What’s in a name? When EA announced it would change the title of its premiere soccer series from FIFA to EA Sports FC24, we all wondered: is this also the year it finally takes a real step forward, out of the microtransaction-focused darkness and into the light of its full potential? Well, the answer is a resounding… kind of. There are breadcrumbs of greatness in EA Sports FC 24, with many new mechanics like Evolutions and Tactical Visions showing the series can evolve into something better. Yet, for every exciting improvement added in, there's still far too many of the same things, like poor AI, that have frustrated me for years.

For the first few hours of EA Sports FC 24, everything feels familiar gameplay-wise, for better and for worse. HyperMotion V and the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller feedback return make matches realistic, with precise ball and player physics, noticeable field wear and tear, and goal post-shaking haptics. It's hard to deny that there's a lot of attention to detail going into recreating a realistic soccer atmosphere.

New overlays showcase useful statistics like shot volume and player fatigue mid-game, with numerous background interview segments laced throughout matchday's pre, mid, and post-game segments as well. While they don’t feature any actual interactions with players and interviewers, it’s one of the many noticeable bits of detail that add to the atmosphere. If you foul someone to set up a free kick, you’ll even get a neat little first-person setup from the ref’s perspective, just like you’d see during a live broadcast. At the same time, team walkouts and ceremonial songs have sadly been cut, replaced by a few different shots of either fans or players getting ready for game day. It's a shame that I can take a League Two side like Wrexham all the way to the Premier League and still not get to hear their glorious anthem or see them walk out during their debut on the grandest stage of them all.

Unfortunately, the artificial intelligence part of the Hypermotion V technology that has been so heavily advertised doesn't live up to the hype. While Kinetic Shielding makes for some exciting battles, players still fall all over each other in unnatural ways. Advanced machine learning, which is pretty much a fancy way of saying constantly improving AI, is also hit-or-miss. Your goalkeepers will sometimes stand sideways and let an easy shot in or punch a ball that could have been caught, AI teammates make terrible attacking or defensive decisions that would have Harry Maguire blushing, and you'll likely find yourself yelling about an incorrect passing input more than once a match despite knowing you angled a perfect through ball with your sticks.

It’s frustrating that these issues are still a part of the series, but there are changes that help ease the pain of dealing with them, most notably Playstyles. As the name suggests, Playstyles customize every player's method of play to fit their specific strengths and weaknesses. As a result, no two players control the same way, adding a fresh layer to gameplay and how you approach team management. It’s genuinely impressive how EA has managed to capture each player’s likeness, as you can bully opponents off the ball and rip through nets with Erling Haaland's Power Shot or finesse passes and set pieces with James Ward-Prowse’s Dead Ball approach.

When creating your own customized player's Playstyle, you'll sift through 32 abilities spread across six categories: Shooting, Passing, Defending, Ball Control, Physical, and Goalkeeping. While it might seem simple at first, each one has a lot of unique sub-abilities to sort through that determine your character’s build, making a world of difference when it comes to tailoring your preset skills to work alongside your specific manner of play.

Since I always create a Forward player that dominates the middle of the pitch, getting the Tiki Taka attribute makes controlling the middle of the pitch with quick passes to teammates a breeze, especially when coupled with First Touch, which makes getting and controlling the ball for the first time while under pressure more possible. With the ability to control the ball perfectly, my character can open up the field with wide through balls that get played right back into him or teammates to create a lot of chances on goal.

Alongside Playstyles, you can now go into the settings and turn on an option to control the direction of your passes and shots, replacing the previous Precision system. Shots are more on target while using the left stick to aim and general passes and lobs can be directed to exact locations. Mastering these techniques won't come without a bit of practice, but they open up the possibility of making creative runs, especially when working with other players.

Thankfully, the updated practice arena has more depth in EA Sports FC24 than it ever did in FIFA, adding in Scenarios that new players and veterans alike would be wise to check out. You can try out specific set pieces here, or nail down what Playstyle works best for you in drills or even full-on matches. Putting your pride aside and playing here to get the hang of the controlled shots and passes is worth it in the long run, as you can run experiments in a much quicker and more efficient manner than you’d be able to by playing full games thanks to the sheer amount of control you’re given.

Once you've got your style nailed down, it's time to dive into the real reason EA Sports FC 24 is as popular as it is: its trading-card game mode, aka Sports Yu-Gi-Oh, aka FUT, aka Ultimate Team. As always, you'll need to go into Ultimate Team knowing full well that it always feels inherently unfair because people who are willing to spend real money on microtransactions to get packs will have a much better squad in a shorter amount of time than someone who doesn’t. The name of the game is still that quantity results in quality, and microtransactions pay for quantity. While it’s aggravating that grinding or paying the big bucks are still your only two options for significant progress, improvements elsewhere help deliver one of the best Ultimate Team experiences to date, even if you don’t pay.

Evolutions in Ultimate Team allow you to take the base stats of cards and improve them by completing challenges, as long as they fit the criteria, which vary from stats like Overall, Pace, and Rarity. Manchester United lovers no longer have to wait to see Alexander Garnacho's potential fulfilled, taking him from a Left Wing 75 rating to a Relentless Winger 82 rating thanks to the Founders Evolution. To do this, you’ll simply complete objectives that are broken down into levels. Finish a group of requirements in a level, and you’ll get a stat boost reward. What’s nice is that completing these objectives isn’t as brutal as previous games in the series (yes, I’m talking about you, FUT 20), as most just ask you to complete matches with your EVO player. Getting to improve players you draw instead of just praying for a good pull is an enticing incentive to play Ultimate Team for the long term.

Another leap forward for this mode is the addition of over 19,000 fully licensed players, 700 teams, and 30 leagues from the women’s soccer divisions to Ultimate Team; FIFA 23 only had 12 NWSL teams and four stadiums by comparison. EA Sports FC24 not only lets you play as everyone from Sam Keer to Kadidiatou Diani, but it makes men's and women's statistics equal. That means Nadine Kessler is able to body players off the ball the exact same way that Adama Traore can, making for some wild mixed-gender matchups and lineups.

The other, often overlooked stepchild multiplayer mode in EA Sports FC 24, Volta, didn't change up too much, but it's the one I had the most fun with. Sure, there will be matches where someone is idle or is a complete ball hog, but the ones where you link up with compatible players bring back fond memories of FIFA Street. Few things are more satisfying than wall bouncing to a teammate who dekes around the keeper after a great build-up that leads to scoring multiple points. Since chemistry is so important, it’s recommended that you try and round up a solid squad of four friends if you want to get the most enjoyment and best results out of Volta. Stadium variety also adds quite a bit of variety to matches, with some featuring larger goals and others having higher walls to bounce the ball off. It’s a welcome bit of diversity to help prevent each game from feeling too repetitive.

By comparison, the single-player focused Career Modes are a considerable letdown. Player journeys are once again riddled with a poor excuse for role-playing, with FIFA 23's Personality Points rearing their ugly head again. Honestly, I can't imagine anything screaming 'I love soccer' more than purchasing a Jetski to earn 50 “Maverick” points that will result in my player being a more aggressive shooter. The addition of Player Agents and Dynamic Moments show some potential to help flesh out the mode and make it a more fun RPG, but even those fail to stick the landing.

While the idea of meeting certain goals via a Player Agent to get a transfer or renewed contract from your dream squad sounds nice in theory, some of the objectives are insane. You can have a Ballon d'Or, 60-plus goal season, and still be released from contract because you didn't hit five bicycle kicks in any of them. Yeah, sorry, Messi – we know you broke the record for most goals scored in a campaign, but we had to let you go because you didn't get enough Scorpion Kick goals as you were doing it. What?

The whole thing sours what could have been a really great way to make up for the lack of being able to choose your own path and direction that has weighed down previous Career Modes. Dynamic moments also fail to capture the weight and gravity of situations fully, as you can only watch the same cutscene so many times before wondering where the story-based content of FIFA 17's Alex Hunter has gone.

Manager Mode is a little more interesting in EA Sports FC 24, mostly due to the seven tactical identities that your coach can apply to their club. Tactical Vision is what Playstyles are for an individual, just applied to a whole team instead. Pick the more defensive-minded Park the Bus option for a great defense, or use Tiki-Taka to control the middle of the field. I always prefer Wing Play, as nothing beats charging down the field and crossing it into an open net. Even then, there isn’t much that has changed in this Career Mode either, as single-player once again feels like an afterthought, cowering in the long shadow cast by Ultimate Teams.

When it comes to arcade classics like Bomberman, the secret to longevity is keeping it simple. Though there have been dozens of iterations of Hudson Soft's absorbing competitive puzzler, they've all largely adhered to the same principle: blowing things (and people) up in a candy-colored paradise. Just about every one of them has a new gimmick waiting around the corner, whether it’s the spacious areas of action-flavored Bomberman Generation or Bomberman Tournament's Zelda-like Quest Mode. That's how Super Bomberman R 2 manages to keep the hits coming: with some clever modes that put a new spin on things. Of course, Bomberman has always been at its best when played with others, so it's no surprise that's where this feature-rich sequel shines in contrast to its repetitive single-player story mode and largely empty open world.

True to the format of the top-down, 2D original, the fun of Super Bomberman R 2’s multiplayer modes comes from throwing down explosives to blow up destructible obstacles while avoiding your own blasts and those of everybody else. When you aren't narrowly escaping an enemy's explosion, you're looking for ways to trick or trap them into walking into yours. As a result, you’re always forced to go on the offensive, constantly calculating where your next bomb is going to go, all the while keeping an eye on enemies who are doing the same.

There are tons of ways to play with friends via local or online multiplayer, including the 64-player Battle 64 mode that has you fighting through a knock-down, drag-out battle royale. (Fortunately there’s crossplay, so there’s no trouble filling games.) It doesn’t jam 64 people on one map – that would be chaos – but rather takes a smarter, more manageable, tournament-style approach. You start out in a traditional four-player Bomberman match, while the other 56 combatants duke it out elsewhere in 16 other rooms simultaneously, much like the Switch’s now-defunct Super Mario 35. A timer counts down from 60 seconds, and when it hits zero, play areas are removed one by one. That leaves the last few players scrambling to survive, with one player being crowned victor. You can travel through the other boards during the Movement Phase to stay away from elimination zones, so it's smart to keep track of where everyone else is, too. It's humbling to finish dead last your first few rounds, but like any good battle royale, the drive to improve kept me coming back over and over again.

Also new is Castle, an exciting and surprisingly strategic asymmetrical multiplayer mode that designates one Bomberman character as "king" and pits them against 15 other players. On the castle side, the king defends a number of treasure chests scattered throughout the stage by editing the map to their liking and setting traps and obstacles, and it’s fun to watch the attacking side try to get through it all. For example, gimmicks include parts like the Conveyor Belt, which can move players and bombs alike, and are meant to be part of enemy-stalling strategies. Weapons are simple but effective, with options like cannons that shoot bombs that can fly over walls, blades that you can plant to slash enemies in close proximity, lasers for long-range targets, and more. It may seem like a one-sided fight, but even when I was playing as one of the 15 attackers it can be difficult to suss out and capture all the treasure chests when you’re playing against a smart king. These matches are just as tense and unpredictable as Battle 64.

Another mode, Grand Prix, returns from Super Bomberman R: you and other players are divided into two teams to compete in four types of minigames. While they aren't drastically different from one another, each serves up a unique challenge that adapts familiar multiplayer rules like Capture the Flag. For instance, one mode has you competing to steal five "Balloms" from the other team to bring them back to your base. Crystals is just a race to see which team can collect the most crystals in a certain amount of time. If you don't feel like a lengthy Castle battle or want to spice things up beyond regular Bomberman matches, these quick Grand Prix rounds are a good alternative.

On top of that there's a robust level editor (similar to what's available to the king in Castle mode) that you can use to make your own traditional Bomberman stages. Conceptually, it has a lot in common with Super Mario Maker, including the ability to share and download levels with others online by way of nine-digit level codes. Alternatively, you can browse what’s available until you see a level you like. In practice, unfortunately, the controls are cumbersome, making painstakingly placing each map detail block after block feel like a chore. For those who do decide to invest in some serious building time, there are absolutely brutal maps that can be crafted, as evidenced by my sifting through the maps already online and finding some real challenges.

As with most online games these days, there’s a whole progression system to advance through, and moving up the ranks means earning currency to unlock fun character skins, player quotes, and more. Importantly, you’re racking up currency whether you’re playing online or offline modes, win or lose, and there are no real-money microtransactions at all – but it’d take a long, long time to earn everything.

There's a dizzying amount of customization options to choose from, including costumes from Konami games like Metal Gear, Castlevania, and even Silent Hill. Yes, you can have an adorable Pyramid Head to run around as. There are even a few references to classic Japanese dating sim Tokimeki Memorial, with an entire Shiori Fujisaki skin available. Since many of the costumes are more like brand new characters with their own abilities, movement speeds, and different bomb damage zones, it's worth racking up hours to earn your favorites. Others, like accessories and quotes as well as player badges, are just for you to spruce up your profile.

Those are the reasons you’d want to play Super Bomberman R 2. The six-hour, four-world story mode, on the other hand, is not one of them. To be fair, it’s a considerable improvement on its predecessor’s campaign, but that isn’t saying much. True, it's twice as long and ditches linear arenas in favor of open-world exploration. However, these open areas are in no way comparable even to Bomberman 64's rudimentary RPG campaign; this one is little more than a tutorial for multiplayer. Bite-sized cutscenes with Bomberman and his rainbow-flavored pals move the largely forgettable plot along, but they at least explain why you're recruiting the cute little Ellons in each world to help solve puzzles and unlock new areas.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to see in each themed world beyond obstacles to destroy, simple puzzles to solve, and Ellons waiting to be rescued. And though cutscenes are heavily stylized with vibrant colors and fun character designs, the disappointingly basic and bland in-game environments and character models don’t follow suit. Luckily, the music is as good as it’s ever been, which at least helps make up for the confoundingly bad voice acting.

The occasional boss encounters break up some of the monotony, but it's back to drudgery after that. If your Bomberman is hit even once, whether by your own blast or an enemy’s, you lose all your collected Ellons following you in your current world. So whether you had two or five, you’ll have to go all the way back to your base to retrieve them. Sometimes it’s a trek to head back to your base after making all that progress. You’ll have to trudge through each monotonous maze once more, because some obstacles require a certain amount of Ellons for you to pass. All this backtracking only adds to the repetition, which means the story will likely wear thin long before you reach the end.

Occasionally, you'll also see Castle mode within the story as well, which is an interesting twist. When you first start playing you're required to create your own stage with the level editor to be used as your HQ. Bots will take the role of human players, and if they steal all your treasure, you'll end up losing a life. So at least you’ll quickly get a lot of practice for multiplayer by completing the story.

When you install a cozy life sim with crafting, farming, fishing, or other tasks, you can expect that you’ll have to do some work. A lot of these games are based around the idea of you playing a character who has to contribute to a system or community, which often involves labor. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since the grind of a fake job can be a great way to explain why you have to gather resources, make money, form relationships, or construct buildings, but it’s up to game designers to ensure you don’t feel like you’re doing work just for the sake of it. Mineko’s Night Market doesn’t do this. While building a world where a girl has to save a town through work, the developers at Meowza Games forgot that the work has to have a point.

You play as a girl named Mineko who moves with her dad to a remote island that’s fallen on hard times, and it somehow falls on your shoulders to bring more people to your village and to the dying Night Market, which happens once a week and features all manner of vendors and events. More interestingly, you get wrapped up in a mystery surrounding Nikko, a giant cat spirit who may or may not be loose on the island and the secret agents who are on the hunt for him, which is driving even more people off the island.

It does enough to let you know what your goals are and, for the most part, I had a simple 20 hours or so of cutting down trees, breaking rocks, making crafts, and either selling or gifting them. It’s also visually stunning, with bouncy character animations and a gorgeous art style brimming with cute Japanese iconography. Plus there are cats! So many cats! And you can pet them and they’ll purr and follow you around. Unfortunately, any goodwill that the Minkeo’s Night Market builds falls away thanks to long stretches of repetitive grinding that have little payoff.

Can you do me a favor?

When you get to the village, located on an island at the foot of Mount Fugu, you’re immediately thrown into a new life consisting of three things: gathering resources to make stuff to sell, gathering resources to make stuff to gift to your neighbors, and solving the Nikko mystery. There isn’t much time spent on getting to know most of your new neighbors, either. They just start asking you for favors in exchange for recipes so you can go make more stuff. It’s kind of rude, really.

You meet more than a dozen people on the island, but besides a few that show up later as part of a series of quests, they’re too broadly categorized to be interesting. A girl named Hana likes boy bands; Ben is a nerd; Hatty, uh, wears a hat (and is into baseball). They also only have a couple lines of dialogue each, so until you manage to get the item they need they’ll just repeat the same canned words. And since it can be many hours until you’re able to complete these quests, you’ll spend a long time not getting to know any of them.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. One is Bobo, a little boy who will be a companion of sorts while you’re going through the main story. He has some of the best dialogue. A lot of his jokes and punchlines have a meta quality to them, like how he suggests you use “combat” to take out the agents infesting the island, even though there isn’t any in Mineko’s Night Market (your plan of sneaking around them is fun too, he eventually says). He also has a mom whose name is Bobo’s Mom (yes, it was very lucky that she would eventually have a son named Bobo. That would’ve been weird otherwise).

Arguably the human character that stands out the most is Miyako, a girl who’s set up as your rival in the same way Gary Oak is to Red in the first Pokemon games. It’s an obvious homage (Miyako even parrots some of the same dialogue, like “smell ya later”) that’s good for a few chuckles and, without spoiling anything, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Bobo, Bobo’s Mom, and your dad are the others that get significant screentime, but since you spend most of your time grinding for materials, even they don’t participate in enough interactions to stand out a lot. And all your dad really wants is for you to fix the house while he sits in front of the TV all day.

