Playing as a scion of the hereafter fighting his way through the realms beneath in a roguelike graveyard shift might sound familiar. I also played Hades. But Have a Nice Death let me take control of your boy, Death himself, who runs a very different kind of quirky, new underworld order. Full of dark and dry workplace humor, this clerical reimagining of life after death as a soulless corporation forms the backdrop for some wicked hard, frantic, side-scrolling combat. And at its best, it's a killer time, even if the progression systems don't do the best job of providing ongoing motivation.

Slaying my way through randomized levels and laying the smackdown on the various, rank-and-file deadbeats was the highlight of this Stygian adventure, with fast and responsive combat featuring a lot of different techniques to master. A variety of swappable scythes with multiple special attacks each are just the beginning. You can also unalive the undead with magic spells and secondary weapons found randomly throughout the levels – from a big, beefy hammer to a sorcery that summons a flock of hungry crows. In addition to responsive jumps, dashes, and powerful "frenzy" finishers, no dust-up is lacking for variety.

Each chapter, based on a different method of death, from war to food poisoning, is distinct and full of new enemy types. One moment I was swatting away slimy seagulls who died in an oil spill, and the next I was doing aerial combat with bubble-headed nerds who suffocated on chewing gum. The designs, both visually and in terms of how they attack, are consistently creative and charming. And the excellent soundtrack compliments all of the mayhem very well.

Along the descent into darkness, you'll be collecting red, green, and blue Curse cards, which sounds bad, but these are actually the main passive bonuses you can stack during a run, like adding bleed to your weapons or getting health back when you defeat a boss. And its in the offices of those brutal Thanagers and Sorrows that the difficulty really kicks in. These are some incredibly unforgiving fights, and given your very limited defensive options, they can be very frustrating. Memorizing patterns is essential, as the margin for error is too small to really get by winging it, which can be aggravating when your run ends to a miniboss you haven't seen in a while due to the randomized floors.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS

For capital D-Death, lowercase-d death isn't that big of a deal, of course, as you'll simply get sent back down to your office to live again and hopefully take revenge on your disobedient underlings. And you get to hear a catchy little jingle every time, too. The main issue I ran into is that the long-term progression systems don't really give you a feeling of momentum that would have been quite welcome considering the steep difficulty curve. Almost everything you earn goes away as soon as you're slain.

Let me put it like this: You can kind of break up the types of persistent upgrades you get in a roguelike into three categories. First, you have straight-up permanent increases to your stats. Second would be things like rerolls that don't necessarily make you stronger directly, but increase your chances of having a good run with good items. Finally, you have unlocks that merely add more abilities or passives into the pool of available drops. Have A Nice Death focuses heavily on that last category, and there is very little meaningful power to earn in the other two. One of the level up perks gives you a whole one percent increased chance to find rare weapons. That just feels like a joke!

I don't mind really punishing games, usually. I like to be challenged, and I'll always be a prisoner to my ambition. But at least in something like Hades or even Elden Ring, I feel like my many defeats are all building to something and I'll eventually overcome the challenges before me by getting stronger little by little, alongside my skills improving. It takes the sting out of those lose-lose days when it seems like the first boss is just kicking my ass every time I see him. And without much of that persistent progression to look forward to, I found my enthusiasm to keep going in Have A Nice Death was often on a downward trajectory. It took me over 100 runs to even see the final boss, and I was feeling worn down well before that.

CURSED NIGHT

You can eventually unlock elevators that let you skip a lot of normal stages and go directly to some of the big bosses, but this ends up hurting more than it helps as you miss out on all the currency and upgrades you would have earned on those floors. So it's not really a way of building momentum, but rather another way to make everything more challenging. That said, every elevator does give you a choice of which type of level to visit next, with the exception of the ones that lead to area bosses, which can have a major impact on how well kitted-out you'll be for the tougher challenges. Knowing which floors are more valuable in which situations, thus, becomes a huge help. And I definitely appreciated that extra bit of control over each run's progression.

If you're really feeling stuck, you can activate an optional "Self-Fulfillment Mode" that gives you some extra healing items and slightly nerfs normal enemies, but it doesn't change the boss fights at all and I found it to not be that much help. It's definitely not an "Easy Mode."

Even when I was feeling stuck, at least I was always being rewarded with new lore. The afterlife's various departments are in turmoil, and as you seek out lowly ghosts and dissident department heads to make them afraid of you again, you'll unlock entertaining snippets about how this postmortem corporate bureaucracy works. Similar to Hades, you'll also get new dialogue with the various friendly characters like your pumpkin-headed receptionist. Some of them even have humorous long-term storylines to follow.

These made me chuckle more than once, and at the heart of it all is a powerful conspiracy to uncover. Some of the jokes can feel a bit tired, like they've been used in every workplace comedy ever. They even directly reference the stapler in jello gag from The Office. But the off-beat setting and quirky tone keep things interesting.

“Even Stronger” is the perfect tagline for WWE 2K23. Last year’s reinvention laid a solid foundation, and every aspect of it has been refined for the better this year. Combat is flexible without becoming burdensome, and the MyRise campaign mode focuses on telling more focused stories without compromising its open-ended gameplay. MyGM is more user friendly and lets you invite a larger number friends to get in on the action, too. Even the 2K Showcase, which has maybe the most glaring inconsistencies of all the modes, subverts expectations in creative ways. The pickings are slim for full sim-style pro-grappling alternatives, but WWE’s flagship game has never been more deserving of its spot at the head of the wrestling game table.

2K wrestling games have been largely hit or miss when it comes to how they look and sound, but 2K23 has to be the best “hit” this series has had in years. There are still several characters who’ve adopted newer looks and attitudes than the ones captured here, but with only a handful of exceptions everyone at least looks good. Cover boy John Cena and the son of a son of a plumber, Cody Rhodes, are standouts on the high end, which ironically makes some of the low-end models like poor Dana Brooke feel like that much more of a missed opportunity. New lighting effects and reflections give an overall boost that make stages shine and title belts sparkle. Menus are clean and colorful, a step up from last year’s bland layouts, all without sacrificing legibility. Visually, 2K23 is a grand slam.

Literally no one should be surprised that combat in the squared circle of 2K23 is much like it was in 2K22. This is an annual sports game, after all, and the wheel has not been reinvented, especially when last year’s big overhaul was widely considered a huge success. The simplified grappling layouts and a combo-based striking system add a bit of depth to each of the close to 200 wrestlers that are either available to play at launch or unlocked with in-game currency. There are a few noticeable changes, though: the pin minigame now has an optional stick-flick mechanic instead of simple button-mashing, which is one of my favorite improvements. 2K22 had a timing-based button press alternative, but flicking a stick up at the right time mimics the dramatic kick out in a very satisfying way, which stylishly solves the problem of fatiguing yourself in real life by bashing a button manically. It would have been nice if the philosophy of removing button-mashing were consistent, though. You still need to mash to recover back to your feet after getting dropped, and when fighting your way out of submissions.

Stamina – and specifically the lack there off – is a way bigger deal as matches go on. Without it, it’s tough to run faster than a crawl, and you become way easier to counter and beat down. Spamming offense relentlessly risks tiring you out early, and the only way to regain your energy is to hang back and idle for a few seconds. Knowing when to slow your roll and when to hit the gas can give matches between evenly skilled opponents a fun rhythm.

The payback system, a set of special abilities individual characters have that can have massive consequences on matches, has been expanded as well. Each wrestler can have up to two abilities, giving them more flexible options in a pinch compared to last year. They’re still only one use per match, but now you have a secondary scenario in which you can turn the tables. Using your Resiliency to instantly win a pin or submission minigame doesn’t have to be the only trick up your sleeve anymore.

Some old payback options that were missing last year are back as general defensive options that you can spend a portion of your special bar to use. Being able to instantly recover from attacks or play possum for a quick hit or surprise roll-up pin helps keep you in the match even when you're on the wrong end of a mud-hole stomping. The risk-reward relationship of the special bar makes you think as well: these defenses can be used to great effect to stop taking damage during vital moments, but if you fill that bar completely, either by dealing or receiving damage, the Signature move you unleash could do more to turn the tide in your favor. This is the kind of resource management usually only seen in traditional fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, but it fits like the perfect pair of boots in 2K23.

This year’s 2K Showcase focuses on John Cena’s biggest losses, which is an interesting take on the marquee game mode. Cena’s spent so much of his 20-plus-year career winning that it’s refreshing to see him run down the monumental Ls he’s occasionally taken from greats like Kurt Angle, Brock Lesnar, and Triple H. I enjoyed the winding trip down memory lane, though there were a few notable bumps in the road. A few omissions are understandable, as some of the major names involved are currently contracted outside of the WWE and not willing or able to play ball, but it was strange not to see folks like JBL and The Miz. Cena himself also provides some moments of reflection on the ones that made it in, but they are oddly sterile and surface level considering he is known for being a deep thinker when it comes to pro wrestling. His monologues between matches offer no real insight beyond largely juvenile “I went in there and tried my best” mantras, which is a shame because it doesn’t do some of his best character work any justice.

The structure of the Showcase is similar to past ones, but there’s a great twist: since this is all about Cena losing, you get to play the gauntlet of matches as his opponents. This keeps the action fresh from match to match, but it will mean you’ll need to relearn character movesets every time, which could be a little jarring – especially when different versions of the same character (The Undertaker circa 2003 versus 2014, for instance) may have similar moves but mapped to different buttons. Thankfully, the objectives you're given do a good job of laying out exactly what's being asked of you, down to the exact button combinations needed to execute a particular maneuver.

At the same time, the interlacing of old WWE footage into gameplay doesn’t feel as clever as it used to, especially when the live-action video has awkward music playing over it with no commentary, fake crowd reactions, and censored referee and commentator faces. Also, the objectives are a bit inconsistent with how it attempts to get you to reenact some of the old classic matches. Sometimes you’ll need to hit a specific move, and when you do it will trigger an old clip to fill in what happens next. Other times you just have to stand someone up and attack, and the match will play out a whole sequence of moves like AJ Styles hitting his signature Pele kick and crushing Cena with his patented Styles Clash that would have probably have been more fun to do yourself than they are to watch. On more than one occasion a simple attempt to attack or grapple started a clip that led directly into the end of a match, with no further input required.

The tail end of the showcase throws a few fun curveballs that you won’t see coming, but the overall package remains an earnest but rough attempt to do the impossible. It would seem that you can’t truly recreate specific wrestling moments and capture the drama and magic in a playable way.

The other major single-player mode, MyRise, is split into two separate stories. Of the two, I preferred The Lock, which has you jump into the boots of a global sensation whose talents have finally elevated him to the WWE. Its tale about the conflict between attempting to be yourself versus trying to be what the machine of the WWE wants you to be clicked with me more. The Legacy, a story about debuting in the shadow of your Hall of Fame aunt, is also a solid tale about living up to expectations, and the various ways that old rivalries and bad decisions in and out of your control can make that challenging.

Both modes give your progression to the top of the card some real focus. Where last year’s MyRise often felt like I was just running around doing quests simply because they were there, this year the main thread wrangles you into very clear-cut chapters. Instead of running between different locations to find the proper NPC or scrolling through the in-game social media feed to start beef with people, your main and side objectives are laid out clearly in the story progress menu, and all of the appropriate people to talk to in order to initiate these quests are all in one area. The story is also separated by acts, and the progress menu will show you all the distractions you could get into before moving on to the next one.

The open-endedness of last year’s MyRise still exists, though. Between matches during the main storyline you can interact with accessory characters and make choices that can determine how story arcs end, or what kind of side quests you end up on. Some of them are simply one-off matches that net you some points for customizing your character, while others can be whole multi-match feuds. I wish that the back and forth you have to do to start many of the side feuds were more than text blocks on a fake social media platform, but the parts that are voice acted feel more consistent across the board than last year. I'm not sure any of this will make you a MyRise fan if you weren’t already, but a strong story mode is a wrestling game staple, and I’m glad it finally feels worth the time again.

For folks looking for more of a sandbox approach to superstardom, Universe is back and, with the exception of some slight tweaks in the story building tools, it's practically identical to 2K22’s version. For Classic Mode fans, this means you can have a field day tweaking every single detail of your own version of the WWE, from the shows you produce, the stars and feuds between them, and even the belts they can win and defend. Its top-down approach is a little too big for my tastes, with too many knobs to twist and not enough reward outside of the satisfaction of simply doing the thing. I preferred Superstar Mode during the relative time I spent with Universe, so I could put my created grappler through an endless career of rivalries and title shots.

GM Mode is my preferred management sim mode, and this year’s version is even bigger and more robust than ever. Besides giving us more brands to control, managers to work with, and power cards to choose from, now up to four players can try to out-promote each other across multiple season games. New surprises like the Shake Up – big, game-altering passive abilities that you can select after big shows – helps keep your opponents on their toes. Bonuses like lowering the stamina cost it takes for wrestlers involved in certain kinds of matches may seem like a small buff, until you realize that it means you can pull more risky matches off more often, pulling in better match ratings and more fans with fewer injuries.

Finally, little quality-of-life changes help make it easier to see the benefits of certain actions over others. Something like popularity bonuses you’ll receive for booking a certain arena were in the previous game, but it's much clearer here. Specific match types can also accelerate the ferociousness of a rivalry better than others, and now that's clearly identified as well. But figuring out how to make popular, highly rated matches over long periods of time is still a steep learning curve.

In light of the high-quality remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 released in 2019 and 2020, it felt like a safe bet that Capcom would do an equally admirable job of rebuilding Resident Evil 4. Even so, when I hit the start button on this 2023 remake of the legendary 2005 action-horror game I wasn’t prepared for how forcefully it would knock my knees out from under me and suplex me headfirst into 16 hours of sustained tension and exhilaration. This fully revitalised campaign dramatically one-ups the original in almost every conceivable way. Its Spanish countryside setting is substantially more sinister, its pacing has been tightened to the point where hardly a single minute is wasted, and its controls have been modernised in order to allow its signature dynamic shooting mechanics to really shine. I’ve been waiting 18 years for a game to thrill me in the same way as Resident Evil 4; as it turns out, this whole time I’ve just been waiting for another Resident Evil 4.

The original Resident Evil 4 is a landmark installment in Capcom’s seminal survival-horror series that, for many, would need no introduction. However, considering it came out back when we assumed that Episode III would be the last Star Wars film and iPhones didn’t even exist yet, I should probably give it some context. At the time it was a big deal for Resident Evil to switch from the series’ traditional fixed-camera perspectives to a then radical over-the-shoulder viewpoint that brought us uncomfortably close to the gore and put the emphasis on reflexes and precision targeting, and as a result Resident Evil 4 was an action-horror epic without peer. Its influence has subsequently been felt in countless other third-person classics like Gears of War, Dead Space, and The Last of Us, and now its original DNA has been extracted, synthesised, and injected into a state-of-the-art host game, mutating it into a menacing new monster that's breathtaking to behold and immensely intimidating to encounter.

In preparation for this review I returned to the original game for the first time in years and was shocked at how badly this remake was needed. The movement of main star Leon Kennedy felt ridiculously restricted; he struggles to get around as though he’s wearing an old pair of skinny jeans that haven’t fit him since his police academy days, and is immobilised anytime he gets his gun out as though he’s incapable of independent control over his hands and feet at the same time. By modern standards it’s absurd, and would absolutely put off a lot of newcomers before they could begin to understand why this game is so highly regarded.

Sight for Saw Guys

Thankfully, those days are gone. Not unlike the recent Metroid Prime Remastered, this Resident Evil 4 remake plays like a 2023 game. Luxuries like simultaneous twin-stick movement and targeting mean that you can cautiously back away while still keeping your gun trained on the advancing hordes, or side-step out of the way of an incoming crossbow bolt without having to remove your eye from the scope of your rifle. This newfound freedom of movement makes you better equipped to really make the most of the immensely satisfying area-specific damage effects; blowing kneecaps out to expose an enemy to a melee finisher, blasting sticks of dynamite held in the hands of attackers before they have a chance to throw them, or simply reveling in some of the grisliest headshots in the history of video game shotguns.

None of this will shock you if you never played the original, but trust me, it’s a big deal to those of us who are back for round two: the rough edges of a number of other interactions have been filed down, like how crates and barrels can be quickly smashed at the tap of a button rather than having to clumsily line up a knife swing, making it much faster to scramble for ammo and health pickups in the heat of a battle. Weapon switching is now performed instantly with a tap of the D-pad rather than having to pause to hop in and out of the inventory screen, and Leon’s combat knife can also be used to parry enemy attacks or bring a swift finish to staggered foes, or to take enemies out silently after he’s crept up on them with his new ability to crouch. (It must be those looser fitting jeans).

Crucially, though, this overhauled control setup makes combat more enjoyably fluid without compromising any of the challenge when played on the Hardcore setting recommended for returning players. (‘Standard’ and ‘Assisted’ modes are included if you want an easier time of it.) The added benefits of the knife are balanced by the fact that it takes damage with each use, so you can only rely on it sparingly – otherwise it will break like a tiny Master Sword and must be repaired at a merchant before you can resume stabbing.

Meanwhile, enemies move in dangerously erratic ways and have a tendency to quickly overwhelm in numbers, so you still have to make snap decisions when it comes to prioritising targets. They’ve also learnt a few cunning new tricks to trip you up with, like the sneaky way the homicidal villagers will lay down bear traps in the middle of a fight to keep you on your toes while you’re busy flexing your trigger finger. Resident Evil 4 may well give you a more expansive toolset to aid Leon’s survival, but you still need to keep your wits and reflexes sharp – because losing your head amidst a crowd crawling with a murderous mind-controlling parasite can swiftly result in Leon literally losing his. Thankfully, a new checkpoint save system minimises any arduous backtracking from your last manual typewriter save should Leon perish – but purists should take note that the unlockable Professional difficulty mode removes that safety net if you prefer a more punishing run the next time through.

