer additional insights into the characters and setting, and on-field conversations you can trigger where characters banter about themselves.Places you visit offer hidden trinkets and treasures if you’re willing to poke around suspicious nooks and take side roads, making exploration satisfying. The HD-2D graphics also feature frequent callbacks to pixel-based Final Fantasy titles that eagle-eyed nostalgia fiends will find delightful. The soundtrack is excellent, offering new versions of classic Final Fantasy songs as well as its own set of defining music leitmotifs. With its presentation, it's easy to imagine Resonance as some sort of lost "middle step" between the pixel and polygon eras of FF.

For the most part, the game is a visual treat: Detailed sprites have fluid animations, and environments are packed with artistic flourishes (the water city Olderion and its surroundings are a personal favorite). The cinematic sequences also attempt to do action and camerawork in ways not yet seen in Square-Enix's HD-2D games. When it works, it looks great, but there are also times when odd-looking compositing of the pixel art over the background or an awkward animation takes you out of the moment. Still, it's hard not to respect the effort, even if there is a lot of reuse of Brave Exvius assets throughout.

So how does Resonance differ from the mobile game it's based on? For starters, the gacha-related element of the game has been completely eliminated. The concept of Visions--characters' spirits who aid the heroes with their unique abilities--still exists, with most of them derived from classic Final Fantasy titles. In Brave Exvius, these Visions were obtained and powered up through gacha — randomized rewards obtained by spending in-game currency (which can also be bought with real money)., but in Resonance you obtain them by visiting shrines hidden throughout the world, then power them up using Magicite items. There's a mix of both familiar faces and original characters in the Visions, though I found it disappointing that only the "main" characters in each FF game (and one beloved villain) got Visions when Brave Exvius was filled with fan favorites.

While Resonance succeeds admirably in retelling the saga of Rain, it does have a handful of shortcomings that keep it from becoming the next great Final Fantasy epic

While Visions were separate units in Brave Exvius, here they act as sort of a modular skillset, able to be equipped and exchanged throughout your party as needed to augment a character's default skills. Every Vision's skill loadout is unique, and by increasing their Mastery Rank through battle, characters can learn and equip individual Vision abilities, even if they aren't using that Vision. For example, when fully mastered, Terra's Vision grants a passive skill that allows characters to break the 9999-damage cap, while Zidane gives his wielder the Steal command. These can be set in a character's ability menu once learned. This system allows for fun character customization, letting you mold characters to your tastes--though one issue is that characters who join the party later have less to work with, simply because they join without any innate Vision skills.

Combat is the other area where Resonance deviates from its Brave Exvius roots. The often chaotic hybrid of turn-based, menu-driven, and tap-to-act combat that the mobile game offered has been completely replaced with a turn-based battle that feels like a hybrid of Persona, Octopath Traveler, and Final Fantasy XIII. 

Enemies have two meters attached to them: a health meter and a stagger meter. Smacking a foe with weaponry or magic depletes health, but it also reduces their stagger bar. The amount of stagger damage you do varies depending on your stats, various buffs, what sort of techniques were used, and so on. Enemies also generally have one (or more) weaknesses, and hitting that weakness deals both increased health damage and significantly boosted stagger damage.

Staggering enemies is important, because not only does it cancel all of their upcoming actions for that round of combat, it also greatly lowers their defense, leaving them open to a world of hurt from your highest-level techniques. The character who triggered the stagger also gets a bonus action at the end of the combat round. If you manage to put all the enemies onfield into stagger, you get the Sweeping Stagger status, which gives your entire party bonus turns, as well as lets you use the ultimate technique of one of the Visions your team has equipped to finish the round. If any enemy managed to survive the round, their stagger meter resets, and the cycle begins again. The benefits of staggering enemies are immense, making it essential to figure out how best to put enemies into stagger (almost always through hitting weaknesses) while keeping your own team safe from their attacks.

It's an interesting combat setup, which is why it's so frustrating when battles become slow-paced slogs. Even sped up, you'll run into fights that take their sweet time, since enemies frequently have high HP--more or less requiring you to stagger them to deal any real damage. (There's no auto-battle option, either.) I understand wanting players to engage with the mechanics, but combined with battles being unavoidable random encounters, it means you're often stuck just menuing through to hit all the weaknesses and hoping it's enough for the Sweeping Stagger so you can summon a Vision to wipe the board clean and move on. 

Compounding this issue is that a decent chunk of encounters simply aren't very interesting. Fights with interesting gimmicks that force you to change up the base strategy of "target stagger bar, heal when needed, then use high-cost high-damage skills during stagger, repeat" are rare, and many of them tend to be optional or late-game encounters. Those encounters are great, and they show the kind of strategic challenge that the combat system is capable of delivering. More often, though, Resonance would rather give you damage-sponge enemies that require little more strategy than patiently poking their weakness over and over again--which means that unknowingly entering certain fights without those skills is a recipe for tedium, since you can't swap Visions or party members mid-fight. (At least you can reload a save from combat.)

But for Resonance's faults, the game otherwise delivered exactly what I wanted--a way for everyone to experience the story, characters, and world of Brave Exvius once again. I can only hope that this is the first step in Square-Enix reviving some of its shuttered mobile games in ways that keep them playable for the future--especially since there's still a lot of story from Brave Exvius that goes beyond the events of this game. As both a remake and a standalone experience, Final Fantasy Resonance shines more than it stumbles.

In 2019, Infinity Ward rebooted Call of Duty's Modern Warfare series, delivering a gritty and polished campaign featuring Captain Price and the assembly of the iconic Task Force 141. Despite the strong start, the series' sequels stumbled a bit, with  Modern Warfare 3 in particular standing out as having a weak story and open-world missions that missed the mark. But with Modern Warfare 4, Infinity Ward returns the series' campaign to strength with a satisfying narrative and well-crafted missions for an epic conclusion to the rebooted series.

Modern Warfare 4's single-player goes back to being a traditional and mostly linear experience that some recent entries have strayed from. There is only one open-world mission this year, and it is far more engaging than the previous attempts. Modern Warfare 4 doesn't introduce anything new or innovative, but it finds success with a consistently strong narrative and engaging gameplay built on nail-biting tension. Thankfully, you're never forced into any mission objectives that feel like silly chores or ill-timed distractions. Every mission in Modern Warfare 4 carries urgency and drives the plot forward.

That plot closes out the ongoing narrative surrounding Price and Task Force 141, but it also takes Call of Duty to Korea and introduces a fresh new cast of characters. The campaign intertwines two seemingly separate stories for an over-the-top, globetrotting affair across New York City, Paris, and Mumbai, in addition to several parts of Korea. This is the explosive Hollywood-style action you'd expect from a Call of Duty campaign at a quality level we haven't seen from the franchise in years--that includes the recent Black Ops entries.

One half of the game places you in the boots of Private Park, a young South Korean soldier, who has never experienced real combat before. Private Park and his squad are forced to fight back to save their country when North Korea launches an invasion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuzBlGUDxx4

The other half of the campaign follows the events of Modern Warfare 3 and the aftermath of John "Soap" MacTavish's death. In Modern Warfare 4, Captain Price is in a much darker place, going rogue to hunt down Makarov and also tie up any other loose ends with the villain's associates.

This new outlaw version of Price ties back to one of the most-telling quotes of Modern Warfare 2019, where he lays out his ethos on where the lines in war are."You draw the line wherever you need it, Sergeant," Price says. "End of the day, someone has to make the enemy scared of the dark. We get dirty and the world stays clean. That's the mission."

That line is seemingly in a place no one could have foreseen, as Price is furious and more willing than ever to get his hands dirty in pursuit of making everyone allied with Makarov scared of the dark. Being on the run leaves Price with very few allies, though. In a desperate attempt to reach the Archer (Mads Mikkelsen), who is another threat linked to Makarov, Price makes a deal with Valeria Garza and the cartel.

Price hasn't turned into a complete monster, but the cartel don't mind blasting through civilians in order to achieve their mission. This team-up makes for chaotic gunfights through Paris and engaging banter between the characters. Price is constantly trying to look out for civilians and wants to minimize the collateral damage, but Valeria just comically taunts him, calling him Papi and old man, as she operates with less strict rules. The extent to which Price is a contrast to Valeria becomes a key part of the story. After a chase scene where they commit a particularly brutal act of violence, Valeria tells Price that "he's still a good guy," but she is a notorious cartel leader trying to get paid for delivering a weapon to the bad guy, so how much weight can her words really carry?

Price's cartel team-up also leads him to realize this weapon delivery is dangerous enough to shift the balance of power, setting in motion a much greater conflict. To make matters worse, Price also has a target on his back as the remaining members of his Task Force 141 team, Simon "Ghost" Riley and Kyle "Gaz" Garrick, are sent to capture or kill him.

This manhunt for Price leads to a standout mission called Gone Dark, where your POV switches to Gaz as he hunts Price inside of a dark hotel. At the start of the series, Captain Price served as a mentor and moral compass for Gaz, so there's a lot of emotional weight to the mission as Gaz, and the player, see just how far Price has fallen from a clearer third-party perspective. There are shocking moments and intense exchanges between the now fractured members of Task Force 141 that leverage the squad's long history effectively. There's an emotional pull throughout the mission, as Price begs Ghost and Gaz to back off, and a bigger gut punch when Price says he doesn't want to kill them, but implies he will. These moments really nail down how Price's moral compass has broken. The events of Gone Dark also set up a powerful moment in a later mission to bring the series full circle in a way I appreciated.

The Korean invasion intertwines with Price's epic revenge tour, causing the new South Korean squad and US forces to team up. Although that may seem overwhelming, even with these shifting POVs and a non-chronological story, the narrative flows well from mission to mission, keeping things moving at a good clip through stealth missions, on-foot and vehicular chase sequences, slow-motion breach-and-clear segments, and even some satisfying action of manning a chopper gunner. There's also a Clean House-style mission with night-vision goggles, where you need to clear rooms with extreme trigger discipline to avoid shooting any civilians. 

Modern Warfare 4

Although the missions are a mostly familiar affair, they remain effective Call of Duty staples and the  campaign as a whole had me on the edge of my seat throughout. It doesn't necessarily do anything better than some of Call of Duty's most notable other campaigns, but it's proof that, for me, the series doesn't need to reinvent the wheel to produce a thrilling single-player experience. In this instance, having a strong narrative and compelling characters carried me through the missions. Whether I was playing as Park or Price, I always felt the weight of my actions.

The game's only open-world mission is called Stranded, and this is definitely one of Call of Duty's best attempts at a fully open-world mission. You play as Park, who is stranded behind enemy lines with his squad in a snowy and mountainous setting in Korea. Park needs to scavenge supplies to bring back to his squad, and there are three main objectives on the map. You can choose to complete these objectives in any order, but more notably, you can fast travel directly to each one and bypass the entire scavenging and exploration part of the mission. Doing this means you won't have the best guns and gear to complete your objectives, and it will mostly feel like you're navigating through a standard mission instead of going through a vast open-world experience you may not be interested in.

If you choose to explore in Stranded, there are bags of supplies to scavenge all around the map, and there are sealed shipping containers with combination lock puzzles you can solve to secure even more loot. The supplies you bring back to your squad can be used to repair suppressed weapons, craft lethal equipment, or utilize a mortar strike to help get the objectives done with more firepower or stealth, depending on your preferred playstyle. While I'm relieved the entire campaign isn't built on open exploration, there was an allure to the optional scavenging for weapon upgrades in Stranded. By undertaking a little of it, I looted enough supplies to secure Park a suppressed sniper rifle that proved its worth later. But for the sake of time, I fast traveled to my objectives with little consequence, calling into question the value of even having the option. At the very least, the open section introduces a replayability factor, for those that want it.

Modern Warfare 4 emphasizes boss-fight-style encounters where you only have your fists or a knife equipped and go toe-to-toe with an opponent. In these scenarios, of which there are a few, timing your blocks is critical, allowing you to parry and counter with hits of your own. Admittedly, these aren't overly complex fights, but they serve as a good way to mix things up and each one adds just the right amount of tension to the scenario and the campaign overall, especially when they tie into the competing ideologies that character dynamics are built on.

Modern Warfare 4

Modern Warfare 4 also keeps the optional dialogue prompts introduced in Modern Warfare 2, which allow you to ask your fellow soldiers questions or make small talk. You can choose to say nothing, but the banter usually adds a small layer of depth to the supporting characters and sometimes lightens the mood after an intense mission. It's a small amount of agency in what is essentially a rollercoaster that is appreciated, even if it doesn't really amount to anything deeper.

One mission places you in the boots of a high-ranked North Korean soldier who doesn't always agree with the orders he's given. This part of the story is a harrowing mission filled with public executions, but it does make use of the dialogue prompts as you walk around interrogating civilians, providing the opportunity to define the demeanour of the character a little more. The conversation prompts let you choose how to approach many situations. You can intimidate or try to calm people with the dialogue prompts you're given, but you can also just pull out your gun and threaten them with action instead of words. These small interactions don't impact the overall story and oftentimes your actions are fruitless, but it's good to have the option to choose empathy when dealing with civilians. Ultimately, this mission also does a good job of showing the ruthless nature of this North Korean threat, and how many soldiers will still blindly follow their orders.

While I'm more emotionally invested in the Task Force 141 storyline, I still enjoyed all of the missions focused on the South Korean squad. Park is forced into the military through conscription, so being a soldier wasn't a choice or an act of valor. Initially, it seems like he doesn't want to be a soldier at all, but when war hits his doorstep, he still tries to push back his fear and make the best decisions he can to protect his people. Park also provides a nice moral balance to Price's side of the campaign, where nothing matters except his thirst for revenge.

Despite the campaign otherwise being a blast, the final "boss fights" of the game are a major disappointment. Neither fight feels particularly challenging, and they feel too brief for the climactic moments, but the way the story concludes is satisfying all the same.