You can do favors for any character, which usually includes crafting or buying certain items. Completing these side quests levels up your relationship, but you don’t get much out of those interactions. Finishing a neighbor’s quest line does give you a conclusion, but they’re unexciting for the most part. In one, I reminded goth teenager Saki (whose primary character trait is “goth”) that her family was pretty great, which I did by giving her items I made. A little dialogue after each successful gift built up her relationship with her family slightly, but not nearly enough to make it feel impactful when she finally has the realization at the end, especially when Mineko really didn’t seem to have any effect on the situation.

In similar games, like Spiritfarer and Cozy Grove, gifting items not only increases your relationship level but also unlocks conversations that flesh out those characters’ backstories and your connection with them. Or in Stardew Valley, where trying to find the best item for certain NPCs is also a minigame in itself, and at the end, you can even get married. In Mineko’s Night Market, all you get are a couple lines, a new crafting recipe, and another favor. And once you’ve run out of recipes to collect (I got them all around halfway through the main story), you just get random gifts like food or gems, both of which just go back into your work. If you max out a quest line with a character, nothing comes of it. They might say hello if you go and talk to them after, but the conclusions are pretty anticlimactic.

That’s just a symptom of a larger issue I have with Mineko’s Night Market. You work so hard to rebuild the island, the Night Market, and to get rid of the threats against Nikko, but there’s a disconnect between your actions as Mineko and the story. There are points where you do have an impact on events, like when you gain access to a new area and have to free trapped cats without getting noticed by agents. This will, in turn, drive the agents out and allow the cats to come back. Otherwise, it feels like Mineko just does things because the genre demands that you constantly need to work. You craft items for people, which makes them happy, and sell stuff, which makes the Night Market happy, but it’s unclear how any of this helps the island’s economy. It just does. It just works to isolate Mineko from the other characters, which is unhelpful in a game that’s partially about building relationships.

The only real personal connection built up here is between Mineko and Nikko. Mineko ends up being the person who protects him from agents and tries to get him home, both because she has to as the main character but also because she feels a kinship with him as somebody who’s also isolated from what they know. This is sort of true, and the way you’re constantly running around doing favors for other people exacerbates those feelings, although I’m not sure if that was purposeful.

Also, the themes don’t quite line up: Mineko just moved away from everything she was familiar with; Nikko is being hunted and is trapped in a place where he constantly has to hide. The parallels between the two’s stories aren’t as similar as the developers seem to think they are. However, this relationship at least moves forward as Mineko opens up new areas and learns more about the island and the agents’ movements. It’s a story where you actually have an impact, so it’s still deeper than just about any other plotline here.

All of this makes a lot of Mineko’s Night Market feel empty and without purpose. Sure, you help Nikko out, but what’s the point of crafting gifts for your neighbors or items to sell in the Night Market? The incremental changes that occur upon completing a night or leveling up a relationship don’t make your tasks any easier or introduce a new exciting element to play around with. It just moves you along to the next week, where you just repeat the same tasks over and over again.

It also feels like you’re just… doing stuff. I mean, you are, but the act of doing in video games has to have some kind of end result. This is especially important when it comes to labor in a cozy slice-of-life sim like this one. In Spiritfarer, making spirits comfortable can help them move on to the afterlife. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, crafting helps make the island look like almost anything you want and gives you money to pay off your debt. Mineko, by contrast, is put to work so quickly and has few other outlets that she doesn’t feel like much of a character at all. The developers try to get around the banality and cruelty of it by inserting some meta humor that seems to call itself out for arbitrary mechanics and story events, but it just feels like a distraction. It also doesn’t stop the fact that the work will never end.

Working hard or hardly working?

Mineko’s Night Market is a grind that never lets up. Every day, you wake up, travel by bus to one of the resource areas (a forest for gathering wood, a dock for fishing, a cat farm for gathering hairballs, etc), and then come home. You can only go to one per day, so you have to plan your week wisely. It’s a decent attempt to limit the amount of resources you can gather, but it mostly works to pad out the length and to make it even more frustrating when, for one reason or another, you don’t gather as much as you’d like.

Gathering is pretty simple. Besides flowers and hairballs, which are the easiest of the materials to gather, there’s a little timing minigame for each. But while these vary slightly in concept, they all play too similarly. For wood and paper from trees, for example, you have to click once you hit a circle at the bottom of a meter and hold until it hits the other side. The same goes for crafting. Each of the around seven craft types (by my count) has a timing minigame. For flowers, you just have to click where the meter turns green. For sewing, you have to follow a path exactly. They’re not interesting or challenging; each just works as a quick obstacle before getting the item you want and nothing more.

And you’ll need this money for buying food and drinks for energy, and new tools to unlock their corresponding resource areas. Then, you need to get rid of the agents infesting those areas by freeing the cats they’ve captured. This involves running around and either avoiding the agents’ flashlights or pretending to be an errand boy and getting them stuff scattered around the area to distract them. I thought that each level would have its own gimmick, but I soon realized there were limited ideas for variety and it got repetitive quickly. The sequences change slightly once you can control Nikko to solve these puzzles, but the only thing this does is let you release cats in a different part of the level, therefore letting the developers make these areas a bit larger.

The pacing is arguably where Mineko’s Night Market suffers the most. It starts off so quickly, but then slows to a crawl because it can take a while to gather certain resources and earn the cash needed to buy new crafting benches and tools. This means there are long stretches where you’re just grinding and nothing else is happening. No alternate dialogue from NPCs, no new agents arrive to shake things up and, for the most part, you’re not going to progress any other quests enough. You might complete a gift, but then you’ll just get another favor with little fanfare. You also get more energy as you progress through the main story so that you can gather more resources, but you don’t get the third one for at least a dozen hours. And since you can only eat or drink three times a day, you’re really limited in what you can gather and sell, especially during parts of the plot when you need to buy super-expensive tools to unlock those areas.

You only get reprieves on Saturday nights when the Night Market opens, and even then you’re all about your work. You see, the success of the Night Market falls on you, so the more you sell, the more you level up the market. With each level, the market gets more stalls and you get the ability to lay out more items for potential customers to browse. Each week, there’s also a different event — a parade, a play, a race, and a hunt — but they repeat each season. There are four weeks per season, so after the first four markets there aren’t too many surprises left.

It is nice to see the market fill out. You get more stalls, which means access to more items that can potentially help on quests. I was happy to find a flower stall that sold out-of-season flowers, which was super helpful for certain creations. The developers also did a great job changing up the styles of the stalls and their merchants for a lot of variety. Some are brighter, others are more subdued, and they all ooze personality and culture. It’s a shame you don’t get to know some of these merchants, but it’s at least a change of pace.

Freeing the different areas from agents is nice, too, since you potentially get access to new regions to explore, but there’s not a lot to discover once you do. The first few have little puzzles that reward you with a clue in the early parts of the Nikko mystery – but even that drops away after a while. Most of the areas just have their one resource, some cats to pet, and maybe a body of water for fishing. Regardless, any change is good. There is so little of it that any time something different occurred, I was ecstatic.

We live in a time of exceptional video game quality and abundance: There’s always too much to play (especially as I type this in September of 2023). So it’s all the more surprising that The Making of Karateka, which focuses on a game from nearly 40 years ago, totally captivated me. Part classic game collection and part documentary, wrapped in an interactive historical experience, The Making of Karateka follows the true story of a teenager’s path to publishing a hit video game in 1985. And the story is a good one. While Karateka is not a particularly fun 2D-fighting game to play, exploring its story in this weird and wonderful package is very much so.

What makes this story extra special is twofold: First, the surviving documentation of college student Jordan Mechner (who went on to make the original Prince of Persia) creating a video game for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and other early PCs with the help of his immediate family, especially his father, is extensive and exquisitely preserved here. Jordan’s personal journals and goofy development sketches, playable code of multiple game iterations, typewritten paper correspondence between him and his publisher, and even 3D scans of 5.25-inch floppy discs with their original Sharpie-on-sticker labels – the amount of detail gets even more exacting from there.

Second, Digital Eclipse’s interactive timeline presentation of these documents, video segments, and of course, the games themselves, are irresistible to explore. (This playable history platform debuted in Atari 50 last year, which scored a 9 on IGN.) The experience is not passive, like a film documentary: There are little tools to compare audio and visual tweaks between versions, a timeline to check off your progress, and an entire, playable version of Karateka with developer commentary built right in. The commentary, by Digital Eclipse developer Mike Mika, is a documentary unto itself. Seemingly Karateka’s biggest fan, Mika’s explanation of why he loves this game goes well beyond the screen and deep into the fragile balance of programming tricks that made smooth animation possible on a computer better equipped for primitive arcade ports. (One of these ports, an Asteroids knockoff, was in fact created by a teenage Jordan Mechner.)

This remake is actually a much more fun version of Karateka, which still feels clunky and inaccessible in its original forms (of which there are five included in this collection, including ports and demos). Digital Eclipse’s Karateka is definitely worth playing through – but only after watching the documentary (and giving yourself some extra lives) for some very important context. Without spoiling anything, the ending “twist” is both funny and shocking.

The remade Karateka is the best game of the collection because it includes several enemies and instances that were conceived of and discussed in the documentary, but were not technically possible at the time. The significance of the remake’s small expansions, like a puzzle with a larger cat, is heightened by listening to the developers talk about each one with lavish enthusiasm – it’s infectious. Similarly, the inclusion of several ‘80s PC platform conversions, which we learn from the documentary were extremely difficult to create, seem janky and not fun to play at first blush. But after discovering how each system was bent to these young game devs’ will to make Karateka work, it was at least fun to spot the differences, if not actually fun to play through the whole original games.

Even if it’s not fun to play through these many iterations of Karateka, however, you can instead just watch them: A perfect playthrough is included, and you can assume control of it any time (and several playthroughs you can watch have commentary tracks of their own).

The documentary content itself is admittedly simplistic: People involved in the original Karateka, fans, and other commentators are shot against an austere studio backdrop or in their lived-in homes – it doesn’t scream high budget. However, the jankiness melts away with the documentary’s most perfect moments: Those between Jordan Mechner and his father, Francis, who sits at a piano and recalls, in precise detail, breakthrough moments in his son’s early (again, highschool and college!) development career. These scenes are breathtakingly sweet. Kratos has nothing on video game’s best dad, Francis Mechner, who supported his son unconditionally through pursuing his passions.

In fact, the elder Mechner not only suggested the rotoscoping technique that led to Karateka’s cutting-edge animation, but he put on his wife’s gi and clambered onto a car to help Jordan get frames. Francis composed Karateka’s music, and then worked with his son on getting the buzzes and beeps of the Apple II to sound like music – no small feat. When Jordan demanded quarters (which, in 1980, had the same buying power as a dollar today) for the arcade, he doled them out like his endless patience, excited encouragement, and total engagement with his son’s interests. So much so that Jordan at one point asks why his father was so supportive of such a complete distraction from school. Why? His father tells him it’s important to encourage a child’s interests, and that it usually turns out okay. That is some powerful parenting.

Resident Evil 4 sure knows how to set the tone: the remake’s intro sees Leon slowly advancing through creepy woods and rotting, ominous houses, culminating in the horrifying crescendo that is the infamous village attack. But with that groundwork already laid, The Separate Ways DLC has no need for such a slow build-up, and smartly wastes very little time shifting into high gear: we’re put up against an extremely imposing boss mere minutes after taking control of Ada Wong, the star of this show. In fact, though it only took me just over four hours to complete this side story’s seven chapters, Separate Ways rarely wastes a moment of your time, and proves to be a highly entertaining roller coaster that includes some very satisfying new takes on ideas from its original 2005 inspiration.

The story of our cool and competent covert operative runs basically parallel to that of Leon Kennedy’s quest to find the President’s daughter in a remote Spanish village, and while their paths often intersect in interesting ways, it’s the objectives that Ada follows on behalf of a familiar shadowy figure – and some revelations that should surprise even those who know the original’s story inside and out – that make her adventure worth playing.

Where the original included more than a few “Go help Leon before he dies a nasty death” tasks, the remake’s Separate Ways feel more like a believable arc of Ada having to choose between leaving emotions at the door and putting the mission first, all while lending her own brand of assistance (but still looking for a way to use the situation to her advantage later). Ada’s story in Separate Ways also has more room to breathe than it did in the 2005 version, with less focus on retelling Leon’s story from a different angle, and more about her growing reluctance to put her client before her allies.

Rather than having Ada largely follow Leon’s familiar story path and events as the original Separate Ways did, this particular version does an exemplary job of giving Ada her own adversaries to contend with in a variety of ways. Right from the get-go, Ada’s own private antagonist in the form of a relentless, black-robed monstrosity that stalks her for a good portion of the story. The fights you have stand out from what Leon has to deal with, even as you find yourself in familiar locations. There’s a wonderful range of encounters — from zipping between rooftops to avoid an El Gigante’s attacks, to panicked escapes from unstoppable killing machines. With Ada’s story being as condensed as it is compared to what Leon goes through, every encounter remains fast and fresh, repeat performances feel exceedingly rare, and every boss fight has a new surprise.

You’ll revisit a lot of the same locations seen by Leon during Separate Ways, and while that may not sound exciting, Capcom makes smart use of familiar terrain by changing the context — often having you fight through enemies going a different direction than Leon did — which provides new ambush points, enemy surprises, and new pathways to learn that weren’t there before. I especially liked how some places that were mostly a lull in the action for Leon, like the old factory and village chief’s house, had different foes waiting for Ada this time around.

However, Separate Ways isn’t solely content to retread old ground, and some interesting choices are made on when to send Ada off into uncharted territory. These places might not be too wildly off the beaten path, but they do make for some entertaining moments, such as turning a corner and realizing you’re actually right above an area that Leon will arrive at soon after, letting you watch a familiar cutscene from a very different point of view. While some cutscenes will obviously play out just as they did from Leon’s perspective, there were plenty of fun twists on seeing exactly what Ada and Luis were doing when one of them contacted Leon on the radio. Even though you can’t exactly alter destiny and team up directly, it was always cool to hear Leon fighting off hordes of villagers nearby, or hearing faint crying while scaling a church rooftop.

I’m also extremely pleased to announce that if — like me — you were bummed about certain scenic spots from the 2005 Resident Evil 4 not appearing in RE4 Remake, you may greatly enjoy how Separate Ways manages to find unexpected ways to sprinkle recognizable sewers, gondolas, and high-tech labs into Ada’s path.

Ada herself is no slouch, and benefits from all the same features that Leon enjoys in RE4 Remake in addition to some nifty new gadgets of her own. She can sneak, slit throats, parry, and kick just as well as Leon, and her unique grapple gun allows her to zip-kick straight to a stunned enemy as if she were a guest character in a Batman Arkham game. I found it incredibly useful, using it to zip past swarms looking to pin me down and scatter them like bowling pins, pulling off headshots all the while. The grapple gun also works to quickly platform across areas in a hurry, and though it only attaches in very specific spots, it gave me new ways to move around many of the larger open areas and let me pull off maneuvers like grappling across the castle’s courtyard maze to intercept a fleeing zealot, or escaping quickly when I was backed into a corner.

The Batman similarities don’t stop there: when Ada isn’t zipping across rooftops like Leon Kennedy’s version of the Dark Knight, she also employs her own detective vision mode with special contact lenses to solve a few puzzles. Unfortunately, none of this is anywhere near as flashy as the grapple gun, and more than once I was told to solve the thrilling mystery of “follow these specific footprints along a very straightforward path.” Part of me wishes there was more that could be done with the gadget, but I’m also glad these simpler puzzle ideas were used sparingly enough that it didn’t ruin the pacing.

Aside from having to occasionally get her informant Luis Sera out of trouble, Ada isn’t constrained by the ebb and flow of RE4 Remake’s main story. There’s no helpless girl to haul around or somber moments of rest and reflection before the next leg of the journey, and Separate Ways takes full advantage of this by rarely dialing things down. In her quest to acquire a specimen for her client, there’s rarely a dull moment. You can still chat up the mysterious Merchant and upgrade Ada’s unique shotgun and explosive bow, and there’s oodles of treasure to find by spotting chests and hanging objects, but I appreciate that Separate Ways doesn’t try and slow its momentum with shooting range minigames (though Ada can still buy charms to gain passive bonuses, which is a great touch). There are even a few merchant requests to take on if you do want to take things slower; my favorite was trying to find a few camouflaged Novistadors in an area before moving on, which required careful scanning of walls and ceilings (with the help of a bio-sensor).

While the story is destined to end with Leon’s showdown with Saddler, I appreciate that Capcom didn’t shy away from giving Ada a chance to shine on her own, culminating in a one-two punch of a satisfying solo boss fight, and a behind the scenes race to help Leon deliver the killing blow that matched the heart-pounding pace of Leon’s eventual escape from the island. There’s even some added context to Ada’s ending we don’t see from Leon’s point of view, and it’s left me intrigued about what the developer has in store for their inevitable Resident Evil 5 Remake.

Remember how many dildos were originally in Cyberpunk 2077? You couldn’t loot a corner in Night City without picking one up, to the point where CD Projekt Red actually had to patch a number of them out. Lootable dildos weren’t necessarily a problem on their own, but their abundance was a good example of how Cyberpunk’s grand story could occasionally clash with the cheap shock humor found around it. Phantom Liberty aims to right that dildo misalignment, and after some soul-searching, has seemingly found what kind of Cyberpunk story it wants to tell, and nails it. Balancing the punk-rock verve of Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop RPG with an exquisitely crafted spy story and best-in-class visuals, Phantom Liberty is Cyberpunk 2077 at its best.

Phantom Liberty begins with the President of the NUS crash landing in a self-governed district of Night City called Dogtown, and you’re hired by her Secret Service detail to rescue her. From there you will meet the two most important new characters in the expansion, Song So-Mi, an NUSA hacker excellently played by Christine Minji Chang, and Solomon Reed, a sleeper agent who is brought back into commission portrayed by the iconic Idris Elba.

Elba is again channeling his city-wise American accent from The Wire, only this time on the other side of the law. He’s definitely not phoning this role in either, delivering a thoroughly captivating performance as a secret agent who made me so desperately want to trust him even though he is Night City’s greatest spy, and therefore probably never telling the full truth. Phantom Liberty relies heavily on make-or-break decisions that can’t be taken back, and Reed is part of the reason why those choices become so difficult.