No matter what difficulty you choose, a major strength of Resident Evil 4 is that enemy types are continually shuffled so that you can never really settle into a one-size fits all strategy. Just as you’re comfortably pulling off headshots, they start wearing helmets to force you to target their legs. Then, once you’ve busted more kneecaps than a debt collector, they start coming back to life with deadly whipping tendrils sprouting out of their shoulders. Then, when you’ve figured out how to take out these terrifying mutations efficiently, you come face to face with a seemingly unstoppable waddling tub of nightmare fuel that can regenerate every blown off body part like a T-1000 that was hand-sculpted by Clive Barker. Resident Evil 4 gives you a growing number of guns that all feel great to use, from submachine guns to rocket launchers and the especially powerful magnums, and does its absolute best to ensure you’re leaving very little in the chamber after each frenzied firefight.

I also love how the tactile nature of almost every element in your surroundings can be used as a tactical advantage, provided you can think fast enough on your feet. The chainsaw attacks from the terrifying, sack-hooded Dr. Salvador are just as deadly to Leon as they are to every other enemy in the vicinity, so baiting him into lunging at you and then steering him into a crowd of his own minions is a great way to thin the herd. Meanwhile, dangling oil lanterns can be shot and dropped onto an angry mob to set them all ablaze, but they can also be used to ignite hapless animals like cows who will rage out of control and scorch everyone in their path. When ammunition is always at a premium, it’s both practical and ridiculously entertaining to let a flaming hunk of hamburger do your dirty work.

Spanish Castle Magic

Many of you under 30 might have no clue what Resident Evil 4 is about: it’s perhaps best described as riding a rollercoaster that’s careening off the rails to crash through a row of spectacular haunted houses. What starts as a fairly straightforward rescue mission, with Leon sent into a small Spanish village in search of the US President’s missing daughter Ashley, soon hurtles into a heart-stopping series of battles against giant sea monsters and towering trolls, desperate defenses against crazed hordes in boarded up cabins, outrageous assaults on a heavily fortified castle, skulking sections through shadowy laboratories, explosive minecart chases, and countless run-ins with some truly twisted freaks infected with the mutating Las Plagas parasite, all of which look consistently incredible reimagined on Capcom’s RE Engine (which also powered the last two remakes). The original RE4’s famously flabby final third has been tightened up considerably, and it all builds towards an improved and genuinely imposing final boss fight that took all of my skill and ammo reserves to topple.

Of equal importance to its renovated environments and enemies is the anxiety-inducing audio design. It can’t be overstated how effective the sounds of Resident Evil 4 are when it comes to cultivating a genuine sense of dread. Whether it’s the manic chanting of its parasite-riddled peasant farmers when you enter a new area, the snarl of wolves as they whip through the leaves around you in the castle’s hedge maze, or the throaty rumble of a chainsaw motor idling in the distance, just listening to it all routinely had me inching towards the edge of my seat in anticipation for each enemy encounter, so when the the carnage kicked off and the tension spiked I had hardly any couch left to cling to.

At every step of the journey there are enhancements, both big and small. The original’s gimmicky, quicktime-event-heavy knife battle against Major Krauser has been transformed into a gripping blend of parries and counter-attacks, while the frustration of escorting Ashley through certain sections has been reduced significantly by ditching her health bar so you don’t need to waste valuable green herbs on healing her, and her intelligence has been improved so she’s less prone to foolishly stumble into the hands of a bloodthirsty mob. Elsewhere, there have been considerable structural changes that make the environment feel more cohesive. For instance, in the original game the lake area primarily served as the backdrop to a boss fight, but now you can fully explore the lake and its surroundings by boat, docking at various inlets to scour cabins and caves for additional puzzles, valuable treasures, and hidden horrors lying in wait.

In fact, despite having played the original several times over, there still seemed to be something that surprised me around each and every corner, and the pacing of Leon’s plight never gets bogged down in the sort of storytime stroll that’s become so common in a lot of big-budget single-player adventures. With all due respect to the likes of The Last of Us and God of War Ragnarok – which are both excellent in their own ways – Resident Evil 4 has no time for dialogue-heavy deep and meaningfuls. Leon’s foppish haircut might scream noughties emo but his stoic attitude is all-out ‘80s action hero, and no matter how much I had to Tetris-swap the expanding selection of guns and ammo to fit his inventory case he always seemed to have plenty of room left up his sleeve for a winking one-liner to whip out after a thoroughly insane action sequence before sliding a fresh clip into his submachine gun and running headlong into the next.

Stranger's Things

When you do need to take a breather, the mysterious merchant returns to keep Leon topped up with a suite of dangerous devices like a quaint form of Q Branch, along with new recipes that allow you to craft the exact ammo types you want when out in the world rather than having to rely on randomised drops. He also pays the bounties on the optional side quests that have been added throughout the campaign, like shooting down hidden blue medallions or tracking down a rare golden chicken egg, which proved to be fun little diversions away from the story’s murderous main path. These bounties are paid in spinel gemstones which can be traded for unique items and upgrades outside of his standard inventory of wares, so although I was initially sad to see the iconic red dot sight removed from Leon’s starting pistol, it only took me a few short quests to be able to buy one and satisfyingly fit it myself.

One thing in particular that I appreciate about the remake’s merchant is that he’s a lot more generous when it comes to the trade-in value of your weapons. In the original it never really made sense to invest too heavily in upgrading the base pistol and shotgun early on, only for their value to drop dramatically when it came time to trade up for some beefier boomsticks. However, in the remake you’re effectively refunded close to the full value of each weapon along with the cost of any upgrades you’ve added to it, so you can re-spec your favourite guns and boost them towards their optimal forms without copping as big a penalty to your purse of Spanish pesetas.

The merchant also gives you access to the new bolt thrower weapon during your first encounter, and its reusable bolts come in handy in the story’s early hours when you’re still finding your feet as far as managing ammunition reserves and crafting resources goes. Yet despite his generous prices and fabulous wares, I couldn’t help but feel a little shortchanged after each transaction; his re-recorded dialogue isn’t delivered with quite the same kind of goofy charm as that of the grizzled original. However, in the scheme of things it says a lot for the overall quality of this remake when the only minor black mark I can give it is for its slightly blander black market dealer – and if this is your first time playing it won’t bother you in the slightest.

It’s also a shame that The Mercenaries mode isn’t included at launch, although it’s reassuring to know that it will be coming as part of a free update sometime in the future, and I’m extremely keen to tackle its frantic time attack challenges with the benefits of Leon’s more malleable move set. In the meantime there’s a New Game+ mode and a lengthy list of in-game challenges to complete in order to unlock additional weapons, costumes, and concept art, though it seems that bonus modes Assignment Ada and Separate Ways that were present in older versions of Resident Evil 4 have either been scrapped or potentially saved for DLC. Their loss isn’t that big of a deal since they were never as huge a draw as The Mercenaries for me personally, but when a campaign is consistently this amazing, it’s hard not to feel greedy for a little bit more.

The phrase “It’s Pizza Time” could cause a number of different reactions in your average person. Maybe it unlocks a memory of playing Turtles in Time at the arcade as a kid, maybe it makes you think of Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2, or maybe you’re hungry and it just gets you excited for some pizza. But for me, as someone who just played through the eccentric and thrilling Pizza Tower, when I hear Pizza Time, my hands start sweating, my pulse quickens, and anxiety creeps in as that music starts to slowly build in my head.

The debut game from developer Tour de Pizza could most simply be described as a spiritual successor to the Wario Land series, but it’s so much more than that. The speed of its 2D platforming can rival that of even the fastest Sonic games, its unforgettable art style oozes love for 90s Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows like Ren and Stimpy, and it's absurdly packed with secrets and extra challenges. Then there’s the eclectic soundtrack, which expertly nails the unique theme and vibe of each of its levels, especially the anxiety-inducing main theme that kicks in at the end of every stage as you race back to the start to avoid getting killed by an evil pizza face. Not only is Pizza Tower an adrenaline-filled thrill ride from start to finish, it’s one of the most creative 2D platformers I’ve played in quite some time.

Pizza Tower keeps things simple as far as its story goes: You play as Peppino Spaghetti, the down on his luck owner of Peppino Pizza, who suddenly finds himself frantically climbing the neighboring Pizza Tower in an effort to stop the giant pizza in the sky from blowing up his shop with a laser. The art has an intentionally low grade look that generally seems like it was made in MS Paint, but it all somehow comes together to give Pizza Tower a strikingly unique look. Peppino himself is one of the most hilariously expressive characters I’ve ever seen, flipping between being an absolute nervous wreck, to a rabid psychopath as he bulldozes his way through lines of enemies, to a musclebound anime protagonist. It’s absolutely unhinged, and does a great job of emulating that 90’s cartoon style of characters constantly being drawn off-model for comedic effect.

Return to Wario Land

While Pizza Tower may get most of the inspiration for its mechanics from the Wario Land series, its levels adhere to the Sonic the Hedgehog mantra of “gotta go fast.” Peppino’s most important technique is the ability to start a dash, and once he builds up enough momentum, he's able to bulldoze his way through enemies, objects, and even walls without slowing down. Fans of Wario Land 4 in particular will be very familiar with this technique, but the big difference here is that Peppino can also maintain momentum while running up walls, allowing him to navigate through nearly every basic element of any level while continuously running at full speed. This essentially makes Pizza Tower feel like a modern version of Wario Land if it were developed by a speedrunner.

Peppino’s other abilities are all designed to keep his flow going. He can dive from the air at a 45-degree angle and land with a roll that lets him continue sprinting, he can use a shoryuken-like uppercut get some extra vertical height on a jab while also hitting enemies above him, and most crucially, he has a dashing grab attack that can snatch enemies and allow him to turn them into deadly projectiles. That grab attack can also be used as a way to quickly gain momentum for a dash, making it so that even if your sprint is cut short by a hazard or straight vertical wall, you can get right back up to full speed almost immediately.

All of this amounts to a game that, when played well, has a speed and pace that rivals that of a Sonic game. But it isn’t just about hastily smashing through walls and plowing through enemies. Just about every single one of the 20 levels in Pizza Tower is built around some sort of creative central hook. Whether that’s a unique feature of the level itself – like the Five Night at Freddy’s inspired “Don’t Make a Sound,” which features enemies that will trigger an alarm if they spot you, chasing you down with the threat of a genuinely startling jump scare if you’re caught – or a unique power up that transforms Peppino and completely changes up his abilities. For example, in the level Pizzascape, Peppino can pick up a sword to transform into a knight in armor, which will cause him to slide down slopes, break metal blocks just by standing on them, and pierce through rats that otherwise cannot be killed.

Hurry Up!

The best trick Pizza Tower takes from Wario Land is a countdown that starts once you reach the end goal of every level, forcing you to quickly race back to the entrance in a limited amount of time. It’s not a simple retracing of your steps either – paths that were previously blocked off will now be open, and the route you initially took will very often be closed off. This frantic race to the start is made even better by the incredible anxiety-inducing theme that starts off like a warning siren and slowly builds before reaching an absolute fever pitch as the timer gets dangerously close to zero. It helps that the stakes during these final moments are high, because if you don’t reach the start before time runs out, you have to do the whole level again. It’s a punishing mechanic, but one where the intensity and relief of success is well worth the cost of failure.

In addition to the main 20 levels, which are split across five floors of the tower, there are also a handful of truly great boss fights that do a wonderful job of exploring Peppino’s surprisingly deep moveset in entertaining ways. His taunt actually doubles as a parry, which adds a fun defensive element to each boss battle by giving him another way to avoid damage beyond jumping or quickly dashing out of the way. Several fights even give him a gun, like the second boss battle against the vigilante, making them almost Mega Man-like with the ways the boss arenas are structured and how you have to analyze the moveset and patterns of your foe.

Pizza Tower is not a terribly long game, with my first playthrough running about five to six hours, but the levels feel endlessly replayable. That’s not only thanks to the fact that it’s just fun to try and master these stages and shoot for higher score ranks, but also because every level is packed with secrets. Each one has three secret bonus rooms, a hidden treasure that requires you find both a custodian and the door he unlocks, and a pizza portal that asks you to do an extra lap of the race back to the start to gain even more points on a level. If you’re able to find all of those things on a single run, you’ll gain the coveted “P” rank. It’s not an easy feat to accomplish, but it’s a fun challenge to undertake that will certainly add many more hours to my playtime.

Whenever I’m asked what my favorite roguelike is, my answer is confidently and unabashedly Dead Cells. That’s been true across five years of superb content updates, and it’s even more true with the arrival of its latest paid DLC, Return to Castlevania. This sizable expansion expertly remixes the base game and Konami’s classic action-platformer series – one of Dead Cells’ biggest inspirations – into something that feels wonderfully and wholeheartedly its own. Its more traditional story structure is less mysterious than the connect-the-dots style we’ve seen in the past, and it's immediately clear how much work has gone into bringing Castlevania's iconic characters, weapons, music, and locations into Dead Cells’ world. It puts the castle itself center stage and makes it feel alive, and that reverence really helps sell the crossover fantasy. Return to Castlevania is a masterful mashup that brings together the best parts of both games, with the same challenging and engaging Dead Cells action that might leave you in bloody tears of frustration or joy by the end.

While the story traditionally hasn’t been the reason you’d play Dead Cells in the first place, Return to Castlevania does an amusing job setting up why you’re satisfyingly smashing your way toward Dracula’s notorious throne room this time rather than simply trying to escape your island prison like in runs of yore. By the end of its story I’d not only taken on the Count in an epic final battle, I’d also faced Medusa and even Death itself in fierce showdowns. It almost felt like a new, more streamlined version of a classic Castlevania adventure, all while still staying true to the Dead Cells name.

The brilliant gameplay formula of quick sword swiping action, ground pounds, and bashing through doors against a colorful pool of monsters hasn’t fundamentally changed, but Return to Castlevania introduces more weapons, enemies, bosses, and outfits than any paid expansion before it. Discovering all the new surprises continues to keep it more than fresh even after the 20 hours I’ve sunk in so far. As you storm a spectacular castle floating in a blood-red sea, the original Dead Cells’ weapons, blueprints, and outfits you’ve found from any path can be used across the board here.

That’s absolutely for the best because you’re able to mix and match between those and 14 vampire hunter-flavored weapons to find creative new builds. That could be pairing the flint with the whip to overwhelm enemies up close and personal, or the throwing ax with the lightning bolt to focus on attacking from afar. There are also Castlevania classics like the holy water and the cross, but my favorite of the new additions has to be Death’s scythe, a double-sided weapon that converts its victims into my own spectral army who in turn dive at enemies and explode while I simply smile and watch. It’s this level of creativity that makes punishing new enemies like skeletons and werewolves with my whip sword or a cute but ferocious magical cat even more fun. There are a handful of refreshing enemies from the Castlevania series to take on, further selling the idea that I’ve been transported into this fantastical world.

Dracula’s Castle is made up of two distinct locations – the grounds outside the castle and its interior – and there is so much more within them than you might expect based on past Dead Cells updates, including some great renditions of iconic songs like Vampire Killer. I was surprised to find the castle outskirts are designed as a sort of proving ground, satisfyingly testing whether or not you’re even worthy to enter Dracula’s domain by having you ascend several floors before you even reach his doorstep, cleverly demonstrating how big of a threat the iconic vampire is. That idea is only expanded upon once entering his castle.

No matter what distance you’re looking from outside, Dracula’s castle appears massive – and once you get inside it’s just as grand. It is filled to the brim with ornate decorations and detailed sculpture work that is complimented nicely by Dead Cells gorgeous pixel-art style. The atmosphere of the gothic structure is only heightened thanks to the red fog that pours in through each window you pass by. The castle’s background layers impressively convey how vast the fortress is meant to be as you run through Dead Cells’ procedurally-generated layouts that change the map for every visit. All the while the villain himself appears at times to slow you down by throwing fireballs, unleashing swarms of bats, and yes, even flipping the castle upside down. And while I don’t want to spoil anything, the final confrontation is easily the most challenging and unique boss Dead Cells has seen yet.

You’ll find plenty of charming nods and surprises from the old-school Castlevania games to interact with while exploring these new areas as well. You might stumble across a room holding the save dice from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which provides a little bit of extra flavor rather than actually letting you save your game. Inclusions like this are great throwbacks for people who are already big fans of the series, but they are also a fantastic source of motivation to encourage those who have never played Castlevania to go back and try it for the first time (and likely start to recognize even more references along the way).

Once you find Richter Belmont in the castle you’ll be able to play the short but excellent Richter Mode after your next run, a separate, discrete level that puts him in the spotlight. While most of Return to Castlevania generally plays like Dead Cells in a loving Castlevania skin, Richter Mode strips down the combat a bit to be a lot more like the methodical and tactile nature of a Castlevania game. Richter is only equipped with one weapon and one tool to use instead of the usual two, plus your tool can only be used by consuming a heart currency just like many of the games from his series. Because he has much less health and fewer resources to work with than a standard Dead Cells character, I had to focus on taking my time and spacing myself from enemies instead of diving in and mashing my attacks. Playing carefully leads to powerful rewards, though, and I eventually found myself literally raining down holy water on enemies, which lived up to the legendary reputation of the Belmont Clan. Dead Cells is all about learning how to overcome challenges, so Richter Mode is a fantastically innovative way to bring something new to the table while putting Castlevania in the spotlight. Once I beat it, I was left more than convinced developers Motion Twin and Evil Empire could make an incredible traditional 2D Castlevania if Konami allowed them to.

The amount of time it takes to reach and defeat Dracula will depend on whether you are a new or returning player, but either way you will be able to start the adventure a couple of runs after starting a fresh save, allowing you to get in on the action quickly. Even after thinking I had done everything there was to do in Return to Castlevania, I often found myself discovering new things. During one run I found a merchant in Dracula’s castle, only for the vampire himself to show up and snap them out of existence. The big bad then paid me for helping him find the merchant, which left me shocked, but I had to laugh out loud because of how clever and unexpected it all was.