Overall, Modern Warfare 4 wraps up the series with several shocking moments and ends on a high note. The pacing never falters despite the two interwoven storylines and alternating POVs, and the wide variety of missions and locations ensure that the story remains engaging. Modern Warfare 4 is another edge-of-the-seat thrill ride. What distinguishes its campaign from others is a feeling that the devs had more time to think through the experience to create something that can serve as a worthy conclusion for the Modern Warfare series. Because of that, Modern Warfare 4's campaign ranks as the best we've seen since Modern Warfare 2019.

Street Fighter has long been more than just a fighting game. It’s impossible to discuss the most popular video game characters of all time without mentioning Chun-Li, Ryu, or Ken. For many of us, it shaped our '90s childhood at the arcade and served as our introduction to the fighting-game genre. It also has inspired multiple movies, comic books, an anime series and manga, on top of endless collaborations with other fighting game and comic book franchises.

Street Fighter's massive popularity is also a curse when it comes to live-action video game adaptations: 1994's Street Fighter and 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li were poorly received, despite both films having big budgets and being hyped among fans. The franchise failing twice as live-action films was an embarrassment to Capcom, so it's no surprise fans would be concerned about a third attempt at creating a decent live-action film.

When Kitao Sakurai was announced as the Street Fighter director, fans were both excited and concerned about him taking reins due to a history of working closely with Eric Andre. There was hope though, especially with the positive reception of a few other video game adaptations in the last few years: Perhaps the experience of Andre’s eccentric style of comedy could mean a more unconventional approach, similar to Zach Cregger’s approach with Resident Evil? Maybe the casting mix of Andre, pro wrestlers, martial artists, and, for some reason, podcaster Andrew Schulz could produce a very chaotic live-action comedy? Unfortunately, the questions around the movie's identity are ultimately what hurt the adaptation the most because, even with  cartoonish action and plenty of attempts at humor, this Street Fighter movie doesn't really figure out what it is. 

As with many other adaptations of Street Fighter, Ken is rich and famous, but he is also a shell of the fighter he once was--Ryu's absence has clearly taken its toll. Noah Centineo encapsulates Ken’s flashy personality and inflated ego excellently, while showcasing his more fragile and sensitive side as he reminisces about his past life with Ryu. Meanwhile, Ryu is now living in the shadows as a homeless ramen chef. Andrew Koji as Ryu is also fantastic casting: His serious and noble demeanor, even when it comes to making terrible ramen, feels natural. The first act of Street Fighter is engaging thanks to its focus on Ken and Ryu’s relationship. Their individual personality quirks should have set the tone for the rest of the film, but sadly it starts to have an identity crisis when it transitions to the main plot.

Don’t get me wrong--there are still many aspects of the film that capture the essence of the Street Fighter games: vibrant and thrilling fight scenes, cheesy dialogue, and some initially questionable casting choices that finally make sense after seeing the movie, especially Noah Centineo's Ken Masters. Street Fighter also immediately captivates you. Shortly after the Capcom logo hypes up the audience, the film transitions to a beautifully animated sequence that highlights the deep bond between Ryu and Ken. The animated sequences are the best Street Fighter has ever looked on screen, and luckily these scenes become a staple throughout the film to highlight the history between the two young fighters.

Once the opening credits are over, the film continues to learn into '90s nostalgia with cool environments and oddly endearing comedic moments, as it depicts Ken living his life in 1993 without Ryu, his childhood rival and sworn brother who has been missing for years. Ken and Ryu’s last moment together was witnessing the death of their master, Gouken, by the deity Akuma, who was awakened by Ryu’s powers in the first World Warrior Tournament. Haunted by the death of their mentor and blaming himself for causing it, Ryu has disappeared from the fighting world.

As with other movies based on fighting games, Street Fighter is in a rush to reach its core goal: Get Ryu and all the iconic characters to battle in the World Warrior Tournament. The rush never fully allows the audience to absorb the other characters and environment. This flaw could have been balanced with the proper tone and character focus, but Street Fighter fails to do so, doing the cast a disservice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6sbm1OaJb8&t=1s

The biggest letdown is the dialogue, as the humor is inconsistent and the movie never fully understands its own tone. Some characters, like Chun-Li and Dan Hibiki, don't fully commit to their personalities, either. Perhaps it’s the juvenile scripting or a casting issue, but either way, it felt like I was watching amateur actors in poor cosplay rather than seeing well-realized versions of these characters coming to life on screen. At first, the cringeworthy interactions got a few laughs out of me and had some very minor endearing moments, but it tries too hard to keep that comedic momentum going and fails miserably. The film forces you to accept bad writing and performances to drive it forward instead of allowing any of the interactions to feel natural.

Chun-Li’s character was the most disappointing to me. Her tragic backstory of avenging her father is already canon, which should’ve made it easier to adapt into a decent side plot with the right amount of tweaking, but instead she is incredibly flat and never fully fleshed out. Actor Callina Liang seems bored and uncomfortable throughout the entire film, even during her intense interactions with M. Bison and minor action moments. The writing and odd directional choices cater to the male gaze, making it obvious she was lazily written by a man. As one of the most capable and badass female characters in gaming, Chun-Li and, by extension, Callina Liang deserved better, and so did the fans.

The dumbfounding casting and scripting choice for this film was Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki. When Street Fighter was first announced, there was an immense amount of backlash for the casting of Andrew Schulz--a controversial podcaster and stand-up comedian. I could go on about the drama surrounding Schulz’s audience, his racism, hot takes, comedic style, etc., but for the sake of our collective sanity, I'll just say  his inability to portray  Dan’s character with any competency is yet another reason to question why he has any involvement in the production.

In Street Fighter canon, Dan is often portrayed as cocky and arrogant, while also being a bit inept as a fighter, yet in the movie his characterization is unclear--is he slimy or charismatic? Is he supposed to crack jokes, or just be an awkward friend? It’s also very odd how prevalent Dan is throughout the film, especially since he is without an arc or story to justify his frequent presence. The movie tries to sell you on a bond between Dan and Ken, but it’s a very uncomfortable friendship that never seems realistic or entertaining. The one vulnerable moment between them is immediately ruined by a weirdly homophobic joke--which, sadly, the film has a few of--and it comes off unsettlingly. In general, Dan and his casting are flat and uninspiring.

The initial joy of '90s nostalgia also wears off pretty quickly. It was certainly a welcome choice to have '90s hits like Montell Jordan’s “This is How We Do It” and 4 Non Blondes’ "What's Up?” feature on the soundtrack, but the movie goes on to then disregard the era the movie takes place in by blasting “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” a song that came out in 2000. While the film still remains pretty colorful, the lack of commitment to being period accurate undermines the vibe frequently.

The only aspect of Street Fighter that maintains a consistent quality is the fight choreography. This film is not afraid to embrace the cartoony vibes and reference unique movesets: hurricane kicks left and right, the iconic Hadoken, Blanka’s Electric Thunders, Zangief’s spinning piledriver, and a few more are sprinkled throughout each fight. Although the action was a little more limited due to the PG-13 rating, I was still impressed with the over-the-top stunts and tonally varied fights--silly spats with gags, a John Wick-style club brawl, and a few unique 1v1 battles that closely resemble what you would see in a Street Fighter game.

It’s also disappointing that a movie called Street Fighter fails to use its tournament structure for more individual fights between side characters. I would’ve loved to see Guile bust out some Sonic moves, or M. Bison doing anything other than complaining he needs more psycho power, but the film attempts to make up for it with a mix of impressive martial arts and campy action sequences elsewhere. Despite a PG-13 rating that limits the level of violence, the choreography team does fantastic work nevertheless. I just wish it had more Street Fighter style fights with different characters instead of being overshadowed by the goofy brawls you see in typical martial arts films.

Street Fighter is full of goofy action, colorful shots, and gorgeous animated sequences that focus on the bond between Ryu and Ken. It’s entertaining for some silly, mindless fun, but also a very messy movie that never quite figures out its tone and fails to sell you on its plot or characters. This is the best Street Fighter live action we have as far though, but unfortunately that's not an accolade worth bragging about.

When playing Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, I couldn't stop thinking about Symphony of the Night. Almost 30 years ago, that game reinvented Castlevania as a search-action game, and did it so brilliantly that it earned half of the "metroidvania" portmanteau. Belmont's Curse does not attempt such a dramatic shift. It doesn't change genres or reinvent the series as something entirely new. What it does, however, is achieve a brilliant synthesis, with every component operating at peak performance to deliver a new high for the series. Castlevania is back, and it is fantastic.

Put simply, Belmont's Curse is the total package. A sprawling map bursting with mysteries to uncover, joyous traversal tools that make roaming the map feel great, a story that balances a macabre tone with occasional lightness, a cast of creative and well-drawn characters, and hands-down the best combat of any Castlevania game--in fact, among the best combat of any 2D action game, period.

What makes all of these synergize so well is the addition of the tarot cards, which serve as an elegant way to fuse the game's disparate elements, and makes them all feel like part of one cohesive whole. At different points your tarot deck serves as mission signposting, environmental puzzles, pieces of story lore, characters to serve as dialogue for Rose, boss locations, and ultimately, your pool of spells.

You play as Rose Belmont, daughter of Trevor Belmont, who has trained her whole life as the successor of the Belmont clan. Though silver-maned Trevor is still a capable fighter, Rose volunteers to investigate the otherworldly happenings in Paris, France, eager to prove herself worthy of the family name. But Rose is also afflicted with a cursed red mark on one arm, making her dangerously instrumental to the machinations of Dracula and his armies. 

The tarot deck is a set of magical cards gifted to Rose by her late mother, Sypha, who passed on the curse to her at birth. Each card represents a follower of Dracula, with honorific names like The Fallen, The Warrior, or The Builder. As you explore the castle you find clues that reveal story details and hints about how to find them, often both simultaneously, and they each have their own roles in Dracula's royal court. When Dracula's castle emerges in the heart of Paris--as you obviously knew it would, this is a Castlevania game, after all--the full deck is revealed, putting the complete array of monsters in your sights. Once you've tracked down and defeated one of Dracula's servants, their tarot card becomes an Arcana you can use as a spell, which then opens its own flexible progression system. It may sound complex, but the system is actually an ingenious way to merge different gameplay elements and make them all feel digestible and cohesive.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

As an example, take the first boss, The Fallen. Finding him is a relatively simple task, given that it's meant to serve as a basic primer for finding clues and navigating the winding streets of Paris. When you defeat him, you absorb his Arcana, which grants you two important tools: a recognizable boomerang axe spell, and an arcane whip that allows you to grab onto grapple points to reach new locations. But this new traversal tool is also a combat tool, since the same function can grab onto any enemy; a well-timed strike while grappling toward the enemy can then do serious damage. Then on top of that, the combat tool itself can also be used for traversal, as enemies flying midair can help you reach distant platforms, as long as you can grapple onto them. It all harmonizes beautifully, and exemplifies Belmont's Curse as a whole--abundant with mechanics that complement and fold into others in surprising ways.

Dracula's legion of followers also serve another purpose, as being captured forces them into the tarot where they occupy a mindspace for Rose to speak with. This ultimately gives her characters to bounce off of for story purposes, but the characters are also well differentiated from each other. The Fallen is a gruff creature that comes to feel protective of Rose, whereas Medusa, even imprisoned in Rose's deck, is unsubtly rooting for her to fail and constantly trying to trick her into making moves that will further her master's plans. Lots of characters you find throughout have their own agendas and rivalries, and are often at cross-purposes with Rose or each other, adding a compelling dynamic as they all bicker inside of your head. The regular addition of characters in your deck means that any of them could interject in dialogue to offer some commentary--though the core cast, so to speak, remains the first three that you find. 

One drawback of having such a dynamic cast of characters is that the protagonist, Rose, is less interesting by comparison. She's a determined heroine archetype and remains that way throughout. She is a central point of gravity for all of the other characters to orbit around, and works on that level, but I do wish she had more agency herself. She is deadset on her mission from start to finish, and not much more. 

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

Each Arcana spell also comes with a set of three objectives to complete, called Works of Mercy. These can be as simple as defeating a set number of enemies with the relevant spell, but often are more complex to incentivize exploration or experimentation. One notable objective for The Warrior rewards you for finding a particular location, which works thematically with that character's story. One of Medusa's has you petrify an enemy carrying a shield, a reference to the myth of Perseus. Your reward for completing these is opening a node to choose one of three power-ups for the spell; once you've completed all three, you're rewarded with extra dialogue from the Arcana character. 

And so you explore the streets and undercity of Paris along with Dracula's castle in freeform fashion, an open structure lightly guides you toward critical objectives for unlocking new equipment that you need to reach other corners and layers of the world. If you're ever stuck you can refer to your tarot deck for clues that you may not have thought about for a while. The environmental puzzles add just enough brain-tickling challenge to make you observe carefully and think through the clues, without grinding your progress to a halt. And the ability to track down enemies and steal their powers makes for a compelling loop that reminded me of one of my favorite series: Mega Man. I was always eager to take down the next boss and see how they would augment my combat and traversal abilities. 

Combat is where you can truly see the expertise of developer Evil Empire shine through the most, as its expertise from Dead Cells transfers beautifully to this franchise. Your strikes across the wide variety of weapon types feel forceful and kinetic, and each weapon type has its own advantages and special charged ability. Your basic longsword is well balanced and lets you dash through enemies, while the whip has long reach but only the tip strikes with its full power. I found I favored the lance, with its versatility of long reach as a handheld weapon or the ability to throw it as a projectile, and ultimately stuck with it for a long time even after finding other weapons at higher levels. There are four weapons each across seven type categories, so the seven weapon types offer loads of room for experimentation to dial in on the one you like best, or just swapping situationally.

What makes the combat transcendant, though, is the addition of a parry. This is new ground for a Castlevania game, but it also works differently than the parry I've seen in many other games. As a holy shield gained from your second boss encounter, it works independently of your regular strikes. It doesn't interrupt your attacks, and by default the attack button is mapped to a face button while the parry is mapped to the left trigger. That means you can be attacking while also parrying your opponent's attack, making combat a lightning fast series of choices that puts you on offense and defense simultaneously. As someone who has struggled with many parry systems and never quite got into them in other games, this one made a believer out of me. It just feels so good to wail on an enemy, parry a projectile from behind, and then grapple over to finish them off. Belmont's Curse is full of moments like this, as practically every room you enter is occupied by enemies, and frequent forced combat encounters test your mettle against mixtures of them. 