Keanu Reeves also makes a return as Johnny Silverhand. Maybe it’s the years since I last played, but I feel Reeves is actually better this time around, performance-wise. Honestly, I think it’s that he has better material to work with in Phantom Liberty, which requires him to rattle off fewer diatribes about screwing over the system. Instead, the expanded story lets Reeves explore Silverhand’s mournful side, delving into his existence as a failed revolutionary imprisoned in someone else’s body. But more than that, between Elba, Reeves, and Chang, Phantom Liberty does a great job highlighting just how advanced its character animations are compared to some other big-budget RPGs. At the intersection of performance and technology, CDPR has found something in Cyberpunk 2077 that can genuinely move you. Just wait until you meet Reed’s spy associate, Alex.

Overall, Phantom Liberty has a much firmer grasp on what kinds of stories can be told in Night City. It’s a metropolis full of political wheelings and dealings, all manner of crime, and more than its fair share of idiots, and that’s unique in the sci-fi hacker genre compared to the dour and operatic worlds of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. Cyberpunk 2077 is grunge and metal, and Phantom Liberty harnesses this wild energy into mature storytelling – something the outstanding animated Netflix show, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, also managed to capture.

Elevated by Elba’s and Chang’s respective performances, Phantom Liberty hits all the things I love in a Cyberpunk story: it hones in on the hopelessness of hyper-capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of technology on our souls, all while using the spy motif to introduce some new themes to the world. How can we trust anyone when every element of the future has been so thoroughly taken over by automated forces of corporations and government? It has more to say than I expected going in, and more than I could have hoped for after my initial playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077.

Similarly, CDPR gets a ton of mileage out of its spy premise. There are exciting moments where you’re channeling your best Ethan Hunt from Mission: Impossible, complete with a new face to trick your targets, as well as an entire section that was very clearly inspired by Skyfall. I was curious to learn how an espionage plot could fit into Cyberpunk 2077’s story about varying levels of criminality – from the dingiest streets to the tallest executive corporate suite – but Phantom Liberty reminds us that the government, too, is part of our hyper-capitalist meat grinder, and not much separates a government agent from a streetwise fixer.

It’s serious business, but whenever the storyline begins to feel too heavy you can take on side jobs for Mr. Hands, a fixer whose clientele ranges from kidnapped arms dealers to a doting resident who just wants to rescue her dumb-as-bricks fiance and his even dumber friend. But make no mistake: CDPR has played a wicked trick by infusing these side missions with the same kind of complex moral dilemmas you’re forced to resolve during the main campaign.

What remains just as impressive as it was the first time I played Cyberpunk 2077 is Night City, which is still one of gaming’s great locations. The sense of awe at its scale hasn’t faded, and returning there after three years I find myself with the same level of admiration for CDPR’s grand work. Maybe even more so, given that Phantom Liberty adds an entire new district to the already-packed city. Sure, the idea of an independent Dogtown is a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with the lore, but this lawless Thunderdome proves to be a great setting for Phantom Liberty’s paranoid spy-thriller.

This new area draws visual inspiration from both Las Vegas and Santa Monica: it’s part beach town, part luxury resort destination, with extravagant hotels, glamorous night clubs, and a football stadium that’s been converted into a city center. The line that “the location is also a character” has never been truer than it is here. There’s so much fun in wandering around Dogtown and discovering some hidden storyline or bit of environmental storytelling. It’s almost an anti-Tears of the Kingdom, where the joy isn’t in emergent bits of gameplay but in archaeologically uncovering secrets hidden throughout the area. There was always something magical about exploring Night City’s skyline, and doing it again knowing that no other game since has replicated this feat is just as impressive. This is one game I never want to fast-travel through.

Without spoilers, there’s a specific point in the expansion’s story where it will diverge based on your decisions, leading you down one of two very distinct paths and endings. I played both for this review and found that one certainly feels more “canon” than the other. There’s also an entirely new ending that’s been added to the base game that feels like it might be the de facto true ending, and takes Phantom Liberty’s themes of self-sacrifice and near-future alienation and uses them to wrap up V and Silverhand’s story. I may start an entire new save to experience this story fully, from beginning to end. With all of the impressive changes in Cyberpunk 2077’s free 2.0 update that arrived alongside this DLC’s launch, starting fresh is actually something I’m looking forward to.

On that note, while Phantom Liberty isn’t required to install the 2.0 update, it’s hard to say that the revamped gameplay didn’t positively influence my experience as I played through 20 hours of Phantom Liberty. In particular, the newly reworked skill tree that makes it easier to build your character towards specific playstyles was a revelation. I had always wanted to play my character as a hacking netrunner, but in the 1.0 release in 2020, hacking was a pretty limp tool that let me do little more than distract enemies while waiting for a chance to shoot at them. With 2.0’s revamped cyberware system, I’m able to not only equip more cyberware at once, but the new skill tree makes it easier to enhance both my cybernetic and hacking abilities. I’m finally able to create a true netrunner character, someone capable of getting a group of enemies to point guns at each other if I want them to. Whether you’re pursuing a hacker build, augment-build, or something else, this alone makes Cyberpunk 2077 a much better experience than it was in 2020.

To be clear, these are improvements that all Cyberpunk 2077 owners can experience even without buying Phantom Liberty. The expansion doesn’t include much in the way of exclusive abilities, but does feature some exclusive clothes and weapons. The weapons, in particular, are very much themed after the spy stories Phantom Liberty has taken inspiration from, giving us access to very fun, very powerful stealth tools that will let you infiltrate the deadliest den of thieves without getting caught. If you’re planning on coming back to Night City for another run, I cannot recommend enough that you take a detour to Dogtown while you’re here.

When I first heard that Mortal Kombat 1 would be skipping the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles, but would in fact, be coming out on the Switch, my first thought was, “Surely that means that it’s going to be one of those cloud version-only games like Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and so on. But I was wrong: Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch is a straight-up port, running directly off the Switch hardware, and yes, that is as bad of an idea as it sounds.

Before we begin, please check out my Mortal Kombat 1 review for the version that’s on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC to get a full overview and my critiques of it. Long story short: MK1 is great! There are exciting changes to the gameplay formula in the form of the Kameo system, the fighting itself feels fresh thanks to some smart tweaks to how combos are structured, and the story mode is fantastic, even if some of its online features feel outdated and the Invasions mode doesn’t quite land.

Mortal Kombat 1 on the Switch can claim all of those things too, but the technical limitations of the hardware make experiencing them feel like you’re trudging through whatever sludge Reptile crawled out of. Let’s get the most obvious knock against it out of the way first: It looks abysmal compared to the other versions. Character models lack detailed textures, the expressive facial animations of the current-gen versions are highly compromised to say the least, clothing – and sometimes even skin – constantly stretches and clips through body parts, and every so often you can even see straight through them. Those absolutely gorgeous stages that I praised in my other review look like they had a heavy gaussian blur filter applied to them in Photoshop and briefly made me think that I needed glasses.

So yeah, it’s bad, but this also isn’t a big surprise – the Switch was an underpowered console when it launched six years ago, and truthfully, if this was the worst of Mortal Kombat 1’s problems, I’d still be able to recommend it because even though it would look bad, it’d still play great. But the issues go far deeper than just skin – they’re down to the bone.

Before you even get into a match, you’ve got to deal with egregious load times lasting, on average, around 40 seconds. This is made all the more noticeable by the fact that the character select screen is designed for you to quickly and seamlessly take you from here into the match. On the other versions you select your characters, they clash, say a quick two lines of dialogue, and when they separate, you’re in the match. On the Switch, they clash, say a quick two lines of dialogue, and then… stare awkwardly at each other for half a minute while textures pop in and out all around them.

Loading pains are felt the most in both Invasions mode and online play. Invasions is particularly bad because it’s designed for a ton of quick bouts that you’re able to generally steamroll through in order to collect rewards like new gear pieces, skins, etc. At its best it’s already pretty grindy and slow paced, but when you add on the fact that you’re frequently spending more time waiting to get in and get out of a fight than you are actually fighting, it becomes straight-up joyless.

Ranked online play is especially frustrating because of the fact that every match is a first to three set, and despite the fact I’m playing with the same characters on the same stage, with the same Kameos, it still takes about 40 seconds of staring at a black screen in between each match of the set. That’s just too long to wait when you consider that you’re also waiting for matchmaking, waiting for opponents to accept matches, and occasionally even waiting a moment or two for fatalities to happen.

But the real kicker is the actual performance of the gameplay during a fight. There’s a lot of slowdown that affected my timing and led to dropped combos, similar to how it’d feel if I was playing online with bad netcode… only this was playing locally, against a CPU. Some stages are worse than others, but it is something that I felt to a certain degree in pretty much every match that I played. There’s also a couple of weird bugs that I encountered, such as Li Mei’s lantern disappearing after a certain amount of time in the air; Sareena’s dreaded boomerang Kameo attack doesn’t return, which makes it essentially useless; and the list of combo trials isn’t at all like the list from the other versions, with most characters getting six challenges instead of seven, and some characters getting just one. It’s almost like it’s working off of a different version.

If Story mode is all you’re interested in, then you may find some value in MK1 on the Switch. The cutscenes are pre-rendered and look great, even though the switch to in-engine fights is incredibly jarring, and the problem with long load times is mitigated due to the fact that you’re just watching the story as it loads. But you’d be less frustrated just watching it on YouTube.

With Party Animals, developer Recreate Games takes the goofy joy of floppy, physics-based multiplayer games like Fall Guys, Gang Beasts, and Human: Fall Flat and puts its own spin on them. Instead of falling in with the rank and file, Party Animals pushes the genre forward thanks to a thoughtful attention to detail, creative levels, and its engaging, comedic showdowns, though it does stumble over its inflexible rules and local multiplayer mishaps.

You’ll take control of an adorable, clumsy animal with a powerful right hook as you join up to seven other players in punching, dropkicking, headbutting, and flopping your way to victory in a variety of different challenges. Their wobbly animations cause a sticky, moving-through-molasses-like feel to the controls that might be a turn-off at first, but after a few rounds it clicks. Doing just about anything – including walking – has a short wind-up, but the delay eventually becomes satisfying as you watch your party animal launch itself into motion. It feels intentional, and contributes to Party Animals’ overall loose sense of combative chaos.

Attacks all have a similarly long wind-up that contributes to the ragdoll nature of your chosen combatant, but when a blow connects, it feels less like a plush pawing from a stuffed animal and more like a powerful pound from a heavyweight boxer. Time even temporarily slows down to really emphasize the impact of a particularly potent punch before your cute little guy goes flying.

With three modes, each with its own set of maps, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into here. The main one is Last Stand, which distills Party Animals to its purest, most chaotic form. Each of the nine maps feels relatively small, but they are perfectly sized to house eight-player, every-animal-for-themselves bedlam. They all present you with distinct, clever environmental challenges to overcome and/or throw your opponent into, from a cracking ice float to a high-speed wind tunnel. Weapons appear in all three modes but are most useful in Last Stand because here KOs are prioritized above all else.

Those weapons include giant lollipops, crossbows, tasers, nunchucks, and toilet plungers among others, and they rain down from the sky to help whichever lucky animal picks them up wreak even more havoc. My favorites are the bomb, which can be lit and tossed into the middle of a cluster of critters like something right out of a Looney Toons cartoon, and the nunchucks, which are a chaotic pickup that deals heavy damage very quickly but might also smack you in the face.

As players get whittled away things can start to slow down, but most of Last Stand’s maps ensure that rounds never drag on much longer than three or four minutes on average, as it becomes more difficult to survive as time stretches on. Maybe the rope bridge you’re fighting on suddenly falls sideways, or perhaps the levers that you use to defend yourself from a wild tunnel’s gale snap off, leaving you to get swept away.

True, it’s a drag to be KO’d early and have to spectate until the next match, but you can fling increasingly powerful items like fish, banana peels, and bombs onto the battlefield after getting knocked out, which keeps everyone engaged. On a few occasions, I’ve even seen a projectile from a knocked-out player determine the outcome of an entire match.

The second mode, Team Score, splits its eight maps in half. Four are variations on different sports like basketball, soccer, hockey, and American football. They’re all fun party modes, but they’re not particularly interesting or novel. The non-sports maps, on the other hand, all come with their own unique mechanics that run the gamut of playstyles. In one, you have to carry big chunks of coal to the front of a train to push your team’s locomotive ahead of the other. In another, you’ll launch explosives (and your teammates) across a river into your opponents’ base. Most of them also allow you to sabotage your opponents, adding a welcome layer of chaos to the competition that keeps you from falling into a repetitive rut. Almost every single map introduces new ways to reward you for understanding Party Animals’ floppy controls without leaving new or unskilled players in the dust.

Finally there’s Arcade Mode, which is entertaining, but is overshadowed by the others thanks to its relatively small list of just two maps. It’s also very similar to Last Stand; the levels in both modes feature similar mechanics and design philosophies while avoiding the custom-built challenges and objectives found in Team Score. The only real difference is that Arcade puts you into two teams of four with 10 lives shared between them. That similarity is a little disappointing, but Arcade Mode does have my favorite map in Party Animals: Final Destination, where you’re fighting for control of a subway platform. Throwing your opponent down onto the tracks before a train comes is really fun and makes for some tense moments.

It’s so amusing, in fact, it makes me wish I could play it more consistently or in other modes! But because Arcade Mode only makes up two of the 20 total maps in Party Animals, the online matchmaking that seems to pull randomly from the overall pool causes it to come up a lot less often than Last Stand and Team Score. It would be nice if Party Animals included a playlist system that let players opt into whichever modes or maps they like the most.

One thing that sets Party Animals apart from other similar games is that it supports up to eight players, but that bigger scope can also kill a small party’s vibe; while I spent the majority of my time playing in full lobbies, playing with smaller groups uncovered some confusing rigidity beneath the surface. Where other party games have dozens of options to customize rules like item spawn rate and score limits, Party Animals does not. It’s missing the elasticity that makes a great party game replayable for years on end.

This problem is at its worst in Team Score mode, where you can’t modify things like score limits or the arbitrary timer that pops up whenever a team goes a certain amount of time without scoring a point. Playing with people who don’t follow a map’s specific objective or who aren’t familiar with Party Animals’ controls will result in matches that drag on because each map and game mode is designed in very narrow ways that don’t accommodate doing something the developers didn’t necessarily expect.

Local Multiplayer is similarly stymied by some eyebrow-raising decisions. Mainly, you’re forced into four-way split-screen (causing frame rate slowdowns on my PC) with a clumsy camera when it seems as though a fixed view of the whole map would work better. I felt discouraged from playing locally with my roommates or inviting friends over to play a few rounds rather than just playing with them online. In 2023, it’s frustratingly common for a party game to force local multiplayer into the backseat – here it’s even hidden within the online multiplayer menu – but it is always disappointing.

These issues, though minor, point to where Party Animals needs some post-launch love and care. I could very easily see a patch or update fixing a majority of them, and it seems like Recreate Games at least intends to support this fluffy mayhem for some time to come. For example, there’s a full item shop where you can spend in-game currency, a progression system, and a locker system that you might expect from a live-service game.

It’s impossible to bring up Party Animals’ item shop without gushing about the adorable cosmetics you can unlock. Almost every character has a variety of cute costumes that range from cheeky nods to pop culture, like an aviator jacket for a goose, to just plain charming digs that make a tiger look like a champion fighter. They don’t change gameplay whatsoever, they’re just there to look cute.

The version I played had everything unlocked already, but you’ll need to earn in-game currencies to unlock a legally distinct Darth Vader lookalike costume for your duck or a samurai costume for the Shiba Inu. It’s hard to say for sure ahead of launch, but between the Fortnite-like shop and the ways Party Animals’ multiple currencies are displayed, I have a feeling you’ll be able to buy in-game currency if you’d like to unlock a specific costume. (There’s also a blind capsule machine where you can buy random items.) That’s largely par for the course in a modern multiplayer game, but at least here you do earn currency, skins, and opportunities to use the capsule machine as you play.

Not many things are better the smaller they get. Mortgages? Certainly. Golf scores? Sure. Kidney stones? Okay, yes. But video games? That’s more of a grey area. For The Crew Motorfest, developer Ivory Tower has chosen to give its chunky interpretation of the entire continental USA the chop in favour of something far more concise: a scaled-down riff of the single island of O’ahu, Hawaii. The result is better in some ways and worse in others, but overall it’s actually an experience that sometimes feels like it’s trying harder to emulate Forza Horizon than its own predecessors. I can’t say I blame them considering how much I loved Horizon 5, and they’ve done a good enough job at it that I’ve had many great moments in Motorfest over the past several days. It has the best handling in the series so far, and it does boast some incredibly strong lighting. However, while Motorfest is a mostly earnest romp for car lovers in a vibrant, tropical paradise, it definitely loses some momentum due to its confusingly dead world and slightly uneven campaign, and its omnipresent, baked-in microtransactions are a constant bugbear.

After its handbrake turn from an illegal, underground street racer in the 2014 original to the sanctioned motorsport TV show format of The Crew 2 in 2018, The Crew Motorfest has peeled away in yet another new direction: that is, it’s now based around a bustling summer car culture festival. Let’s admit it’s not exactly original, though: the Forza Horizon series has had this patch accounted for since 2012.

A Motorfestivus for the Rest of Us

However, it really does get off to a very positive start, with a confident and well-curated prologue segment that gives us an effective taste of Motorfest’s varied racing action and – immediately after that – the freedom to head out into O’ahu to tackle the large pile of events in essentially whatever order we choose.

Admittedly, Motorfest has far, far less real estate to race on than The Crew or The Crew 2. You can drive all the way around the island in a little over 15 minutes; in The Crew 2 it takes around 40 to 60 minutes to drive from one side of the map to the other. However, the narrower focus has resulted in a map that’s more handsome and densely detailed (and, while it lacks the same ambitious scope, it doesn’t seem to be plagued by nonsensical, procedurally generated storefronts selling chicken-grilled coffee). I do miss the sheer variety of vistas and landmarks of The Crew 2 but there are moments – particularly during sunsets – where it looks quite exceptional, although there are also times where low flying reveals some pretty egregious vegetation and shadow pop-in. It’s at its worst hedge hopping over the centre of the island.