There are 20 different outfits to unlock based on notable Castlevania figures like Simon Belmont and Alucard, to name a few. In a fantastic little touch, getting to Dracula’s throne room dressed as someone from Castlevania even changes the conversation before the fight, giving you a small taste of the background for each character. That was enough to entice me to do it for every single one I’ve found, which means I’m spending upwards of 40 minutes each time just to see what is normally a mere 15 seconds of dialogue. These little details are yet another example of how Dead Cells cunningly encourages you to do that “one more run” before calling it quits for the night.

While this all might sound like Return to Castlevania relies heavily on nostalgia to be enjoyable, one of the things this DLC does so expertly as a crossover is that it still rewards you even if you’re not familiar enough with the series to pick up on all the references. As someone who isn’t a Castlevania diehard but has played some over time, not only did I never feel left out, I actually felt encouraged to go and play more of the series, simply because of how well it’s integrated into a game that I love so much. To me, that dopamine effect is the highest compliment that a crossover can reach, and this one does it brilliantly.

And even though many games today undoubtedly owe so much to Castlevania, years of exceptional updates and refinement mean Dead Cells has earned the right to sit on a throne proudly alongside its own inspiration. Return to Castelvania is more than doing right by Castlevania, it also cements Dead Cells as a timeless classic in its own right. That makes this crossover feel like more than a loving homage or a well-deserved passing of the torch alone. Not only has Dead Cells surpassed expectations in doing right by Castlevania, but it has also brought itself on to greater heights with the best level design, bosses, art, and creativity we’ve seen yet.

On the chitin-covered heels of the impressive Witch Queen expansion and a relatively strong year of live-service support overall, it seemed like Destiny 2 was finally gaining momentum as it headed toward the conclusion of its epic saga. Sadly, my optimism for a game I’ve spent thousands of hours playing has come crashing down like a Cabal drop pod after just a couple dozen with Destiny’s latest expansion, Lightfall. The story is so shockingly incoherent that even someone who has spent countless hours reading Destiny’ lore like I have couldn’t understand its nonsense, the new destination on Neptune feels as lifeless as the real planet, and the endgame/seasonal activities have so few surprises to offer (at least so far) that they give me deja vu in the worst possible way. Thankfully, a number of Lightfall’s activities are challenging enough to warrant me leaning forward in my seat, the new Strand subclass is a nice addition to Destiny’s sandbox, and the most recent batch of quality-of-life improvements largely succeed at making my time shooting space rhinos in the face a less bumpy ride. I still have a little more to do and the eventual raid ahead of me, but so far even Lightfall’s best parts haven’t been able to wash the overwhelming taste of disappointment out of my mouth.

The opening moments of Lightfall are some of its best, as Destiny’s long-awaited final villain, The Witness, arrives in our solar system to deal a blow against humanity and our allies. But any excitement is quickly swept into the vacuum of space as you’re bizarrely and inexplicably redirected from the action to take part in a seemingly unrelated sidequest in the Neptunian city of Neomuna. Not only is the story a decidedly low stakes diversion that draws you away from the real conflict happening on Earth, but it flatout does not make sense. That’s not just me saying that, either; some of the Destiny community’s greatest lore minds have been completely stumped by the utter nonsense of Lightfalls’s story.

The events on Neomuna surround a macguffin called The Veil, a mysterious artifact that you’re told is super important, but nobody ever, ever tells you what it is or its purpose, even a little bit – ever. Your enemy is Calus, a stack of pancakes cosplaying as an air fryer, who serves as the least intimidating antagonist in Destiny’s history. As you wage war against an incompetent moron for control of an artifact you know nothing about, you’ll also discover the dark powers of Strand, a green elemental subclass our heroes spend half of the campaign trying to figure out how to use in a process so dull they literally skip over some of it by giving you a Rocky-style training montage at one point. Yikes.

Along the way, you also meet the Cloud Striders, Nimbus and Rohan, who are 12-foot tall cybernetically infused humanoids with personalities that were apparently drawn randomly from a basket of cliches. Rohan is an elderly Cloud Strider who all-but stares directly into the camera to tell you he’s a day away from retirement (I wonder what will happen to him), while Nimbus is a young surfer dude who makes cringey jokes as humanity’s holocaust unfolds. Staying on brand with the rest of the campaign, the writing for these two is so extraordinarily bad it makes interacting with them a painful chore, especially Nimbus, who manages to make the low stakes of Lightfall’s story feel even more laughable with his irritating adolescent hijinks.

Just as quickly as it began, the story wraps up a mere 8 hours later while resolving none of its greater questions and kicking the can down the road for any actual story developments to be dealt with at a later date, neatly putting all the pieces back exactly where they were at the beginning. The storytelling is so dreadful it makes me nostalgic for the days of the infamous “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain” line uttered in vanilla Destiny – but worse than that, it undermines the approaching finale by trivializing the arrival of The Witness and slamming the brakes on any momentum or goodwill Destiny gained from The Witch Queen’s excellent writing. As a longtime Destiny fan, I was utterly heartbroken by both the disappointing whiplash in quality and all the wasted story potential by the time I finished Lightfall’s campaign.

It’s not just the plot that disappoints, either. The levels themselves feel decidedly less unique or memorable than The Witch Queen. The interesting puzzles and diet raid mechanics featured in last year’s campaign have been replaced with irritating battles taking place in an arena where you’re often running in circles to survive, stopping to take shots here and there while you can. Instead of fighting interesting new enemies like the light-bearing Hive, Lightfall has you mostly fighting the same burly Cabal that we’ve been at war with for nine years, which have always been one of Destiny’s less engaging adversaries.

Strand does at least help ease the monotony of the campaign’s action, representing the biggest shakeup to Destiny’s sandbox in a long while. The powers themselves aren’t revolutionary to Destiny: you get a new melee ability, new supers for each class that deal huge DPS, and some new buffs and debuffs to play with – like Suspend, which lifts enemies off the ground and entangles them briefly, or Sever, which causes the enemy’s damage output to become significantly reduced. Admittedly, these additions aren’t hugely different from what we’ve seen in Destiny over the years. For example, Suspend effectively does the same thing as the freezing powers of Stasis that we got with Beyond Light. And casting Strand supers to take out large groups of enemies works more-or-less identically to other subclasses but with a different color.

But that’s not to say Strand has nothing unique to offer! The main reason to pick it over other classes is in its unmatched mobility, since the subclass replaces your Guardian’s grenade with a grapple hook that allows you to swing around the environment and pull yourself towards enemies to follow up with a devastating melee hit – both of which are a lot of fun. It’s definitely an interesting tradeoff since gaining access to a grapple hook is rarely worth losing a grenade over, but it still adds some much-needed diversity to the sandbox and is a great option to help navigate the vertical nature of Neomuna’s skyscrapers.

You’ll be spending most of your time on the neon-soaked streets of Neomuna, a city that’s been peculiarly hidden from the rest of the galaxy until now, yet houses massive buildings and technology that surpasses even that of Guardians during the golden age. Unfortunately, this setting is as flimsy as its lore, and is barren and lifeless despite supposedly thriving up until the recent Cabal invasion. Each area of Neomuna contains a handful of featureless buildings and plenty of Cabal and Vex enemies to battle, but little else to engage with aside from the standard fare of patrols and public events that we’ve seen in every Destiny location since 2014.

You might be thinking: “but shouldn’t this thriving city on Neptune be full of people to talk to?” Of course it should, right? It’d be crazy to make the whole thing look like a derelict corporate park with no intelligent life in sight. Well, as you’re conveniently told early in your visit, all of Neomuna’s citizens have been uploaded to a virtual network to achieve immortality, so they only appear around the city as blurry, ghostlike outlines. The only physical beings occupying the meat space of Neomuna are our duo of Cloud Strikers, who apparently follow the Sith’s rule of two so there’s no chance of you meeting a third, maybe more interesting character even by accident.

Luckily there’s at least one exciting new enemy for you to fight along that way, as Lightfall introduces the Tormentor, a warrior of the darkness who chases you around with a scythe, takes away your abilities with suppression powers, and can nearly one-shot you with his terrifying grapple attack. As the first true footsoldier of the darkness we’ve faced after years of speculation that their pyramid ships would be filled with new horrors for us to confront, the Tormentor serves as a glimmer of hope for what I imagine will be a fully realized enemy faction once we finally face The Witness head-on. But for now they’re one of the only things to occasionally inject some desperately needed freshness into Lightfall’s otherwise stale sandbox. They may be a bit overused in the campaign for that reason, but they are at least a genuinely fun new obstacle to overcome.

A less thrilling addition is that Cabal enemies, now infused with the wicked powers of darkness, will frequently drop a shard upon death that grants an overshield to their allies for a long time unless it’s destroyed. While it’s at least a new challenge to contend with, it mostly just causes the flow of combat to grind to a halt every couple of seconds as you’re forced to remove overshields from the enemy before proceeding, only for another shard to drop the next time you kill something.

Once you’ve completed Lightfall’s campaign, you’ll be greeted by the usual post-game quests and busywork that have followed all of Destiny’s recent campaigns. There’s nothing bad about the postgame stuff I’ve played so far, but there’s also nothing super exciting about it. You’ll learn a little more about Neomuna and go on an odyssey to obtain a new exotic weapon, or maybe even grind out some more customization options for the Strand subclass, but nothing I’ve played has made me particularly motivated about continuing to traipse around Neptune.

I still have some quests to check off my list before finalizing this review, and am hopeful the raid that debuts on March 10 will prove more entertaining than the rest of my adventure so far. But as of right now, things are looking pretty dire for a game that’s been close to my heart for many years. No doubt Lightfall’s shortcomings are made more painful by immediately following The Witch Queen and its strong post-launch updates, which felt like Destiny 2 had finally overcome its storytelling woes and charted out a strong future for itself. After playing Lightfall, perhaps too fittingly given its name, that future doesn’t look quite as bright.

I'll never forget my first confusing, terrifying encounter with a cannibal in 2018's The Forest, when an intelligent creature out of a nightmare decided simply to watch me rather than try to kill me. And while its sequel, Sons of the Forest, can't truly replicate the creepy novelty of that first time, it does build upon the gameplay, story, and atmosphere of one of the best ever survival crafting games in some very satisfying ways. It occasionally reminded me of its Early Access status with seemingly unfinished cutscenes and inconsistent performance, but not nearly as often as a lot of other recent games that use that label.

Set several years after The Forest, Sons of the Forest challenges you to survive and uncover new mysteries on a lush, temperate island that reminded me of hiking in the American Pacific Northwest. It's about four times the size of the original's map, and it is downright gorgeous. The amount and variety of vegetation, some of which can be used as a food source or to make medicines, adds a fullness and richness to the landscape that we rarely see in this type of game. The lighting is also incredible. Clouds that partially block out the sun on a warm day completely change the mood of my exploration. It's one of those small details that most games ignore, but when one of them gets it right, I really notice.

It isn't perfectly optimized yet though. While my RTX 3080 could generally cruise along at a smooth 60 frames or better at 1080p with DLSS set to maximum quality, I did run into semi-regular dips into the 20s when traveling long distances over land. And you sometimes see annoying pop-in with leaves and rocks appearing a couple dozen meters in front of you, which can really take me out of the experience. I also had a lot of glitchy sound issues, particularly during rainstorms or other times when a lot of different sounds were playing at once. Performance is usually one of the last things to be finalized, though, so hopefully a lot of this can be worked out over the course of Early Access.

Further adding to the believability and hostility of the environment in Sons of the Forest is a full system of seasons, including snowy winters that kill off most of the edible vegetation and require you to keep track of your body temperature. It's a nice change of pace, but I think there's more that could be done with these weather effects. Being soaking wet and freezing cold, even on higher difficulties, is more of a small annoyance than a life-threatening challenge. And, hilariously, you can't break the ice on frozen bodies of water, even using C4 explosives. But overall, I enjoyed both the visual variety and shift in difficulty seasons provided quite a bit.

Of course, I haven't mentioned the cannibals yet. Much like in the first game, they cleverly subvert everything we've been taught about video game enemies, prioritizing self-preservation over aggression. Every run-in with these bone-clad baddies begins with a tense stand-off, and many will choose not to fight, especially if they're alone and you don't act afraid of them. Their AI has definitely gotten a significant upgrade since The Forest, with improved stealth, more advanced social dynamics, and more varied group behavior.

They can climb trees to get away or pounce on you from above, and even set ambushes, disguising themselves in piles of leaves. It's terrifying, especially if you're caught outside at night and you can hear that they're nearby, but you don't know where. I'll let you discover some of the more interesting interactions you can have with these fine folks on your own. Suffice to say, every time I thought they were out of surprises, they surprised me again.

When you venture into the depths of the island, though, cannibals will be the least of your worries. There are a lot more hulking, horrible mutants in Sons of the Forest than there were in its prequel, and they're a lot more dangerous. I really came to enjoy the stronger focus on combat, as it's used very effectively to build tension rather than just to check a box or provide cheap thrills.

Every fight with a powerful opponent or a large group of enemies is a heart-thumping resource management puzzle that reminded me of some of the best parts of Resident Evil or The Last of Us. Ranged weapons keep you out of danger, but ammo can be very difficult to come by. In melee, it's almost impossible to win without taking some amount of damage, which depletes your breakable armor pieces and healing items. And without batteries for your flashlight, you're as good as dead. I'd rather run out of bullets and food nine times out of 10 than lose my light source deep into a cavern run.

So I found myself having to carefully consider the risks and rewards of each approach. Is losing a handful of arrows worth the loot I'll get from this cannibal camp? Is it worth the medicine I'll have to use to patch myself up if I go at this mutant with my axe to conserve ammo? The fighting itself also feels precise and responsive, so I never felt like I was robbed of my resources due to a bad hitbox or sluggish animations.

Even if you played The Forest, and you know how far some of the later chapters stray from a stroll in the woods, I can fairly confidently say you still would never guess where Sons of the Forest is going to take you before the credits roll. And if you didn't play the first one, well… buckle up, I guess. The terrifying tale that begins with trying to find a billionaire and his family who went missing in the wilderness expands on the supernatural elements established in the first game – not always in ways that I enjoyed, but it certainly never got boring.

The ending is both mind-blowing and, currently, pretty rough around the edges. I'm not going to show any of it here, but it's one of the few places I could really tell I was playing an Early Access game, with what seems like quite a bit of missing dialogue and some glitchy character interactions. In fact, I'd probably recommend you hold off on completing the story until it's in a more polished state, since there's so much else to do in the meantime.

And that includes building your dream cannibal-proof fortress with a new, totally modular building system that lets you place individual structure elements like windows and support beams wherever you want. I spent a good five or six of my 25 hours so far just setting up a base, and I really barely scratched the surface of what is now possible. Especially if you have a full, eight-person crew in multiplayer. Which, by the way, has been running great for me so far, with no significant server issues.

At this point, it’s probably fair to say that Team Ninja has a pretty good handle on this whole soulslike genre thing. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty may not reach the same heights as Nioh 2 did back in 2020, but it certainly scratches that same itch of lightning-fast combat, punishing-yet-rewarding difficulty, and deep build customization options that you can craft and tailor to your own playstyle. It’s great for the same reasons that the Nioh games are, and it accomplishes that feat even while completely changing up the fundamentals of its combat system to be closer to Sekiro than Dark Souls. But by that same token, it also falls victim to the same familiar issues nagging at those other Team Ninja soulslikes, including subpar storytelling and excessively fiddly loot mechanics. But when you consider that the things Wo Long does better than just about any other game in this genre, that baggage amounts to scratches on an otherwise pristine set of armor.

If you’re familiar with the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history you may get more out of Wo Long’s story than I did (my knowledge basically begins and ends with the fact that you should not pursue Lu Bu), but I think even then it won’t be a highlight because Team Ninja continues to struggle with telling a memorable story with likable characters. This is a supernatural take on the final days of the Han Dynasty, where we take control of a nameless warrior who gets swept up in a power struggle between warring kingdoms and their pursuit of an elixir of immortality. In practically every level you team up with some sort of historically significant warrior to fight through a level, have a boss battle against an evil or corrupted historically significant warrior, and then move on to the next one.

Characters are introduced at a rapid-fire pace and leave the scene just as quickly, often without making any sort of impact on the overall story. Sometimes they return many hours later, but I’d already forgotten them because they didn’t do anything meaningful. Fortunately, the actual gameplay in between the cutscenes make up the vast majority of what we’re here to do, and it’s there that Wo Long shines brightest.

The Dance of Combat

Wo Long’s combat is a puzzle that needs to be figured out really quickly if you plan on getting past even the first major boss, but once you solve it, it’s incredibly satisfying to play around in. Similar to Sekiro, it’s a system that relies a lot on carefully timing deflections so you can preserve your Spirit meter while also avoiding damage, especially when enemies also start mixing in powerful, unblockable attacks that have to be parried rather than blocked. Crucially, though, you can completely negate damage from regular attacks just by holding down the block button, so long as you have enough Spirit built up to avoid having your guard broken – if that happens, you’re left helpless. You can even hold down the block button while also attempting to deflect, making it so that even if you’re too late on the deflection timing, you’ll still block the attack.

It’s a good thing that Wo Long has this leniency built in because in practically every other regard, it doesn’t pull any punches. Enemies will regularly power through your attacks to deal a more powerful blow of their own, they have combos that go on for days, and they do a really good job at varying the rhythm of their attacks to try and bait you into parrying too early. It rewards a careful eye and punishes falling into a predictable rhythm. Even with all of that it isn’t nearly as hard as Nioh 2, for reasons I’ll get to later, but it still manages to find a really satisfying balance of being tough, fair, and absolutely exhilarating once you start to pick up on an enemy’s attack patterns and find yourself deflecting each hit of an incoming combo.