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

This is not to say combat is easy. Far from it. The cursed streets of Paris and Dracula's castle are littered with monsters and ghouls familiar to Castlevania fans, reimagined for this combat style, and Rose is very vulnerable. It's easy to die even in regular combat encounters, and boss fights take a good bit of pattern recognition to learn tells before you can successfully fend them off. But the combat is so fine-tuned that you constantly feel in control and recognize what you did wrong. Very occasionally the screen would be so full of enemy attacks I missed a parry window because it was hard to read all the visual information at once, but it was rare enough not to detract from the overall experience. Similarly, navigating extended gauntlets of traps can be trying, but they always feel satisfying to complete, and you're rewarded with items like ability-augmenting Relics or further clues for your tarot deck.

If combat or traps give you trouble, Belmont's Curse adds a few quality-of-life features and options to ease your growth. For one, you keep all the XP earned during your runbacks to bosses, so even if you have to try a boss multiple times, you're still leveling up and gaining power on the way. You can also turn on the Custom Mode to tweak options like setting a checkpoint right in front of boss doors, boosting your damage output, reducing the damage from traps, and more. There doesn't seem to be any cost to using this system, and you can turn it on or off as you'd like. The one element missing, for good reason, are any extra navigational tools to find your way. It's clear that Evil Empire doesn't mind giving you a leg up on reflex-based challenges, but it still wants you to think through puzzles and explore to uncover secrets.

Belmont's Curse also has some of the most inventive bosses I've seen in the series history. One notable boss twice escaped to a different section, introducing a difficult platforming challenge in the middle of the fight to continue it. Another hexes you with a sigil indicating the number of hits you can take before you simply die, forcing you to minimize strikes on you even if you have plenty of healing items to prevent dying outright. Even after 20 hours there are many other bosses in my deck I have yet to find, and I'm eager to see what else Castlevania has to offer. 

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

Exploring the castle is a visual delight, because Belmont's Curse is gorgeous. Far from a gray-soaked castle, Evil Empire has leaned into its house art style of vivid, saturated hues and unexpected color palettes. The approach to Dracula's castle, in which Rose and all of the enemies are silhouetted against the pink-red color tone of a burning Paris behind them, is one of the most visually arresting moments I've seen in a game lately. The character designs themselves are distinct and creative, like Carmilla, a hemomancer whose slinky red gown is made of dripping blood. I could go on and on, but I'll let you discover them for yourself. Plus as you explore you get treated to new renditions of classic Castlevania music alongside new tunes that fit right into its milieu. 

Every element in Castlevania: Belmont's Curse works so well both independently and as part of the whole: flexible combat, beautifully acrobatic traversal, fine-tuned environmental puzzles, wide cast of interesting characters, and eye-catching visual panache--all wrapped within a smart tarot system that lets these ideas complement each other. Belmont's Curse feels destined to be regarded alongside Symphony of the Night as one of the best Castlevania games, and one of the best metroidvania games, of all time. 

The soulslike genre has been around long enough now that it's easy to pick out its most recognizable traits. Whether it's managing stamina in combat, the risk of losing progression with each death, health items and enemies that respawn when you reach a bonfire, lantern, or some other recognizable checkpoint; all of the best in the genre adapt these in their own distinct ways. 

Valor Mortis is no different, but attempts to stand out through its shift in perspective. By moving the action to a first-person view, Valor Mortis affords itself novelty, which works well with snappy and satisfying combat that rewards deft parries and patience in equal measure. But it's also marred by a weak story and sluggishly paced opening hours that betray the more captivating moments in its second half, where Valor Mortis' most interesting narrative beats and combat encounters finally deliver on some of the potential you can see being established in the hours prior.

You play as William Dowsett, a very British-sounding member of Napoleon's army who returns from the dead only to find former allies taken over by corruption sweeping across Europe. The corruption has twisted people; large red boils replace the heads of riflemen, infantrymen have their spines snapped as they are transformed into grotesque and rabid attack dogs, and piles of bodies have become living masses of flesh that slowly crawl toward you when you least expect it. It's a familiar world that has been transformed into a nightmare for William as he attempts to reconnect with missing comrades and understand how the war has found itself in this state, leading him to answers that will likely be far less surprising for you as a player.

Valor Mortis' story is frustratingly straightforward, and wastes a setting so rarely used in action games. William's slow realization that the war he's been waging on behalf of the bloodthirsty Napoleon Bonaparte might not be as noble as he assumed is annoyingly drawn out for how predictable it is. It's hard to get invested with a main character who has little more going for him than verbalizing his disgust over the consequences of a war he so recently was proud to be a part of, blissfully ignorant to the horrors he was unleashing on innocent citizens along the way. Conversations with the game's supporting cast don't help either, with none making a lasting impression. 

Once Valor Mortis starts exploring the villages and cities besieged by Bonaparte and his corrupted forces, there are more compelling stories to discover. You'll come across brief echoes that capture fleeting conversations from the past, distilling short but often heartbreaking stories. They effectively convey the desperation some civilians endured when faced with a foreign, oppressive force taking over their day-to-day lives. There's an entire city filled with orphans who scurry around underground tunnels, and another nearly entirely underwater after a heinous war crime extinguished a rebellion without care for civilian casualties. They're effective at contextualizing why so much of the world around you is desolate and broken without having to see those events play out, and they do a great job of making you hate an antagonist you'll hardly ever see.

It's frustrating that it takes a while to get here, however, with many of Valor Mortis' opening hours taking place across battlefields that, while twisted by the corruption around them, ultimately blend together in forgettable ways. These areas are almost strictly linear, with clear paths from beginning to end and only slight detours to explore. Around the halfway mark, this monotonous world design flips around entirely--you move from abandoned villages to burning cities and down into labyrinthine catacombs beneath an eerily empty university. These spaces feel more like small hubs, with smart shortcuts back to resting points (represented here as lanterns, which restock your healing vials and respawn enemies as you might expect) that make them feel more carefully considered in comparison to the opening hours.

Valor Mortis' combat is where it takes its biggest swings. Its shift to a first-person perspective is the most immediate and distinct change from typical soulslikes, but its split between melee and ranged combat and multiple weapon options are equally impactful. It is still all about crowd and stamina control, as well as a familiar reliance on parries, too. The tighter field of view makes it important to intelligently choose which enemies to engage and when, though off-screen markers  help alleviate potential frustrations the perspective change would otherwise introduce. Melee combat is fast and responsive, with parries being especially satisfying to pull off given the tight windows that make many duels, especially those against bosses, exhilarating. I rarely tired of hearing the sound cues of a critical attack, be it from a stealth attack or through breaking their posture, accompanied by violent, contextual executions that varied based on the weapons I had equipped. Ranged combat is given a greater emphasis than most other soulslike games too, and you'll routinely be challenged to pick off enemies from afar while juggling those within striking distance. 

"By moving the action to a first-person view, Valor Mortis affords itself novelty, which works well with snappy and satisfying combat that rewards deft parries and patience in equal measure"

There is a range of offensive weapons and abilities on offer, each of which is introduced as you progress through the story. Included are three types of swords: a rapier that excels at parries and building posture damage, a two-handed claymore that forgoes parries entirely in favor of slow, powerful, and magically imbued attacks, and a well-rounded saber that balances damage and posture damage. Firearms are similarly varied, with a quick-firing pistol, a slow but powerful blunderbuss that's devastating at close range, and a two-handed musket that's great for picking off enemies from afar. You're also granted three transmutations, or magical abilities, which allow you to hurl fire at enemies, freeze them with stasis, or absorb and reflect their damage back at them, as well as the ability to wall-run (which feels just as good as it did in developer One More Level's Ghostrunner series).

Each of these weapons and abilities feature its own upgrade trees, with specific materials required to unlock each sequential node. I ended up finding enough materials to nearly max out each upgrade tree without specifically hunting for them, which allowed me the freedom to experiment with each one without having to commit to specific configurations. This seems by design, given that you'll always have one sword equipped in your main hand and either a firearm or spell in your off hand, similar to Dishonored or BioShock 2, as well as the ability to swap either one at any time.

Despite the freedom of choice, I was surprised by how little I swapped between the various options, especially when it came to both swords and magical abilities. The saber, which is the first weapon you're given, fulfilled my needs so perfectly that I only briefly dabbled with both the rapier and claymore before changing back. The rapier's slightly additional posture damage never made up for its inability to block attacks without perfect parries, and the claymore is introduced so late and is incapable of performing parries entirely, stripping out one of the most satisfying elements of the entire combat loop. 

The same goes for the three transmutations, as I found myself mostly sticking to fire given its effectiveness against most enemies. Building up enough stasis on enemies consumed more nephtoglobin, or mana, than it seemed worthwhile, and the act of absorbing and returning damage with the third ability always felt more clunky in practice and less effective than just sticking to the far more satisfying parrying mechanic. These two other abilities are utilized more often in environmental puzzles, though these are predominantly used to initially explain how the abilities work. They go mostly ignored afterward, annoyingly not building on the gameplay design introduced early on.

Enemy variety is partly to blame. Valor Mortis features a relatively shallow pool of foes and takes a long time to start combining them in ways that make you consider how to approach a fight in specific ways. You'll be fighting the same slow-moving and weak infantryman in your first and last hours of the game, which saps some of the satisfaction out of the combat when you're pulling off the same parries against the same attacks for hours on end. In a similar fashion to the level design, this starts resolving itself when you have the full complement of weapons and abilities at your disposal, at which point enemy combinations and slight variations start becoming more abundant. With the added benefit of more open spaces to explore and more opportunities to deliver surprises with enemy placements, Valor Mortis' combat eventually starts to shine. It's just a pity that it takes some time to get there.

That might be a blessing or a curse depending on what you're coming to Valor Mortis for, but it has a noticeable knock-on effect that's difficult to ignore. Runbacks after death were far less tense because of how familiar and, in many cases, sparse enemies were. Character progression, which is governed by an upgrade tree with no branching paths to commit to, didn't drastically change the way I played, instead just giving me a means to buff my attributes to keep up with the escalating damage and health pools of enemies. I was rarely seeking out a specific upgrade to help deal with new foes because I had become accustomed to fighting the same ones over and over again. Thankfully boss fights offered some reprieve to this, as they tend to feature a good variety of enemies, large and lumbering to small and nimble, that inject the combat with a sense of challenge and tension. 

There are many other elements outside of combat, too, that only start to really click closer to the game's climax. Early stages are so preoccupied with introducing you to new weapons and abilities and providing you with spaces to learn each one of them that they feel disjointed and unfocused. At one point you're taking out distant groups of enemies conveniently placed next to explosive barrels to showcase the effectiveness of your new musket, and at another you're engaging in a long platforming sequence where you need to string together wall runs and grapples while maintaining pace with a moving cart through a mine shaft. Ultimately, all these issues stem from a lack of restraint; There are too many disparate ideas that feel at odds with the best aspect of Valor Mortis, making it feel directionless at times.

Valor Mortis betrays the heights it reaches in its second half. Its first-person combat is snappy and satisfying, but the limited enemy pool, underutilized weapons and abilities, and lack of consistent challenge ultimately prevent it from shining. And while this historical period is novel to explore with a dark, supernatural twist, it doesn't play host to a wider, captivating story, and is only salvaged by smaller, emotionally charged vignettes that effectively convey the consequences of a war that its protagonist so naively comes to terms with. There are the bones of a great game here--one that would benefit from a tighter focus on its engaging first-person combat and a trimming of the superfluous mechanics that detract from the ones that work. Instead, it's an uneven experience that delights as much as it disappoints.

Capcom choosing the exact same subtitle for two separate expansions in two different games makes a lot of sense. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is not only a thematically relevant title, but thanks to the first game's expansion of the same name, it also conveys to longtime fans what to expect: namely, a new gameplay cycle focused on reworked loot and plenty of dungeon crawling. The key difference this time around is that instead of heading into the labyrinthine depths of a cursed island, you've got an entirely new region to explore.  

As someone who loved Dragon's Dogma 2, I couldn't really ask for much more. Yet changes to some of the game's core systems also dilute what made it so unique when it launched back in 2024. I know it's always been a fairly divisive game, and these changes are intended to make the experience more approachable, but they also strip away some of its magic in an effort to appeal to more people. Dark Arisen is still a great expansion, transporting you to a fascinating new region with more loot to earn, fantastical beasts to slay, and stories to behold, but it also shifts Dragon's Dogma 2 in a slightly different direction. 

To start with, Dark Arisen alleviates some of the game's intentional friction by reducing how often you need to travel on foot. The Eternal Ferrystone was already added to the game a few months ago, letting you freely fast travel to any portcrystal without expending a scarce resource. Those same portcrystals are located at every key location in Dark Arisen's new Norgan region. You still have to reach them on foot first to activate them, but once you do, you can simply teleport from one side of the map to the other. 

Using the Eternal Ferrystone is entirely optional; you can still traverse almost all of Norgan on foot if you desire, so the friction is still there if you want it. However, Dark Arisen also feels designed with unlimited fast travel in mind. The first settlement you come across, for instance, acts as a hub of sorts, letting you manage your gear, rest at the inn, and pick up a fair few side quests, so you're intended to return here often. 

Meanwhile, many quests require you to visit the same locations over and over again to speak with specific characters. Heading off on foot might be an option, but it's never incentivized and feels antithetical to how it wants you to play. 

I'm not a fan of this change. I can acknowledge that giving players more choice is a positive, but the back-and-forth quest design and reliance on fast travel means you never really feel like you have options when traversing Norgan. This has a fairly significant knock-on effect, too: Without embarking on foot more often, I rarely stumbled into the emergent moments that made the base game so thrilling. And without that palpable sense of adventure, Dark Arisen feels less like Dragon's Dogma and more like any number of action-RPGs, rendering this a fundamental change to its identity, rather than an improvement.