Overall, the map is a little dead, though. There are no people on the streets, and traffic is extremely light. Motorfest tries to add zest by tossing in AI racers that spawn in suddenly and dart through the streets around us, but it actually just makes the free-roam driving occasionally frustrating. Traffic cars can be collided with, but AI cars and other racers can be ghosted through. Unfortunately, it’s not always instantly clear which is which at 400 kilometres per hour. Motorfest does have a better approach to trackside smashables than The Crew 2, though, and far fewer of them will completely stop us dead.

Motorfest splits its campaign into a series of themed Playlists, each drilling down on either a particular car type, driving style, or other aspect of auto culture. For instance, one Playlist focuses on Japanese custom shop Liberty Walk. The voiceover work here is a little stern but it’s a cool and occasionally educational showcase of some heavily customised cars. Another highlights the history of the 911, which is a clever way to make use of several generations of the iconic Porsche that Motorfest has at its disposal.

My favourite so far is definitely the Donut Media Playlist, which is mostly a series of fun showdowns between famous rival vehicles. Known for their automotive apparel and YouTube content, Donut has already had a couple of collaborations with Forza Horizon 5 prior to its appearance in Motorfest – but the addition of hosted vignettes before each race here injects a little more of Donut’s madcap approach to motoring, and I actually found their Motorfest appearance the more entertaining of the two.

Not every Playlist has landed for me, though. For instance, I’m quite disappointed in the drifting Playlist. The first few events are passable, although I don’t love that they’re hosted on huge and unrealistic raised structures – including one that coils into the sky like a giant spring. The next few actually resemble real-world drifting on twisting mountain roads, but then it just loses the plot completely and throws us into several traditional races. The pretext is that you’re supposed to discover whether a drift car can beat street cars in a conventional street race, but the upshot is… we’re driving to be as quick as possible and not to look as cool as possible. It’s essentially the opposite of drifting. Why these events constitute the whole crescendo of the drifting Playlist is anyone’s guess.

I’m also doubly disappointed that Motorfest’s boat and plane events have been lumped together into a single Playlist that largely feels like an afterthought. Like The Crew 2 before it, the water effects in Motorfest are genuinely great and racing through huge swells is chaotic fun – but there are far fewer boat events in Motorfest than there are in The Crew 2.

Aircraft events are again mundane races against the clock, and the planes are still woefully slow. Motorfest adds a Grumman F8F Bearcat to its hangar – literally one of the fastest piston-engine aircraft of its era – but it’s barely capable of a third of its real top speed in Motorfest. Thanks to this, flying feels mostly dull – and it’s not helped by the fact the default flight model is absolutely awful. For reference, there’s an aircraft handling assist that automatically locks some of the flight axes, but the flying feels infinitely better with it toggled off (I’d recommend using the chase camera that rolls with the wings – not the one locked to the horizon).

I can anticipate some resistance to Motorfest’s strict focus on its Playlist approach, and I will concede it does seem odd to have us agonise over choosing a free starter car that basically functions as a taxi to take us to events we’ll complete in preordained “loaner” cars. In fact, our personal cars are mostly irrelevant until a Playlist is complete, at which point we can redo races in the cars of our choice. I don’t really mind this format; I just can’t really bear the constant babble of Motorfest’s so-called AI assistant anymore. She certainly mispronounces a lot of words. The Groo-man Bearcat? Cred-ough? Diss-plin? Are we just saying typos out loud now?

I’m a little exhausted with the fact that effective fast travel is locked behind the completion of 10 Playlists. I'm also cynical about why some Playlists can be completed without owning any prerequisite vehicles, and some require arbitrary and expensive in-game purchases. It’s especially galling when, even after you buy a required vehicle, Motorfest literally still “loans” you a duplicate of the car you just purchased to complete the event in anyway. As with The Crew and The Crew 2, Motorfest is still pretty stingy when it comes to payouts, and it’s endlessly tedious how Motorfest’s virtual currency is only ever a button-press away.

Garage Mirage

You could spend a lot of money instantly unlocking all of the vehicles in Motorfest – Ivory Tower quotes a figure of 600+ – but in reality that’s a blatant exaggeration. Yes, there are plenty of genuinely great cars here, but the final figure is bolstered significantly by counting multiple versions of the same car several times over simply because they have fancy nicknames and some stickers spackled on them. Piles of these are also just reward cars from The Crew 2 that can’t actually be accessed unless you already own them there, so 600 cars just isn’t an accurate or meaningful figure for a new Motorfest player. Sure, 13 Mitsubishi models sounds like a extensive assortment, but they’re mostly doubles. The Evo X is doubled again, so a quarter of them are the same car.

That said, the vehicles are highly detailed – except for the Vaseline-smeared and completely functionless mirrors – and they generally look and sound great. More importantly, I find the cars feel noticeably better in Motorfest than they did in The Crew 2. Put simply, there’s a much-improved sense of weight and grip, especially when flicking a car quickly from side to side to break the rear end loose. The cars come alive in corners with traction control off, but I dislike how having the driving aids off appears to be a decent advantage for our AI opponents, who seem to get a perfect launch at the start of every race. I eventually relented and opted for some mild TCS to try to level the playing field.

If you want my advice, turn on the driving aids when racing online, too. Trying to keep up with other human players in the island-spanning Grand Races in Motorfest’s most-mental hypercars simply isn’t worth the effort without some traction assistance. That said, I doubt I’ll get much mileage out of the multiplayer, as even getting a race has been taking as long as the events themselves. Sitting in a lobby for 10 minutes waiting for at least 14 people to show up isn’t fun. Why can’t we register for a Grand Race and continue to drive around until enough players are on board to trigger it?

Multiplayer isn’t the only thing I’ve bounced off in Motorfest, either. I’ve never liked The Crew’s loot-based upgrade system and I never will, and grinding for legendary gold parts isn’t on my agenda (and nor is buying them outright for real-world money).

When I think about what's cool in the Dune universe – what really sets it apart from other epic sci-fi – I think of a lot of the same things Shiro Games has chosen to focus on in Dune: Spice Wars. There's the complex galactic politics, the smooth blend of the futuristic and the ancient, and the deadly, sweeping splendor of Arrakis. When I first reviewed it in Early Access, Spice Wars already felt like a reasonably complete RTS. And after a year and a half of additions and refinements, it gleams even brighter.

The core of each hour-ish-long fight for dominion over Dune is a well-paced real-time battle system that pulls off the difficult tightrope walk of being complex but not complicated. You can jump right into it and have a good time, but it really rewards understanding unit synergies, like the teamwork bonuses of the Atreides legions or the lone wolf, hit-and-run tactics of the Fremen. It's just the right amount of micro for me, too, where a little bit of repositioning will go a long way, but you don't need esports reflexes to get the most out of your army.

One shakeup to this formula since the Early Access launch is the addition of airships, which are expensive, late-game units that can really turn the tide if used correctly. Or… they can be a giant waste of money if the AI keeps dancing them in and out of my missile turret range. Tactically, I really have not been impressed with the AI so far. This can even apply to your own units if you get a big enough group of them, as they tend to wiggle around nonsensically if clustered too closely together. As an RTS veteran, I had to turn the difficulty up to Hard to feel decently challenged in combat. But don’t let its clumsiness on the battlefield make you complacent: the AI can be cunning and effective on the strategic level even on Normal, and will use the various diplomatic and espionage options to pull victory out from under you.

Feeding these flashy clashes is a clever, hands-on resource system in which you're always having to decide when to sell and when to stockpile the ever-important spice based on changing exchange rates and a periodic Imperial tax that can levy punishing penalties on you if you don't pay. Whether it's manpower, political influence, or life-giving water, I never fell into a rut in this glimmering desert where I felt like I had enough of everything. Spice Wars always keeps you thirsty, which can lead to conflict even with a long-time ally if they just happen to beat you to that juicy spice field that's critical to your plans.

The changes to how water works since Early Access launch have added a new strategic dimension, too. The supply system depletes the provisions of any ground unit crossing neutral or unfriendly territory, and they'll start taking health damage if they run out. Particularly dangerous are the deep deserts, which divide up the map with deadly expanses that drain supplies three times as fast. Running a surplus of water, though, increases both the maximum supplies your units can carry and their recharge speed at friendly settlements, so keeping your industrial operations minimal translates into freer movement across the planet. In a very tangible way, living in harmony with Arrakis rather than trying to reshape it is rewarded.

The Fremen are the masters of the desert, being able to cross it more quickly and safely than other factions, as well as being able to gather spice without noisy harvesters that attract attention of the sandworm variety. Everyone else has to choose between setting up their harvesters to automatically evacuate at the first sign of a sandworm, which gives an ongoing debuff to their production, or be prepared to do so manually and swiftly when the interface warns you danger is coming. Sending ornithopters as escorts costs you a valuable scout but gives you an earlier warning to get the hell out, creating even more interesting trade-offs in the economic gameplay.

Of course, you can never actually remove the threat of the worms, so you have to learn to live with them. I really like how this reminds you that no matter how powerful you get, you still have to bow to Arrakis' unforgiving rules. In this way, the planet comes alive and becomes a character of its own, supported by gleaming stretches of dunes in the daytime and an eerily quiet, almost meditative sea of twinkling blue at night. The look of the units and buildings is a bit cartoonishly stylized, but putting everything together, it's gorgeous. The music and ambient sounds of wind and sand add to this skillfully.

Above the dusty surface, high-level strategy simmers as each faction jockeys for position in the cutthroat space senate, the Landsraad. The Houses Atreides, Harkonnen, Corino, and Ecaz are voting members with official representation, but all factions – including the unrecognized Fremen and Smugglers – can spend an Influence resource representing bribes and backroom deals to get what they’re after. It sounds complex, but the way it works is very easy to follow, with resolutions like increasing the upkeep on certain goods or giving a faction the ability to raise special Imperial armies coming to a vote periodically. It's impressive how Spice Wars was able to bolt a fairly deep political system onto an already complex RTS without it feeling bloated, confusing, or unbalanced.

There’s even an assassination action that brings a great deal of tension to the espionage system. Collecting enough intel on a faction lets you launch an assassination attempt against their leader, the progress of which can be slowed down by the target devoting spies to counterespionage. If you're targeted, you have to spend money on localized scans to find the assassin, who could be hiding anywhere on the map. If you can't find them in time and send some units to arrest them, it's game over. I lost to this a couple times, but I wasn't frustrated by it. Win or lose, the race against the clock and having to divert my resources into a big detective game was exhilarating. And the costs to even attempt it mean foiling an assassination will put your would-be killer at a sudden disadvantage, so it feels balanced by risk.

It’s all handled by a UI that makes it relatively easy to keep up with. Since agents are one of the main ways you generate resources, a player who doesn't focus on espionage will naturally unlock operations that support their playstyle even if they're not actively engaging with it much. There’s even an operation that immediately stops rebellions at the cost of intel, which may as well have been directly targeted to solve two of my biggest, specific complaints from that earlier review. Spy traits, like settlement traits on the map, can be ignored without crippling yourself, but add a little extra layer of optimization for min-maxers that will pay dividends if you're just a bit more meticulous.

Outside of the standard skirmish, there are two extra modes; Kanly Duel is a fast-paced 1v1 showdown on a much smaller map with many elements like technology sped up. It seems purpose-made for competitive play, or just getting in a quick grudge match with a buddy. The other, much more sweeping mode is Conquest, an in-depth campaign that takes around eight or nine missions – roughly 12 hours – to complete. You unlock perks and passive resource income by conquering sectors on the turn-based campaign map, with bonus rewards for taking on challenging, optional objectives like deliberately refusing to pay the Imperial spice tax.

Going into a mid-campaign mission with the off-map spice fields I conquered earlier created a meaningful sense of progression, as well as tactical escalation as factions with stronger starting income can build up bigger armies much faster. There's also a Pressure mechanic that pushes back against inevitable snowballing when you get too powerful. Controlling a lot of territory makes it more likely that the rival houses will attack or even try to assassinate you.

Conquest does have its downsides, though. There are some maps, like the Volcanic Mountain Range, that don't contain spice or sandworms – for valid lore reasons, to be fair. So you have to sell other resources, like fuel cells, to drive your economy. It's kind of an interesting change of pace the first couple times, having to optimize settlements completely differently from how I was used to. But ultimately, Spice Wars just doesn't work as well without the, you know, spice. Or the worms. Dune without sandworms? What are we even doing here? You also can't play as the Smugglers or Fremen in Conquest, and as those are two of my favorite factions, that's a bit disappointing.

I just got my hands on Mortal Kombat 1 a few days ago, so a full review won’t be ready for a little bit, but it’s already making a strong impression.

If there’s one thing you can applaud Netherrealm for with regards to the gameplay system of each new Mortal Kombat game since MK9, it’s that each one plays dramatically different from the last without sacrificing that very distinct Mortal Kombat feel. So it’s not surprising that, even before we get to the crazy Kameo system, Mortal Kombat 1 makes some drastic changes from MK11 that really set it apart. For starters, it returns the meter management to just one meter that governs enhanced special moves, breakers, and now jump cancels out of uppercuts; fatal blows are still around, but are no longer invincible on start up; krushing blows are gone completely; character variations are gone; wake up attacks and wake up rolls are gone; every character is now able to do much more damage without even spending any meter thanks to a new air combo system; and thank the lord, blocked crouching jabs are now punishable with crouching jabs of your own, making them much less spammable than before. These are all good, smart changes that make the action in MK1 feel fresh, yet familiar, while addressing some of the pain points that the fighting game community had developed with MK11.

The biggest new addition, though, is that Kameo system. For the first time in a Mortal Kombat game, you choose a second character that you can call upon as an assist in every fight. Your Kameo is governed by their own meter, and every time you call them in you use up half their meter (or in some cases, like Goro’s powerful unblockable stomp assist, the whole thing). And it’s great that every Kameo has at least three assist moves, which adds multiple new tools to the repertoire of any character you choose to play as.

So for example, let’s say I’m playing as Baraka, who notably does not have any overheads or lows in the middle of any of his combo strings. That would make him a character you can pretty safely just block low against once you block the first hit of a string. Unless… I add Scorpion as my Kameo character, who has an overhead as one of his moves. So now there’s a new, added layer to my offense that I can use to try and open up an opponent in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to before. Or I could pick Frost and use her in neutral to try and catch my opponent with a quick low hitting attack that freezes to start up a damaging combo.

Other Kameos can be used to extend combos that typically would not be extendable, convert respectable damage off of small hits that normally wouldn’t be convertible, and some even have more specialized uses. Maybe you give characters a teleport, or a way to become invulnerable to projectiles, or a way to quickly retreat and return a full-screen distance away. I’m not usually one who enjoys assists in fighting games, since they’re usually accompanied by tag systems and I’m more of a 1v1 fighting game fan, but their implementation here is extremely well thought out and does nothing but improve upon the already solid foundation that MK1 stands on.

That said, Mortal Kombat has always had a very distinct feel to its movement, and the more I play other fighting games, the harder it gets to come back to. There is still some stiffness in the controls, and I’ll never prefer having to hold a block button down as opposed to holding back as far as 2D fighters go. But beyond those minor quirks, Mortal Kombat 1’s actual combat is as strong as it's ever been.

Its Has Begun

Story mode this time around is a true new beginning for the series, and that’s uniquely satisfying. This isn’t just a timeline reset like Mortal Kombat 9 – the entire history of Mortal Kombat has been re-written: familiar characters get brand-new looks, backstories, relationships, and powers. It picks up literal eons after the events of Mortal Kombat 11, in which newly minted Fire God Liu Kang used the Hourglass of Time to reshape the world as he saw fit. Earthrealm is at peace, Outworld is ruled fairly by Queen Sindel, and while the Mortal Kombat tournament between realms still exists, it’s more of a tournament of pride and honor as opposed to a tool for realm invasion. Eventually that peace is threatened by outside forces that I won’t get into, but suffice to say, after a few very chill and lighthearted opening chapters with supportive dad, Fire God Liu Kang, cheering on his plucky new champions in their first martial arts tournament, things get very real very quick and the stakes get raised in all the usual ways.

Above all, I loved seeing these new takes on classic kombatants, especially those who have historically been relegated to minor roles. Baraka and Reptile, for instance, never really got to be anything more than henchmen in previous games, but in Mortal Kombat 1 they’re major players with their own chapters and defining story moments. Plus, the writing is full of plenty of cheeky in-universe references that felt like nice rewards for being a longtime fan of the series.

Netherrealm fighting games have always been the best at delivering story modes that are essentially the video game equivalent of absurd popcorn movies, and Mortal Kombat 1 is no exception to that rule. The campaign has no new gameplay innovations to offer, but its six hours are big, bombastic, well-acted, and ridiculous in all of the right ways. If that sounds familiar, it’s because I said virtually the same thing three years ago in my Mortal Kombat 11 review, speaking of its single-player story mode. And if I had reviewed Mortal Kombat X, Injustice 2, Injustice 1, Mortal Kombat 9, or Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, I could’ve said the same for those as well. There does seem to be an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy at play with Neatherrealm’s designers. So you can take that to mean that if you liked those, as I did, you’ll probably enjoy this one too.

While I wouldn’t say anything needs outright fixing, there’s definitely some room for refinement that still hasn’t been capitalized on. Every chapter just throws you into the shoes of a new character without a hint of guidance of what’s special about them – what their combo strings are, their launchers, or their special moves, for instance. I had to learn on the fly by bringing up the move list, trying things out string by string, special move by special move, and by the time I’m done achieving a base level of competency with a character, the chapter’s over and I’ve moved on to the next. This mode would benefit so greatly from optional, short, developer-led character guides that can get you up to speed on the fundamentals of a character before you have to spend the next 30 minutes playing as them.