One clever wrinkle is that your Spirit meter is also a resource that can be spent on spells, special martial arts abilities, and Spirit attacks. That’s a nice risk-reward mechanic that lets you put yourself in a potentially more vulnerable position in order to gain some sort of advantage. If you know an enemy has an elemental weakness, for instance, you can exploit that by spending Spirit to enchant your weapon with an element to stagger and quickly break them. Martial arts abilities are unique depending on the weapon you’re wielding, and there are many that offer powerful attacks that can either do big single-target damage or give you a way to deal with many enemies at once. Finally, Spirit attacks are powerful strikes that increase in damage the more Spirit you have built up, which give you another reason to hold onto your Spirit meter until you need it.

If it’s not already clear, there are tons of layers to Wo Long’s combat, which greatly enhances the already excellent swordplay by laying out a ton of options and ways to vary up my strategy whenever I found myself dying repeatedly to a particular boss. If just straight-up attacking didn’t work I could focus more on defense and reduce their Spirit by deflecting their big attacks; failing that, I could double down on rushing them down and trying to break their Spirit with aggressive attacks and martial arts abilities. Or, if I could figure out what they were weak to, I could try using spells. So while Wo Long is certainly tough, I never felt like I was ever stuck against a wall with no idea of what else I could try or how to overcome a particular challenge.

The Loot Problem

Where Wo Long feels very similar to the previous three Team Ninja soulslikes – in a bad way – is in its loot. More specifically, there’s an overabundance of it. I became absolutely inundated with garbage gear that I had no use for within just a few hours, and it only got worse after that. I’m just not the kind of person who really wants to spend 10 to 15 minutes in a menu trying to decipher whether a -2.6% reduction in Martial Arts Spirit is worth sacrificing a +7.2% Genuine Qi Obtention, or if I’m willing to sacrifice a few points of attack power for +24 alliance Spirit defense. Those simply aren’t interesting decisions – those are spreadsheet entries and math problems, and it’s made worse by not even being able to sort your massive list of weapons by set, or by a specific special effect you’re looking for.

I’m fully aware that there are people who love these games for this level of hyper-specific build optimization, and if that is you, then you’ll find a lot to appreciate here. You can salvage junk gear to extract their special effects, then slot those special effects into weapons that you want to use, and then you can copy the appearance of any other weapon or armor so you don’t have to worry about being forced to use an ugly weapon or armor set because it has great stats. It’s fairly exhaustive in its options, but it’s also not for those of us who prefer action to menu screens.

Fortunately, I found that I didn’t have to get too far in the weeds on my first playthrough because I was more than powerful enough just by engaging with loot on a surface level. For armor, I just picked whatever gave me the highest defense number without putting me into the heavyweight category, which would limit my mobility. Then I would pick a weapon type I liked, swap it with one with a higher gear score whenever I came across one; similarly, when I found one that came with a Martial Arts ability that I liked, I just upgraded that as high as I could. No major tweaking was necessary to keep me from falling behind the power curve, leaving the complexity for those who are looking to test their mettle in the multiple iterations of New Game+ or PvP invasions.

Raising Morale

One of my favorite new ideas in Wo Long is the addition of Morale Ranks, which is basically a separate progression system that starts at zero at the beginning of every main mission and goes all the way up to 25. You gain morale simply by defeating enemies, but you’ll gain it even faster by killing them using Spirit attacks, Martial Arts abilities, or critical strikes. You will also lose some morale everytime you die, up to a certain point determined by your fortitude level, which you can increase by finding various flag poles throughout each mission. Enemies have Morale Ranks too, and those with a higher rank than you deal more damage. I love this addition because it gives every level a very natural ramp-up in difficulty, while adding extra incentive to explore and mop up more bad guys.

Each level begins fairly easy: a bunch of low-morale-rank enemies make up the majority of foes, with a few high-rank monsters sprinkled in here and there to give you an occasional challenging fight. By the time you’re near the end of the level though, you’re regularly going up against rank 20 enemies and bosses that will be really tough to deal with if you haven’t been thorough in clearing out the opposition.

Much like Nioh, Wo Long’s campaign is broken up into main missions and side missions, with the main missions taking you through humongous levels – from castles, to active battlefields, to jails with Dark Souls-like poison ponds on the ground floor – and the side missions typically having you revisit those settings with some sort of fun twist with regard to the objective and enemy placements. Some of my favorite side missions even have you sparring against your allies in challenging boss battles. One of the really great things that Wo Long does is that it allows you to exit out of a mission from a Battle Flag and save your progress on that main mission. This is a wonderful safety net, because frequently what can happen is you can find yourself underleveled and stuck on a main mission; here you’re allowed to back out to the level select, complete some side missions to level up or get new gear, maybe head to your secret village home base to upgrade that gear, and then return right where you left off on that main mission without feeling like you’ve lost your hard-fought progress.

The levels themselves won’t win any awards for how they look, but they’re very well designed from a gameplay perspective. Branching paths that often allow you to find an easier way through a particularly tough area and tons of easily missable optional detours leading to bountiful rewards keep them from being straightforward paths from point A to point B.

Wo Long’s biggest problem – bigger than the loot issues and the poor storytelling – is its enemy variety. Even though the combat system is excellent and varied, there’s simply not enough different types of opponents to fill a game of this size. The ones that are here are fantastic and fun to fight, don’t get me wrong, but part of the fun of a soulslike is encountering a new threat, learning their attack patterns, and finding ways to get through the fight without taking heavy damage. In Wo Long, I felt like I figured out everything I needed to know to get through every non-boss encounter by hour five of a game that, in total, took me about 22 hours to beat. That took out a lot of the tension and fear of death that these games thrive on. Without the anxiety that something unexpected might be lying in wait around the next corner, Wo Long is still a very challenging game, but one that lacks a certain sense of adventure.

It’s also worth mentioning that Wo Long also includes online co-op for up to three players, an extensive New Game+ for those who really want to min/max their characters to the extreme, and even has PvP invasions (which you can opt out of if you’d prefer to deal with relatively easy AI invaders). Unfortunately, not enough people were playing ahead of launch for me to test the competitive multiplayer features out for this review, but cooperative play is super easy to set up and play through, just like it has been in prior Team Ninja soulslikes. You can either recruit random strangers into your game from within a level when you need help, or you can start a level fresh from the beginning with a friend.

Pen-and-paper gaming works a little like Murphy’s law: as young hobbyists get old enough to fully grasp the intricate rules of Dungeons & Dragons or other, similarly complex tabletop RPGs like Cyberpunk 2020, it’s almost inevitable that age and wisdom give way to hectic work schedules and busy personal lives, making it grueling to stay consistent with any RPG. By stark contrast, Demeo takes many of the most enjoyable conventions of D&D – including its strategic turn-based combat, deep character classes, and an extensive bestiary of goblins and ghouls – and juices them into a digital formula that’s condensed to be immediately engaging. The result is an infinitely replayable, widely accessible, easy-to-learn (yet difficult to master) tabletop-inspired game that feels just as good in a VR headset – such as the brand-new PlayStation VR2 or the portable Meta Quest 2 – as it does on any gaming PC.

Up to four players can pop into the same session at any time, and thanks to wide crossplay support extends across a number of VR and non-VR platforms (notably absent: Nintendo Switch and Xbox), and aside from a few bugs – like characters getting stuck in geometry and refusing to move in some of the worst instances – it’s all pretty seamless. Even when things aren’t going well, Demeo’s versatility makes it just as much fun to play whether you choose to head online with up to four strangers in Quickplay mode, gather your established tabletop buddies in a private room, or go it completely alone in Skirmish mode.

Five visually-diverse campaigns are broken down into three floors apiece, each more difficult than the last until you face the area boss – like the macabre Elven Queen or the deadly Serpent Lord – on the third and final floor. For the sake of convenience, it can take roughly 30 minutes to one hour to complete each floor – but it’s usually on the quicker side since all you need to do for the first two floors is find the key and make it to the locked door in one piece.

It all takes place on a simulated game board with miniatures and tile-based topography that evokes the sense of playing a game within a game. You’re affecting a fantasy setting rather than being fully transported to one, and to this end, Demeo’s basement kitsch works notably well – it makes me feel like I’m playing in the comfort of a buddy’s house rather than in an actual dungeon.

There’s no complex story to speak of, though each campaign is accompanied by an interactive pamphlet that lets you flip through the details about the area boss, various monster types (including their strengths and weaknesses), and a few general story tidbits explaining what’s going on. This means Demeo always sticks to its most essential basics, like a one-shot pen-and-paper campaign you might find in a game store (or in the depths of an internet forum) and it’s great that it doesn’t need a human dungeon master to run the show.

While the gameplay might look like an isometric CRPG in the vein of Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Baldur’s Gate from a distance, but don’t be confused: Demeo deftly takes you directly to where the action is without getting bogged down in story, and thanks to its intelligent monster AI that keeps you on your toes with plenty of status-altering spells, movement-deterring group attacks, and smart use of chokepoints – it’s much more of a tactical board game than an RPG.

Each of the seven playable classes is decked out with a dynamic, constantly revolving set of powerful abilities unlocked through a randomly generating deck of cards. Defeating monsters gradually refills your card meter until a new card is drawn, but it’s slow enough to make you think about when to unleash your best abilities. It’s a slight disappointment, though, that each of the characters available to use in your party is entirely premade, name and all. Also, it’s a bit of a bummer that Demeo’s account-wide progression system is only cosmetic – meaning you won’t see your characters gain any persistent progress through an extended series of quests and adventures.

This can seem oversimplified, but the prime benefit is that you or anyone else can immediately drop into an ongoing session, pick up a character, and… that’s it. You can just play without any knowledge of the rules, and the rest is up to a mixture of skill, strategy, and fate. Much like its tabletop counterparts, Demeo is governed by a dice-rolling system, but it’s way more compact with three potential outcomes – either your attack or spell works as intended when the dice lands on one sword, delivers a critical hit when the dice lands on two swords, or misses and potentially strikes a teammate when it lands on a skull.

Things are kept nice and clean by the fact that each character gets two action points per round. For example, moving from one tile to another, delivering a basic attack on a monster, or redeeming a card to unleash a unique ability will generally take up one action point. But it’s nice that some cards – like health potions – are treated like free actions that don’t use any points at all. Demeo’s initiative system is also pretty straightforward: monsters and players make their moves on alternating rounds, and you can comfortably view everyone’s move order on your right wrist in VR. It also feels smooth to just pick up your character and plop it down wherever you want when it’s time to move or attack, and the card deck system is stylishly represented by a literal deck held in your left hand. It pops out when you turn your left palm toward your face, and it’s cool that you can use any ability in your deck by grabbing the card and dropping it onto the map.

Each campaign is themed around different creatures with different tactics, but Demeo’s monster encounters always feel challenging without immediately overwhelming you, and its tense turn-based combat tends to be unpredictable no matter which campaign you’re playing in. Since each character’s basic attack only does three points of damage, combat often leans more in favor of the dungeon master’s minions than the players. But considering each campaign only takes, at most, three hours to complete from end to end, it’s never really that big of a deal if you lose. It’s a nice consolation prize that you’ll still earn at least a little progression XP at the end of a floor, even if your party wipes before beating the final boss.

If you get bored or distracted, you can just save at the end of a floor (while speaking to the card merchant) though it’s frustrating that you can’t save in the middle of a floor if reality calls mid-run. And if you forget to save before quitting mid-game, you lose all the experience points that you would have earned toward your account’s progression had you simply died. This makes sense as an incentive to keep people from quitting in the middle of an online session, but I missed out on too many opportunities to earn XP in the single-player Skirmish mode just because I saw where things were heading and didn’t feel like narrowly carving my way out of danger or waiting for my party to wipe.

That said, Demeo’s satisfyingly asymmetric combat encounters can feel like tug-of-war at their tensest moments; often managing to remain tight enough to make you think carefully about each move, but never so much that you’re left completely out of options if you have a few odd cards and some spare patience and creativity to figure something out. It’s only when the odds are most stacked against your party that the rich interplay between Demeo’s classes gets to shine, and there’s a level of nuance here that you don’t often see in true-blue RPGs.

For instance, the Barbarian has a grappling hook that he can use once per round, allowing him to quickly propel himself to a distant tile, bring enemies closer, or capture an elemental trap (like an exploding oil pot) to use as a projectile on his next turn. This means a party of four Barbarians can rapidly travel across the map in a group, barraging an opponent with wave after wave of elemental traps – including poison and fire traps that magnify one another’s effectiveness – then quickly move away together. It’s a remarkably different strategy than what would be tenable in a party containing one speedy Barbarian, a sneaky Assassin, a tanky Guardian, and one courage-inspiring Bard, each class bringing its own unique skills to create a bevy of strategic possibilities.

Granted, the camera can be a bit finicky. This was especially the case when I approached Demeo from outside of a VR headset on both the PS5 and on Windows, where the map’s geometry often occluded important details and moving it around wasn’t always as intuitive as I would have liked. But in VR, you do get an impressive amount of control over the camera. Grabbing the world with both hands and stretching it out or spinning it around to get a better view of the board always felt natural to me, even though I felt like I was constantly moving it around and altering it to get a better angle. It’s cool that I could even zoom all the way into the board if I wanted an up-close look at the miniatures. I also appreciate the level of detail that developer Resolution Games placed into each of Demeo’s colorful zones, like the desert village of Izteria, and it all holds up while standing directly inside of them in VR.

Other players in Demeo’s multiplayer modes are represented by masks and hands, but there’s just enough detail there to give you the essence of social interaction in a physical space – that is, without the added hassle of setting up a game board and tearing it down after. It’s also pretty neat that you can unlock different cosmetic skins between sessions and, for what it’s worth, there’s no microtransaction shop here – so don’t even think about paying for a decked-out pair of dice.

My final gripe is that the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Rift versions have an exclusive Heroes’ Hangout mode which is missing from its PS VR2 and Steam counterpart, and it’s here where you can paint your own miniatures and read up on the various campaigns – or just kick back with a few arcade games. Even then, though, sucks that you can’t bring your own painted miniatures into actual Demeo sessions.

As I took my first steps on Scars Above’s mysterious planet, I felt my excitement and fear rising. Almost immediately, an encounter with its grotesque alien creatures turned out to be much more complicated than I anticipated. I even died a couple of times before making any significant progress at all, giving me the impression that I was at the beginning of a harsh and nervewracking journey that was going to ask the very best of me to survive on its default difficulty level. But my fear of the unknown proved to be unjustified in this case, and the initial thrill dissipated after an hour or so when I’d unlocked the first few of a vast arsenal of weapons. After that, most of my battles became trivial, and they remained that way until the very end – even when I turned the difficulty up to hard.

Scars Above’s first section is calm. You’re introduced to your protagonist, Doctor Kate Ward, and the rest of the space scientific crew while they are investigating a strange object in Earth’s orbit. Some silly chit-chat, puzzles, and exposition later, you get to (barely) know your team and craft your first device — a tool that will become like the standard assault rifle you find in most shooters, but with shock ammo. Then, you’ll hear an unnecessarily serious speech from your captain that is supposed to be inspiring but ends up being cheesy due to its delivery and timing. The next thing you know, you wake up on an unknown planet with no idea about what happened or where everyone went.

Right after picking up an electric cutter – a basic melee weapon with the most boring attack pattern I’ve seen – I faced the first enemy. This one was easy enough, a kind of spider that usually brings some friends but doesn’t really mean any trouble — unless there are too many friends. However, when I grabbed the assault rifle I’d built and got back to the main road, it was the turn of the second type of creature: a mutated scorpion that usually hides underwater. It surprised me coming out of nowhere, and then zapped me with a poison projectile. After dealing with the beast and his partner, I realized that my life was still going down thanks to the new status. There was no way of curing this, and a few seconds later, I was respawning at the checkpoint. The same scene repeated a few times until I managed to stop catching the beast’s vomit with my face and reached the next checkpoint.

What honestly felt unfair at first became the most important lesson I learned through the nine hours and six chapters of Scars Above: keep your distance from the enemies and everything they throw at you. Your electric cutter is a joke – even with the charged attack that you can unlock, it will always leave you exposed when you could just blow the aliens’ heads off with a good headshot. Of course, sometimes this will be challenging in a linear third-person shooter in which you’ll face faster monsters and smaller spaces with nowhere to run as you move through levels, but after the first couple of hours you probably won’t need any combat tips at all. You quickly craft new guns and gadgets and level up, and before long you’ll end up being so powerful that you’ll find little to no resistance.

In essence, the weapons in Scars Above are the typical guns you’ll expect from any type of shooter, but with an elemental twist: there’s the aforementioned assault rifle with electric bullets, a gun that can be charged up to shoot fire ammo, a grenade launcher that freezes enemies, and a shotgun that disintegrates them with acid. As you might imagine, you can chain attacks with these weapons and produce elemental reactions that will deal bonus damage to anything that comes near you, and you can also use the environment to your advantage. Fire and acid bullets create a strong explosion, while shooting an enemy standing on water with your grenade launcher will freeze it faster. Some enemies will have a weak point in their body that will represent the element you want to shoot them with, and there are color-coded orbs around the levels that are effectively explosive barrels that deal elemental damage, too.

This is a clever way of making you change weapons at all times, thinking of which is the best and most effective plan against what’s in front of you. It kept me interested for a while… until I realized that the system worked a little too well. Most of the creatures in front of me could be squashed in mere seconds by exploiting any possible elemental combination, regardless of their strength or the situation. Instead of being one part of a larger plan, shooting an electric orb at the right time completely exterminated all the threats around.

If this wasn’t enough of an advantage, Kate has the ability to craft a variety of gadgets, such as a barrier that protects her for a few hits, a gravity grenade that makes everything in its area except you slow for way too many seconds, or a hologram that baits creatures, among others. All of these use the same resource (batteries), which are crafted from a resource that’s pretty much everywhere, or replenished by refilling your inventory at any checkpoint. This is way too convenient because it means you’ll hardly run out of ammo or crafting resources, especially after you’ve increased your carrying capacity.