When Dragon's Dogma 2 launched, traveling the regions of Vermund and Battahl felt treacherous, especially in the black of night. The world was as hazardous as the enemies you encountered, and campsites provided a welcome respite on your weary travels. Now, those feelings of everpresent danger and welcome safety are mostly gone. There's no risk when you can freely fast travel out of danger or skip a journey entirely. The game's uncompromising design has been softened to broaden its appeal.  

The same goes for changes to its save system. By letting you roll back to a manual "Interim Save" at any time, there's no longer any risk involved in your decision-making. You won't have to live with the consequences of accidentally angering a bunch of guards in Battahl's jail or fret over when to use the Unmaking Arrow. This one-hit-kill item still triggers an autosave as soon as it's fired, creating tension the moment you decide to draw back the bowstring, but the ability to select an earlier save robs it of its finality. If these changes were strictly tied to Dark Arisen, they wouldn't be quite as detrimental. Yet this sanding down of its intentional friction affects the base game, too.

By changing these systems, Capcom has fundamentally altered what made Dragon's Dogma 2 so fantastic. The emergent moments that happened on the road, the interplay between its systems and physics engine, and the need to deal with the consequences of your actions--all of this combined to make the base game an unpredictable and powerful adventure that stood apart from other similar games. I enjoyed its resolute design because it forced me to tackle the world on its own terms, providing a challenge that captured a rousing sense of adventure. I still thoroughly enjoyed Dark Arisen, despite these changes, but there's also this nagging feeling that something's missing.  

Norgan, for its part, has moments where that classic Dragon's Dogma abrasiveness returns. The frigid region offers a nice change of pace from the verdant forests and arid deserts explored previously, with jagged, snow-capped cliffs; frozen rivers; icy tundras; and dilapidated, long-abandoned castles. 

The hyperboreal climate doesn't just provide a visual shift, either; the weather can be both an ally and a foe. Sudden blizzards blanket the screen in heavy snowfall, obscuring your view within a few feet and taking the mini-map out of action. You also can't fast travel during these intense whiteouts, which restores the feeling that you're battling the elements just as much as the ghouls and monsters waiting to ambush you.

On the flip side, you can also use the environment to your advantage, knocking down giant overhead icicles to crush your foes, throwing and skewering them on pointy shards of ice, and rolling boulders downhill that grow larger as they pick up more and more snow. You'll appreciate the extra help when facing down demonic goatmen and abominable snowman-esque monstrosities with gnarly mouths that cover their entire torsos.   

At first glance, Norgan's map might seem fairly small, but there's a sprawling verticality both above and below the surface that hides its true density. New climbing hooks and grapple points have been introduced to help you tackle the elevation changes, while interconnected dungeons and caves reveal shortcuts amid expansive ancient ruins and the piles of loot therein. 

Speaking of which, Dark Arisen entirely reworks the game's loot system with the addition of Relics. You'll unearth this generic gear in chests and on the bodies of defeated enemies, and can then take it to one of the new vendor characters for appraisal, revealing what kind of equipment you've found, its raw stats, and, on occasion, whether it has any special attributes that enhance weapon skills or grant passive abilities. 

This creates a Monster Hunter-esque loop as you explore and defeat powerful foes to gather more Relics, before returning to the appraiser to reveal what you've found and upgrade your character. An unseen dice roll determines the type and quality, and no single piece of gear will remain in use for too long before you'll invariably find something better, but this is still a marked improvement over the base game's uninspired loot system--where I think I purchased more usable weapons and armor than I actually found. 

The base game's map has also received a similar gameplay loop of its own, with the addition of 12 repeatable dungeons known as the Lost Rite Trials. While you can easily travel back and forth between Norgan and Vermund/Battahl, these new dungeons are designed to be tackled before venturing into the snowy north, setting you up with more powerful gear to make the transition easier, with repeat visits netting more and more loot. 

Some of these dungeons are fairly straightforward (reach the end and kill everything along the way), while others rely on different mechanics or require prerequisites before you can enter. One such trial, which asks you to enter as either an Archer or Magick Archer, features rooms filled with support pillars you can shoot down to topple the terrain and wipe out groups of enemies. 

Aside from better gear, completing each Lost Rite Trial nets you an Offering Flame. These can be used at various Obelisks scattered across the frigid Norgan landscape to unlock new vocation skills and stat buffs that boost health, damage, and so on. 

The new skills are welcome, though bumping up the amount of skills you can equip at one time from four to six is a more notable improvement. Having more options at your disposal opens up the game's combat a tad more, and somewhat makes up for the lack of new vocations. As someone who's already maxed out most of the game's classes, though, I realize I might notice the dearth of new ones more than most.

One of the more surprising things about Dark Arisen is how much I enjoyed its self-contained story. Okay, maybe "enjoyed" is the wrong word, but I was definitely more invested in seeing how things would unfold than I was in the base game. It's a solid-enough vehicle for getting you from point A to B, even if it's still just remixing themes from the first game. More characters are involved, and you spend significant time with them, so there's at least something to latch onto. The writing still has little time for subtlety or nuance, but it's appropriately broody, and the story eventually leads you to some fantastic set pieces and locations. 

At over 20 hours long, Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen is the kind of hefty expansion we don't see very often. I might like this softened version of the game a little less than I did before, but even if some of its prickly nature has been smoothed over, Dark Arisen still offers a whole bunch more of what I loved about Dragon's Dogma 2 in the first place. For first-time players, and those returning with new hopes, it's a more approachable game, and I hope this helps it reach a broader audience. Whichever side of the divide you fall on, there's something here for both. That might sound blasphemous to some, and its vision isn't as unflinching as it was once before, but Dark Arisen--and Dragon's Dogma 2 on the whole--are still well worth your time and attention.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a grotesque game. It puts sex and extreme depictions of human mutilation front-and-center in its first-person perspective, and asks you to face it–even stick your hand in it. It's uncompromising in bringing Clive Barker's vision to a level of fidelity that not even the movies could dream of matching. It looks incredible.

While salacious in its nature, it can be easy–even forgiving–to fixate on Hellraiser: Revival for its lurid subject matter and blaze past its more considered themes of desire, abuse, and the darkest realms that linger in the human mind. But beyond the sensation of Revival's violence is a game that dares to be ambitious in both its gameplay and narrative.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival can feel like it's wearing the skin of other games at times. Each of its inspirations feeling like a Frankensteined limb attached to another. But by the end of this horror-action survival game, Revival becomes a beast all its own. Although it stumbles through an identity crisis in the early hours of its 10-hour runtime, it is unabashed in its display of grotesqueness and sexuality, and ascends as a game worth seeing through to the end.

Rooted in Clive Barker's original novella,The Hellbound Heart, and the first two films, Hellraiser: Revival takes place 20 years after the first movie. But don't worry--no prior knowledge of the franchise is required to engage with Revival's story. It focuses on Aidan Lynch and his girlfriend, Sunny–two folks from affluent families whose paths crossed in their joint journey to seek taboo and fringe forms of stimulation, by way of sexual desires and substance abuse. Sunny has a particular taste for collecting occult artifacts and manages to get her hands on the Genesis Configuration: one of the many mystical puzzle boxes that opens a gate to an eldritch realm of a neverending concrete labyrinth hellscape, home of the Cenobites–demon priest-like beings who seek to harvest souls and entrap them in an eternal hell of pain and pleasure.

Aidan, ignorant of the Genesis Configuration's otherworldly powers, uses the cube as a toy to evoke (consensual) pain on Sunny while making love, and in the process, triggers the box to summon the Cenobites, who mutilate Sunny in front of him and drag her away into The Labyrinth. Genesis Configuration in hand, Aidan marches into hell to get Sunny back.

It isn't long until Aidan finds himself at the center of the Scarlet Church, a cult of murderous psychopaths who worship the Cenobites and their god, The Leviathan, and seek ascension to become servants of its power. But on his journey, Aidan is haunted by much more than the terrors of the Cenobites, the monsters the realm produces, and the Scarlet Church itself. His own troubled past and vices, torment him too.

The setup for Revival paves way for myriad gameplay styles and design philosophies, and Revival attempts all of them, with the game's opening hours functioning much like a game-design tasting platter.

As Aidan, you'll find yourself stealth-killing cultists one moment, fighting tooth-and-nail with Condemned-like melee combat the next, and, soon after, shooting a machine gun at a horde of monsters, launching sawblades and performing Doom (2016)-esque glory kills. Oh, and there's Resident Evil 4 inventory management. The good news is that it all feels great, but I could also feel the game straining to pace its gameplay ambitions as it ushered me through scenario after scenario.

Sections often felt like self-contained miniature set pieces of what you'd expect in a Resident Evil-esque mansion, involving exploration and backtracking to find several keys in order to progress. But in Revival's case, most of it is confined to smaller spaces like finding toys for a dominatrix in a sex club in exchange for a key to the VIP lounge, or a literal mini-mansion that saw me unlocking one room at a time, each one revealing a key item to the next location. This scaled-down approach works in favor of the game's linear pacing to keep its narrative going over the game's tight runtime. It also demonstrated a clear understanding of classic RE design in a way that pleased my RE veteran brain.

It's all woven into a loop of stealth and white knuckle gun fights with capable and murderous cultists, until the power dynamic shifts as you face off against hordes of spongey Unworthy (zombie-like monsters). Going toe-to-toe with mobs of Unworthy better showcases the Genesis Configuration by using the environment in battle, along with kiting monsters into booby traps. Or, in later sections of the game, using the Configuration to move giant spinning propeller blades around an arena and turn enemies into mincemeat. 

At first, the Configuration functions much like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2–a device that can pick up and hold items from the environment and launch them as a weapon–albeit much more limited in the items it wields, ranging from saw blades, railroad spikes, and metal propellers, which are more like prescribed opportunities to pick up and use, rather than something as dynamic and freeform as the gravity gun. The saw blade, in particular, calls back to Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, and there's even a severed torso propped up on a saw blade in a wall as a direct nod.

With the Configuration's telekinesis gravity-gun-like ability, you can grab deadly items and launch them at enemies, cutting through a crowd and removing limbs, leaving a few poor saps to crawl your way instead. Eventually the Configuration can absorb fire, allowing you to hurl fireballs; move select structures around to solve puzzles or unleash them as deadly hazards against enemies; and unleash Hellchains, an ultimate ability that wraps a mob of enemies in hooks and rips them to shreds. It rules.

This frequent shift from offensive to methodical gameplay involving stealth and considered shots is not unlike the game's motif of power exchange that's hand-in-hand with BDSM culture. And regardless of the role the game puts you in, it feels good.

Revival offers a lot of tools in a fight, and when played well, can lead to a great synergy of violence. Objects like gas cans can be equipped, allowing me to pour trails of gasoline around an arena, strategizing for a fight I anticipated to come, and lay a trap of my own for unsuspecting cultists. In one case, I Home Alone'd a room with bear traps and gasoline, and the result was a satisfying display of dismembered legs, charred bodies, and used shell casings on the floor.

There are a lot of options, and thank the Leviathan that there's no skill tree or perk system to further complicate it. Combat skills evolve with the narrative's progression, and considering the snappiness of its length, Revival uses The Labyrinth to, once again, shakes things up. The Labyrinth often comes in as pacing speed bumps, shifting the focus away from combat encounters and more on traversal and puzzle-solving, functioning as breathing room between fights (despite being suffocating and claustrophobic in its own right). It adds yet another flavor of horror and gameplay, often introducing chase sequences that utilize Aidan's ability to sprint and slide under spiked chain obstacles.

These parts work in what they're trying to accomplish, but their linearity is so cut-and-dried at times that they feel too literal in their purpose–to slow the player down, or act as routine opportunities to dump exposition on the player to add some color to the Cenobites, explain what they are, and reveal their motivations. 

Like many things in the game, however, the game's clunkiness fades more and more as it progresses, especially as Aidan's world collides with the eldritch realm: the cold stone interweaving with the human world; the once neon BDSM club laced with the grey walls of the suffocating Labyrinth. Worlds mesh, allowing me to see earlier areas now wrapped in chains, flesh, and far-off sights of a fantastical maze. 

Among its many balancing acts is how it weighs its depiction of BDSM culture and kink. The taboo subculture is handled with consideration and care, never blurring the lines between people who part take in fetish practices and the murderous cultists who seek to torture and murder others for pleasure. It's emphasized by posters on the wall about consent and respect, as well as the game's dialogue. In one particular scene, Aidan is corrected by the merchant Zora. Upon entering a BDSM sex club, he claims he needs to get away from these maniacs (referring to the cultists), only for Zora to reply, "Careful now, most of these patrons are innocent maniacs, just yearning for something to satiate their desires." 

Furthermore, Revival's reliance on sex and explicit nudity–while plentiful, especially in the game's early hours–doesn't feel gratuitous. The display of sex is used with deliberate purpose, often to paint an image of those who seek physical desire, or, in Aidan and Sunny's case, to develop their characters as well as their motivations. 

Despite being an action-horror romp, the core of Revival is about the relationship between desires and needs, and it's the crux of Aidan's entire journey to go through hell in order to bring his companion back. But as the story progresses, Aidan's motivations are challenged in the process. "I love her, I need her," he claims to Zora, to which she replies, rather matter-of-factly, "Those are two different things." It's a throughline that anchors his arc from start to finish, and pays off well. 

Aidan is a well-realized character that's teetering on camp, but it's a camp that I welcome. Aidan is in ways something like an Ethan Winters from Resident Evil Biohazard and Village–a joe-schmo tossed into the deep end, who is a regular guy one moment, and then a gun-wielding, machete-slashing, herbalist self-healer the next. The difference between an Aidan and an Ethan is that Aidan's skills are explained, being a medical-school dropout seeking an elevation of life's offerings, by turning to a life of crime and joining a biker gang where he learned to use guns and get in fights. Like I said, it's campy, but I'm all for it. It also works because Aidan's backstory plays a part in his journey through Revival, often using his goody-two-shoes-turned-bad-boy nature to inform how he got here. It's the characterization that made me genuinely care about Aidan, his faults included.