Invaders of the Realms

Beyond the cinematic story mode, the big new single-player mode for Mortal Kombat 1 is Invasions, which combines the themed environments and rewards of The Krypt, some light RPG elements from older Konquest modes, and the quick back-to-back gimmicky battles of the Towers of Time, packaged in the form of a virtual game board. It’s a mishmash of ideas that sound good on paper but, unfortunately, tries to be a few too many things all at once.

Here’s how it works: Almost every invasion “board” is made up of a series of spaces that each have a themed fight assigned to them, like a fight against Reptile on a space called “Look to La Luna,” or a fight against a super powered Kung Lao on a space marked “Kung Wow”. You move around the board conducting an exhausting grind of clearing repetitive battles against enemies that – at least for the first several hours – don’t put up much of a fight, collecting a slower-than-usual drip of worthwhile rewards, finding keys to unlock gates, and completing challenges like Test Your Might or survival minigames, until you reach the end. Along the way you might find themed towers where you must fight in a series of battles, with one loss sending you back to the bottom; you might get ambushed in between spaces and have to fight a slightly more challenging opponent with unique modifiers. But even those in my experience have largely been pushovers. For the vast majority of encounters I went into auto pilot mode with Li Mei, doing the same unsafe launching combo, regardless of who I was fighting or what the modifiers were, only occasionally being forced to consider the RPG elements in the chapter-ending boss battles that dramatically power up one of the kombatants in unique ways.

Sure, there’s a lot of extra stuff going on underneath the hood in Invasions mode. Every character and Kameo has a damage type, with a complicated type advantage/disadvantage chart, there are talismans that can be upgraded to provide a variety of different status bonuses, and relics that frequently come with both a positive and a negative bonus to weigh against each other. But that’s all just a lot of complexity that doesn’t really add any value to the actual gameplay. I’m sure later game boards will make engaging with the RPG elements more of a necessity, but honestly, I’m not really looking forward to that either. Mortal Kombat 1’s at its best when there are no gimmicks involved. I’m happy to have the option to play the occasional silly match with wild modifiers and themed challenges, but Invasions strings too many of these fights together and expects you to play through them all in order to unlock many of the best cosmetic unlocks for its characters. That turns it into a chore. The Krypt was far from perfect, but so far I'm not feeling Invasions mode as a replacement for it.

However, one thing that MK1 does get right is that the more you play with a character, the more you unlock for that specific character. And there is a ton to unlock for everybody. There’s new gear, skins, taunts, brutalities, and even fatalities that come with every level up. Granted, you’ll probably be able to find the input command for the locked fatalities before you unlock the in-game instructions if you search online, but nonetheless, you’re rewarded well for maxing out a character’s progression track.

One very strange thing that I feel that I have to point out is that there are now combo challenges for every character, but they're wildly inconsistent. Some characters have a full set of six challenges, others only have one super basic combo, and others still have challenges that are bugged and teach you combos that don't actually work – even the demonstrations of those combos don't land. That said, the general tutorial is extraordinarily comprehensive and is one of the best fighting game tutorials I've seen.

I still need more time with Mortal Kombat 1 before I'll feel comfortable rendering a verdict, mostly to play the full suite of online modes and get some more time playing the game against people rather than bots, but so far, the Kameo system and smart changes to the fighting make MK1 feel fresh and exciting, the story mode is predictably great, even if Invasions seems like more of a grind than I'm willing to put myself through to unlock the best cosmetic items. Check back for more soon, and if you're playing at launch tomorrow let us know how you're enjoying it. If it's fatalities you're after, we've also got a growing list of Mortal Kombat One Fatalities that you can bookmark for later.

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit

You know we’ve entered a new era in the increasingly crowded soulslike arms race when we’re now turning classic children’s stories into dark, twisted Bloodborne pseudo-sequels, but hey: here we are. Yes, Lies of P is yet another game inspired by the dark and unforgiving FromSoftware masterpieces that have captured the hearts of so many (myself included), but it’s also an undeniably impressive standout amid a sea of games chasing the soulslike trend. It suffers from some uneven difficulty and overly linear level design, but its impressive story, extremely well-tuned combat, and memorable areas and boss fights mean that this isn’t one you should miss out on. It’s fair to say that sometimes Lies of P emulates its inspiration so closely it feels like someone else is pulling its strings a little too forcefully, but that puppet show is still a whole lot of fun to watch.

It’s both praise and criticism to say that Lies of P follows the blueprint pioneered by FromSoftware down to the finest detail, with precious few deviations. The UI and menus are strikingly similar to every soulslike you’ve ever played, the aesthetic is almost identical to Bloodborne, and combat is a methodical dance of attacks and parries designed with difficulty in mind. It sticks so close to the script that it got to the point where I’d meet a seemingly friendly character and think “Ah, this is the one who’s going to betray me later,” with full confidence that I was spot on in that assessment. There’s even a major boss with the same name and rough appearance as a Dark Souls boss, which is honestly just kinda hilarious.

In fact, this isn’t even the first Eurocentric soulslike featuring murderous marionettes! Almost exactly one year ago I reviewed Steelrising, which has a bizarre number of things in common with Lies of P, from its mechanical enemies gone mad to its trendy and historical urban setting. Thankfully, Lies of P is a much better game and manages to stand out in other ways, but it doesn’t exactly earn a whole lot of points for originality.

One of the ways it does set itself apart though is with its story, which is a dark reimagining of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio – a story about a mischievous puppet known for telling falsehoods and longing to become a real boy. Lies of P’s version takes a lot of liberty in its much more gory and depressing version of the classic tale, but it's got some nice nods to its inspiration, including an untrustworthy cat and fox and a neat mechanic where you have to choose to tell lies or the truth (which have an impact on the outcome of your adventure).

This style of game isn’t known for having the most comprehensible stories and Lies of P isn’t wholly an exception to that rule, but it does try more than most. There’s a whole bunch of dialogue and cutscenes that kept my interest throughout my first 30-hour run instead of just a loose collection of vagaries and hints in item descriptions. In fact, of all the distressing and enigmatic stories I’ve seen in this genre, this is definitely among one of my favorites – not quite as relatable and polished as something like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but certainly more approachable than your Bloodbornes or your Dark Souls. It’s got some interesting twists and turns, and a few memorable characters too, like the self-obsessed socialite Venigni, who constantly made me want to speak in an over-the-top Italian accent.

As you’d expect, you’ll split your time hacking your way through levels where practically everything in sight wants to kill you and taking on much more formidable bosses, and Lies of P largely nails both of those genre pillars. The city of Krat is memorable and dystopian, while also continuously reminding you that you’re playing out an iconic fairytale about puppets. It comes complete with your cricket sidekick Gemini and your puppet-making father Gepetto, who always reminds you to be a good boy right before he sends you on missions to butcher everyone in your path. You’ll visit a puppet graveyard that serves as a kind of poison swamp level that every soulslike legally is required to include, and an exhibition hall filled with hopeful depictions of a future that clearly didn’t work out quite as planned, among others. Each is thoroughly enjoyable to stab your way through.

It’s a little disappointing though, that Lies of P is far more linear than most similar games, with a very straightforward path from beginning to end and no significant optional areas or boss fights aside from the odd side quest that sends you back to someplace you’ve already visited to solve a small puzzle in exchange for a new outfit or upgrade material. Once you’ve played through the story, you’ll more or less have seen and done everything there is to see and do – except to do it again on New Game+, of course.

Another item on the checklist is some memorable (and usually disgusting) boss fights, and Lies of P’s got those in spades. From an evil puppet law enforcement official to a hulked-out guy who’s basically just Bane from Batman, there’s lots of big things that need to be slapped in the face. Doing so is always enjoyable, even though they’re all pretty straightforward encounters where you whittle down the enemy’s health bar. It would have been nice to have one or two encounters where they mix things up with a puzzle or trick you’ve gotta figure out to best your opponent – those are always my favorite.

Also, almost all of the bosses have two phases, which I’m normally a fan of, but they’re used to the point where it became a little grating by the end. Usually the first phase is quite easy, but when the second phase is repeatedly killing me and I have to keep replaying that first phase until I’m completely bored by it, I kinda just wish I could skip it and get to the part that’s actually fun and challenging. Many fights felt like they put the first phase there just as a warmup round before getting to the actual meat of the encounter, but rest assured: by the 10th attempt I was thoroughly warmed up and plenty ready to take another shot at the real boss.

For better or worse, much of Lies of P’s combat draws clear inspiration from Bloodborne specifically, with a couple minor tweaks. You can’t restore health lost from direct attacks by striking back at your enemies like in Bloodborne, but you are given the ability to partially block some of that incoming damage then counter to restore the chip damage you absorbed. The result is a similar meta where aggressive gameplay is encouraged, and that keeps fights moving along at a quick pace – but it also discourages more defensive playstyles, which tend to be my go-to in soulslikes. That feisty combat is extremely fun, balanced, and well-tuned, but you’re definitely boxed into playing in a specific way instead of allowing you the freedom to craft diverse builds, like a ranged magic user in Dark Souls, for example.

Another idea borrowed from Bloodborne is that your melee weapon is assigned to your right hand while your left is reserved for a utility weapon that often include ranged capabilities by turning your robotic left arm into a Winter Soldier-esque tool of destruction, and that ends up being a pretty darn clever take on that mechanic. You might decide to close gaps quickly with the quick and effective Puppet String, which lets you tether a grappling hook onto your enemies, or make use of the formidable Falcon Eyes to turn your arm into a cannon and blow up deranged puppets from afar, or my personal favorite: use the Aegis shield to block incoming attacks and dish out damage in kind with a fiery explosion that triggers when it’s hit. It’s especially cool that each of these tools can be upgraded with additional effects, like the Puppet String’s ability that lets you follow up your grappling hook maneuver with a devastating airborne attack.

But it’s the new stuff, namely the completely awesome weapon-crafting system that lets you disassemble any weapon in your arsenal and mix and match the various hilts and blades to create Frankenstein abominations, that really lets Lies of P distinguish itself within a very crowded genre. Have you ever wanted to attach a giant saw blade to a rapier’s handle so you could jab with it like you’re fencing? Well, it’s probably not advisable at all, but knock yourself out. How about attaching Mjolnir’s hammer to the end of a rusty pipe? Go for it, man! You do you. With dozens of possible combinations, you’re given quite a bit of freedom to make some silly or surprisingly effective stuff, as certain stats and abilities from your chosen hilt and blade combine for a unique combat experience. It’s a bit of a shame, though, that the best weapons available are legendary tools that can’t be disassembled and reforged into new items, and many of these are so much more powerful than anything you can build that you’re sorta disincentivized from actually engaging with the crafting system the longer you play.

With all that freedom to create silly weapon combinations, it’s a bit disappointing that there aren’t any of the multiplayer modes you find in many of Lies of P’s peers. Not having co-op is understandable since it might break any semblance of balance (plus, who wants to see two Pinocchios wailing on a boss anyway?), but PvP in particular seems like it would fit perfectly with the fast-paced contest of reflexes at which Lies of P excels. Maybe we’ll get something like that as DLC, but for now you’ll need to enjoy your neat builds and creative weapon combinations on your lonesome.

Another cool tweak on the formula is Lies of P’s skill tree, which lets you upgrade your puppet’s mechanical innards to snap up some seriously useful upgrades, like adding amulet slots to your loadout, gaining additional Pulse Cells (that are used for healing), and increasing the number of consumable throwing objects you can carry on your person. I spent way too long agonizing over each upgrade decision and considering different ways to optimize my build to improve my chances of becoming a real boy, and that was a pretty nice change of pace in between all those unfortunate murders I had to commit.

Of course, the main thing that defines any good soulslike is how soul-crushingly difficult it is, and Lies of P has mixed success in this regard. On one hand, nearly all of the world exploration where I was fighting your run-of-the-mill evil puppets and gross monsters was disappointingly easy, to the point where death was a rare occurrence throughout my playthroughs. The same can be said of most boss fights, which Souls veterans can expect to beat without breaking too much of a sweat since they’re usually big, slow, and stupid creatures who are easily confused when you move behind or underneath them and telegraph all their attacks like they’re in the WWE.

But then I’d encounter the occasional showdown where the difficulty spiked up dramatically without warning and I’d die 20 or 30 agonizing deaths on a single boss, leaving me to wonder if I just wasn’t properly leveled or something (which was never the case – I just needed to git gud). Those specific bosses stand in such stark contrast to the much milder exploration sections that it can be quite jarring, and I often felt like the levels preceding a tough boss didn’t properly prepare me for that gauntlet; more likely, my skills probably worsened during the stretch of mostly undemanding travels between the dramatically more difficult boss fights.

That inconsistent difficulty is even more noticeable depending on your chosen character build. That’s because, so far as I can tell, playing with a Motivity (Lies of P’s equivalent to a strength stat) build is multitudes less difficult than speccing into Technique (its version of dexterity). As a Technique player, your weapons don’t do much to stagger enemies and your ability to block incoming damage is painfully limited, since you only fully negate a small percentage of the attack unless you’re able to pull off a perfect parry. In order to best the most formidable bosses, you’ll have to learn the enemy’s attack patterns and get down the precise timing required to perfectly parry most attacks before finally breaking the enemy’s guard and laying into them with your fast-moving weapons – a process that’s quite enjoyable, but also extremely unforgiving. Meanwhile, as a Motivity player, you can simply smack down bosses with your heavy weapons that do enormous stagger damage, leaving them wide open to deadly executions. That’s pretty hilarious to watch, but also feels pretty busted, especially compared to a significantly more demanding Technique-focused playthrough.

Lies of P also just has some nice little quality-of-life improvements I’d like to see carry over into other soulslikes, like how you don’t lose all your Ergo (its version of souls) by dying, but rather have a certain amount deducted every time you take damage on your way to recover your lost currency; or how you’re notified whenever you’re carrying enough Ergo to level up your character instead of resting at a checkpoint, only to discover you need to kill one more enemy and come back. Little touches like that go a long way.

Unfortunately, Lies of P doesn’t manage to rid itself of the clunky roots of the genre completely, and I did encounter some fairly obnoxious bugs during my time with it. Among other things there were a few times where I phased through the environment in a weird way, and enemies have a weird habit of just despawning right in front of me like they were fading away during the season finale of a long-running high school TV drama. Thankfully, none of these issues were particularly widespread, so they’re unlikely to drag down an otherwise perfectly enjoyable adventure, especially since performance is otherwise rocksolid. I maintained a perfectly stable framerate at every point in my adventure, which isn’t a given in this genre.

Also, many soulslikes are known for having memorable music, but Lies of P truly stands out in this regard. Not only are the tracks during boss fights great, but there are collectible vinyl records that you can play at a jukebox back at your base – and some of those songs are seriously just fantastic. So much, in fact, that it’s become a bit of an obsession to collect them all – and I’ve still got a lot of searching to do. Seriously, that jukebox made me find excuses to hang out at the social hub, crafting weapons and working on my build. It’s that good!

From the city street shootouts of Heat to the creepy clown masks found in The Dark Knight’s opening moments, there’s something alarmingly alluring about the Hollywood bank heist fantasy. Fortunately, the excellent Payday series has been letting me live it out for more than a decade without needing to establish a rap sheet of my own. The next chapter in this long-running burglary simulator, Payday 3, recently concluded its open beta before we all get to filch the final version later this month – and though this early look was only a limited snapshot of what’s to come, it already feels like a significant step up from the lawbreaking of Payday 2. After twelve hours of smashing and grabbing, I’ve got a whole lot more left to see in the full game, but so far I’m very excited to come out of retirement and continue my life of crime.

Like its predecessor, Payday 3 is a cooperative multiplayer FPS where you and three friends take on increasingly elaborate heists. But within seconds of beginning my first run of the introductory bank robbery (the beta’s only available level), the movement and gunplay already felt enormously upgraded. You move faster overall and can now do more modern maneuvers like sliding, which I found useful in combat as well as for stealth. Weapons feel more punchy and satisfying, even if they do have hopelessly small magazines and long reload times before you’ve spent some of your ill-gotten cash on upgrades. You can even use civilian hostages as meat shields now, forcing enemies to engage you in melee to avoid hurting innocent soul, which is a nice touch. After years of incremental updates to Payday 2, Payday 3 immediately feels like a proper sequel, even if the formula of breaking into vaults and throwing bags of cash into an unmarked van remains identical.

One less exciting adjustment, however, is the new skill tree system, which does away with the complicated buildcrafting found in Payday 2 and replaces it with a loadout system that makes you pick just four perks to take with you on each job. The good news is that the perks you can equip are pretty darn cool (even if many are old abilities making a return), like one that makes you so charming your own hostages will revive you if you get downed in combat and another that lets you slide tackle any silly narcs who get in your way. Building out my character’s tree and making weighty decisions about which role I’d occupy within a crew was such a big part of Payday 2, so this overly simplified and noncommittal replacement feels like a pretty big step backwards from what I’ve seen. Not only did I feel less powerful due to the limited set of perks, but since you can just instantly swap abilities from mission-to-mission, it completely removes any sense of the specialized roles that’s central to the crime genre. They also seem to have done away with Perk Decks in the beta, which allowed you to round out your character with minor perks related to their background – another concerning sign that things may have been dumbed down here. We’ll see how much of this remains in the full version, but so far I’m not particularly enthused by these meta changes.

That said, the revamped progression does help enable some hugely expanded options and mechanics geared towards stealth runs, which are even more significant than the improvements to movement and combat. In Payday 2, only the most committed and elite players really stood a chance of pulling off a totally clean heist, and proper leveling was almost a requirement to unlock things like a silent drill to get through vaults before making an attempt became even remotely viable. In contrast, pulling off a clandestine operation during this beta was almost immediately achievable, even with a randomly matchmade group of players only loosely communicating with one another via text chat.

That’s also largely owing to clever and fantastic changes to the way missions are designed, in which stealth runs are now given a completely different route to success. For example, the Secure Capital Bank level normally requires you to go the humdrum path of using thermite to burn through the top of the bank vault then dive in from the floor above before making off with the loot, but this series of objectives smartly only triggers as your primary path once you've been caught. Before that, your crew can take the much more complex and rewarding route of breaking into various parts of the bank to sabotage electrical systems and deactivate security measures to gain access to the vault without anyone being the wiser, which plays out like an entirely different level if you can pull it off. In Payday 2, that same kind of bank heist required players to follow more or less the exact same path of drilling through the vault no matter your preferred tactic, and to do it stealthily you just had to not get caught.