What’s worse is that the variety of gadgets that seem interesting and well thought-out when used individually felt useless when they start to overlap with each other. For instance, you can basically spam the gravity grenade and earn effectively the exact effect and/or advantages of all the other gadgets. And you can forget about dying when you find permanent healing items with several charges that can be easily refilled.

Some regular enemies that you’ll discover later will make things a bit more interesting, like one beast that can teleport behind you or a fungus monster that blinds you. They arrived a bit too late to the party, though, after I’d already become pretty bored by several hours of effortlessly killing everything around me.

Not even the bosses stand out as challenges, except perhaps for the first one that you meet while you’re still creating your basic guns. That doesn’t mean that these battles are completely uninspired – they do come with mechanics that will keep you changing ammo constantly and moving around big arenas. They are fun while they last, but they also don’t present ideas that you haven’t seen already in other games (and better executed). For example, breaking the surface where an enemy is standing isn’t exactly new, and it doesn’t feel great either when you can do it more than once in a row without letting the boss move or shoot you back if you’re fast enough. The fact that some boss battles are repeated doesn’t help the case, either.

What’s so frustrating about all of these issues is that Scars Above has its moments of pure joy. Facing a new creature for the first time normally involves a moment of genuine surprise, and figuring out how to handle them is engaging. Even being an unstoppable killing machine can bring satisfaction when you feel rewarded by perfectly understanding the tools at your disposal, or just by feeling your own power. And some of the later areas even took me by surprise with their scatological and repulsive (but in a good way) design, at least when compared to the dull plains and boring swamps from the earlier stages. The lack of a map directing you around is a good choice as it makes you follow your intuition and find the way, even if none of the scenarios are really big or full of secret pathways. The building blocks for a more engaging game are here, but they are surrounded by elements that lack polish, depth, and any sense of challenge.

Apart from fighting, you’ll spend time analyzing resources, clues left in the environment, and some pretty basic symbol-matching puzzles. There’s an intention of bringing a scientific perspective, considering our protagonist’s background, which is mixed in the exploration – for example, when scanning unknown objects we hear what Kate is thinking. She approaches how one creature’s digestive system works with genuine amazement, wondering how its body evolved into that group of organs and functions.

The delivery of Erin Yvette, Kate’s voice actor, feels fresh and embodies a character more worried about discovering and understanding what’s around her during these calmer moments. It’s a shame that her face lacks any expression during most cutscenes, creating an unintentionally hilarious contradiction between what we are hearing and what we see.

The objective of finding the rest of the crew is one of the main plot points, but it is weak and lacks any motivation due to the fact that we don’t know anything about them. I can’t tell you a single thing about any character apart from that they are “people of science” and one of the dudes has a cute little cat toy that wears a hoodie. The intended emotional moments don’t land and some of the transitions between scenes are incredibly abrupt, killing the pacing and the tension built.

Something similar could be said about the plot. While Kate’s motivations are clear and you always know why you’re doing what you’re doing and why, it can’t be said that it’s interesting or original at all. The world of Scars Above feels flat, with some cool alien designs here and there, but not much else that made me want to explore every corner or find all the available audio logs. Far into the story, there are some cool ideas that I won’t spoil, but they are either abandoned or never pay out in any major way, and it’s a disappointment to watch them fizzle out.

This review exclusively covers the multiplayer mode of Company of Heroes 3. For thoughts on the campaigns, read our Company of Heroes 3 - Single-Player review.

For a lot of long-time fans, Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy series that’s more about competitive play than single-player campaigns, and we've logged hundreds more hours playing against other people than against the AI in scripted scenarios. That'll certainly be true for Company of Heroes 3, because while the single-player campaigns are trapped in a quagmire of a strategic map and bogged down in their storytelling, in multiplayer we can focus on what really matters: moment-to-moment gameplay, balance, and faction mechanics. CoH3 nails all of that thanks to a wide variety of factions, snappy unit controls, and great multiplayer stability.

I'll say that, as of a few days after launch, this is the most diverse, balanced, and stable multiplayer game in the entire Company of Heroes series to date. Sure there are specific balance issues – the M18 Hellcat's too tough! Those flamethrowers are OP! – but show me an RTS without balance issues at launch and I'll show you a liar. (It'll be you. I'll be pointing at you.)

Emphasis on movement and physical reality, how long a gun takes to move around, to set up, and to aim before they can become lethal is what flavors Company of Heroes games, and that flavor is richly present in CoH3. Units have counters and counter-plays like in other RTS games, but using them effectively is dependent on your deployment and tactical maneuvers rather than simply a rock-paper-scissors triangle. An anti-tank gun counters vehicles, but only in ambush or defense situations; a flimsy scout car can bedevil one with flanking maneuvers because the men behind the gun’s forward-facing shield can only turn their weapon so fast.

The highlight here is the series' distinctive interplay of infantry and vehicle combat. Infantry units rendered as whole squads make the battlefields come alive with motion even when there are only a few actual units present, with each member covering terrain as a group with others and taking cover to protect themselves. Watching infantry in action is also better than ever, with detailed animations showing men vaulting over nearby cover on their own to get past fences and walls. Vehicles, meanwhile, come in their own speeds and flavors, and are forced to deal with realities like turret rotation speed for tanks or turn radius for wheeled vehicles. To best use or defeat a unit you have to understand how it moves, turns, and accelerates. The quality of animations and of most models (with some notable exceptions) goes a long way towards that, though sound design is far below this series’ standard.

In fact, perhaps the single biggest disappointment in Company of Heroes 3’s multiplayer mode is that its sound seems oddly muddled. Individual sound effects, taken in isolation, are excellent, like the delightful blast and ring of a shell exploding against a tank. That nice bass explosion, however, can too easily fade into the background when other weapons are firing. There's something weird going on when sounds start playing over each other, as they often do in a battle. Something to do with not starting and stopping correctly, maybe? For example, the sound of a tank engine idling doesn't always play correctly if you weren't looking when the tank stopped moving. This would normally be a curiosity, but sometimes vital sounds – noises meant to alert you to units under attack off screen can vanish under machine gun fire – don't play or get totally lost in the background, causing you to lose a unit that would otherwise have lived if you'd retreated it. Likewise, a longstanding and fun feature of CoH is that you can hear enemy vehicles in the fog of war, but in CoH3 that disappeared idling engine noise lets tanks get a bit stealthier than I'd like.

Despite those oddities that are most noticeable for long-time players, the general pace of fights has improved. The balance of damage and time-to-kill for units is much better than in the past, weighing the value of quick reactions with the likelihood of a squad getting wiped out before you can react at all. For example, infantry squads very generally have more protection from explosions while in retreat, so they can more reliably escape barrages of grenades or artillery with at least one or two members alive (preserving their valuable experience/veterancy status).

Fundamental balance changes like these also draw out the stages of a match, letting the early infantry and light vehicle combat flourish for longer before medium vehicles, crew weapons, and tanks move in for the kill. A lot of that is down to faction design, where – barring a few exceptions – every side can build a playstyle focusing on their choice of the triad of tanks, infantry, and support weapons. That's a contrast to Company of Heroes 2, where certain playstyles from the original just weren't supported due to resource constraints.

CoH3 provides interesting new tools to use in your fights. Building on the series’ long-established tradition of garrisoning troops in buildings to use as defensive emplacements, some infantry units can now assault and enter garrisoned buildings to force enemies out of their strongpoints. Elevation over enemies is treated as a bonus, too, meaning height plays a greater role. Where normally red, yellow, and green cover have always had their own meanings, a degree of elevation over enemies now weakens or eliminates their cover. A stone wall that would've protected your men from machine gun suppression in the past is far less effective if that MG is firing from a house atop a hill.

Tactical mobility is likewise upgraded, as utility vehicles can now tow field guns while infantry can hitch a ride to the front on certain tanks. It's not just a little touch of realism, it's a tactical option that lets a heavy mortar do a lot more work on the offensive, or an anti-tank gun move up to quickly secure a taken position against counterattacks.

For all that, there are still a few nagging little issues in the gameplay mechanics. For instance, broad classes and counter-systems leave some weird stuff that's very unintuitive. Open-topped vehicles aren’t affected by flamethrowers in the way you'd expect, and you’ll see jeeps and halftrack gunners merrily firing away amidst patches of inferno. Likewise, if you don't know the WW2 gear in advance you won't understand that your Wirbelwind Flakpanzer can't damage medium armor, despite its very loud and impressive gun – a problem that better interface and more direct unit descriptions could have headed off.

None of this would matter much if the map design was bad. After all, it doesn't matter how dynamically you can affect the battlefield if the battlefield is boring as dirt. Thankfully, the terrain of Italy and North Africa delivers in spades. The emphasis on a variance of open spaces, and the tight, winding streets of urban combat is some of the most fun map design I've seen in an RTS. Italian maps, for example, are replete with agricultural hillsides to capture in tank maneuver warfare, but parts of the map will be a twisting snarl of little streets in a tiny town, requiring fierce house-to-house fighting to take. The sense that you can firmly control part of the map well is never entirely there, so you’re forced to constantly watch your back lest flanking enemies snag a key cutoff in the rear and deprive you of income from your entrenched front sectors. It's the best kind of strategic paranoia.

There's also a notable lack of obnoxiously designed maps with single strategic chokepoints that draw out matches, which were a series staple and are mercifully absent here. No, instead we get a pleasant selection of varied maps, all of which cater to a breezy style of 30 to 40-minute matches – though I could see a particularly hard-fought 4v4 stretching past the 60-minute mark.

I quite love the range of units available, and the focus on equipment from earlier in the war adds a lot of less-seen tanks and gear. Each of the four factions – the Wehrmacht and Deutsches Afrikakorps for the Axis, Americans and British for the Allies – has its own three sub-specializations called battlegroups. Those let you purchase specific unique units, abilities, and upgrades on top of the playstyle customization within each faction.

Among the allies, the Americans take a much more flexible approach while the British are a more rigid, if simpler, faction. Americans choose between air support, mechanized, and infantry abilities and upgrades on top of their battlegroups, giving a total of 12 possible choices for strategies on top of choosing the build order for your units and structures. It means that every match as the Americans brings in an array of possibility, giving you that powerful fantasy of being the Western powers' beating industrial heart.

The British have to advance linearly through their tech, making them the simplest faction to learn, but the core units they get access to are good at their jobs without exception. This lets them lean on diverse battlegroups that can be specialized into an artillery/infantry, air and sea power, or armored force. Unfortunately, while other factions are blessed with cool abilities as their units gain veterancy (when they level up, another series staple) the British have little in the way of incentives to preserve your units over raw stat boosts.

The Axis forces, meanwhile, are also two wildly diverse groups. The Afrikakorps (DAK) are the most mobile faction, able to call in halftracks carrying infantry or pulling guns as a set of base abilities. In return for that flexibility they have to be careful, shepherding their resources in order to be sure that none are wasted because accessing new units requires they build expensive buildings and upgrades. DAK players will need to make their chosen strategy work rather than adapting to what enemies are doing, as the wrong buy at the wrong time can mean precious minutes go by before you get the unit you actually need.

Finally, the German regulars, AKA the Wehrmacht, are slower-moving and defensive-minded but also flexible in how they execute that goal. They're most interesting for their big, mid-match choice between two playstyles: either going on the offensive with short-range Panzergrenadiers or transitioning to opportunistic, defensive ambush with tank-hunting Jagers. Having one big interesting choice based on what opponents are doing keeps the whole faction fresh each match.

I do have one pet peeve with faction design – and please forgive me in advance for how truly peevish this is – but I dislike the appearance of ahistorical or never-fielded weapons systems in what is otherwise a historically inspired game. Equipment like the Sherman Whizbang, which never actually fought in this part of the war, or the Churchill Black Prince tank, which was never even finished, feels out of place in a game that otherwise highlights cool history from the North African and Italian part of World War 2. They're just a couple examples, but they feel like units added more to cater to the demand for more powerful toys rather than as design choices around an interesting period of warfare with its own limitations.

Off The Battlefield

Much like single-player, the framework around everything that isn't a match is almost barebones, and some interfaces and issues are really counterproductive in CoH3’s quest to being the kind of competitive RTS it has the potential to be. These range from basic features like the lack of a replay system – a must-have for competitive players who want to know why and how they won or lost. There's also the broader issue of stat tracking that's simply unavailable. How many matches have I played? How many have I won, or lost? Do I have an ELO or MMR? Post-game stats exist, but are anemic – they show infantry and vehicles, but not ubiquitous team weapons, and are padded by strange "damage dealt" metrics that rarely add up to their supposed totals for units or players.

That's not to mention in-match interface problems. Take the shortcomings when playing with a team as examples: If you’re playing with more than one ally, there's no way to tell which teammate owns a specific unit – same goes for if you’re playing with two opponents. You can also swap between Team Colors and Player Colors, but the player colors aren't separated by type or any color theory. So your allies can be red and pink and an opponent can be orange, all while you're blue and an enemy is green, rather than putting warm colors on one team and cold on another. You know, like Relic did Company of Heroes 2.

And there are little annoyances, like tooltips for your battlegroup abilities not having the cost of the unit or thing you're unlocking on them. How should I know if I want a unit right now when I don't know if I can afford it?

But! But! And I cannot lie, it's a big but: This game is fun as hell in multiplayer.

Everybody knows Lady Dimitrescu is tall, but I was still shocked to see just how large she loomed over me from a first-person angle in VR. Resident Evil Village VR captured my undivided attention even beyond my fascination for the tall vampire lady, offering a fresh perspective on a nearly two-year-old game I have played a dozen times over. From the robust tutorial before you start playing to the many ways you can customize the controls for the most comfortable experience, Resident Evil Village’s VR mode is no afterthought, but rather a well-crafted and exciting way to experience an already excellent game.

Nothing has been watered down in the transition to VR: you’ll endure Ethan’s rescue mission from start to finish. That said, this mode doesn’t quite give you access to everything Resident Evil Village offers – the timed challenge Mercenaries mode is not supported in VR (probably for the best, given that it’s all about moving quickly), and the modifiers you may have already unlocked in the non-VR mode, such as weapon attachments and upgrades, are not transferable to VR mode and you will have to unlock all those items once again. This obviously isn’t a big deal for anyone playing Resident Evil Village for the first time, but as someone who has unlocked and upgraded all of my weapons over the course of several playthroughs, that was disheartening. Interestingly, Village VR does offer new weapon attachments, such as a bayonet for the M1897, which you can purchase from The Duke after destroying a certain number of wooden goats scattered throughout the village.

Unlike the third-person mode available in The Winters’ Expansion last year, Resident Evil Village mostly flourishes in VR. Exploring this remote European village, I’ve never felt more immersed in the action. From using my hands to move shelves and barricade doors, to reloading my firearms physically, to drowning Ethan’s hand in First Aid Med, Resident Evil Village VR captures a level of realism that is simply unachievable in traditional 2D first-person games.

Village VR looks beautiful; you can easily get lost roaming its maps and taking a closer look at all the little details in the environment. Castle Dimitrescu often had me doubling back to examine all the paintings and photographs on the wall. That said, because the action is all up in your face, it is easy to spot the low-res textures on some things while exploring, most notably the rotten food that is littered throughout the village.

Resident Evil Village VR’s controls have all of the expected options, allowing you to play either standing or sitting, each with its own pros and cons. Playing standing provides easier access to your arsenal, but usually meant I couldn’t play for as long without fatigue, while sitting down extended my play time but could cause some uncomfortable angles when throwing pipe bombs or using the scope to aim with a sniper rifle. Customizing the control scheme is helpful for either method, allowing you to swap between options like physically reloading weapons manually or having that be handled automatically. I opted for a hybrid of the two as it was really fun mimicking the motions of using a real firearm, but in situations where a lot of action was occurring and things got hectic, it was convenient to have my guns automatically reload.

Knife combat has also been greatly improved; what was once limited in movement and stiff with a controller now feels extremely smooth and responsive as you take actual swipes at your enemies and crates alike. (Or you can punch every crate you see; that’s pretty effective, too.) The more interesting thing I discovered when playing with the knife, however, is that you can throw it without worrying about collecting it after because it immediately respawns in your holster a few seconds later. That makes for a handy way to kill enemies and destroy boxes from afar without using ammo.

Accessing Ethan’s arsenal is done with your hands, pulling weapons and ammo from different areas of your body. While the idea is immersive, the different ways you have to access your weapons can be a bit cumbersome. Sometimes I went to grab a land mine only to pull out my flashlight instead, while other times I would reach for my shotgun only to grab my sniper rifle. I wish there was a hybrid option that allowed me to pull up a quick menu with four preset weapons of my choice, similar to what Resident Evil 4 VR offered, but that doesn’t seem feasible given the lack of a D-Pad on PS VR2’s new Sense controllers.

While I would sometimes forget Village has a block ability since I never had to use it during the base game (even when playing on the challenging Village of Shadows difficulty), it was my new best friend in Village VR. With the number of enemies coming at you all at once, plus the high stress of trying to get avoid damage while simultaneously reloading your weapon, blocking became a very useful tool I hadn’t previously relied on.

Blocking may have felt new, but one feature that’s actually exclusive to VR is the ability to dual-wield weapons. This makes it a lot easier to get out of tight situations, or to simply bust open some lycan skulls faster. Weapons that were once used with two hands, like the shotgun, can also be wielded with one hand with the pistol held in the other. That’s super convenient if you need to get a quick shot off at an enemy close to you, but it comes at the cost of more recoil decreased aim. There’s a lot of fun experimentation to be done with the combinations of weapons alone, which makes for a welcome new level of freedom.