Hellraiser: Revival consistently walks a fine line of never taking itself too seriously, without completely derailing its more serious and touchy themes of abuse, both with drugs and in relationships. Most of that heavy lifting is done by its larger-than-life villains who are eccentric cornballs (welcomed cornballs), especially Bruno, the "artist" whose art is mutilating corpses into absurd spectacles of flesh and bone. Revival is colored with a wide array of varied antagonists, including the leader of the Scarlet Church, Marlowe; his companion, the Sister of Mercy; or Charlotte, a young woman who volunteered herself to ascend as experiments to the Cenobites, and turns into a horrible creature that acts as the game's stalker, a la Resident Evil's Nemesis enemy, who terrorizes Aidan. 

Each character, and often the one they surround themselves with, have a surprising amount of depth and characterization. By the end, I knew and understood every villain I fought. 

The most grounded and compelling of these characters is Zora, the merchant who keeps tabs on Aidan. She also serves as Aidan's devil's advocate, questioning his motives around every corner, and forcing Aidan to sometimes question himself in the process. She is an anchor in the narrative, and is as vital to the story as Sunny, the villains, and the Cenobites themselves.

Everything the game attempts to accomplish synergizes so well by the end, that I wanted to start it all over again, which is why I'm let down that Revival doesn't offer a New Game Plus mode. I hope it's added in a future update, especially because the game's harder difficulty feels unbalanced and unfairly punishing. After completing the game on its normal difficulty, which presented a moderate, albeit, approachable challenge, I still yearned for an increased amount of pain to fulfill my pleasure to have my survival skills tested. 

The game's Hard difficulty, however, does not complement the game's existing design. Hard doesn't feature quick saves and has fewer save points, with those save points sometimes being located far apart. The difficulty is altered with the addition of more enemies in any given area, and alerting one will send all of them running exactly to your location. One area involved a lengthy stealth section where one wrong move could send me back 15 minutes, making the experience feel less rewarding of my skill, and more tedious to repeat over and over again. I wouldn't recommend Hard on a first playthrough, or even a second (unless you're truly seeking some masochistic ascension).

By the end, Hellraiser: Revival stood more confident and self-aware than its early hours, shaking off the imposter syndrome for an outfit that fits it just right. And damn, it looks good in it, too.

In a moment where conversations around modern audiences are becoming more averse to sex scenes, and mainstream video games are taking fewer and fewer risks, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival feels like a statement piece in both sex and violence. While explicit, Revival suspends these real-world topics to such fantastical extremes that I find it hard to view it literally. But the topics it tackles, from abuse to sexual exploration, still somehow remain tasteful when wrapped in its otherwise over-the-top depictions. But, hey, that's what made Clive Barker's original novella and the original Hellraiser film so compelling. And Hellraiser: Revival is a well-deserved addition to the Hellraiser legacy.

A good puzzle game needs to constantly find new ways to challenge you, to walk you through skills and reward your observations, and to contain answers that make logical sense without being too obvious, or too obtuse. 

Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzler from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly hits those marks with impressive, cunning, and devious puzzle design. But even when it misses and gets frustrating, the game takes so many swings that it's easy to  head to another level and find another opportunity to bend your brain and stretch your smarts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMaW-V42Xwg

In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is how expansive it is. Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles to solve spread across an expansive overworld map that's full of discreet dungeon-like levels, mimicking the formula of 1987's The Legend of Zelda. And like the original Zelda, all of those puzzles involve pushing blocks around a grid, seen from a top-down perspective. Finding ways to keep the act of pushing blocks challenging, compelling, and unpredictable for hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest feat, but that ingenuity can also make the game a little too sprawling and, at times, unwieldy.

All those puzzles are born of the many smart and intricate mechanics Order of the Sinking Star brings to bear on its simple underlying concept. The game finds you in what appears to be some kind of strange artificial garden facility, and you start by controlling a character who, after being plucked from some kind of battle, at first wonders if she's died and is now in the afterlife. But one assumes Valhalla or whatever would have more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she sets about exploring, she discovers audio logs left behind by some other person who explored the place ahead of her and recorded his many findings.

Soon after, you enter a massive open overworld, where you can set out in four different directions, each representing a different set of mechanics. Those areas are each inspired by other, smaller puzzle games, and here those games' creators serve as level designers for their specific areas. From the overworld, you can enter different puzzle levels, activated from points on the ground like spaces on a game board. Completing those puzzles opens pathways forward to keep exploring the overworld.

What you soon discover is that each of these sections of the map, with its unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the multiverse sense. Each world has its own characters, whom you control within individual puzzle levels. The idea of different worlds and their denizens being pulled into this strange, ethereal place provides a story reason to include a ton of different mechanics, and then gives Order of the Sinking Star a handy excuse to combine them in fascinating and novel ways as the different worlds collide.

In the north, you run across levels inspired by the Heroes of Sokoban games, sporting traditional role-playing characters, like a Warrior, Mage, Thief, and so on. Each has their own capability: The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once as opposed to just one at a time, the Mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects when he faces them, and the Thief can't push objects forward but can drag them behind her. The east draws its mechanics from the game Mirror Isles, where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. The south, inspired by Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, carries a series of puzzles that have to do with skipping stones across water to create pathways and divert currents, while the west builds on Promesst and is all about using special beams that let characters walk through walls, teleport long distances, destroy objects, and more.

Those individual areas work well as upgrades to and expansions on the original titles that inspired them, and present a wide array of different modes of thinking as you explore, thanks to the array of characters you control as you go. Several can't push things at all but can transform objects or carry them in a pocket. One guy wears a bulky contraption that means he needs empty space around him to turn, so you have to think differently about how he navigates levels than you do with other characters. All those elements make for strong, tough puzzles in their own right, but Order of the Sinking Star raises the bar significantly as it starts to mash the worlds and their mechanics together.

Sinking Star hits best when it's pushing you toward creative ways of thinking with combinations of all those different aspects, and the game deftly teaches you new concepts that build on old ones in mostly intuitive ways. The puzzle design all the way through is impressively tight, and you can always rely on the idea that if you're stumped, it's because you're missing something or you're not using all the included elements. Through my nearly 70 hours with the game, I encountered only one puzzle that could be solved in a way that didn't seem to be what the developers explicitly intended. Sinking Star produces a ton of "ah-ha!" moments as you realize what each puzzle is trying to show you, and you then extrapolate a leap that makes you feel extra smart.

One puzzle featured both a teleporting beam and the teleporting mirrors. Under the right circumstances, the mirrors can create copies of your character that you have to control all at once, and I quickly wound up with four characters to deal with--but this level had only one exit spot, so only one character could complete it. You can't kill any characters and still finish a level, so I had to find a way to zap these four copies back into a single guy, without using the mirrors. When I finally figured out how to fuse all those copies together like Brundlefly, it changed how I thought about all the elements and opened up new lines of thinking for puzzles I hadn't considered.

The drawback of four games' worth of good ideas mixing together is that you have to keep them all in your head at the same time, and things get very complicated the deeper you go. There are a few puzzles that cram so many things together that their challenge is derived from overwhelming you with rules and complexity, rather than forcing you to expand your thinking. 

There were also times when I stared at a puzzle for minutes or maybe hours, only to realize the solution was some simple but esoteric interaction of rules that I'd forgotten because there are so many to keep in mind. In one particularly vexing puzzle, I needed to use a pushing character, skipping stones, and the pulling character together, and figured out what I thought was the solution fairly quickly. But I found myself staring at the puzzle for hours, trying to figure out its second step. I realized much later that I did have the solution, but I'd wasted a bunch of time because I was misremembering a past rule about how the stones worked from puzzles I'd completed hours earlier.

So to some degree, the breadth of Sinking Star's mechanics can work against it, and the game can seem enormous for the sake of enormity. On the other hand, the game is so large that you can always just wander off and make headway elsewhere, because there's always something else to solve.

Sinking Star is also merciful in how easy it makes experimenting with different solutions to a puzzle and undoing your mistakes. An instant undo button dials you back one action, and an action includes moving a character by one grid square. It's extremely easy to just zap back in time to one step before you accidentally shoved some essential item off a cliff or trapped yourself in a corner. There's also a dedicated button for instantly restarting a puzzle with no loading. You can slow down and speed up time at a whim, making it easier to complete puzzles with tricky timing, or to skip the boring parts when you're stuck waiting for something to happen. Sinking Star's highly forgiving nature makes it very convenient to mess around and test ideas, without wasting any more of your time than you already are by being a little dense. More puzzlers should take a page from that design approach when they're able.

While overall, Sinking Star's puzzle design is great and the game is full of inventive challenges and fascinating interactions, it does wear on. The plot elements that are meant to provide you with an overarching drive to explore wind up being pretty thin--at least through the many tens of hours that I played. 

Each character has their own personality, agenda, and motivations, and all get waylaid by stumbling into this strange puzzle world. But the tidbits of story you find for each are never particularly satisfying. The RPG heroes from the north are chasing some evil magistrate, but he's little more than a disembodied voice, if he's present at all. The scavenger from the beam world wants to collect gems for research and personal profit, and I didn't really get what that would be good for. Those mirrors are part of some kind of series of trials and the mirror character failed them at some point in his past; so what? 

All the stories are told in tiny, spread-out tidbits, and mostly feel like they exist as a veneer to justify new puzzle ideas, which makes them more confusing than compelling. And the larger mystery of uncovering what this puzzle place is, why it exists, and who created it, is just as obtuse. There are answers here, that much is obvious, but they require an even bigger investment in plumbing Sinking Star's secrets. After hitting the first of the game's endings with little but more questions and a lot of hanging plot threads, it became clear that the motivation for continuing on in Sinking Star has to come from enjoying the discovery of what new and interesting challenges the developers have in store for you, and not uncovering the narrative that surrounds them.

Often, though, the challenges are enough. I loved realizing I'd learned something that could help me uncover a solution on the overworld, only to open up a whole new area with a bunch of puzzles working with fresh takes on what had already been established--and those takes never seem to run out or get stale. Order of the Sinking Star might work better had it been a bit more curated in deploying its massive pile of puzzles, but the occasional frustration and overcomplication is an affordable price of admission to play around with so many fun ideas.

I felt such a sense of whiplash jumping into Star Wars Galactic Racer after playing Zero Company. Unlike Zero Company--and plenty of the other Star Wars games we've gotten in recent years, like Survivor and Squadrons--Galactic Racer isn't trying to emulate the science-fantasy drama that defines the majority of the Star Wars movies and other assorted fiction. Instead, it's silly. We're not making morally gray decisions in a fight against an evil empire here. No, we're trying to win a racing league in order to dethrone the comically evil rich competitor mounting some kind of hostile takeover of the league. Oh, and we have an infinite number of chances to qualify, and protagonist Shade can walk away from the most violent of wrecks without a scratch. It's such a ludicrous situation that makes no sense if you think through the logistics of it for even a moment. 

And yet that very absurdity is exactly what racing in the Star Wars universe is all about. It sees competitors strapping themselves into barely functioning death machines to jockey against each other at breakneck speeds while soaring past lava, through narrow desert canyons, over acid-filled valleys, and alongside icy cliffs to the cheers and jeers of a bloodthirsty audience. Everything about the competition is comically ridiculous, and by leaning into that irrationality, Galactic Racer not only feels authentic to that fantasy, but it's also a hilariously good time. 

You race through the game as Shade, a former-racer-turned-cargo-pilot, who finds themselves brought back into the sport as both a favor to the league's commissioner and as a means of seeking revenge against Kestar Bool, an arrogant champion who wronged Shade in the past. Galactic Racer doesn't do too much to set up the stakes for this plot, framing Shade's revenge through a lens of a mystery. What did Kestar do to Shade? Why does Shade always wear a helmet? Why is it so important for Shade to get Kestar to remember who they are beneath that helmet? Don't you want to learn these things? Yes, yes, I do.

However, while the mystique surrounding Shade, their relationship to Kestar, and the ramifications of the racing league at large for the galaxy are all intriguing setups that drive much of the drama in the early hours of Galactic Racer's story, the payoff to these questions is disappointing. The story eventually tells us the answers, but they're often hand-waved off in brief conversations, while Shade and the rest of the cast barely show any emotion--the direction for the voice acting is pretty good, but the final result sounds a little stiff, and the character models barely move and don't seem to change expression at all. These shortcomings don't ruin the experience of playing Galactic Racer, but they do detract from any sort of emotional depth that might be provided by the story.

The best part about the story is how it's framed. Galactic Racer's story is a roguelite, not a traditional single-player campaign. To face off against Kestar, Shade has to first qualify to participate in the racing league, and to qualify, they need to win qualifier matches across a number of different planets. If Shade is knocked out--by crashing one too many times or losing an important race, among other disqualifiers--they're forced to fly back to the starting planet of Jakku and attempt the run again. 

This is a fantastic gameplay loop for a racing game. While the order of the planets doesn't change (at least initially--more on that in a bit), the path Shade takes across each one is up to you. With every run, Galactic Racer randomizes two to three paths of progression, with each crossing into another at specific points to sometimes narrow down to only one way forward or ballooning out to multiple options. And each stop along the path is a different type of event. 

You might just be competing in a simple race, for example, or get asked by one of the other characters to help them test pilot a specially made vehicle through a trial. Some of my favorite events are Mystery Encounters, in which Shade meets up with a friend or foe to talk--the mystery is you don't know which until you've already chosen the event. In one, I saw Kestar demand Shade pay him back for a small fender bender, and when I had Shade refuse, I started the next race by immediately blowing up on the starting line, losing one of my do-overs, and Kestar gloating that I shouldn't have crossed him. It was so silly and surprising, I laughed out loud (don't worry; I rallied and went on to win anyway), but it's the example I think of now when describing how your chosen path can have unintended consequences. Most dangerous of all events are Eliminators, which slowly knock out the racers who are falling behind one-by-one--make it to the end and you'll earn extra rewards, but fail to keep up and you won't just lose the race; you'll be thrown back to the start at Jakku. 