A bunch of new mechanics have been added to support stealth play as well, like the ability to pickpocket security guards to relieve them of their keycards, or use environmental lures that can draw the attention of those lousy coppers and buy you precious time to lockpick a door and slip by unnoticed. You can also deploy hidden cameras to keep tabs on an area or scout ahead without the risk of drawing attention – stealth play seriously feels like a complete overhaul from its predecessor, and I can’t wait to see what else the full game has to offer for that playstyle.

But all those new options doesn’t mean pulling off a stealth run is going to be easy, and that’s thanks to enhanced enemy AI across the board. Guards now respond to your actions, breaking free of their usual patrol routes to investigate suspicious activity and doing a whole lot more than drawing their gun and shooting you when you’re spotted. For example, if you’re found in a private but not entirely suspicious area, like the back office at a bank vs. the vault, instead of immediately trying to kill you, they’ll simply escort you to a public area and give you a good tongue lashing, which can be used by cunning players to remove guards from their posts temporarily. That smarter AI extends to combat as well, where the police do a great job of swarming you from all sides instead of standing around as target practice. They can also respond to your actions and try to obstruct your heist, like how they’ll pull the fire alarm when you’ve lit up that thermite, using the sprinkler system to delay your fire’s progress. Likewise, hostages are now much more responsive to your commands and easier to boss around and control as you use them as collateral in combat or negotiation.

Which leads me to one of the most exciting changes to the heist formula: each job now has defined phases, meaning that instead of either being in unmasked stealth mode or chucking grenades around like a maniac, there are now defined moments in between those two extremes that allow for different parts of the crime fantasy to be more thoroughly explored. For example, the “Searching” phase triggers when you’ve caught the authorities’ suspicion in a minor way and they begin actively looking for you, but all hell hasn’t broken loose just yet, and the “Negotiation” phase begins if you ever get caught outright and gives you a window of time to lock the place down and prepare for a fight or play nice by releasing hostages to delay the authorities storming the place. This added nuance opens up some interesting new strategies, like hoarding as many hostages as possible to draw out the negotiation phase as long as you can. It certainly helps that zip ties required to keep hostages in line are no longer a limited resource, too, so you’re able to stack those poor bystanders as high as your heart desires.

I know this was only a beta, and one specifically designed to stress test the servers at that, but it’s still worth noting that poor technical performance has been one of Payday 3’s biggest shortcomings so far. Those who played Payday 2, especially in the early years, will recall how much it suffered from horribly painful technical issues, particularly where server connectivity was concerned. During my time with the Payday 3 beta, I experienced several disconnects and occasional framerate hitches that reminded me all too much of those frustrating days of not being able to party up with my friends and becoming disconnected in the middle of an intense firefight. I’m really hoping they iron that stuff out by launch, and ideally this beta will help do just that, but I’m still a little worried history may repeat itself.

Oh, and as always, the music in Payday 3 absolutely crushes it. Any disappointment I feel when my stealth run fails is immediately forgiven once the beat drops and a money-crazed murder spree begins, making me feel like a complete badass instead of a heartless psychopath. This certainly isn’t new for the series, but it’s great to see they haven’t dropped that very important ball.

With only one mission available during the beta there’s still a ton of Payday 3 left for me to see, but I am certainly excited to see it. We’ll be back with a full, scored review closer to its launch on September 21, and dreaming of flawless stealth robberies and fancy clown masks until then.

I feel like I’m the kind of person Starfield was made for. I loved Bethesda’s last single-player RPG, Fallout 4 (maybe a bit too much), and there’s nothing I like more than a sci-fi universe with spaceships, lasers, and political intrigue flying every which way. And yet, a dozen hours into Starfield, I was feeling lost in space. Things never went too far off course while I was flying my rinkydink little ship around chasing down mysterious artifacts and war criminals with a damn fine crew of companions at my side, but man did Starfield make me work hard to get through that opening stretch. Even when it mostly righted the ship and I was loving the story, sidequests, and launching boarding parties on enemy ships, there were still too many problems that constantly popped up, forcing me to curb my excitement. It’s a bit like Starfield’s own elaborate shipbuilder tool: even though you can slap a bunch of high-end parts together and it will technically fly, sometimes it’s just not the best fit.

I would expect no less: Bethesda has built out a sprawling universe with detailed lore in which humanity has left Earth behind and colonized the galaxy, but hasn’t made first contact with sentient aliens as of the 24th century. It’s chock-full of backstory about wars between its three major factions, run-ins with mysterious space deathclaws called terrormorphs, pirates, and an immense amount more. I wouldn’t call a lot of it especially distinctive – it’s a setting that’s reminiscent of The Expanse, Firefly, and Starship Troopers, full of references to every sci-fi movie from Aliens to Blade Runner, and of course Interstellar. There’s even a fair bit of Indiana Jones influence as it sends you on a treasure hunt to collect mysterious artifacts. In fact, there’s a significant similarity to what Obsidian created for 2019’s The Outer Worlds. But it’s so densely packed in, with more stories around every corner, that I found it easy to get invested in it – once I learned the difference between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective.

Creating your character is a matter of picking a background story for them that comes with a set of skills and traits, as well as up to three modifiers. It’s always a bit tough to choose this on your first playthrough, since you don’t really know what you’re getting into and there’s no respecing allowed, but none of them is dramatic enough to really hinder you. Some – like the one where your parents are alive and well (if you don’t pick this they just never come up), or the one where a crazed fan follows you around – sound like they’ll be fun to experiment with later, which adds a sense of replayability.

After that, while everyone starts out in the same mining camp and touches the same space magic that sets off a trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey-style vision, Starfield is an immense game that will send you off in all kinds of different directions once it hands you the keys to your first spaceship. It’s to the point where talking to others who played alongside me left us all bewildered and asking questions like:

“Wait, what do you mean you don’t know who the Vanguard are?”

“How did you not meet this person?”

“How are you crafting those weapon mods already?”

“Wow, you didn’t unlock [REDACTED] until level 20?”

“What the heck even is a Va’Ruun?”

“You met who in a bar?”

“Where did you find that ship?”

If you’re not sticking strictly to one questline and just take missions as they pop up (sometimes you get them simply by walking past NPCs as they chat), you can easily fall down all sorts of wormholes into extended chains of missions that take you on adventures that rival Skyrim’s in scope. Even after about 70 hours there are major questlines I haven’t even touched, and others I barely began. I’m eager to go back and finish a lot of those up now that I’ve completed the main story.

In typical Bethesda fashion, that main quest isn’t terribly flexible in how you resolve the situations it thrusts you into. Your options here are, for the most part, about picking whether you want to be a boy scout for whom a good deed is its own reward, a wise-cracking mercenary who asks to be rewarded after doing a good deed, or an all-business mercenary who demands to be paid up front to do the good deed. There are a few choices you can make that affect who lives and who dies, and there’s a decision at the end about which philosophy to embrace heading into the final battle, but most of it is going to play out the same way because, no matter what, your goal is to solve the mystery of the artifacts alongside your secret society of explorers known as Constellation. I won’t say much about where the plot goes because there’s a lot that can easily be spoiled, but I did enjoy the way it probes its biggest concepts – even those we’ve seen plenty of times before – in distinctive ways, and there’s plenty of well-written discussion about what it all means.

It’s in the side quests that you really get to act out your character’s morals: I happened across a dispute between a ship full of colonists and an obnoxious resort planet and had options that included peacefully resolving the conflict (which involves a clever technobabble puzzle) or stealthily sabotaging the ship and blowing up the colonists. There’s a storyline that felt very Boys from Brazil-inspired, as well as numerous related quests about hunting down war criminals and banned technology that pose ethical quandaries to reconcile. You can join up with the Crimson Fleet pirates and dive into a life of smuggling and general space crime, or take up the mantle of a legendary pirate hunter.

There’s no shortage of interesting companion characters to hang out with throughout all of this either. I never felt like my Constellation teammates were wasting my time when they asked to chat, since they always had something to share about their background or a quest they wanted me to help them with. There’s definitely a focus on Sarah, the virtuous leader of Constellation, and Sam, a former lawman with a young daughter in tow who he lives in fear of letting down. However, I was richly rewarded for taking the slightly more eccentric scientist Barrett along with me on some missions, and I suspect the others hold a few surprises up their sleeves as well – likely even the ones you hire out of bars when respectable folks like Sam bail on you for picking too many pockets or hijacking too many ships. But you can only take one person with you at a time, so I have more exploration to do here.

It helps that Bethesda has certainly upped its facial animation game for Starfield. Granted, it’s nowhere near as precise and lifelike as motion-captured performances we’ve seen in The Last of Us and God of War, but it’s on par with other big RPGs where you interact with hundreds of NPCs for dozens of hours, like Baldur’s Gate 3. Character models are generally expressive enough that they can do justice to the excellent voice performances.

Starfield’s problems, though, are glaring – some of which in ways that are inherently different from Bethesda’s other games. I have to say that the early hours are pretty rough going, and there was a while where I was wondering if the stars would ever align. So this review is going to go through that rough patch, too, as I lay this out. But bear with me – just like Starfield itself, it does get better by the end.

The biggest fundamental contradiction within Starfield’s design is that while this is a galaxy-spanning adventure with literally hundreds of worlds you can land on and explore, it can feel extremely small when each of them is separated by little more than a (thankfully) brief loading screen. The first few times I set out I really got into it: I’d enter my ship, climb to the cockpit, strap myself in, then watch the cool animation as my ship blasted into orbit. Then I’d open the nav screen, select a star and a planet to set my course, and grav-jump to my destination before selecting a landing spot and watching my ship set down in a blaze of retro thrusters and dust. But then I realized that, in many circumstances, I could bypass most of that procedure by just going to the map screen and jumping to another planet without even setting foot on my ship. Put another way, while you can walk across an Elder Scrolls or Fallout world without ever fast-traveling, in Starfield you can’t go anywhere without fast-traveling.

A mission might send you to the other side of the vast starmap, but the actual travel time between systems is always the same (and the poorly explained fuel system, which is actually just your range, isn’t much of a limitation). When I discovered that so much of space flight is effectively a series of non-interactive cutscenes, it largely shattered the illusion of exploring a vast universe. It’s impossible not to compare Starfield to the way you freely enter and exit planets’ atmosphere in No Man’s Sky, so it’s a bit of a letdown every time you see a planet and remember it’s just a picture of a planet you’ll never be able to reach by flying toward it. It’s something that happens a lot.

The next nuisance that irritated me no matter where in the Settled Systems I roamed is the fact that there are no actual maps – mini or otherwise – to refer to when you’re on foot. All you get is an extremely low-detail display showing you large points of interest – such as the many abandoned research and mining posts where raiders and robots wait for you to shoot and loot them – and the large swaths of alien wasteland and wilderness that separates them. Within a city, there’s nothing to guide you around beyond shop signs and text-only directories that tell you what stores are located in which district, but not where they actually are.

My guess is that this was a deliberate choice Bethesda made to mitigate the fast-travel problem, where we’re just zipping through the universe without stopping to appreciate the detail and thought that went into creating dramatically different cities like the gleaming capital of New Atlantis, the frontier settlement of Akila, and the dingey cyberpunk metropolis of Neon, among others. And these places are fascinating to look at. The reality, though, is that this isn’t even how we get around the real world today – not since the iPhone rolled out in 2007 – so it’s exasperating to be in the year 2330 with no comparable navigation tools. I spent way too much time running in circles searching for basic things like vendors to sell my loot to while I tried to memorize the layouts of multiple settlements, annoyed that if I were playing after launch I could’ve just checked IGN’s guides for their locations. The tradeoff in immersion just doesn’t seem worth it.

The third ever-present annoyance is, fortunately, one that stands out as something that can be fixed without a major overhaul. Like Bethesda’s previous RPGs, Starfield is a game that is roughly 30% inventory management… and yet it is shockingly bad at that task. To avoid becoming overloaded you’ll constantly need to transfer the weapons, space suits, materials, and alien goo you’ve collected between your inventory and your companion’s, or to and from your ship’s cargo hold, but maddeningly you can’t view the contents and capacities of both the giving and receiving container at the same time. You’re just blindly dumping things out of one until you get a message saying the other is full. All the while, much of the screen is wasted on an overly large image of an item. It’s a bizarre and aggravating step backward from Fallout 4, and the kind of thing I expect modders to remedy within a week of launch.

Those problems never got better during my playthrough – I just learned to live with them. The hump that I did get over, though, is that Starfield just doesn’t tell you enough about how its huge collection of systems work, and it trickles out the cool stuff too slowly. Out of the gate you can’t mod your equipment, you can’t use your spacesuit’s boost pack (which is super useful and fun, especially in low gravity, and I can’t imagine not having it for an entire playthrough), and you can barely use stealth or board enemy ships at all. You have to put a skill point, of which you only get one per level, into those to unlock them.

And yet from the start you can build outposts that are a lot like Fallout 4’s settlements and can extract resources for you, but Starfield doesn’t tell you that you probably shouldn’t bother for a long while. Early on you don’t need huge quantities of a single resource, so it’s largely a waste of time until you’ve climbed to the higher ranks of the crafting skill trees.

You probably don’t want to go out of your way to mass produce anything early on, because storage space on the first tier of ships is obnoxiously small for the amount of loot you gather (and there are an incredible amount of minerals and materials that seemed like I’d be kicking myself later for not bringing with me). I resorted to silly workarounds like simply throwing junk on the floor of my ship like a space hoarder, which somehow doesn’t count toward your storage space.

It’s also worth noting that the worlds you explore are generally visually different (with varying levels of gravity) but fairly barren and lifeless. You’d expect that from planets that’re mostly uninhabitable and untouched by intelligent beings, but that doesn’t make them a lot more fun to run around; outside of a handful of scattered outposts all there is to do is scan rocks or zap them with a mining laser, or sometimes scan and maybe shoot alien wildlife. It’s a far cry from Bethesda’s previous games, where you generally couldn’t swing a dead mudcrab without hitting something interesting.

There’s one part of the main quest that’s pretty repetitive, too. You’re sent to investigate a series of ancient structures, and it’s annoying that what you do inside each one is completely identical. The rewards are different and enticing enough for me to want to chase them all down, at least, but after the first few I couldn’t help but wish that Bethesda’s designers had taken some inspiration from Breath of the Wild when it came to creating different puzzles for each one.

It wasn’t until a dozen or so hours in that I unlocked enough upgrades that things started to gel for me. Starfield is absolutely one of those games that takes way too long to get to the good part. But the fact that it eventually did get its claws into me forced me to jettison all of the “More like Starfailed!” jokes I’d been workshopping into space and focus more on what this sci-fi epic gets right – or at least, does well enough.

Filed under “does well enough” is combat, which is the thing you’ll likely solve most problems with unless you’re extremely dedicated to the idea of talking or sneaking your way past most encounters with hostile pirates, robots, wildlife, and anything else that looks at you funny. It’s not bad, and it’s kept me happily plinking away with my tricked-out laser rifles and shotguns, but not especially good, either. Without anything new and exciting to fill the void left by Fallout’s distinctive VATS system, gunplay is left feeling largely unmemorable. Even when you unlock some late-game abilities it’s still pretty straightforward.

To their credit, enemies do react in amusing ways when shot in their heads, legs, or arms, and they will sometimes flee when you’ve killed off their friends. This definitely isn’t the first game in which I’ve seen a soldier panic just before his jetpack explodes, but that never really gets old. By and large, though, these feel like they could be bad guys from Far Cry or Borderlands or any number of other RPG/shooter hybrids. I was especially disappointed by the more powerful enemies you run into in the latter half of the story; oftentimes they simply stand there shooting at me while I empty my shotgun into their faces and stagger or otherwise disable them, ending those supposedly big fights just as they began.

Combat is also kept interesting by the loot: the modifiers on epic and legendary weapons and gear have some fun stuff going on. I found a rifle that weighed just 0.14 kilograms instead of three or four, and one that does more damage as my health decreases and makes enemies more likely to drop med packs. I found a spacesuit that has a 10% chance to set nearby attackers on fire and made me invisible when I crouched and held still. Some weapons do more damage in space and less on the ground; some boostpacks give you significantly reduced oxygen (stamina) consumption. These are modifiers that aren’t afraid to be dramatic enough to be game-changers that you’d build your character around.

The other side of combat is ship-to-ship battles, which are also fairly simple as space dogfighting games go. Even so, it’s entertaining enough to blast away at pirates (or to become one yourself) and watch the resulting explosions tear ships into pieces. There’s some basic power management where you can divert energy between your weapons systems, engines, and shields, but I never really felt the need to fiddle with that in combat because most ships I bought or found had enough power to go around if I wasn’t powering my grav drive (and there’s little reason to in a fight until you decide to make a run for it). Unlike the classic X-Wing games there are no shield facings to adjust, so it’s mostly just light and arcadey blasting. It’s also somewhat disappointing that the in-cockpit displays don’t actually function – your only radar is directional indicators on the edges of your screen.

The closest thing to VATS you get in Starfield is in space combat. When you spend a skill point on target locking, it zooms in the view and lets you select one of the enemy’s systems to pelt with lasers, ballistic guns, and missiles. (This is another one of those skills where it’s a little crazy that it isn’t unlocked by default.) Disabling a ship’s weapons is a great way to even the odds when you’re being ganged up on by three or four pirates and don’t have time to fully destroy one, but even better is that when you take out their engines it leaves them vulnerable to being boarded. Some of the best moments in my Starfield playthrough have happened during these raids as I went room by room mopping up enemies (sometimes with the gravity on the fritz and corpses floating by like in Star Trek VI) until I reached the bridge, gunned down the captain, and sat in their chair to seize their ship and its cargo for myself. I didn’t turn to the enticingly profitable smuggling and piracy during my traditional “good guy” first playthrough, but I can certainly see the appeal of that style of play being more than worth the bounties you’d incur and the companions you’d alienate.