However, some tension and jump scares I encountered in the original game were not as scary in VR. Sure, a few moments still left me in fight or flight mode, such as Lady Dimitrescu chasing me in her castle or when I encountered that one specific section in House Benevieto. But most of the jump scares can be entirely missed if you aren’t looking in the right direction at the right time, which I learned the hard way the first time Ethan encounters a lycan. It doesn’t put a major damper on things, but it can still be a bit disappointing.

Thankfully a lot of the tension and scares from Resident Evil Village come from the combat itself, which there is plenty of. There are a handful of sections where Village throws dozens of enemies at you at once, and the VR changes to combat mean you can now easily drop your gun when you meant to reload it, or forget to cock your shotgun after firing a shell. Similar to what I said in my review of Resident Evil 4 VR, this new combat style comes with a severe learning curve, which can sometimes be frustrating, especially in later sections. But trust me when I say that it’s worth mastering, making the challenge all the more rewarding to overcome once you get the hang of it.

Village VR unfortunately shares some frustrations with the VR mode for Resident Evil 7 as well – most notably, the animations that occur when enemies grab you or knock you down. Not only do they drag out the length of combat encounters, but they also put you into some extremely weird and awkward viewing, especially since you can easily look in another direction while the animations play out.

On the flipside, Resident Evil Village’s puzzles are much more fun to solve and interact with while hands-on in VR. These sections could feel a bit tedious and repetitive in 2D when you are just following cumbersome button prompts, but Village VR has you physically interacting with objects by doing things like flipping a switch to restore power to a room, or moving a statue to solve a puzzle, which makes them feel like more than just busywork.

Many traditional sports games release a new edition every year, with mixed results on whether or not they feel different enough to justify themselves beyond a roster update. So I'm surprised at Blood Bowl 3, the latest digital adaptation of Games Workshop's ultraviolent board game parody of American football set in a wacky alternate version of the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It presents shockingly little reason for its own existence compared to the previous version, which came out almost eight years ago. I like the intense and hilarious premise and mechanics of Blood Bowl on their own, but what we have here is basically Blood Bowl 2, again, but worse.

If you've never played Blood Bowl before, you might be able to coast for a while just on the absurd novelty of the concept. Elves, dwarves, orcs, and minotaurs line up on a grid iron and try to bash, pass, and juke their way to a touchdown, with often brutal results. Because this is Warhammer, players can be seriously injured and even killed depending on how the virtual dice fall, which has the potential to create bitter and satisfying rivalries in long-running leagues.

Moment to moment, the turn-based mechanics are fun, tactical, and exciting. A lot of my pre-existing criticisms of Blood Bowl as a video game still stand, in that I think using six-sided dice for everything can feel a bit too random, and that works better when you're leaning over a table and having some beers with friends than it does in a video game against the AI. Sometimes the outcome of a play comes down too much to luck and too little to player skill.

Brittle League

But all of that could have been said about 2015's Blood Bowl 2. In fact, I did say it. And I'd highly recommend its Legendary Edition, which you can get on Steam, PlayStation 4, or Xbox One with all the DLC for the same price or less than this lackluster sequel. Across the board, Blood Bowl 3 feels like a much less polished game. It just isn't as bombastic or eye-catching, whether you’re on the field looking at the overlays or in the menus. Even things like icons that present you choices during certain plays, like using a reroll or an apothecary to avoid an injury, are smaller and harder to read.

It also kind of looks worse overall. Obviously the higher graphics settings have increased fidelity and make use of more modern rendering techniques, but when I look at Blood Bowl 2 and 3 side-by-side, I just prefer the former. The colors were more saturated and in-your-face, the whole match was more readable. And I could be wrong, but it seems like the player models and animations have hardly changed at all.

The caster duo of Bob the ogre and Jim the vampire are back in Blood Bowl 3, but are mostly heard and not seen. We don't really get to watch them bantering at the desk that much anymore. A lot of their lines are recycled from the last game, and most of the new ones are specific to certain matches or competitions. I got sick of them quickly because whenever one of those scenarios came up they’d repeat over and over. Matches end largely without fanfare or analysis, booting you back to the menu unceremoniously even if you just defeated a major antagonist.

Everything just feels kind of, for lack of a more accurate term, half-assed, including some pretty big oversights. Often the score shown in the end of game summary will not reflect the score of the actual match. Most of the names of AI teams, or randomly-generated players aren't even capitalized correctly! It might seem like a smaller nitpick, but I'd expect more attention to detail out of a fan game or a mod. Come on, am I wrong?

Flag on the Play

Not everything in Blood Bowl 3 is a step backward. At least compared to the launch day version of Blood Bowl 2, there's more diversity in the teams and player types. But even then, there's a lot of recycling going on. The Chaos Chosen have five player types now, instead of three. But two of them, the ogre and troll, are just copy-pasted from other teams.

There’s also the Chaos Renegades, a new team type that is entirely made up of Chaos-worshiping variations of players from other teams. But they don't even get any Chaos-themed starting abilities, and the new Black Orcs team, much like Blood Bowl 2's Chaos roster, only has three player types. This is somewhat made up for by the huge variety of interesting skills you can eventually use to customize players as they gain experience, but I don't see myself playing Blood Bowl 3 long enough to explore the full potential of that system.

You can still create your own leagues and competitions with custom rules, up to 128 teams, and playoffs like in the previous game, which is neat. However, progress can't be carried over between your offline and online profiles.

There are six single-player mini campaigns with some kind of shallow premise about a battle of the sponsors, and the first two are pretty good, actually! As for the others, I couldn't get them to unlock even after winning the championship in the previous ones multiple times, which took a few hours, and hovering over or clicking them doesn't give any indication of how they're unlocked. Maybe they're coming at some point after launch? Maybe it's a bug? Blood Bowl 3 doesn't seem interested in telling me.

Note: This review covers only the single-player modes of Company of Heroes 3. The multiplayer review will follow shortly after launch.

Writing this review hurt my feelings. The Company of Heroes series is near and dear to my heart – all three of them are real-time strategy games that cut to the core of the genre, focusing on overarching strategic decisions coupled with tactical troop movements and a battlefield that truly matters. I'm pleased to say that Company of Heroes 3 implements those series fundamentals quite well in a gentle remix that brings the series to diverse theaters of World War 2 that it hadn't touched yet. What I'm very displeased about is that the ambitious Italian campaign mode is incredibly disappointing. While individual missions and scenarios within the strategic sandbox are strong and even thrilling at times, almost every feature on the strategic map doesn't work, either because it's bugged or because it's such middle-of-the-road game design that it's simply boring.

There are actually two single-player campaigns in CoH3. The larger one is the Italian Campaign, a broad, turn-based strategic mode on a large map of central and southern Italy that has you capture territory town by town, and took me about 25 hours to complete the first time around. It has theoretically complex systems in which your armies – called companies (with heroes in them) – capture towns and ports using deployable air power and naval fleet movements, and build emplacements to defend territory or provide offensive bonuses in battles. It's all very visually similar to the setup of the Total War series.

Actual battles that break out when two companies collide or you invade a town are the highpoint: They’re an exciting mixture of skirmishes with dynamic, interjected bonus objectives, shifting modifiers like a fixed force of starting units or specific enemy troops you need to counter. You might be given a small group of units cut off from the vanguard as it defends a position, or thrown into a normal-looking skirmish where the enemy has a number of extra troops and pre-fortified positions on the map. It's all really fun, and the scenarios are diverse enough that I never got bored with them – it's always an interesting surprise when a column of damaged enemy armor suddenly appears, or a friendly plane goes down and needs rescuing.

Of course there are also fixed missions, a la a traditional RTS campaign, that happen when you attack certain towns or reach specific regions. These might have you command partisans, liberate a POW camp, or play out famous battles like the assault on Anzio and its railway guns. All of those are the good stuff we’re accustomed to from Company of Heroes campaigns, barring the somewhat-buggy and overblown finale map that seems to be more interested in big booms and making you defend nauseating chokepoints than anything tactically interesting.

Again, a lot of those missions are excellent, but the shine is taken off of them by the fact that they're surrounded by the meaningless campaign layer. What initially seems to be a complex system of resource management, defensive emplacements, and company types with skill levels and support detachments ultimately has little impact on what's happening when push comes to shove and you play a skirmish – and it's not even clear if that's because of poor game design choices or if it's all bugged. I couldn't always tell. Every decision on the campaign map is just so low-stakes that it just feels like a waste of time. Did your company take some damage from enemy defensive emplacements? That's fine: every company can heal itself and still attack on the same turn – not that being damaged seems to have any bearing on what happens in a skirmish match anyway. Do I start with fewer troops? Lower resources? Fewer tickets? It doesn’t say and I couldn't tell.

Even worse, the enemy's companies and assets on the campaign layer are incredibly passive. On both medium and hardest difficulties they rarely – if ever – counterattacked me outside of clearly scripted moments. Otherwise they would happily sit in encircled territory as I took objective after objective around them, never making an effort to break out. I never once saw an enemy company attempt to conquer even a completely undefended town that was right there for the taking.

The Italian campaign simply doesn't work as anything other than a miserable framework for delivering skirmishes and missions that the previous two games served up better. What may have been a triumphant and explosive RTS campaign is instead a massive dud.

Much of that meaningless busywork would be forgivable, even fun, if the Italian campaign experiment worked as intended. However, it does not. Unit movements and especially aircraft are very strange on the map, often doing immediate and strange turn-in-place movement that's jarring in a series with otherwise very close emphasis on how things look in motion. And that’s on top of the fact that the interface in general is confusing and lacks visual flair.

Yes, I said there are two campaigns, so all is not lost… yet. The other is North Africa, a more story-driven and traditional, if short, series of eight scenarios that takes about six hours to beat. Against the overwhelming failure of the Italian campaign, this second one is left in a strange place.

You play as Rommel's Afrika Korps, fighting marquee battles from the Germans’ very successful campaigns of 1941 and 1942. What’s odd is that, interleaved with those scenarios, is the story of the war as narrated by a North African Jewish family that has been split apart by the German-Italian invasion and conquest, showing how Nazi and Fascisti occupation so devastated those communities that they barely exist today. These are two interesting stories, but the way they're presented alongside each other doesn't work. The juxtaposition is poorly handled, failing to show the context of how action in one affects the other. It'd be neat as a bite-size prelude to the Italian Campaign, but the story falls flat as anything other than some pretty animatics and a series of decent RTS scenarios.

If you ignore all of that story and campaign context, which you might, the scenario and map design in both North Africa and Italy are actually quite good. The maps consistently present fun situations that understand how maneuver is at the heart of Company of Heroes firefights. It's so much fun to maneuver units from place to place, with infantry vaulting over obstacles or diving for cover as vehicles struggle to navigate cramped roadways or tanks smash through walls and buildings.

The Italian maps are particularly great, emphasizing gaining elevation over enemies and forcing the fighting to alternate between fields and winding, tight urban environments unlike anything the series has done so far. In fact, this may well be the best urban combat I've ever seen in an RTS, and the map design is a key part of that in both campaigns. Italian maps almost always have a mix of hills, streams, broad vineyards, and dense villages or towns. North African maps alternate desolate landscape with rocky ridges, wide valleys, and small, densely packed settlements. The play and counter-play of diverse tactical options is superb: when up against a strong, garrisoned building you can use mortars, grenades, smoke, or even direct a close-quarters assault by some infantry units to flush out enemies. You can have units go into buildings not just as a garrison, but through them – in one door and out the other – to outflank enemy positions. The tactical options it opens up made me think about engagements in new ways.

Unfortunately the AI just isn't up to the task of fighting these battles in a convincing manner. To its credit, it sometimes makes what seem to be clever plays with infantry maneuvering, and it does use all the tools available to it – up to and including building assaults and movement through tight areas. Those are the exception, however, and even on the hardest difficulties the AI is very clearly propped up by artificial bonuses and boosted veterancy levels for its units rather than fighting any smarter. It's especially disappointing in armored combat, where the AI will blissfully charge superior forces into the maw of deadly guns rather than adopt safe positions for an easy win in an exchange of fire. Those victories never feel earned.

Sound, always a series high-point, is still quite good in Company of Heroes 3. It has some of the best unit chatter and voice lines in the series on the Allied side: The blended Canadian-American SSF Commandos are fun in action, as are the appropriately overpowered and suicidally brave Gurkha riflemen. In contrast, the German voices are rather blandly written and disappointingly acted, more stereotype than characterful dialogue. The crack of rifles and chatter of machine guns is rousing, as is the thrum of tank engines… but something about the burst of grenades and the firing of the biggest guns lacks the deafening, big-budget Hollywood war movie energy I associate with Company of Heroes and CoH 2. The soundtrack gets the job done but isn't a big attraction – I have no major critique other than that it fades into the background rather than uplifts the action.

If the campaigns don’t speak to you, as they did not for me, there’s naturally also the skirmish mode. This is your classic RTS set of maps and matchups ranging from 1v1 to 4v4, and uses the same cornucopia of four well-designed factions and 14 maps as multiplayer.

Speaking of which, CoH3's four skirmish factions stand out as a remix of, and set of highlights from, the series' past. For example, the focus of the campaigns being earlier in the war leaves some tanks out entirely, like the ubiquitous Panther and infamous King Tiger, and draws in some famous early-war vehicles like the dual-gunned Grant tank and Panzer III. Americans are fast-moving and aggressive, inspired by the first Company of Heroes. The British forces are a diverse set of straightforward unit types, unlike their prior incarnations as the complex faction, and have surprise appearances by some exceptional elite units. The regular German Wehrmacht is just as defensive-minded and tough as ever, but this incarnation is notably absent their heaviest vehicles, instead emphasizing diverse combined arms. Finally, the Deutsches Afrikakorps is a mobile, focused force that can both call in specialized Italian allies and transition to a hard hitting armored fist late-game.

Each of the factions has three sub-specializations giving it an alternate flavor – the British, for example, can specialize into an armored company with extra-heavy tanks or an Indian artillery regiment supported by elite Gurkha rifles. Most notably, the work of diversifying how factions spend their resources is a marked improvement from CoH2, allowing playstyles like infantry to spend their Fuel resources on upgrades rather than vehicles.

It’s a bit annoying that there's no way to experience the unique faction designs, scenarios, and abilities of the campaign armies on-demand. You can't even play a specific North Africa scenario without the whole campaign, let alone pluck a special skirmish type or fixed scenario from the Italian campaign. Those are puzzling exclusions.

Unfortunately, no matter how you play you’re likely to be hampered by an uncharacteristic lack of polish and attention to detail. For every beautifully animated infantryman vaulting over a wall there's an absolutely goofy-looking glow around a repairing tank. For every tank juddering over uneven ground or dynamically weathered in combat there's a weirdly boxy model with subpar textures. Looking back at the quality of the first two games it’s just jarring to see. I’m not mad, Company of Heroes – I’m just disappointed.

There’s a lot to be said about unapologetically single-player games like Atomic Heart: its entire focus is on creating an intricate world for us to explore and discover for ourselves. An eye-catching blend of super-powered shooting and first-person puzzling, this is a lengthy, tough, and terrific-looking shooter that has us bathing in the blood and gears of elaborately designed enemies both biological and robotic and dispatching them with an impressive set of combat options. Granted, it’s not as clever as it thinks it is when dealing with melee combat or its typical fetch quests, and the story doesn’t quite stick its landing, but the journey from point A to point B is a sight to behold.

Atomic Heart is an alternate-history shooter cut from the same cloth as BioShock and MachineGames’ Wolfenstein series. It’s a kind of retrofuturistic romp back to an imagined past perverted by ridiculously advanced technology; a world where science has made the supernatural a reality and robots are now running rife. These are far from the only shooters Atomic Heart is unafraid to crib from, either. Half-Life and the puzzle-solving of Portal are also clear inspirations, and there’s been an attempted sprinkling of Arkane’s successful brand of first-person stealth, too.

However, it’d be unfair to call Atomic Heart wholly derivative despite such recognisable building blocks. Certainly the idea of a peaceful utopia torn to pieces thanks to technology turning on its ambitious masters is nothing new, but developer Mundfish has still assembled its vision in a confident and compelling way – and the art team here well and truly understood the assignment.

Mechanical Mystery Tour

The most remarkable element here is the superb visual design, especially the look of these well-crafted enemies. Its range of robots is particularly strong, from its sleek and sinister moustachioed terminators that charge at us without ever averting their gaze to its pot-bellied parking meters with mouth tubes that make them look like they’re sucking at the drawstring on an invisible jacket. Its featureless ballerina bots and spindly-legged battle balls are equally memorable – the latter of which are probably best described as scaled-down, Eastern Bloc knock-offs of those things that couldn’t kill Mr. Incredible. There’s even one that looks like Baymax cosplaying as a tank.

Atomic Heart’s outstanding aesthetic also extends to its large range of partially ruined labs, facilities, and transportation hubs – each filled with long, snaking globules of the liquid polymer that powers the advancements of this fantastical 1950s. That said, there is a distinct feeling of ‘look, don’t touch’ in these places (there’s definitely a lack of destructibility; balloons immune to axe swings are probably the worst offenders) but the level of detail overall is strikingly good.

There are some especially tiny touches in Atomic Heart that smack of a great deal of consideration, like the way there are different reload animations for unspent magazines compared to empty ones – the latter of which are flicked away while the former are grasped by the same hand sliding a fresh one in. Watching them play out is a pleasure, which is why it was a bit annoying that my HUD was sometimes cluttered up with pick-up notifications and health bars for minibosses no longer in the area that froze onscreen until I reloaded from a recent save. I’ve also experienced some uneven quality when it comes to graphical glitches as I’ve played on Xbox Series X. The worst is a terrible strobing effect on some fast-moving robots running circuits around a large room, but fortunately it seems mostly isolated to these bot types. I’ve had no such problems with similarly nimble (and often much larger) bosses.