The limited choices of what you can do next creates this thrilling sense of risk-versus-reward. Aiming for harder challenges can mean earning enough improvements to your speeder to finally win that final qualifier, a very tough race on all but the lowest difficulty, or it could be the one setback that sends you back to the start. There's a palpable tension to the campaign, enforcing the narrative stakes in a way that the dialogue between races never manages to. 

That tension carries into the moment-to-moment action as well. There's no guiding line in Galactic Racer, no voice in your ear telling you where to go or what to do, and no rewind function to correct a mistake. This puts the entire onus of individual decisions in your hands, and you have to make them at breakneck speeds because you go fast. Between the rumbling of your speeder through your controller, the escalating blurring of the environment, and the use of sound to emulate flying past objects, you feel like you're hurtling forward at speeds that should kill you, and it's only your quick thinking that can keep you from a multitude of career-ending crashes with every lap. This isn't a roguelite where you take stock of your options and make measured decisions; this is the slow accruement of muscle memory and honing of reflexes (and, heck, maybe mastering the Force) over repeated attempts to handle a rocket-propelled hover car. 

The design philosophy of each track leans into this idea too. While each planet offers its own unique challenges to deal with--Jakku's hot sun can more easily overheat your engines, for instance, while Sentinel I's pools of acid can melt away your speeder if you hover over them for too long--almost all of the tracks feature narrow tunnels, obtrusive obstacles, and exceptionally sharp turns. While there are a few outliers (Crait has an oval track in a wide-open salt field, for example), each track regularly pushes you into positions where you're jockeying against other racers for room and making quick judgement calls without a ton of space to maneuver. 

The tracks on some planets even encourage you to aim for the most narrow of routes. You can temporarily escape Jakku's burning sun in some places by avoiding the open fields of sand and speeding through the wreckage of a Star Destroyer, for example, and if you want to keep your engines from freezing on Ando Prime, you can thread the needle through the dastardly cramped heat lamps scattered about each track. These tight spaces make you feel like you're going even faster, as you need to regularly squeeze past obstacles in the blink of an eye to get ahead. Managing to do so is exhilarating, and forcing or tricking an opponent into succumbing to their own speed and crashing is even more so.

Succeeding at events earns you more points to upgrade your vehicle's stats, like more powerful acceleration or tighter cornering, as well as cash to buy parts for your speeder for that particular run. I always loved purchasing parts that could maximize how much of a boost I could gain by drafting off opponents or increase how long I could "safely" push a speeder's limited but extremely powerful Ramjet into the red before it exploded and took me out with it--anything to get that extra speed. But I was never afraid to try something else and discover a brand-new favorite strategy. I'm sure plenty of tier lists will come out in the wake of Galactic Racer's release that will tell you exactly which parts you should purchase and which you're better off avoiding, but I don't think there's actually an entirely bad one. This game encourages you to experiment and doesn't punish you for trying something new or adopting a different kind of racing strategy. As long as you get to the end, that's all that matters.

If you don't make it to the end, you lose all the upgrades and parts that you put into your speeder, but you can take all the points you accrued based on your performance in individual events to unlock stronger starting stats for your vehicle. You can also use these points to purchase other types of vehicles--you start off with only the well-balanced landspeeder, but the exceptionally fast speeder bike or quick-to-turn skim speeder might be more your speed. There's a separate pool of points for buying visual upgrades, none of which do anything beyond ensuring your ride looks how you want it to. It was tough for me to move away from my starting landspeeder after all the effort I put into customizing its aesthetic appearance and starting stats so that my speeder always began a run looking and handling just as I wanted, but Galactic Racer has a generous respec mechanic so trying out the other two (and falling in love with the skim speeder's knife edge mechanic) doesn't risk much beyond the time used to test them out.

In addition, fulfilling specific requirements or proving your worth to other characters during a run can unlock more starting playstyles and favors for all future attempts. Playstyles let you determine what starting equipment you have, like better shielding to take hits or an ion blaster to stun opponents, while favors give you even more bonuses, such as starting a run with a do-over if you disqualify or earning extra money for making your rivals crash. Over 15 hours into Galactic Racer, I'm still unlocking something new with each run, and while this consistent sense of progression presumably cannot last forever, lasting this long has kept every run filled with excitement. It can be such a bummer to crash and burn just one or two events away from the final goal, but at least I know I'll have a bunch of cool new stuff to try out next time around.

And man do I just want to keep going for that next time around. The framing of a racer within the looping nature of a roguelike is so deeply rewarding to keep playing through again and again.

Ultimately qualifying for the race is merely Act 1 of the game's story. With each subsequent act, more planets are added, and the order in which you race across them changes. New types of tracks are added, as well as more environmental hazards like mines or storms or darkness. Sponsors start weighing in, asking you to complete challenges within a single run to curry favor and fortune, and a betting system lets you wager your cash that you'll beat a specific racer in a single event, allowing you to form brief rivalries for profit. 

As the amount of features and mechanics grow, the number of events you need to complete just to get to the next act keeps growing too. What starts as a simple roguelite racer where every run is 20-40 minutes eventually grows into a gauntlet where every skill you've honed is put to the test in a lengthy planet-hopping adventure that can go for well over an hour on just one run. You can't save your progress within a run either, beyond just letting the game idle and putting your console or PC into standby (which I often had to do because racing near-flawlessly for over 60 minutes straight is pretty brutal). Every mistake I made near the end of my final runs of the story filled me with a spike of dread, but reaching the end of a run and hitting a milestone in the plot always filled me with a rush of adrenaline and accomplishment. I still have yet to complete Galactic Racer's final challenge--I choked on the second-to-last event of the run and had to sit down to write this review so that I could calm down--but all I can think about is trying again.

Granted, it's not all perfect. Galactic Racer has a good variety of tracks--enough to keep each run fresh as you try again and again, but few enough to let you slowly become familiar with them enough to develop strategies and discover shortcuts. But a few of the tracks, especially those on Jakku, have weird sign-posting that can make it irritatingly easy to get turned around and accidentally go the wrong way. 

And I can feel the lack of an excellent soundtrack as I continue to play. A few of the more recent Star Wars games have begun to dip into the culture of the galaxy far, far away--both Jedi games and Zero Company to an extent (and Outlaws especially)--and a big part of that has been getting to hear what in-universe music and radio stations sound like. So I'm baffled Galactic Racer doesn't give me anything to listen to while racing, save for the general ambient noise of each planet, a brief triumphant or defeated score to mark any of my victories or defeats, and the recycled shouts, quips, taunts, and proclamations made by the assortment of racers you hear whenever Shade passes them, gets passed by them, wins against them, or loses against them. Around hour eight or so, that repetition gets a little grating, and having something else to listen to might have alleviated that shortcoming.

Playing Galactic Racer reminds me of my favorite parts of the most recent Forza Horizon games: the first 10 minutes. That initial drive sequence that introduces the new setting, gets you acclimated to the gameplay basics, and moves you from one track to another to let you play around with different vehicles in a bunch of different environments is so fun. It's all about hearing the roar of the crowd and the excitement in the announcer's voice, not needing to rely on the rewind mechanic, and just feeling the rush and exhilarating joy of going really, really fast in a cool vehicle as the world around you becomes a blur. 

Galactic Racer is those absolutely perfect 10 minutes expanded into a full game. Every moment feels joyfully fast. Every decision carries the weight of tension. And every run is a rewarding chance to learn, improve, tinker, and adapt, whether it ends in success or failure. I can't wait to keep playing what's been my favorite racing game in years.

The best prequels typically share the same thing in common. Whether it's Red Dead Redemption 2, Yakuza 0, Metal Gear Solid 3, or Halo: Reach, each game tells a story that recontextualizes what came before. Revisiting a game after playing its prequel should alter the experience, providing you with new knowledge that changes how you perceive certain characters, places, and scenes. 

The events of Red Dead Redemption 2 add emotional weight to the first game and John Marston's mission by humanizing his targets, just as Yakuza 0 deepens the bond between Kazuma Kiryu and Akira Nishikiyama, making the first game's tragic finale much more impactful.

Gears of War: E-Day doesn't do anything like this. 

The Coalition's latest venture back to the world of COGs and Locusts is a prequel to the 2006 original with nothing new to say. You already know where it's going: protagonists Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago go to war as the human world of the surface is invaded by the subterranean Locust, and the heroes survive to fight another day. Even then, there aren't any surprises on the way there. 

The most notable changes occur within the framework of its third-person, cover-based shooting. It's still distinctly Gears of War--full of meaty men wielding crunchy weapons--just with a few new bells and whistles added to improve aspects of its signature action. It's good, and the increased spectacle is impressive, but it doesn't do enough to elevate to greatness.   

For a series that has struggled, or been unwilling, to let go of the past, purposefully going back 14 years prior to the surprise attack that incited the series at least sounded like a solid idea. By tackling the past head-on, with one of the most important days in the series' fictional history, The Coalition gave itself the chance to examine the origins of Marcus, Dom, and the antagonistic Locust Horde from the very moment their fates intertwined. 

Instead, E-Day tells a fairly boilerplate story; one that feels like it was written specifically for series newcomers, rather than anyone who's already fought to the conclusion of the Locust War. There's one moment, for instance, when a character explains that throwing a grenade into a Locust-spawning Emergence Hole will close it, while familiar enemy types like Boomers, Tickers, and Reavers--creatures fans have been fighting for two decades--are given grand entrances.

Introducing or refamiliarizing players with certain aspects of the Gear's universe isn't a knock on the game in and of itself, but the heavy emphasis on treating these known quantities as novel is indicative of a wider issue. E-Day seems uninterested in surprising longtime fans or appealing to the series' own history. 

Marcus is still as gruff, authority-bucking, and no-nonsense as ever, despite a 14-year gap and everything that happened in between, while Dom's still going through the same emotional beats as before, worrying about the fate of his wife Maria. The pair haven't fully developed the close relationship they share in the original game, and mostly bond over their shared grief for the loss of Dom's brother, but their relationship isn't explored deeply enough to add anything interesting to what we already know. 

Even something like the invention of the iconic Mark 2 Lancer--the assault rifle with a chainsaw bayonet that has been a staple of the Gears of War games since the beginning--happens off-screen with a character you only briefly meet twice. It's a throwaway scene that demonstrates just how much this prequel feels disappointingly superfluous.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTxwN-Ck1Zw

The story is entertaining at face value, with plenty of intense action and cheesy one-liners. There's a horror-tinged element to some of the early missions, as you witness the sheer brutality of the Locust firsthand. And I also like the two new squad members, Mags Carter and Lucas Reyes, even if the game takes a while to touch on their backstories. 

It is odd, however, that neither character is ever put in any peril. This is reserved for characters we already know survive, so the stakes remain relatively low throughout E-Day. The story also ends with more questions than answers, seemingly setting up for a sequel or DLC at the very least. Meanwhile, the cliffhanger at the end of Gears 5 remains unaddressed.

Combat is E-Day's strong point. The Locust are still veritable meat bags, with bodies that explode into dense chunks and heads that pop like watermelons–combined with crunchy sound design that's pure dopamine. Classic weapons like the Gnasher shotgun and Longshot sniper rifle are as satisfying as ever, and brutally slicing a Locust in half with the Lancer's chainsaw remains an evergreen delight.

You can also find and equip weapon mods this time, too. This adds slightly more depth to combat, letting you tune gun behavior and add scopes, laser sights, and bayonets to weapons that wouldn't otherwise have them. Perfect reloads, the series' classic mechanic in which you get a damage bonus for hitting the reload button in time with an on-screen prompt, can be altered to grant incendiary ammo or increase the weapon's fire rate. You can also find mods that reduce flinch, speed up reloads, increase damage range, and more. It's a heavily customizable system that gives you the freedom to completely alter how some weapons function or simply boost aspects that play to their strengths.

It's not just your firearms that have been tinkered with, either. Marcus and company are much more agile than they have been in past games, able to slide, jump, quickly mantle over cover, and climb ledges with relative ease. This ties into the game's renewed focus on verticality in its level design, although being nimbler doesn't meaningfully transform how it feels to play Gears. 

E-Day is still a cover shooter. You now have more varied ways of moving from cover to cover, but the moment-to-moment action isn't all that different from what it was back in 2006, with an emphasis on popping up to take opportune shots or maneuvering to flank dug-in enemies. It's surprising how well the Gears formula holds up 20 years later, but also reveals how little has changed.

Gears 5 previously broke the series' mold by introducing open sandbox environments that allowed you to tackle objectives in the order of your choosing and explore vast areas aboard vehicles. E-Day follows suit but reins things in considerably, ditching the vehicles and focusing on smaller spaces. The entire game takes place in and around the city of Kalona, alternating between explorable open areas and more linear missions. 

When you're free to traverse blocks of the city, you'll find myriad collectibles and occasional side missions, but these sections mostly just bring the game's frenetic pace to a halt. The side missions lack variety, typically tasking you with surviving waves of enemies, and with many shops and apartments sharing the same layout, there's little of interest to find by exploring every nook and cranny. Teaming with other players helps, as you can spread out and find everything much faster, but co-op is obviously optional.

It's a shame, because Kalona's architecture is visually fascinating, mixing classical European-style buildings with more modern industrial factories--not to mention a gothic edge. You also get to see it gradually destroyed by revisiting the same locations a few hours apart. Witnessing a street where you once had a firefight turn into a giant sinkhole that cuts through the metro and beyond is an effective sight, showing how quickly the Locust decimated the city. 

This is the one area where E-Day does something interesting with its open-ended sections. Otherwise, its linear missions are far superior, honing in on that classic Gears action while going big on spectacle with some cinematic flair.

These moments are Gears of War: E-Day at its very best. There might be some new ideas here, but you also get the feeling that The Coalition isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. That's fine, but this also made me realize that my appetite for this kind of game just isn't as strong as it was, say, 10 years ago. There are only so many times you can man a gun turret before you never want to see another one again. For better or worse, E-Day is distinctly Gears, and I had a good time with it, even if the story is disappointing and the open areas are fairly dull. But that's all it is: a good game, propped up by combat that hasn't changed all that much over the past 20 years. That's enough to skate by, but I wish Gears of War would dig deeper.