Another highlight of Starfield is the sheer variety of spaceships flying through the Settled Systems, and the fact that they’re so modular and customizable made me wish I’d put more points into starship design so that I could mess with it more and learn the somewhat complicated rules of how to snap the pieces together to form a spaceworthy vessel. It really is wonderful to see your ship on the landing pad so that you can appreciate the scale of it before getting behind the controls. Alas, there is no ability to respec your skills, and by the time I realized the major investment I’d need to fully unlock shipbuilding it was too late for this run.

For all the criticism I have with the stinginess of the skill system, especially in the early hours, it does deserve credit for its clever hybridizing of traditional RPG skill unlocks and The Elder Scrolls’ system of increasing your skills as you use them. Every time you level up a skill you unlock a challenge, which might be as simple as killing X enemies with laser weapons or as situational as using your boost pack X times during combat, and this has to be completed before you can spend another point to level the skill up again. That’s a noticeable bit of progression that pops up between levels, and adds to the roleplaying feeling that my character has actually honed this skill instead of magically mastering it.

Finally, I have to make a special mention of the lockpicking minigame, which is a simple but satisfying challenge that makes you visualize how several pieces fit together to fill holes. This may be the best unlocking minigame I’ve ever seen in an RPG, and I put more skill points into it than I probably needed to just to gain access to more challenging locks. It’s nice to see one of these that’s rewarding to do rather than a chore that must be endured to earn a reward.

Are there bugs? Of course there are. Playing primarily on PC (with an RTX 3080 on high settings) I’ve seen a fair amount of model and texture pop-in, occasional crashes, performance slowdowns (mostly during autosaving), wonky waypoints, clipping issues, wrong camera angles during conversations, etc. Though I have to say it’s been fairly stable for a big RPG – I never had a quest I couldn’t finish, for instance. Your results will vary; with a game this complex they always do. On Xbox, our staff has seen a few dips in the Series X’s 30fps target, but nothing egregious; a couple of people had save files become corrupted, but there were always more autosaves to fall back on so it wasn’t a disaster.

If you need a break from the rogues, wizards, and knights of Baldur’s Gate 3, I highly recommend switching things up with the rogues, wizards, and knights of Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy, which continues the series’ long-standing puzzle platforming excellence. This quinary sequel certainly plays it safe by sticking very closely to Trine’s established co-op playbook, but it does make some key improvements by significantly ramping up the difficulty and complexity of its puzzles, expanding upon Trine 4’s progression system, and adding several unique and memorable boss fights. That said, it still hasn’t broken out of the series’ rut of bland combat sections that pad out the adventure, or conjured up a story that doesn’t pale in comparison to its superb puzzles and platforming. That’s not particularly exciting or revolutionary, but it’s more Trine – and that’s anything but a bad thing.

Trine 5 follows in the footsteps of its predecessors (aside from Trine 3, which we don’t talk about) as a 2.5D puzzle platformer where you and up to two co-op partners play as the three heroes of Trine: an anxious wizard named Amadeus, an obese knight called Pontius, and Zoya, a shady thief. The story begins when an evil queen bizarrely decides to take over the kingdom she’s already ruling using an army of robotic soldiers. The big bad is about as silly and mustache-twirlingly evil as one can get, but the absence of an interesting antagonist is forgivable because the protagonists continue to be so endearing and well written. Still, even with a lovable cast of new and returning characters, the story is extremely predictable and not particularly interesting, which is par for the course for the series.

One of the most significant improvements is that puzzles are oftentimes pretty darn challenging, which is especially nice to see after Trine 4’s mostly humdrum obstacles. I pride myself on being an adept puzzle solver, and during Trine 5’s 10 hour story I found myself stumped for minutes at a time on more than a few occasions – that’s always a pleasant surprise.

A lot of that difficulty comes from the fact that each character gains such a wide variety of abilities by the end that it’s easy to forget about one of the tools in your kit, or neglect to consider how new abilities might interact with old ones to allow for new solutions. For example, Amadeus eventually gains the ability to reverse gravity on his summoned objects so they float in the air like a balloon, which – when combined with Zoya’s ability to teleport to any object her rope can attach to – allows her to reach areas that were previously inaccessible. Clever interactions like that are common, and pretty awesome when it finally clicks.

It’s also cool that some puzzles have more than one solution, which allows you to get creative when the mood strikes you. While each obstacle clearly has a right way to do it, if you can’t figure one out or are just feeling rebellious, there are plenty you can get through by making clever use of your abilities, doing something unexpected, or just getting lucky. You can also return to previous levels with new powers acquired throughout the story, which give you new ways to complete old levels. Some of those actually allow you to gain access to secret areas that were inaccessible on your first run, so it’s worth revisiting those stages.

A returning feature from Trine 4 is that puzzles change depending on the number of players you’re working with, and the extra steps required to solve them with friends often make those feel like the definitive versions. You might find a section that just lets you drag a cart around to get through in solo mode, but if you come back with co-op partners you’ll find that cart tied up, so one of you has to cut it free while another pulls. That said, some sections just add a few extra levers to pull or pressure plates to stand on to keep a few players busy while one actually does the solving, which feels uninspired. Still, no matter which version you’re playing, each offers a pretty decent challenge, which is a fantastic change.

Combat continues to be by far the weakest part of Trine, and I’m still not quite sure why Frozenbyte continues to include it. I sighed with annoyance every time I was locked into a room with a handful of the same boring robots and rat warriors who mostly succeeded in wasting my time as I slapped them with Pontius’ sword or Zoya’s arrows until I could get back to doing puzzles. There’s no strategy to it, and no mechanics are added over time, either, aside from a few new abilities that help you smack around the enemies more effectively – you basically just let Pontius go ham until it’s over and you can move on. Instead of serving as a breath of fresh air between platforming sections, those fights just interrupted my flow and dragged down an otherwise good time. Luckily, you don’t spend a ton of time on it, and for the most part quickly find yourself back to glorious platforming.

It’s also unfortunate when one player gets stuck with Amadeus, who is easily the least useful in combat, especially early on before you’ve unlocked most of his combat-focused abilities. If you’re playing in classic mode where only one copy of each character can exist, you’ll mostly have to sit on the sidelines and watch your friends take out the enemies while trying not to get killed. It’s kinda hilarious how lopsided it is.

The exception to the unwelcome combat encounters are the boss battles, which usually make for a good time since they incorporate puzzle elements. In most fights, before a boss can be damaged you’ll have to figure out a trick to bring their armor down or destroy their barrier of protection, and as the fight progresses the boss does their best to stop you from repeating the same method of bypassing their defenses. For example, in one fight I had to use a cannon to blast the boss, but then he got rid of my cannonballs and I had to trick him into turning a ball of cabbage into stone so I could use that as replacement ammo. Incorporating cool little mechanics like that into combat-focused sections is exactly the type of thing I’d hope for from a game whose main strength is its mind-benders.

There are a number of difficulty and multiplayer options to liven up the experience, from a hard mode that gives you just a single respawn during each section, to an “unlimited” multiplayer mode that allows for up to four players with no limitation on how many players can choose the same character – though not all of those options are created equal. Hard difficulty is a solid addition that allows for a razor-thin margin of error during platforming, but it also makes combat even more irritating than I thought possible by making that sloppy mess more deadly. Similarly, the “unlimited” mode is good for a laugh or if you have a fourth player who really wants to join in on the fun, but absolutely none of the levels are optimized for the chaos of having everyone play the same character. You can simply brute-force your way through many puzzles and generally just cause mayhem.

This sequel also expands on the progression system offered in Trine 4, and gives plenty of ways to improve your character, many of which are awesome game changers. For example, one unlockable allows Pontius to use his shield to glide, which let me pull off some fantastic new maneuvers. That said, the vast majority of unlockables are combat-focused, and since combat is pretty shoddy, investing in those feels like a huge waste. I mean, who would spend precious points on the ability to slam Amadeus’ boxes down on enemies when you could buy the invaluable perk that allows him to summon even more boxes for puzzle solving instead? That said, at least the combat abilities let you make those sections go by a little quicker.

I had to go back and play a little of Chrono Trigger just to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me about the obvious similarities between that classic RPG and Sea of Stars. This brand-new yet old-school game doesn’t present nearly as much time-hopping or world-traveling as its clearest inspiration, but its seafaring adventure still has plenty of twists and turns that fill up a solid 30 hours of linear spelunking. Rich and often funny character-driven stories wrap up with surprising twists that give weight to the story and provide a reason for its visually wild and mechanically interesting boss fights. At the same time, there’s just not that much depth to its combat options, and its 16-bit graphics generally satisfy nostalgic cravings rather than inspiring shock and awe all over again.

By its name alone, Sea of Stars may immediately sound like a generic knockoff of its forebears. The opening scenes present a story about two decently written albeit occasionally overly talkative teenage protagonists who set off to save the world by skipping over to a neighboring island to kill off the big bad once and for all. Fortunately, saving the world is never so simple, and the story’s true form begins to take shape before too long. The brilliance of this is how many times it twists and turns in a completely unexpected direction before the real ending, and I’m pleased by how it unfolds into a story about the importance of each individual.

It conveys the story competently, without frontloading too much exposition after letting you loose within its first hour or so. I’m impressed by how it introduces its villains, magic, and the stakes of its world organically, and if you want to know more you can simply return to camp and speak to the traveling bard to hear them recount the stories about the world and its denizens that took place there.

Speaking of progression, Sea of Stars excels in its level design. This map is split up into islands that are navigated in an overworld that connects different zones with no combat between them, much like in the classic Chrono Trigger. But once you get into a zone, there are often tons of combat encounters and puzzles that fill up the space between larger story moments and boss battles. You get to fight a giant world-eating kraken, and a robot queen that transforms into a giant handgun! And most of them feel like a well-balanced challenge rather than something you have to grind to overcome.

There’s an admirable amount of variety as well. One particularly cool zone had me tumbling down a series of cascading waterfalls adorned by gorgeous plants and flowers, whereas another had me exploring a clockwork castle and teaming up with its immortal residents to face a big boss. It all did a fantastic job of sucking me in and not letting go, much like the RPGs that inspired it.

The puzzles are simple but often require a decent amount of thought. There are some tricky block-pushing puzzles and some that require you to remember a certain sequence of triggers to erect platforms in a certain order so you can climb up to the next doorway. Sea of Stars also makes great use of day and night mechanics, often requiring you to shift the time of day with the shoulder buttons to shine daylight or moonlight on special nodes that unlock parts of the map.

It’s cool that this world’s NPCs respond to your actions and your growing power as literal superheroes, and it’s nifty to eventually gain the ability to fly – that lets you move around the overworld and finish up quests without the hindrance of returning to your ship. Yes, Sea of Stars has a ship, but you won’t spend too much time sailing around since it mostly just serves to connect major points of interest between story events. The world’s most interesting side locations, such as the many Solstice Shrines dotting the map, only become available to visit once you unlock flight.

But I’m especially impressed by how the protagonists’ solstice warrior powers are represented in combat. Zale is a blade dancer attuned to the fire magic of the sun, whereas Valere is a lunar monk attuned to the ice magic of the moon. While facing a few of the campaign’s biggest bosses and their minions, they are often the only two party members capable of dealing damage with their basic attacks and spells. This frustrated me at first, but as the campaign went on I began to understand its pivotal lock-pattern mechanic. Battles are fully turn-based, but enemies liven things up by telegraphing their upcoming attacks in patterns that can be broken with attacks of specific types. For instance, you can interrupt an enemy powering up a spell by hitting them three times with fire attacks, breaking their concentration, and staggering them until their next move.

Later on, these patterns grow more complex and require a mix of attacks from your teammates, and it’s interesting how the other available party members contribute to these fights even without the same damage output. This often lends their unique fighting styles to group combos that can inflict multiple types of damage and break certain locks after the combo bar is powered up through regular attacks. This momentum is helped along by basic attacks that restore MP and can potentially release bubbles of live mana that your active party member can absorb to add potency to the next move.

Each party member also gets their own unique ultimate move which functions similarly to summons in a Final Fantasy game; showing a cool cinematic before dealing a massive amount of damage. They’re not as exploitable, though, since they rely on their own gauge that builds up over the course of battles.

It’s great that you can affect the flow of combat by pressing a button to critical hit, critical heal, or block an incoming attack as it lands. I found it satisfying that most later battles required me to hit these boosts consistently in order to feel fair. But it took a while to get the hang of because their reaction window is frustratingly short, and without using a special relic that shoots a flare each time you land a boost, it’s not always clear exactly when you’re supposed to respond. That’s especially hard to pin down when each animation has a different point of impact. For instance, one character jumps around before landing their strike on an enemy, and it’s easy to tap too soon or too late unless you memorize this whole thing. Even so, it’s still extremely satisfying to pull off certain moves that require you to react to these finicky windows.

Overall though, I’m disappointed Sea of Stars’ combat system doesn’t get much deeper than that. With only six potential teammates to play with – and only a few skills and combos total – I found myself running through the same strategies over and over by the end. Often, the most fun part of progression was getting better at precise timing. The campaign wraps up just before the limited combat options overstay their welcome, but I’d have liked a few more spells or combos per character to master.

In its favor, there’s a lot of strong nostalgia vibes here. I grew up playing the 16-bit SNES, GBA, and PS1 classics – essentially, the good old days of RPGs – and Sea of Stars hits all the right notes to make me long for those good old times. Its zones are varied and colorful, featuring emotive soundtracks composed by none other than Yasunori Mitsuda and Rainbowdragoneyes. The former produced the soundtracks for Chrono Trigger and Xenogears – to name a few – and his unique style brings back memories of those old games. Each area exudes a unique personality, thanks to catchy tunes that masterfully capture their essence.

Everything about Sea of Stars’ look and feel is clean and approachable, and each of its menus is easy to navigate. Even its side quests are easy to finish once you approach the endgame, thanks to a convenient map that tells you which areas still have more things to do and find. Save points and campfires are scattered liberally, and it was great to never have to worry about autosaves – they’re placed exactly where you need them: before tough fights.

It’s neat that you can easily return to your camp from the overworld or from any campfire, where you can speak to key characters and craft food for the next adventure. I also liked the fact that healing items take the form of food rather than generic potions. Cooking ingredients are easy to find, and there’s a real benefit to discovering new recipes and taking the time to play around with Sea of Stars’ competent fishing system in order to keep your pantry stocked – particularly because each item has a different effect, such as healing the whole party’s mana or reviving a single teammate. Since you can only carry 10 food items at once, it does add an extra layer of consideration when choosing which items to carry in your loadout, but it never feels unbalanced.

I only wish there were more ways to customize my party’s playstyle, given that each character only has a few pieces of equipment available to them. Unique accessories are sparse, and those we have lack much oomph. This means there’s even less customization than there is in Final Fantasy 16, and that can make the RPG elements of Sea of Stars feel weaker for anybody who doesn’t find themselves invested in the story.

It’s been a hot minute since the last time we were able to pile bunker an enemy mech in the face, but the team at From Software has finally returned to their roots with Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. It certainly looks and feels the part of a modern mecha action game, with gorgeous graphics, a rock-solid 60fps frame rate that never falters, and an intuitive control scheme that dramatically reduces the learning curve we had to deal with in prior Armored Core games. At the same time, its bland mission briefings and a few elements of its design feel a bit stuck in their old ways. But Armored Core 6 scores direct hits in the spots it matters the most: specifically the highly customizable, intense, and frantic mecha battles.

If there’s one area where Armored Core 6 could have benefited from more modernization, it’s in its storytelling. The five-chapter campaign plays out almost entirely over radio conversations, PowerPoint presentation-style mission briefings, and combat chatter that is nearly impossible to pay attention to while you’re fighting for your life on the mining planet of Rubicon. It doesn’t help that our character is a blank slate who just does whatever they’re told, fighting on behalf of corporations, resistance forces, arms dealers, or the enigmatic Walter and his personal agenda. As a result, despite an interesting setting and premise with plenty of teases of ulterior motives and questionable loyalties, I found it hard to really connect with the story on anything beyond a pure surface level, which is a shame because one of the major ideas of Armored Core 6 is a branching storyline that has you making decisions on which faction you want to take on missions for. I just didn’t really care one way or the other.

The Puzzle of Combat

However, one of the benefits of this mission structure is that it’s able to allow for a wide variety of objectives that each favor a different style of play, which then feeds into the excellent customization elements that make up the heart of Armored Core 6. Before you sortie into a mission, you’re able to equip your mech with four weapons — one for each arm and one attached to each shoulder — a unique head, body, legs, generator, booster, and Fire Control System. And oh boy, are there a ton of different factors to consider beyond simply what to spend your limited money on.

The external parts of your mech all have their own weight, defensive value, AP (health), and what’s known as Attitude Stability, which affects how quickly you get staggered from consecutive hits. Parts with higher defensive stats naturally weigh a lot more and require sturdier but slower leg parts in order to carry the burden, and weapons that weigh a lot require larger, stronger, and heavier arm parts.

But that’s not all! Certain weapons also take a ton of energy to wield, and thus require generators that have large EN (energy) capacities in order to even equip them. But then you have to balance that with the fact that your energy regeneration could suffer, which means energy management gets much more difficult once you’re actually in the mission. Before you even start making those decisions you should consider what range you expect your mech to be fighting at so you can optimize your internal parts for that role… and the list just goes on and on.

That may sound like a lot, and I’m not gonna lie: it is. But still, I felt like Armored Core 6 did a great job guiding me with its sorting tools and descriptive text, which made it easy enough for me to discern what parts were good for what. As long as I had the idea in my head of what kind of mech I wanted to make, it was fairly easy to bring that idea to life. Over the course of the campaign I piloted a lightweight scout with fast boosts that excelled at evasion, a medium-sized destroyer that could wield heavier weaponry without sacrificing too much mobility, and a mobile fortress outfitted with the heaviest and most devastating weapons money could buy – and several in between.