Atomic Heart is, naturally, all tinted with the Soviet-era iconography you’d probably expect from a land tucked away deep behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-1950s, and admittedly the lens through which you may view all this Soviet symbolism is a little different today in 2023 than it was upon its announcement and first reveal back in 2018. Of course, having grown up geographically isolated and politically irrelevant in the southern hemisphere – largely detached from Cold War concerns and raised on Bond movies, Stripes, and Rocky IV – my read on such an overtly Russian backdrop is guaranteed to be markedly different to someone with roots in Eastern Europe. For its part, however, the background does largely fade away as Atomic Heart peels back the layers of its false utopia. At this stage, Facility 3826 and the countryside of rural Russia isn’t much different to the likes of BioShock’s Rapture itself. That is, a place more or less cut off from the outside world and where something has gone deeply, deeply wrong.

Exploring exactly what’s gone wrong is the job of our character, special forces veteran Major Sergey Nechaev, or P-3 as he’s dubbed throughout. The foul-mouthed and amnestic P-3 is admittedly a bit of a relic of games gone by – and his default English-language voiceover doesn’t exactly do him a lot of favours. He comes off as the cookie-cutter American lead of every second shooter ever made.

However, it’s the script that really does him a greater disservice. While I’ll happily admit swearing is virtually my second language, P-3 spews it with the gusto of a teenage boy testing every curse word he’s recently learned twice a sentence. It’s a little exhausting, and the presence of many modern turns of phrase don’t exactly help keep the overall experience seated in the 1950s.

Of course, perhaps I’m being hypocritical in demanding consistency there, because the regularly ruthless soundtrack packed with headbangers courtesy of Doom and Wolfenstein composer Mick Gordon isn’t exactly a sonic journey back to the days of doo-wop, either – and yet the music is pitch perfect as far as I’m concerned. At any rate, there is a Russian-language/English subtitle option for purists, but I would’ve simply preferred an English script that was more tempered for the setting and era.

There are well over 20-odd hours of play here in the main story thread alone, with many more available in the side objectives – some of which border on crucial if you actually want the best weapons. Some of that is padding but it’s a good length overall, and nicely inside that not-too-short, not-too-long Goldilocks zone for a great solo shooter. There are also two endings you can get based on just one choice you make in the finale, although after seeing both I found the first anticlimactic and don’t think the second was worth the reload.

All You Need is Glove

However, while P-3 is disappointingly threadbare as a character, he’s nonetheless very capable and entertaining to play as – largely thanks to his partner, Charles, who is a talking glove. Okay, that’s a bit reductive – rather, Charles is basically an intelligent system embedded in P-3 who is capable of granting him seemingly supernatural abilities, manifested by a set of small, squid-like tentacles that extend from a glove on P-3’s left hand. This not only includes activating an X-ray-style view of your surroundings and tossing certain small objects à la Half-Life 2’s iconic gravity gun, but also the ability to fire bolts of electricity or ice, levitate enemies into the air to shoot or slam into the ground, or even summon a temporary shield.

Akin to BioShock’s Plasmids, these abilities add an important layer of more interesting combat on top of Atomic Heart’s otherwise fairly typical blasting and slightly clumsy melee combat. There’s a great sense of weight when beaning a bot in the brainpan with an axe – and the gouges that appear across their bodies in real-time is a great touch – but I found the weapon swinging too slow and frustrating when swarmed by too many enemies simultaneously.

The juggling act of defeating dense swarms of robots as well as the blender-sized hovering repair bots that continually swoop in to magically resurrect them gets a bit wearisome at times, especially above ground. Atomic Heart’s linear, underground sequences are linked by a decent-sized slab of open world where we’re free to explore and fight wherever we wish, and this zone is initially a nice antidote to the more corralled corridor segments that progress the story or reward us with useful upgrades. However, with their long line-of-sight and overwhelming numbers, I often found myself running or driving away from fights rather than diving in or trying to get the upper hand via stealth before attacking – because they’re not that much fun to fight over and over. There is a way to fry all enemies within a zone for a while if you’re patient, and the robot hordes do become a little less intimidating as P-3 and his arsenal grow stronger throughout the story, but that’s a process that takes some time.

Unlocking and upgrading these abilities requires a steady supply of resources, which the levels and defeated enemies are generally chock full of, even if collecting them can become a bit of a chore. Atomic Heart is smart to keep this process fast by allowing us to extend out a hand and suck up reams of resources like an industrial shop vac, but it still becomes a little tedious having to ransack the same sets of desks and cabinets arranged slightly differently in a hundred-or-so different rooms.

Tedious, too, is Atomic Heart’s overly ambitious attempt to weasel its way out of accountability for leaning on some extremely hackneyed fetch quests. Having the main character cynically gripe and complain about collecting four canisters for a bafflingly unintuitive door-locking mechanism that would never get past any sensible architectural committee isn’t a free pass to proceed with it. The main character being annoyed for the same reason I am isn’t cute, it’s a tone deaf non-apology for weak game design.

It’s a shame that some better context wasn’t baked around these occasional fetch quests because Atomic Heart’s underground chambers feel like a ripe opportunity and are largely great otherwise: eerie, deadly, and mostly devoid of life – unless you count the mutant freaks with skulls shattered into fanged, floral arrangements or the dead bodies that communicate via the confused ramblings of their fading brain implants. It does rely too heavily on repeating the same handful of door lock minigames that serve no real purpose other than to arbitrarily slow your progression from room to room, but I do like the bespoke platforming puzzle chambers and one-off brainteasers – especially the clever visual puzzle you’ll encounter late during your trip to an ornate theatre full of robotic performers.

When I reviewed the original Octopath Traveler almost five years ago, I absolutely loved it. I was completely smitten with its art style, its spiritual and artistic connections to the 16-bit JRPGs I grew up with, and its amazing battle system. Playing Octopath Traveler 2, I was excited to see everything I loved about the original return. What’s surprising, however, is how little it's advanced in the last half-decade. In fact, outside of the specific stories being told, Octopath Traveler 2 is almost indistinguishable from its predecessor. That means it’s just as great in many ways, but that lack of novelty also makes it a bit less magical the second time around.

Because Octopath Traveler 2 is so similar to its excellent predecessor, there’s no reason not to go back and play the original first. But the stories aren’t directly connected either, so if you are considering starting the journey here, you should know that once again the name ”Octopath” refers to the eight playable characters and the paths they follow through the world. You can choose to start with any of them, and after playing through the first hour-long chapter of their story you're stuck with that character for the rest of the campaign – meaning you can't remove them from your party. You're then free to wander the beautiful tilt-shift world, but areas are more or less locked out by their difficulty level. For example, if you enter an area with a "Danger Level 16" and you're at level five, you're going to be murdered pretty much instantly upon your first encounter. You might think to yourself "Ah, but I am a seasoned JRPG veteran, I know a thing or two about how to approach high-level zones," but I'm here to tell you you're wrong. If the area says it's 16, you best have a party of characters at or above level 16.

Once you do begin wandering in your level-appropriate areas, you’ll come across new towns with new characters. Upon meeting a new character you're given the option to play through their first chapter or just add them to your party. I liked that it gives you the choice, since I prefer powering my way through games and asking questions later, but what I didn't like was discovering fairly late in the campaign how important it is to actually play through each chapter yourself. You're just going to have to trust me to avoid spoilers, but it’s too bad it ends up feeling like a deceptive choice.

This time around, each character has a pair of special abilities: one for the day and one for the night. Day or night can be toggled at will, so it’s more like switching between modes than something you have to wait around for. It's pretty cool, because there are some characters you need to interact with who only show up at night, so you can just swap between the different versions of the world rather than drudge across town and visit an inn or whatever.

Throné, the thief I chose as my starting character, pickpockets people during the day and "ambushes" them by night, putting them to sleep. The ambush skill is useful when, say, a doorway is blocked by an NPC, wgile pickpocket is a good way to load up on items without having to visit the shops. It's win-win! Other characters’ abilities include recruiting townspeople to summon during battles, fighting townspeople to learn special combat moves, and capturing monsters to call in during encounters, to name a few. Some of them are basically reskins of other characters' abilities – recruiting followers is the most common of the skills, for example, but it comes in handy when you have two or three extra sets of hands to summon in a battle. I like the system because it lets you pick and choose companions for future fights, but you can also just steal their stuff, too, and they don't even mind!

The day/night cycle is most important in towns, but it also makes a difference in the overworld. Enemies are more difficult at night, which means more experience, so it can be a good idea to change to the night during your travels if you’re feeling confident.

Travel between towns is done via connecting paths rather than an open overworld. It's more like traveling around in a Mana game or Chrono Trigger, versus a Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior game. That's not a bad thing though, and I like that a game called "Octopath Traveler" makes you literally travel via paths from location to location. Beyond the towns and cities, there are temples to visit, which bless a character with a new "EX" ability. I recommend tracking down all these temples, because those abilities are extremely handy to have and make the late-game a little less arduous.

Each character has their own multi-chapter story to progress through, but I did like how they’re all quite different in tone and scope. For example, Hiroki's tale starts off with what's definitely the most epic and open of them all and most typical of what you’d expect in a massive 80-hour JRPG like this, while Partitio's is much more humble – and yet this simple merchant’s story surprised me and ended up being my favorite out of them all. I especially enjoyed the way Cassti's played out, with some entertaining fourth-wall-breaking moments. In fact, I found all of the individual stories' conclusions satisfying, but the paths leading up to them didn't always resonate with me, particularly the ones with less at stake. Again, it makes sense once you've completed them, but it’s harder to savor a story about a clumsy dancer trying to become famous in the moment when someone else is fighting to take back the stolen throne of their country. All the stories are at least an improvement over the original, although not so much that HBO is going to be optioning any of them for a gritty drama any time soon.

It’s fortunate that I’m still a big fan of the excellent turn-based battle system from the first game, because it returns almost unchanged here. Each enemy has one or more "weak points" to uncover by hitting them with the right weapon or elemental attack. (It's not a glowing orb on the back of their head like you might be thinking for weak points in games, it's a point of weakness.) Once you uncover the weak point of an enemy type, it's displayed for every subsequent encounter. I loved the system in the first game, and I'm not surprised to see it return. However, it can get frustrating in some of the bigger boss battles, because you end up wasting so many attacks just trying to uncover weaknesses. Still, I really enjoy the extra dimenson it brings to fights as I try to line up my weak point attacks in a way that stuns a target so my most powerful regular attacks can do more damage, while also aiming to prevent the strongest enemies from getting a chance to attack me back.

However, lifetime of playing turn-based JRPGs means I’ve grown accustomed to a certain predictability with the nature of a weak point, and enemy weaknesses here often feel entirely random. If you encounter an enemy that's clearly made of ice, the vocabulary of JRPGs (and, you know, physics) would suggest that creature would be weak to fire… but in Octopath Traveler 2 that's rarely the case at all. That frozen elemental is actually weak to light magic! Or ice for some reason! If there's a connection between enemy types and weaknesses it's not immediately clear, which means the first round of each battle with a newly discovered enemy is an exercise in guesswork (outside of the few character abilities that will provide a little starting intel). You're pretty safe shooting flying enemies with arrows to expose their weakness, but not always. It seems very arbitrary.

I’m glad I didn’t have to uncover weaknesses every time because there is a fair amount of grinding involved in Octopath Traveler 2, which I don't necesarilly mind. Obviously opinions differ on this subject, but I find grinding in RPGs almost meditative, as long as putting in a little extra effort before a boss battle pays off in the end. You won't progress your party if you don't spend some time on that grind, as the leveling required to get to the next part of the story isn't achieved simply by following the path laid out. You're going to have to do some back and forth and running in circles and leveling up before you can move on.

That being said, if you enter into a "Danger Level 14" area and reach the boss with a party at or near level 14, you should be able to defeat it, so I always had a clear idea of how far off I was. You can brute-force your way through some of the earlier bosses, just like in any JRPG, but the abilities systems, weakness exploits, and battle-point bonuses forced me to get pretty strategic with my thinking in order to do so. After losing a boss battle more than once, I would immediately take a look at my party: What strengths do they have? What complimentary skills can I employ to improve their abilities? Am I equipping the right secondary jobs and weapons? In other words, you cannot live by the grind alone. Once I struck the right balance of all the different elements, I was able to retry and bring down even the trickiest bosses, and it was a lot more rewarding because of it.

That being said, the final boss sucks so much.

Without spoiling anything, I will say that I went into the final boss fight confident in my team's abilities and strengths, only to be defeated time and time again. Of all the RPG boss battles I've played over the years, Octopath Traveler 2 gave me the most trouble. I was one attempt away from making a spreadsheet – and no, that is not a joke. The only reason I finally beat the boss wasn't because I was over-leveled (which I was… by a lot), but because I took a deep breath and literally wrote out battle notes before my final attempt. I struck a balance of skills, weapons, character matches, and item use and gave more thought and organization to that final encounter than I think I've ever done in a game, ever. No joke, I spent more than 10 hours trying, and failing, to defeat the final boss. It was the most astonishingly brutal JRPG boss I can remember fighting, and when I finally got that victory, it was a joy like no other. It sounds crazy, but the way I had to rethink and plan out my entire approach to that final battle actually improved my opinion of this sequel.

I had been under the impression that bringing a gun to a knife fight was strictly the Chicago way, but apparently it was the way of the samurai too – at least if the mix of gunslinging and sword-swinging in Like a Dragon: Ishin! is any indication. This 2023 remake of a 2014 Yakuza series spin-off that was previously only available to Japanese audiences transposes the tried and tested street fighting formula from modern Tokyo onto the final days of Japan’s Edo period, replacing the weaponised traffic cones and potted plants with katanas and primitive pistols. It suffers somewhat as far as its substories and side activities go, with both not quite up to the standard set by subsequent releases, but a card-augmented combat system keeps the fighting fresh and the crime story plot is packed with more delicious pulp than a Nashi pear. Like a Dragon: Ishin! might not be on the cutting edge of the katana blade, but it rarely strays onto the dull side either.

It appears you can take the Yakuza story out of the streets of modern Tokyo, but you can't take the modern gangsters out of the Yakuza story. The events of Like a Dragon: Ishin! may take place in 1860s Kyoto and feature characters loosely based on real historical figures, but most of the roles in its main cast are filled with a host of recognisable faces from other Yakuza games. Thus its protagonist Sakamoto Ryoma, a disgraced ronin out to avenge the murder of his adoptive father, is clearly just series stalwart, Kazuma Kiryu, right down to his permanent scowl and unwavering sense of justice. I must admit that even as a longtime fan it initially got a little confusing when Kazuma Kiryu playing Sakamoto Ryoma went undercover as Saito Hajime in order to infiltrate the Shinsengumi police force. Still, my fondness for him helped me buy into his plight almost immediately, and although Ishin’s story beats are similar to those featured in several other Yakuza games, setting its figurative (and literal) backstabbing against the backdrop of a potential Japanese civil war made the stakes feel higher than those surrounding the typical turf battles.

Unlike recent releases from developer Ryu Ga Gotoku that feature English voice casts like Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Lost Judgment, Ishin can only be played with the original Japanese audio with subtitles. That may be considered a negative to some, but personally I like experiencing these stories with dialogue delivered in the characters’ native tongue, and it seems even more appropriate in this case given that Ishin takes place at a time when Japan was still largely sheltered from Western influences. That said, even with the translated subtitles turned on, there are a great deal of period-specific references to regions, religions, and regiments that I found to be almost impenetrable early on. Constantly pausing dialogue in Ishin’s opening hours in order to consult the in-game glossary (along with Google) to help fill in the gaps did upset the rhythm of the storytelling somewhat, but over the course of my 30-hour playtime I learned to distinguish a goshi from a joshi, and ultimately came away feeling more enlightened about a crucial period in Japanese history that I previously knew very little about.

I was less inspired by the environment itself, however. 19th century Kyoto’s woodland surroundings certainly make for a nice change of scenery from the bustling urban jungle of present day Tokyo, and much like Kamurocho it's arguably best experienced at night, trading neon-soaked streets littered with drunken locals for lantern-lit lanes littered with… well, also plenty of drunken locals. (It turns out sake has been making Japanese people feel jolly for well over a thousand years.) However, while Ishin’s small slice of Japan’s original capital city is not without its standout sections, such as the bustling marketplace lining the canals in the Fushimi district, there are also far too many bland back streets that make navigating your way around a bit less appealing. I found myself far more reliant on the trip-skipping palanquin service in Ishin than I ever made use of the taxi services in other Yakuza adventures.

Katanarama

As with any other Yakuza game, the rustic riverside streets aren’t just meant for sightseeing, but also fight-spreeing, and Like a Dragon: Ishin! introduces a blend of blades and bullets that makes its combat feel refreshingly distinct from other entries in the series for the most part. Ryoma has four different fighting stances that you can switch between on the fly, allowing you to go from the smash and bash of the barehanded Brawler technique to the slash and dash of the Swordsman style with a tap of the D-pad. They vary in usefulness, though, and I found the pistol-only Gunman style to be particularly inconsistent in its implementation. It either made life too easy by allowing me to fill hallways of sword-swinging enemies with unlimited rounds of hot lead before they could get close enough to strike back, or its fickle auto-targeting would frustratingly force me to shoot at foes in the distance rather than the warrior in front of me threatening to clean out my ears with a sharpened spear.

While I may have relied on only two of the four fighting stances available to me for the vast majority of the adventure, they still provided enough variety to entertain. That’s particularly when used in tandem with Ishin’s unique Trooper card system, which effectively allows for custom support loadouts for each of Ryoma’s fighting styles. I enjoyed experimenting with different decks of cards, from the more passive Troopers that provide boosts to your attack power and health, to far more outlandish assault cards like a chicken that lays egg-shaped proximity mines and even your own personal attack bear. There are hundreds of these Trooper cards to uncover in Ishin and each card can be leveled up in combat, fused with other cards, or even promoted to unlock more powerful abilities, bringing a welcome amount of depth and strategy – and a splash of welcome silliness – to what initially seems like a fairly straightforward action game on the surface.