[Editor's Note: Multiplayer servers go live at the same time as this review. This review will be updated in the next few days with multiplayer impressions and a finalized score.]

End of Abyss pulls from a lot of inspirations. It has the same texture to its creepy world as Little Nightmares, which makes sense, given the team at Section 9 Interactive includes some former creators of that series. It borrows a bit from soulslikes, with its towering bosses who pack a mean punch if you don't time your dodge-roll well. Its fixed camera angles are reminiscent of Resident Evil, especially when you can hear something monstrous in a room before you can see it. 

First and foremost, it's a third-person metroidvania in which you shoot monsters, solve environmental puzzles, and regularly unlock upgrades that enhance exploration. Some of its best parts are staples of the genre, but due to a few flaws, including one that broke my trust, and some poor blending of these influences, it winds up being an inconsistent patchwork instead of an inspired amalgamation.

In this 12- to 15-hour sci-fi horror story, you play Cel, a voiceless technician sent to investigate a facility that has gone dark for reasons unknown. Elsewhere in the third-person adventure, other characters try to help solve the mystery, each decked out in hazmat-like coveralls, as you reveal the massive facility floor by floor, section by section. You'll routinely unlock new items meant to send you backtracking to solve puzzles, uncover secrets, and ultimately beat the game. Of course, End of Abyss didn't invent this formula, but it uses it well, consistently giving me strong incentives to retrace my steps as I'd recall old routes I couldn't take until milestone moments in the story. 

This tried-and-true mode of exploration is my favorite part of the game. It was a tantalizing prospect to fight through a tough area with the game's twin-stick shooting mechanics and survival-horror-like limited resources to uncover things like explosive charges that can destroy some weak walls and floors, or a grappling hook that can pull down previously inaccessible ladders, revealing huge new avenues to explore, including many optional areas. Most upgrades are only found in optional areas, so I always made the time to seek them out as I tried to stay ahead of the many punishing enemies shambling around most corridors.

Physically, the explorable space is well-designed, often leaving me to chart much of the facility myself, with some valuable maps hidden off the main path that regularly rewarded my efforts with a full view of a given area. However, End of Abyss betrays its genre and the player alike with one particular area lacking in polish: those all-important maps sometimes lie to you. Due to an apparent bug, sometimes a door you've opened will still register as locked on the map, or a door for which you have the key won't remind you of that with the map icon the game uses to say, "Come back! You can open this one now." 

These are visual bugs only. I could still open a door if I had the right key, even if the map didn't tell me I could, and some doors locked on the map were wide open when I got there. But it meant having to juggle two versions of the game's many intricate areas in my head at once: the world according to the map, and the world according to reality.

It made my favorite part of End of Abyss more frustrating than it needed to be, with more than a few instances of this issue cropping up before I hit the credits. A patch for the game went out just before I faced the final boss, which scrubbed out some other issues I faced to the point that they're not even relevant to this review anymore, but the map problem remains for now. 

As much as I loved exploring every inch of the world, finding hidden bosses and precious resources alike, these sometimes faulty maps are a cardinal sin for a metroidvania, a genre that relies on these in-game signals for players to immerse themselves in their labyrinthine worlds. Once I realized I couldn't always trust the map, navigating became more stressful than some of the boss battles.

Though the map misled me at times, at least the world is gorgeous. End of Abyss's underground facility comes to life thanks to its awesome atmosphere and art direction. The midnight-blue color palette gives every inch of the space an eerie, unsettling feeling. Cel can often hardly see more than a few feet in front of her, and it's not long before she, and you as the player, will come to realize how unfortunate that can be. I love when a sci-fi story can still feel like a haunted house, and though End of Abyss' many kinds of enemies are usually closer to mutated zombies than ghosts, it's all enveloped in an air of disconcerting stillness that I adore.

A few bosses are memorable, but several others are too similar to stand apart.

When in combat, from a certain range, Cel's shots are mostly spot-on thanks to a soft auto-lock that assists you. Get too far away from an enemy, though, and targeting becomes more dependent on your manual aim, giving fights that classic horror thrill of missing shots you really needed to land. It's good tension, even if it can feel like some under-the-hood randomness is deciding your shots in a way I suspect may frustrate others.

There's no shortage of body horror in this game, which pulls from sci-fi classics like Alien, Event Horizon, and The Thing in different ways. Most enemies, with their noodly organic masses spilling out of their heads, behave like mindless drones, running or stumbling toward you, then clawing at you, latching onto your face, or stinging you, so it quickly becomes tense trying to keep a safe distance from the enemies without losing the aim assist that dispatches them more efficiently. 

Early on, every encounter felt like a tense fight for my life. My gun was underpowered and enemies were numerous and quick to close the gap between us, while the cramped quarters and fixed camera angles added purposeful friction. At times, I grew frustrated because of the game's soulslike inspirations. Some of that comes down to taste. I don't enjoy or, usually even play soulslikes because I don't have the interest in getting beaten by a single boss for long stretches of time, and a few times early on, that was my experience with End of Abyss.

But around the halfway point, everything began to click. My guns were more plentiful and powerful, having unlocked a shotgun, rifle, and flamethrower--though none of them really compared favorably to my fully upgraded pistol with infinite ammo. I got much better at timing my dodges, and after a few early bosses gave me fits, I beat several later ones in one or two tries each.

That's partly due to the game's satisfying power climb that ramps up the deeper you get into the story, though it's also true that most bosses don't offer much diversity when it comes to challenge. Most of them want to simply clobber you up close or from range, heaving a fleshy appendage at you with just a half-second's notice per attempt. Though each boss has its own look and a few have some unique gameplay wrinkles, several others hardly feel different from one another. Once you learn to take advantage of the dodge-roll's invincibility frames, you'll be just fine.

Managing a pack of enemies, especially of different types, is often very hard early on.

I went into End of Abyss expecting a tough horror game based on my previous hands-on sessions with the game, and though it is often difficult and the world is definitely horrific, I also came away feeling like the soulslike elements clash poorly with a horror game. The first time I'd enter a room and get swarmed by a specific onslaught of enemies, it was scary. But when I'd get to a restoration pod--a save point and stand-in for Dark Souls' bonfires--enemies would reset. That meant retreading my steps through areas, which, while exciting for their newly opened avenues and hidden upgrades, lost their scare factor when I encountered the same enemies doing the same things as before. There are only so many times the monster can jump out of the proverbial closet before someone sleeps through it unphased, you know? 

As a result, I stopped seeing End of Abyss as a true survival-horror experience and started seeing it more as a darker, creepier Metroid. I like that conceptually, too, though if that's what it wants to be, a more reliable map system is crucial. Getting lost because of faulty in-game hints happened too often for a game so reliant on exploration as its key ingredient. This problem may be fixed by the time you get to it, so you might have a better time than I did. 

There are only so many times the monster can jump out of the proverbial closet before someone sleeps through it unphased, you know? 

Ultimately, my 13 hours with End of Abyss were inconsistent, with long stretches of excitement broken up by regular beats of annoyance. When I was rolling right along, finding major and minor upgrades, unlocking crucial shortcuts, and taking on hordes of enemies in nail-biting combat, I really loved it. But too often, the map misled me, some encounters lost their luster through repetition, and some early difficulty spikes left me flustered. 

In one sense, the way End of Abyss pulls from so many different inspirations lends it much of its appeal. It's the rare sort of game where you could round up super-fans of Dark Souls, Resident Evil, and Metroid, and each of them might come away with something different they enjoyed. But even if a patch fixes my big issue with the map's reliability, it's this same blend of influences that hampers some parts, none more than the repetitive soulslike encounters that reduce its horror elements to mere aesthetics.

When Minecraft Dungeons launched in 2020, it was difficult to know exactly what to make of it, or where it stood in the franchise as a whole. One of the world's most popular games had been transformed into a Diablo-lite-style action-RPG, taking away the mining and crafting that give Minecraft its name. In its place was something far more straightforward: kill monsters, collect loot, and repeat.

The simplicity of Minecraft Dungeons was both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. Its streamlined gear system made it easy to understand, while its enchantments gradually introduced more interesting build possibilities. But its combat could feel a bit too basic.

Minecraft Dungeons 2 feels like developers Mojang and Double Eleven focused their efforts with those limitations in mind. The sequel is far more honed in on what happens between the battles, with expanded inventory systems, more customization options, more reasons to explore, and--perhaps most importantly--a world that actually feels connected to the larger Minecraft universe.

Dungeons felt like it deliberately separated itself from the main game, and that was partly the point. Mojang wanted to create an experience that couldn't be found in vanilla Minecraft, while still using recognizable mobs, environments, and items to make it feel familiar. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD9GtlgU8_c

Dungeons 2 takes a bold and unusual approach that not many other large franchises could pull off. Its story brings the Sift dimension, which was created for this game but is also coming to the vanilla game in 2027. The Sift is accessed via a portal--a mechanic that will feel familiar to anyone who's played Minecraft--and houses an ethereal dimension with all-new environments, friendly mobs, and enemies. The Sift's being added to the base Minecraft game makes the relationship between the two games feel far more deliberate than it did in the first installment. It also allows Dungeons 2 to feel like a bigger part of the Minecraft universe, rather than a smaller branch forging its own path.

As a result of that, Dungeons 2 made me particularly invested in its new dimension. As a Minecraft fan and veteran player, I was also intrigued about whether any of the narrative elements would be carried over to the main game. I walked around the Sift feeling like I was intruding on an unreleased Minecraft build, eager to check out the biomes, friendly mobs, enemies, and potential materials that can be found in the first new Minecraft dimension in a decade and a half. The Sift is the first Minecraft dimension outside of the Overworld that doesn't feel immediately hostile. In Dungeons 2 it's under threat, so there are hostile mobs to deal with, but the pearlescent lakes, muted blue, pink, and purple color palette, and mobs that cheekily poke their tongue out by way of greeting all lead to a very serene world, one that I'm excited to explore in vanilla Minecraft in 2027. 

By having multiple armor pieces, adding Enchantment Books, and having the ability to jump, Dungeons 2 is actually closer to the vanilla Minecraft experience than its predecessor. It feels almost unbelievable that the first Dungeons didn't include jumping, but Dungeons 2 does. This allows for a broader scope of exploration as you can hop up to hidden platforms to uncover chests, jump across gaps to reach previously inaccessible areas, and dutifully check behind waterfalls for hidden loot. It also adds the jump-attack combination, which allows for a more powerful attack that affects any enemies in range and provides another means of effectively dealing with groups of enemies.

The storyline gives you something simple to care about. Your villager friends aren't just background characters wandering around and making "hmm" noises. They want to live peacefully, yet villains lurk around every corner determined to make that impossible. Every time they attempted to interfere with the villagers' attempts to live happily ever after, I found myself increasingly annoyed at them. It's not the deepest or most emotional narrative by any means, but Dungeons 2 understands that a straightforward story and likeable characters can work in tandem remarkably well. It's a notable improvement over the first game, where the story largely existed only to give you a reason to chase down the Arch-Illager. 

That's not the only area where Dungeons 2 improves upon its predecessor. The original Dungeons had an awkward economy that felt almost meaningless. You collected emeralds constantly but were limited in ways to spend them, with many options feeling worthless. In Dungeons 2, upgrading your gear at the Blacksmith improves your existing gear's stats substantially, while rolling for new gear at the town merchant has the potential to give you more powerful items to complement your build--especially if you've used Echo Shards to upgrade the merchant so he can offer stronger gear. 

Since the Blacksmith required rescuing in the original Dungeons, I somehow managed to miss his arrival in Dungeons 2. By the time I realized he was present in the sequel, I had already salvaged a considerable amount of gear that I probably would have kept had I known I could upgrade it. I'm undecided whether that's down to my campaign tunnel vision, or whether Mojang should have introduced him better.

There is still a problem with this system, though. In placing a maximum cap of 9,999 emeralds, I regularly found myself losing them as I wasn't watching my balance when salvaging old items to exchange for more emeralds. Then, as it can often cost in excess of 1,000 emeralds to upgrade an item, I'd find myself struggling for the currency. A cap absolutely should exist, since it's so easy to get emeralds via exploration and salvage, and is part of what led to emeralds feeling worthless in the original game. But when that cap is making you regularly lose currency that you're actively trying to spend on upgrades, it shows that the economic balance isn't quite right.

Where Dungeons 2 does excel hugely over its predecessor is in its willingness to allow you to establish a coherent build. Instead of one armor piece, you now equip a separate helmet, chest plate, leggings, and boots. This gives you more opportunities to shape your character around a particular playstyle, and I spent much of my playthrough experimenting with different combinations. I tried lightning-, poison-, and soul-focused builds, and each one changed the way I approached combat. 

The soul system was probably my biggest stumbling block. The game doesn't do a particularly good job of explaining what souls are, how you acquire them, or why you might want to build around them. I eventually worked it out through experimentation, but I shouldn't have needed to poke around quite as much just to discover something that is fundamental to an entire build archetype. Once you understand the systems, experimentation is enjoyable, but Dungeons 2 occasionally assumes that you know more than the game has actually taught you. 

A new type of equipment, Talismans, add another layer of build complexity. You can equip up to three at a time, and they grant you a passive ability--some summon other characters or creatures to fight alongside you, while others grant generous buffs to your health, attack power, ammo, and more. Amassing a decent collection of them relies on completing side quests and finding hidden loot, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it means players who rush through the main campaign are potentially missing some of the strongest tools they need to make more interesting builds.

While the first game already had plenty of replay value through its difficulty levels, repeatable missions, hidden levels, and eventual DLC, Dungeons 2 expands upon that even further. There are side quests, dungeons, repeatable boss fights, and Soul Surge activities to complete beyond finishing the campaign. Soul Surge activities are time-limited events where stronger enemies spawn in an area, rewarding higher-tier loot that you can't get through normal gameplay. As a result, Dungeons 2 feels like an ongoing adventure rather than a campaign you complete and never return to. 

It also adds a purpose to the loot system. If you're trying to perfect a poison build, getting another piece of equipment is no longer about increasing your power; it's about improving the synergy between your individual gear pieces. The hunt for the perfect item to slot into your build is pretty moreish, and Dungeons 2 gives plenty of opportunities to do that after the story ends.

However, there's a significant problem with the enchantment system. Enchantment Books are scarce, and I spent most of the main story limited to two of them for my armor pieces. You can use each book an infinite number of times, but in terms of build synergy, it's oddly restrictive. My favorite builds came way beyond the main campaign, and I didn't get that moment of feeling true satisfaction as my poison spread from mob to mob until many hours after I finished. Given the mob density throughout the story and the powerful bosses you face, it would have been more satisfying to discover a few more Enchantment Books as part of the storyline's rewards, instead of seeking them out post-game. However, being forced to explore Dungeons 2's gorgeous environments seeking out better loot is far from a terrible experience.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the biggest problem I faced. My roughly 15-hour playthrough of the main campaign was affected by a number of bugs and glitches, with one particularly persistent issue leaving a "Teleporting" label permanently stuck to my character. It wasn't merely a cosmetic annoyance either, as the bug affected traversal, at times preventing me from jumping or safely navigating the environment. Restarting my game could temporarily resolve some of those problems, but the Teleporting label itself never disappeared, meaning I completed about half of my playthrough with the intrusion. 

For a game that places so much emphasis on exploration and movement through its expanded environments, having traversal occasionally break is a serious problem. It's particularly unfortunate because Dungeons 2's environments are beautiful, and being able to properly explore them is part of what separates this sequel from the more linear structure of the original. Hopefully these issues are addressed in a patch at launch, because they undermine what is otherwise a considerably more polished sequel. 

Dungeons 2 isn't a radical reinvention, and rightly so. The first game was already an enjoyable, approachable dungeon crawler, even if it was deliberately lightweight. Dungeons 2 adds depth and connects its world to the wider Minecraft universe while adding a meaningful economy, a build system with considerably more freedom to experiment, and more post-campaign activities. 

Even though the restrictive emerald cap, scarce Enchantment Books, and technical issues dampened my experience somewhat, the difference between the titles is clear. Where Minecraft Dungeons was a charming introduction to the dungeon-crawler genre, Dungeons 2 builds a deeper action-RPG within the same familiar, blocky framework. While it doesn't completely escape the limitations of its predecessor, Minecraft Dungeons 2 is a more ambitious sequel that finally gives its loot, builds, and world the depth that was missing, even if a few rough edges remain.

I never knew I could be so enamored by clouds. There were times in my youth–typically sitting on a train or in the back of a car–when I would absentmindedly stare out the window at interesting cloud formations. Nowadays, phones, laptops, and handheld consoles tend to distract me from the world passing by, but in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, clouds are its ever-present pièce de résistance. 

For all the high-tech jets, explosive action, and melodrama at the game's core, it's the bountiful sky and its stunning portraits of a version of our planet at varying altitudes that truly grab the eye. Flying through a rain cloud as it douses the cockpit window with droplets of water never gets old, and simply cruising through the air is almost tranquil at times. 

Yet Ace Combat 8's clouds aren't mere window dressing. From gauging your altitude by the density of the clouds around you to using them as cover to break a missile lock, Ace Combat 8 uses this technology to push the series forward in tangible ways that go beyond aesthetics.

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is one of the best examples of a game singlehandedly reviving a dormant series–and earning back its goodwill after the disappointment of Assault Horizon–so Ace Combat 8 didn't have to change all that much to keep the good times rolling. It stays true to the series' arcadey dogfighting roots while implementing a number of incremental improvements, making for a slightly more dynamic and intense experience as you go from sustaining heavy G-forces to unleashing a barrage of missiles. 

The story is more prominent and also personal this time around, too, strictly focusing on the members of a single squadron amid a major conflict. Set in Ace Combat's fictional war-torn world of Strangereal, the story begins as the Republic of Sotoa invades the Federation of Central Usea (FCU), quickly occupying much of the nation and scattering its military forces.

Outmanned and outgunned, the FCU relies on propaganda to keep morale alive. This is where the eponymous Wings of Theve comes into play: a legendary fighter pilot known for taking down dozens of enemy aircraft in the fight against the invading Sotoa forces. 

Except none of the pilot’s legend is true. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5irVTl0mD8

War propaganda is nothing new, of course, but this immediately reminded me of Ukraine's Ghost of Kyiv. This mythical flying ace was alleged to have shot down six Russian planes over the capital city of Kyiv back in February 2022. The Ghost's exploits quickly spread like wildfire in the media and online, but two months later, the Ukrainian air force revealed it was simply propaganda to boost morale.

It's easy to see how this might've influenced developer Bandai Namco Aces when creating Wings of Theve. But this is also an Ace Combat game, so it doesn't take long for things to get weird. Top Gun has always heavily influenced the series, so just imagine a scenario where Top Gun: Maverick opens with Tom Cruise crashing and dying, then passing his spirit on to a new pilot who adopts the Maverick callsign. 

For the rest of the movie, Tom Cruise exists as a dead guy in the new, silent protagonist's head, passing on sage wisdom and sharing his jaded thoughts on the war with a melancholy similar to the most recent Wolfenstein's B.J. Blazkowicz. Oh, and Top Gun is an anime now, too.

That is Ace Combat in a nutshell. A dead pilot narrating from inside your head might sound odd if you've never played the series before, but this kind of left-field choice is par for the course. Okay, maybe it has never gone quite this far--the Johnny Silverhand gimmick suits Cyberpunk much better--but it still fits the eccentric tone. There's no rhyme or reason to it, and the story wouldn't change all that much if it were removed entirely, yet I can't help feeling oddly gleeful that it even exists. 

Unfortunately, the basic premise doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. The pilot killed in the opening was the propagandized Wings of Theve, alleged to have shot down multiple enemies despite not opening fire on a single foe. Their famed callsign is now yours, but because this is a video game, it doesn't take long to turn fiction into fact. The Wings of Theve isn't an idea anymore; it's a real pilot who's gunning down enemies and turning the tide of war almost single-handedly, so anything interesting that might've derived from the propaganda angle is disappointingly absent.

Similarly, Ace Combat 8 lays the groundwork to comment on modern warfare in the age of social media, AI, and the mass sharing of disinformation, but all of these themes are ultimately window dressing. Social media is bad when the bad guys use it but good when the good guys do--this is the kind of social commentary you can expect.

Nuanced discussions aren't on the menu; instead, Ace Combat 8 basks in melodrama, with writing full of bold ideological statements and rousing speeches about borders, heroism, and the big blue sky. In the wrong hands, it could feel ham-fisted, but there's also a wide-eyed earnestness at play that's both endearing and optimistic. 

The new first-person perspective in cutscenes regularly features moments where you need to hit A to salute, shake hands, and so on, which veers into "Press F to pay respects" territory. Yet without Call of Duty's self-seriousness, it works in a campy sort of way. 

Humanizing touches also help the cast's pronounced personalities shine through, from Tasha Severskaya, a pink-haired civilian who's the squad's best pilot but hasn't yet pulled the trigger, to her wingman William Coster, who stays mostly silent until a mission where he learns one of the pilots you're trying to rescue used to be in his favorite rock band.

Ace Combat 8 does a good job building up your squad by delving into their unique character arcs through cutscenes and radio chatter during missions. The story has issues and is fairly by-the-numbers, but its bombast is entertaining enough, especially when it indulges in absurdity in a way only Ace Combat can. 

Where else would you face off against an ominous land battleship equipped with a railgun that can wipe out entire city blocks in an instant? Or regularly run into an evil squadron of enemy pilots that plays ominous music over the radio whenever they show up; music that gradually evolves each time they appear, eventually culminating in a pulse-racing dogfight set to some of the best video game music you'll likely ever hear.

Again, this is par for the course, whether it's a sweeping orchestral piece, a prolonged Spanish Guitar solo, or an up-tempo J-rock track. Ace Combat 8 lives up to the series' reputation for phenomenal music, adding another indispensable layer to the game's thrilling combat.

Flying through a rain cloud as it douses the cockpit window with droplets of water never gets old, and simply cruising through the air is almost tranquil at times.

Piloting its assortment of real and fictional jets is surprisingly simple, letting you get into the swing of things relatively quickly. Ace Combat 8 still has that classic arcadey Ace Combat style, but the planes feel slightly heavier than before--like there's more heft beneath the joystick--adding to the satisfying sensation that hits when you accelerate at full tilt and break through the sound barrier. 

The unmistakable crack of a sonic boom, accompanied by the distinctive vapor cone that engulfs your jet and then dissipates just as quickly as it arrives, is always exciting to pull off. Combine this with the way you can execute high-G turns, either to attempt to stay on the enemy's tail or dodge incoming missiles, and the act of soaring through the air is enjoyable in and of itself. 

Blowing up enemy aircraft is its own kind of reward, of course. Tougher enemies ensure that it's challenging to simply stay on their tail and achieve a missile lock-on, using tricks you would expect human pilots to use, such as dashing through clouds to break line-of-sight, launching flares, and pulling off cobra maneuvers to turn the hunter into the hunted. Some larger aircraft also have multiple lock-on targets, letting you pick whether you want to focus on, say, taking out their anti-aircraft guns first or destroying their propellers to send them tumbling out of the sky.   

Between knocking down buildings in the path of the aforementioned land battleship and shooting down suicidal drones to prevent them from destroying a space elevator, there's also plenty of variety from one mission to the next. After 30 years of Ace Combat, it feels like Bandai Namco Aces picked a few of their favorite scenarios from the series' past, while sprinkling in some new sortie types as well. 

One mission, for instance, has you flying an unarmed aircraft through a valley while avoiding detection from enemy radar. Others have you establish airspace dominance, follow contrails to locate massive stealth bombers, and take out coastal ground forces to protect your naval fleet's advance. There's a plethora of blood-pumping moments, although it does stumble into some pacing issues as well.

With 30 levels in total, Ace Combat 8 seems stretched at times. Some missions feel like filler, slightly nudging the story forward while tasking you with fairly basic objectives as though you're simply painting by numbers. They're not intrinsically bad, but these missions typically follow some of Ace Combat 8's more dramatic endeavors. 

I understand potentially wanting to break these levels up with more relaxed sorties to help you catch your breath, but it has the adverse effect of stalling the game's momentum. Fortunately, this isn't a problem as the campaign ramps up toward a particularly histrionic conclusion, yet I can't help but feel like it could've been a more tightly paced experience if a few missions were cut.

That said, I must commend some of these levels for being more open-ended, giving you the freedom to pick and choose your targets, which ties into Ace Combat 8's deeper pre-flight options. 

Before each mission, you can select your plane, its armaments, and a number of parts geared toward enhancing your mobility, weaponry, and other miscellaneous stats. You unlock all of this through an extensive Aircraft Tree, giving you new jets, weapons, and upgrades to play around with throughout the entirety of the game.

Some jets are tailored more for speed and dogfighting, while others excel at wiping out ground targets with bombs and land-based missile strikes. You can further improve these aspects with upgrade parts that enhance maneuverability, shorten air-to-air missile lock-on time, expand your bomb payload, and more. This isn't a rigid, universal system like before, either; each aircraft has a specific capacity for each upgrade type, making some of the more expensive jets feel much more powerful.

You can also outfit each squadmate with specific aircraft and weaponry, maybe balancing land-based attacks with air support, or fully favoring one or the other. However, I never noticed much difference in practice. The return of squad commands is more palpable, letting you order your squadmates to utilize their special weaponry when heavy targets appear, encourage them to be more aggressive, or demand that they fall back and support you. 

If you'd prefer having actual humans by your side, Ace Combat 8 also features the series' most exhaustive multiplayer suite so far. There are 100-player lobbies where you can customize your pilot avatar and wander around, visit the arcade to play Pac-Man, or head to a supply shop to obtain loot crates, among other distractions. 

There's also a battle pass--called the Ace Pass--with both free and premium tiers that unlock upgrades, consumables, and cosmetics for both your avatar and aircraft. We were only given a short multiplayer session to try out before launch, so it remains to be seen whether any pay-to-win aspects are at play. 

You can purchase new aircraft with an in-game currency earned by completing matches, but you're also limited by your rank, so you can't just buy the best jets right away. This seems like a good solution, but it depends on what's available if you're willing to spend real money.

Ace Combat 8's multiplayer rests on two main pillars: Co-op Assault and Co-op Warfare, which let you jump into PvE or PvP matches, respectively. Co-op Assault challenges teams of two to four players to complete a shared objective, rewarding victory to the team with the highest score. 

Co-op Warfare is similar, only you can destroy players on the other team as well, racking up points by taking out computer-controlled units and real players alike. Once again, the highest score wins, but escalating scores also raise the threat level, adding a score multiplier to each kill. The higher the threat, the bigger the swings, making for some intense matches.  

Additionally, limited-time modes occasionally pop up in lobbies. Scramble lets a team of four go head-to-head against powerful computer-controlled squads, while Emergency Sorties task eight players with defeating iconic super-weapons from previous Ace Combat games. Special PvP events also crop up from time to time, featuring four-on-four deathmatches and eight-player free-for-alls. 

Dogfights against human players are inherently fascinating, because even the best enemy AI can't possibly compare with the human mind. There's also plenty here if you'd prefer to team up with friends; the only question marks I have are centered on the battle pass and whether there are any other ways of spending real money to potentially gain an advantage. All of this remains to be seen.

Even if the multiplayer favors those with expendable cash, Ace Combat 8's single-player adventure is still worth the price of admission alone. The story could've been stronger--more introspective--but is entertaining regardless, and while there are some pacing issues with filler missions and some uneven momentum, much of the game is excellent, providing the series' signature blend of melodrama, stirring music, and thrilling aerial combat. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve picks up where Ace Combat 7 left off, underlining that the series is well and truly back to its best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control Resonant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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