Better Homes and Gaidens

Ishin gives Ryoma plenty of opportunities to keep his sword sheathed, and one of the more substantial side activities sees him become the caretaker to a small farm in order to support a local orphan named Haruka. It’s a pretty involved process – you must carefully arrange your vegetable crops to maximise your return on each harvest, invest in additions such as chicken coops and scarecrows to further increase the farm’s output, and then meet meal delivery requests by completing simple Cooking Mama-style mini-games in order to turn a profit. I’ll be honest, farming simulation is really not for me, and if I ever make a stop in Stardew Valley it will be merely to ask for directions to the nearest highway so I can hightail it out of there. Still, this farm is an entirely optional undertaking and it certainly provides a more chilled out change of pace to take a sharp blade to radishes instead of ronins, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after.

Considering I enter each Yakuza adventure with a cocked fist rather than a green thumb, I was far more invested in the 40 different dungeon crawling missions offered at the Shinsengumi barracks. These provide an opportunity for farming of a decidedly more violent variety, running blade-first through bandit hideouts in order to scavenge precious materials required to forge more powerful weapons at the blacksmith, as well as level up your trooper cards to be fighting fit ahead of the next story mission. The reused cave backdrop does start to feel somewhat samey, but the layouts, door switches, and trap and enemy placements are shuffled up consistently enough to make each gauntlet run feel distinct. Even after completing Ishin’s main story, I’ve returned to the barracks to mop up the remaining Shinsengumi dispatches that I missed on my way through because I find them so satisfying to complete.

Elsewhere a lot of the series’ side activity staples are present and accounted for, with various types of gambling including poker and chicken racing, karaoke, and dance mini-games just a few of the distractions to indulge in. There are some fun ye olde Yakuza spins on modern mini-games to be found, too – instead of smacking baseballs in a batting cage you get to slice cannon balls in half with a well-timed swing of your sword, for example – but the bulk of these archaic amusements just can’t compete with the more dazzling diversions to be found in the contemporary settings of other Yakuza and Judgment games. Trading Club Sega arcades and go kart races for fishing and woodchopping feels a bit like forgoing a fun night on the town for a sleepy weekend away at your grandparents’ place – it’s still enjoyable and not without its charms, but it doesn’t exactly get your heartrate up.

The substories that can be stumbled upon are similarly lacking in any real surprises. In most Yakuza games you can’t make your way from A to B without taking an unexpected detour into WTF territory, but Ishin’s substories are mostly more conservative by comparison. There are some rare offbeat exceptions, and I was certainly amused when an errand to buy perfume for a young lady suddenly swerved into a frenetic chase sequence with a lustful salesman hot on my tail like a horny Pepé Le Pew, but for the most part these interactions with locals are pretty subdued compared to the more outrageous scenarios experienced elsewhere in the series. That said, although helping an old lady to find her way home is pretty uneventful (though certainly noble), it’s still worth doing since Ishin’s Virtue system rewards you for almost every interaction you have – whether it’s a substory, shopping at a store, or feeding a stray dog. The Virtue points you earn can be spent on everything from upgrading Ryoma’s sprinting stamina to expanding Haruka’s farm, so rarely does any task in Ishin go entirely unrewarded, no matter how innocuous it may seem.

Ninja Gaiden Black is my favorite action game of all time, so if you describe something as “a hybrid slasher/shooter from the makers of Ninja Gaiden” like Wanted: Dead does on the back of its box, you’ve got my both attention and hopes up right out of the gate. But as quick as they rose, they fell even faster, because Wanted: Dead is a bad game even removed from any comparison to Ninja Gaiden. Its story is nonsense, the voice acting is some of the worst I’ve heard in a modern game, its difficulty is all over the place, it frequently crashes, and even though its combat is the best part, it still feels sluggish and poorly balanced between your ranged and melee options. If you look super closely, you can see tiny bits of some of the ideas that went into the Ninja Gaiden games, from quick and satisfying executions to dismemberment that affects the behavior of enemy AI. But those small sparks aren’t enough to save what is otherwise a soulless throwback to the many mediocre action games of the mid to late 2000s.

Wanted: Dead’s story takes place in Hong Kong and follows the Zombie Squad, a Suicide Squad-esque police task force made up of former military that wound up in prison with a life sentence for one reason or another and joined the squad as a form of rehabilitation. Despite the fact that there is a weird abundance of scenes in between missions where Zombie Squad is together just hanging out (usually eating food), there is zero chemistry between these characters. I can’t even tell you much about them outside of the fact that Herzog is a creep, Doc is super awkward, Cortez only communicates with sign language, and the player character, Lieutenant Stone, has confusing anime flashbacks with no context. Finding personnel files illuminates a little more about each character, like the fact that Herzog is “an extreme lover of women” with “The Beast” as his nickname, and Doc got expelled from med school for liking drugs and wild parties, though most of the rest of these files are copied and pasted between each character.

It all has the vibe of a Suda51 game like No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw, or Killer is Dead but without any of the style or charm that goes into them. It doesn’t lean into its silliness hard enough, and as a result, the tone feels confused. It’s a gritty slasher/shooter that will throw you into an off the wall karaoke performance of 99 Luftballons out of nowhere, or pit you against your squadmate in an eating competition after learning about the history of ramen and its Chinese roots. It’s bizarre, but the kind that makes me tilt my head rather than laugh at the absurdity. The voice acting is also poor without ever having the charm to at least be considered endearingly campy. I had a hard time following what characters were actually talking about because it felt like the actors never really had a grasp of what they were talking about themselves.

A Dull Blade

I can forgive an action game of a lot if the action itself makes up for those shortcomings, and while Wanted: Dead’s combat is the best part about it, it’s far too one-note to save the rest of this sinking ship. Its fundamentals are at least pretty sound: The animations look great, there’s some satisfaction to the gory sword play, and for the first hour or so, it feels good to parry enemy attacks, liberate some limbs, and see some stylish executions. The issue is that it never really evolves beyond that base over the roughly eight hour campaign.

I could buy new skills from a very limited skill tree, but none of them ever felt like they affected my approach to combat. Most either felt like skills of convenience that I should’ve had from the start, like a dashing attack or the ability to use an execution on a downed or limbless enemy, or they were necessary power ramps that felt virtually required just to be able to survive the later encounters, like more stimpacks or flat increases of damage and defense. Nothing ever made me better at defeating specific enemy types or gave me a new way to deal with any particular threat, let alone a reason to use anything other than the same combo that I’d been using since the start. There are no air combos, practically no learnable special attacks outside of a nearly useless charge attack and the aforementioned dashing attack, and no new melee weapons beyond the starting katana. Put simply, Wanted: Dead’s combat is pasta with no sauce.

As a result, the combat grew stale after the second level, and became a chore for the remaining three. It doesn’t help that the enemy AI and variety in Wanted: Dead is terrible. They can basically be boiled down into five archetypes: Weak ranged grunts, weak melee grunts, shield dudes, ninjas, and big boy brutes. While there are some slight variations within those archetypes, they all pretty much behave the same. Once I learned the parry timings, combat essentially just became a game of taking turns. I’d attack until the enemy parried, wait to parry their attacks, and then either die or attack until they parry again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For those looking for a challenge, at the very least Wanted: Dead does provide that, but it does so in all the wrong ways. For starters, the checkpointing is atrocious. I frequently found myself playing for 10-15 minutes without hitting a checkpoint in a single level, and worse still, some of these stretches were capped off with what are essentially miniboss fights – that meant I wouldn’t even get a shot at trying again without retracing my steps through the same 10-15 minutes of enemy encounters if I died. This is especially bad in a game that’s so reliant on learning enemy rhythms and attack patterns.

The most damning thing, however, is that Lieutenant Stone feels super weak to play as throughout the entire campaign despite the fact that she is supposed to be some badass super cop. She can use guns, but most enemies are bullet sponges that take forever to kill; she can throw grenades, but you can’t cook them, so your foes will almost always dive out of the way; she can’t block bullets, she dies in just a few hits, and she needs to purchase upgrades to do basic things, like blocking more than one strike at a time or attacking after a perfectly timed parry.

There are isolated moments where Wanted: Dead does briefly come to life. The third level begins with a cool encounter where it tries to overwhelm you with a bunch of weak enemies that die in just one or two hits, which acts a great showcase for the exciting super move Lieutenant Stone can use to chain executions together, much like Ryu Hayabusa could do in Ninja Gaiden 3. And while it’s super janky to look at, there’s another fun moment where you’re given a chainsaw in a hedge maze, chopping up enemies as you round the corners. Wanted: Dead desperately needed more moments like these to break up the monotony, but sadly they are few and far between. It also doesn’t help that even good moments could be soured by a tendency to crash repeatedly while I played on PlayStation 5.

Just before my group of four young astronauts with major, personal conflicts of interest blast off to the red planet, I'm assured by our team leader that, while some corners had to be cut to get our ship spaceworthy, it should do its job just fine. And it does… kind of. Which is a great metaphor for Deliver Us Mars as a whole. This platforming, puzzle-solving, interplanetary adventure is trying to do too much with too little, and it ends up touching down just North of adequate.

The backstory for our plucky, rebellious, sometimes even endearing hero, Kathy, is that she was separated from her father Isaac just before he boarded a colonization mission bound for Mars. Years later, she's been through astronaut school on a climate-ravaged Earth and a mysterious transmission from Isaac spurs her and her older sister, Claire, to seek seats on the mission to bring the colony ships back. Periodic flashbacks do a respectable job of filling in the complicated and painful story of their family along the way.

The launch sequence from Cape Canaveral is among the strongest. It has you perform various checks and landing procedures that feel authentic and tactile before watching through the front window as your ship, the Zephyr, leaves Earth's atmosphere with no cuts or loading screens. You're not briefed on any of these procedures ahead of time, which led to a lot of me swiveling my mouse pointer around frantically trying to find the highlighted switch for the internal power interval or whatever, but it was neat once I got the hang of it.

Outside these scripted sequences, Deliver Us Mars consists of first- and third-person explorations of an orbital facility and the surface of Mars itself, featuring some fairly simple puzzle-solving and occasional, frustrating platforming. There are several sections where you have to bounce wireless power beams around, matching the voltage on doors and terminals to get to the next area. They're generally not too difficult, but I found some of the trickier ones satisfying to solve.

What wasn't nearly as satisfying were these obnoxious climbing wall segments. You have to click the left and right mouse button at the same time to grab onto a wall to begin with, and you have to do so with enough room that you don't slide off of the climbing surface. But this action is so unresponsive that whether you can get a purchase or not feels more random than anything, especially in some cases where you have to jump at an angle. Also, one of the moves you need to progress in some of the later segments is never explained at all, and I discovered it by accident when I was just trying out random buttons in frustration after I'd been stuck for several minutes. Pro tip: You can hold S and press spacebar to jump to a wall that's behind you.

This lack of direction even extends to some segments of the main story where you have several different ways you can go, but aren't told at all which is the right one and can end up wandering way off in the wrong direction. There is an option under Accessibility to always display quest markers, and while I don't necessarily need a big star constantly guiding my every step, it could really use some sort of middle ground. If you tell me to go to Ark Vita without ever giving me a hint about where it is, that seems like you're really leaving me to twist in the wind.

At least the characters are endearing. What few of them there are, anyway. Neil Newborn (whom you may remember as Resident Evil: Village's maniacal Heisenberg) gives a great performance as Isaac, a complex character with conflicted motivations. Kathy herself is brought to life by Ellise Chappell, who gives a convincing performance with a wide emotional range. And the story is respectable, with the mystery of what happened to the Martian colonists pulling me forward at each turn.

The character models can't really keep up with it, though. They have a very doll-like, uncanny valley look to them – when we get to see their faces at all. A lot of backstory is delivered through these pre-recorded holograms where hairless, faceless crash test dummies pose in place while dialogue plays. It really looks like placeholder art you'd see in an unfinished game, and the developers just never had the time or resources to replace it. There is also a whole chapter toward the end that jumps from one scene to something completely unrelated, giving me the sense that they cut a significant amount of plot without doing a very good job of stitching it back together.

Performance, especially during cutscenes, is also a major issue. My RTX 3080-powered system exceeds the recommended specs, but in many cinematics I would see my framerate drop below 10 fps, even with DLSS on. I had to turn off the per-strand hair rendering altogether because it kept glitching out. In regular gameplay, it's usually fine. But this is clearly not a very well-optimized project.

Do you dream of the chance to get dropkicked by a lava-monkey the size of a building? Of course you do, and goodness gracious is Wild Hearts excited to make that dream a reality. Omega Force and EA’s take on co-op monster hunting is a remarkably familiar one, mixing on-the-fly building mechanics into enormous elemental animal fights across its gorgeous feudal Japanese locations. But even when its crystal clear inspirations can sometimes lead to comparisons that aren’t always flattering for Wild Hearts, the few dozen hours I’ve spent with it so far have been a ton of fun, and I’m excited to keep grinding for materials as I progress toward the end of its campaign and into the endgame.

Let me be perfectly blunt: it’s nearly impossible to talk about Wild Hearts without bringing up Monster Hunter. That’s not to say this is an egregious rip-off or completely unoriginal, as it provides plenty of interesting additions and fun little twists all its own. But in pretty much every way that counts, Wild Hearts is so fundamentally Monster Hunter that you could very easily mistake it for the newest game in Capcom’s series if it weren’t for the name. That’s true of its giant monster-slaying missions, its crafting-based equipment progression with drastically different weapon types, its campaign structure continuously escalating and remixing previous encounters, and even its fine but ignorable story of a hub town investigating why local creatures have unexpectedly started attacking outside of their usual territory.

Importantly, Wild Hearts at least plays this recognizable part very well, making it one of the easiest recommendations I could make to any current Monster Hunter fan looking for new prey. Its combat captures that excellent mix of tactical and terrifying, pushing you to pick your moments carefully against foes many times your size who can often make your health bar disappear in the blink of an eye. It’s as much about learning the ins and outs of each monster, your weapons, and even the terrain around you as it is about actually executing the right button inputs.

But because Wild Hearts is not actually a Monster Hunter game, it gets to leave behind certain legacy mechanics that have started to feel a little dated as Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise continue to streamline and modernize that two-decade-old series. I didn’t miss things like weapon sharpening or cluttered inventory management, and the simplified nature of stuff like stat-boosting food and support items means I feel like I’m spending more time out in the field and less on pre-hunt prep. So far Wild Hearts also seems to have lost some of the complexity I enjoy about Monster Hunter along with those clunkier parts, but this ground-up approach means it’s far easier to recommend to brand-new hunters, too.

The biggest way Wild Hearts sets itself apart is in its karakuri building system, which allows you to both create tactical objects like walls or springboards in the middle of combat as well as place structures like fast-travel tents or ziplines anywhere across its four hunting maps. This system is excellent, with the number of structures you can build limited enough to make me really consider where best to build a custom base camp or a convenient shortcut while still being flexible and open enough that I never had to overthink it, either. It turns the wonderfully detailed maps into little puzzles to be solved in whatever way you see fit, rather than simply arenas to fight in.

During those fights, karakuri play the role of quick-use support items – though everything you place sticks around until it’s destroyed (either by you or a monster), so battlefields can often be strewn with the remnants of past encounters in a pretty neat way. You can summon simple blocks to jump off of or build walls, springs to launch you in any direction, or torches to give you a fast fire attack. It’s an interesting mechanic, but it really shines when you start unlocking fusion karakuri, which let you stack these basic objects in specific patterns to make special constructs like huge bombs or chain traps. This ends up feeling like a mini combo system to master, and adds some nice consistency across all the weapon types.

Outside of those karakuri, each of the eight different weapons play very differently from one another. There are your simple-to-understand options like a middle-of-the-road katana, giant but slow hammer, or… well, literally just a gun. But there are also a couple of unique choices like the quick, bladed umbrella that’s built around parrying attacks. Wild Hearts’ combat is always a fun dance of reading attack patterns and timing both strikes and dodges well, but it was also a little daunting until I found the weapon that clicked with me: the Claw Blade. This fast-slicing knife also lets you pretty much fly through the air after hooking onto a monster, making for some absolutely epic moments as you strike from above.

The monsters themselves are all pretty fun to fight too, with their cool and creative designs each boiling down to “normal animal plus elemental type multiplied by big.” Fights can be a real challenge when you’re playing solo (which is how I’ve spent most of my time so far, since the pre-launch server population is low), and it’s always satisfying to learn their behaviors and turn an initially hard encounter into something trivial through practice and grinding alone. My main issue at this point is that the amount and variety of monsters seems pretty low, with different elemental variants or just stronger “Mighty” versions being introduced almost right away. Those don’t look that different or feel like totally new enemies to fight, so while I’m still having fun for now, I could see it wearing thin if things aren’t shaken up down the line.

That’s also a symptom of Wild Hearts’ structure, with a campaign that is quick to put you up against a foe it’s confident you won’t be able to beat without preparation. That means collecting monster parts to craft new armor or upgrading your weapons through a sprawling tech tree. It’s another very familiar system, but so far there’s less to tinker with here to eek out little advantages than I’m accustomed to as a Monster Hunter veteran – you can’t increase the armor rating of a piece of equipment individually, just make new pieces, and the only way to customize weapons is through a small handful of perks they can inherit as you upgrade them. That means these difficulty spikes incentivize you to grind for armor and weapons tailored toward beating the gatekeeping monster specifically, which is a lot less empowering than finding the direction that most interests me and crafting a build that makes it work.

That all said, I have a lot more Wild Hearts left to play, and right now I am excited to do so. Its equipment systems seem simpler than that of Monster Hunter, but that can be both a good thing and a bad thing, so only time will tell if it’s worth digging deep into. I also hope its monster variety gets more meaningful as I go further, but I’m far from bored yet with what I’ve seen already. All that’s left is to keep hunting and see what the campaign (and the endgame) have in store for me, and I’ll be back with a final scored review for its launch on the February 16 once I have.