What all of this customization amounts to is making every mission feel like a satisfying combat puzzle. Even though there are certainly loadouts that felt stronger than others (hello dual kinetic shotguns on a medium sized bipedal mech), there was never a one-size-fits-all solution to every mission, which is a testament to the stellar design and variety of the missions themselves. You’ll never do the same thing twice. One mission had me investigating a seemingly abandoned outpost, only to be ambushed by stealth ACs that I needed to scan in order to target; another had me dropping down into an underground facility, carefully descending from platform to platform so as to avoid getting disintegrated by the laser cannon at the bottom; and another still had me infiltrating a cave to destroy a generator, which I did, and then had to book it out of there to avoid getting caught up in the resulting explosion. It kept the action fresh throughout the entirety of the 15-hour campaign and beyond.

Failing missions is part of the process, and it's something that will very likely happen to you a lot. But fortunately the checkpoint system is fairly generous, and you’re given an opportunity to change the assembly of your mech after every death. This made it so that every failure came with an opportunity to assess what went wrong, and think about how I could fix it. Coming back with the right answer, whether that was simply by switching out my weapon or a more drastic revamp involving changing up my AC archetype, was always satisfying. That said, I really wish that you could also access the shop as well when you die. If you don’t already have the thing you need to beat whatever you’re stuck on, you have to back out of the mission, buy it, and then restart from the beginning.

Get in the Robot

One of the things that I appreciated right out of the gate in Armored Core 6 is that I was able to pick up the controls extremely quickly. It’s all very intuitive: Right and left triggers fire your right and left arm weapons, right and left bumpers fire your right and left shoulder weapons, X jumps, square dodges, circle toggles your booster jets, clicking in the left stick makes you go into a sprint-like assault burst mode, and clicking in the right stick changes your lock-on mode.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion from longtime Armored Core fans who are not happy about there being a hard lock-on system, with the argument that it lowers the skill ceiling, but I think From Software has found a really delicate balance with it. If you turn on the targeting-assist mode you gain the advantage of keeping the camera fixed on a specific target, but you’re less accurate with your shots. As a result, I found myself switching between the two modes frequently – using the targeting-assist mode so I wouldn’t lose track of a fast-moving boss, and then switching it off and manually keeping it in my sights when I felt like It was time to counter-attack. Having the hard-lock also allows for some really dynamic and intense boss fights that would’ve been much more frustrating to deal with if I didn’t have a way to always keep the boss in my sights.

More than anything, though, combat in Armored Core 6 just feels good. The wide assortment of weapons all feel satisfying in their own way, whether that’s using a charged shot from a linear rifle on an unaware enemy to kill them in one shot, nimbly dashing around with dual shotguns and laying waste to a whole military base, or juggling quad rocket launchers between your arms and shoulders. Things can feel downright anime-like at times with how many missiles you’re able to fire at once – and with how many missiles get fired at you.

In addition to the regular missions, there’s an arena mode that pits you against steadily increasingly difficult one-on-one fights against named ACs, each with their own unique loadout and assembly. You’ll definitely want to go through them too, as completing arena fights rewards you with currency you can use to strengthen your mech and further customize your playstyle. You could increase your damage with a specific type of weapon, increase your defense, unlock core abilities like a super-satisfying kick out of your assault boost, and much more. Better still, you can respec at any point for a fairly modest fee. If you wanna test your arena skills against actual humans, you can do that as well, in both 1-on-1 and 3-on-3 online matches. I didn’t get to test out the netcode extensively in my review period, but the few matches that I did play were super smooth and a ton of fun.

And of course, if cosmetic customization is your thing, there’s a ton of options to paint your mech whatever color combination you desire, place a variety of decals you unlock through arena fights, create your own custom decals, then save and share your creation with the rest of the world.

Beating Fires of Rubicon’s campaign unlocks a New Game+ mode that allows you to take all of your unlocked parts through the story missions again from the very beginning. There’s also a lot of incentive to play through NG+ in the form of multiple endings, new story branching points, entirely new and more difficult missions, and even a whole new set of arena matches to fight through. Needless to say, you’ll definitely want to go through this more than once to get everything that AC6 has to offer.

Madden NFL 24 reminds me of the Marvin Lewis-coached Bengals. Lewis led Cincinnati’s football team to the most wins of any coach in the history of the franchise, and they made the playoffs seven times during his tenure, including a stretch where they made the playoffs for five straight years. They never won any of those playoff games, though. Not one. Some of the losses were close. Some were heartbreakers that the Bengals gave away. Lewis’ teams were almost always good, or at least decent, but they were never good enough – and after a while it became clear that they never would be. Three years after his departure the Bengals would play in the Super Bowl, led by a new head coach in Zac Taylor and the recently drafted Joe Burrow. It’s amazing how quickly things can change in the NFL when organizations decide to try something new.

Like Lewis’ Bengals, Madden NFL 24 is good, or at least decent, but never quite good enough to make it feel like a winning year for this series. After something of a soft reboot last year, Madden NFL 24 is focused mostly on refinement, while attempting to address several sore spots among fans in what has been widely referred to as a “make or break year.” And while several notable improvements have been made, it still feels like what the series has been known for in recent years: a great on-field experience desperately searching for a way to make everything else work. Unfortunately, while can see flashes of greatness and the play is usually passable, it’s hard to shake the feeling that things won’t get meaningfully better until somebody at EA gives EA Tiburon the time and money to make some serious, meaningful changes.

Let’s start with the good stuff. One of the biggest improvements is to FieldSENSE, where the existing Hit Everything system has been combined with new animations that take player size and strength into account. EA Tiburon claims it has added or adjusted more than 1,700 tackle animations, and I believe it, because the new animations look fantastic. There are new contested-catch animations, wrap-up tackles, and my personal favorite, scoops, where large defensive players will pick up offensive players by the legs before slamming them back down to the field. Football is a violent sport, and the new animations depict that in ways that feel realistic. When a big hit happens on the field you feel it, just like you do when you see it during a game – just, you know, without the weird guilt about whether you should enjoy watching it or not.

This year also brings improvements to the Skill-Based Passing system, adding new animations that better represent the scenarios players are in when catching passes. My favorites are the new diving catches, which look spectacular and make those seemingly out-of-reach balls more likely to be caught. It also means Madden NFL 24 is better at tracking player momentum, so hitting your receivers at the right point in their routes is more important – they need to have enough time to turn upfield or juke defenders. These are great changes; you get fewer of those “Oh, come on! You could have caught that!” moments, and plays just look and feel more authentic when you see them executed.

As an added bonus, more improvisational QBs – like cover star Josh Allen and everyone’s favorite Kermit the Frog impersonator, Patrick Mahomes – are more likely to use jumping and diving passes to make plays when the situation calls for it. Combine all of this with the redone player skeletons and player models that (almost, sorry Cam Heyward) always look like they’re stepped off the gridiron and onto your TV screen, and Madden NFL 24 is easily the best-looking and best-animated the series has ever been. It’s a genuinely impressive accomplishment, and it feels like you’re always on the verge of seeing something incredibly cool go down – just like the real NFL.

This year’s edition also refines post-play reactions from players, and once again, they look excellent. You’ll see them do kamehamehas, recreate the Spider-Man pointing meme, cheer, hang their heads, the whole nine yards. I’ve put nearly 40 hours into Madden NFL 24 since its release, and I’m still seeing new reactions. Refs are even back on the field this year (after being bizarrely absent for the last few) and we’ve got both male and female officials this time. Yes, there’s the odd janky animation when players collide, but they’re pretty rare. Madden NFL 24 absolutely nails the on-field presentation.

EA has also made noticeable improvements to the AI, with the biggest probably being to AI blocking. Part of this is because of the expansion of the FieldSENSE animation system, which is being applied to blockers for the first time. Now, blockers are differentiated from one another and will make better decisions when blocking. That means more double-teams, more chip blocking, and more working together to push the pile, which in turn means a better experience in the run and passing game. This is one of those inside baseball (football?), under-the-hood changes that new and more casual players probably won’t notice, but if playing previous Madden games has ever had you screaming “why would you do that?” at your offensive line like I have, it’s an immediate improvement.

It’s just one of the many revamps to Madden’s AI across the board. Another place you’re likely to notice it is against the AI quarterbacks, who will use more audibles and hot routes and play more like their real-life counterparts. That means that players like Patrick Mahomes are more likely to dial up big, highlight-reel-worthy plays in stressful situations, running QBs like Lamar Jackson will try to escape the pocket under pressure, and more cautious quarterbacks like Kirk Cousins will check the ball down. But it’s not just quarterbacks: run defenders will recognize if you call the same play several times and hit their gaps more quickly, secondaries will play short crosses and slants more aggressively and responsively, and running backs are better at finding holes, using cutback lanes, and navigating space.

All of this adds up to a Madden where AI players are simultaneously much smarter, but also more capable of making plausible mistakes if that’s what their real-world counterparts would do. You’re more likely to see clutch big players, goal line stands, breakout runs, and everything in between. It makes for a more exciting, more realistic game, and the best on-field experience I’ve had with Madden in several years. Note, though, these upgrades are almost all tied to the PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC versions. If you’re playing on last-generation consoles, you’re out of luck.

And then you get off the field, and that’s where things start to fall apart. The first place you’ll notice this is in the menus, which are some of the laggiest I’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s not a problem everywhere – the main menu tends to work pretty well – but get into Ultimate Team or Superstar and things take absolutely forever to load. Even exiting a mode and choosing another one can take several seconds, which seems like way too long for this kind of thing.

Madden NFL 24’s menus also have an input lag problem. Sometimes it takes several seconds for your selections to register… if they do at all. This means selecting the option you want multiple times, and in several cases, selecting something you don’t want by accident. This is a minor problem if you go into Ultimate Team when you wanted Franchise Mode, but it’s a real issue when it happens in-game and you call a play you didn’t mean to. It’s rarer when you’re on the field, but it does happen. Even if you’re just playing solo, it makes changing your lineup or opening packs in Ultimate Team a chore, and choosing your options in Superstar or Franchise mode take much longer than they should.

The problems persist when you finally get into the mode you want. One of the most touted additions to Madden NFL 24 is the return of minigames, which have been absent since Madden NFL 13. There are 26 minigames in total and they’re… fine. Some of them, like Rushing Attack, which charges you with taking control of a running back and scoring as many touchdowns as possible, are a lot of fun, and it’s easy to see why fans wanted it back. Others, like Backfield Survival, which adds obstacles on the field and asks you to run around the field for as long as possible without getting sacked, are goofy fun that help you build Stick skills. But a lot of them just feel pointless.

Yeah, Passing Skeleton will teach you how to quickly identify the open receiver, but since the best way to win is to build your multiplier by completing passes, it quickly devolves into just throwing short passes. Target Passing, on the other hand, teaches you absolutely nothing and is absolutely maddening (no pun intended). The goal is to use your receivers to line up your throws to break targets scattered across the field, but even with the precision pass mechanic added last year, it feels more like a crapshoot than a test of actual skill. Worse, many of them are just variants that do things like add more defenders or put you at a different place on the field. Cull the variants and you’re down to just 15 unique minigames, and several of them wear out their welcome very quickly.

The real problem is that these min-games are now how you build player skills in Franchise, Training Camp, and Superstar modes. That would be fine if you could do them once and then keep re-using your highest score, as you could with older training options, but you can’t. If you want the full benefits you’ll have to play them every time. By the time I finished Superstar, I could do the Passing Skeleton mini-game in my sleep. I never wanted to play it again, but since the other options to level up my created QB were variants of Target Passing, a mini-game I hated, I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to level up at a decent rate. It sucked.

Speaking of Superstar, it’s back as the replacement for Face of the Franchise and it’s also…fine. You can create a QB, HB, WR, LB, or CB, and guide them from the Combine – fairly generic mini-games you’ll play once and never see again – interview with teams, and get drafted. There’s a very simple storyline here, but nothing about it is as interesting as what Longshot or even Face of the Franchise did a few years ago.

The Combine is kind of fun, but it’s a one-off, and once you’re into the season it plays out as a fairly standard career mode where your character, the Madden Chosen One, tries to guide their franchise to the Super Bowl and earn the coveted Madden 99 Overall rating. It’s uninspired but fine, though it has its share of problems. Playing anything other than a QB means your career is often out of your control, and the whole thing is pretty generic.

The most interesting thing in Superstar is Superstar Showdown, which replaces The Yard. Here, you can take your avatar online and compete in 3v3 and 6v6 games in an arena. It’s a neat novelty, but like all but a few of the minigames, it wears off fairly quickly.

Other modes have seen updates, too. Franchise sees the return of Training Camp, which uses the minigames and lets you prep your team for the season. It’s a nice addition, but you only spend a little time in it each season. Otherwise, the additions are mostly quality-of-life changes – more trade slots, commissioner settings, coach talent trees, new relocation options, and so on – that don’t do much to address Franchise’s biggest problem: how barebones all of it feels due to the lack options enjoyed by the franchise modes in sports sims.

Beyond that, Madden NFL 24 is much like Madden always is. There’s Ultimate Team, of course, and the combination of challenges, online play, and team building can be fun even if you don’t open your wallet the way you’re pushed to, quick play, the Pro Bowl (which is buried in quick play and easily missed), Madden’s excellent Skill Trainer, and so on. If you’ve played Madden in the past few years, you’ve seen it all before.

And that’s Madden 24’s biggest flaw, really. Once you step off the field, it’s just plain dull. There’s a lot of good on-field additions this year, and the cross-platform implementation EA has added works wonderfully, as does the game’s netcode (I played a near-flawless game with someone on the other side of the US), but unless you’re in love with the act of playing Madden, there’s just not much here to reinvigorate it. Madden desperately, desperately needs a ground-up refresh, and you can tell EA Tiburon is trying, but the yearly nature of the series, and the sheer dominance of the money-printing Ultimate Team over everything else, means a lot of these changes are like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound, especially when the UI is this painful to navigate.

Much like the waistband of MacGyver’s trousers, Immortals of Aveum is a gun-free zone. This may sound like a peculiar predicament for a first-person shooter to place itself in, but developer Ascendant Studios has made it work. How, you ask? Magic. And I’m not being facetious here; I mean, literal barrages of brightly-coloured bullets magically blasted from the fingertips of a bloke who really puts the war in warlock. An unexpected collision of traditional high fantasy adventure with slick FPS action, Immortals of Aveum boasts a wonderful backdrop for its classy combat and comes with everything I crave in a modern shooter: it’s striking to look at, sturdy to play, and it’s strictly single-player only.

There are times when Immortals of Aveum feels like Wolfenstein with wizards, and others when it feels like Doctor Strange has been airdropped directly into Doom. It’s a curious concoction but it’s one that works surprisingly well, and I’ve particularly enjoyed how different Aveum is to anything I’ve played in recent memory. The firefights are frantic and visually spectacular, the light platforming and puzzle work is generally satisfying, and the world itself is very well-crafted.

Aveum’s arcanepunk aesthetic is very absorbing and creates a world of interesting extremes; it’s a world where magic is ubiquitous and powers highly-advanced technology for war-torn societies still living a medieval-inspired lifestyle. This means wild flying machines and mindbending virtual puzzle rooms juxtaposed against gilded castles and ramshackle timber slums. It’s a cool clash of styles, and straddling multiple genres seems to suit Aveum’s ambitions as a first-person shooter with a twist.

Spells like Teen Spirit

We play as Jak who, in a moment of extreme stress in the opening phase of the story, is suddenly revealed to possess the power of a Triarch – an extremely rare person able to wield the world of Aveum's three forms of magic simultaneously. Jak subsequently finds himself drafted into the Everwar – a battle for control over Aveum’s magic that has been raging for millennia but appears to be barrelling towards a catastrophic conclusion. The story specifics get a little lost in the weeds during occasional salvoes of fantasy phrases but it’s otherwise easy to follow – and there’s a steady cadence of moderate twists to keep it from getting bogged. If you want to get seriously steeped in lore there’s a lot of optional stuff to dig through, but it definitely isn’t required to sufficiently understand what’s going on. There are some very elegant ecological and social parables tucked in here, too, and I ultimately appreciated the contemporary relevance – and that the story wasn’t just spinning its wheels mindlessly.

I’ve noticed some resistance to the choice to use modern vernacular and colloquialisms in Aveum’s dialogue, but I honestly can’t see myself being as engaged as I was if Ascendant had opted instead for po-faced, pseudo–Early Modern English. In fact, I’d argue that leaning on archaic language would only undermine how otherwise fresh and modern Aveum feels in the first-person shooter space. Not every line lands – and there’s a certain Generation Z angst about Jak that I didn’t always find entirely endearing – but the performances are good and I can get behind it broadly. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that I need all my fantasy stories sifted through a Shakespeare filter just to dress up the dialogue with some 400-year-old dribble.

On default difficulty, Aveum kept me busy for well over 20 hours to reach the credits. It’s nicely paced and strikes a good balance between switching up our surroundings for new locations and returning us to places we’ve already visited. While there are a few drab and dreary spots, most of Aveum’s environments are exceptionally good looking – from its giant lava pools to its icy and jagged crystal caves. The excellent lighting is regularly a strong component of what makes Aveum’s levels so eye-catching.

It’s a relatively linear experience and not a single open world, but there are some maps that are admittedly quite large and primed for exploring off the main path. There were definitely occasions I found myself slightly frustrated at Jak’s inability to leap on and over surfaces that look entirely suitable for standing on, but my bigger frustration was the lack of communication around things Jak couldn’t access yet by design. For instance, Aveum was very quick to have Jak drop an audio solution to an environmental puzzle I was already well on top of solving, but it’s also content to leave me fruitlessly trying to figure out how to get into a bonus area Jak literally hasn’t been rewarded with the ability to do yet.

Rusty Mage

Jak’s list of abilities is, however, impressively long. They’re also rationed out until quite deep into the story, meaning things that might have stumped us hours and hours prior may suddenly make sense. Aveum feels a little plain at first, when Jak is limited to just his initial basic spell strikes, but as the story progresses he gains access to far more interesting attacks and abilities. These include things like sticky charges that have a slow-motion effect, the ability to hover after a double jump, and a lash that drags enemies in for an easier close quarters kill. Aveum is undoubtedly a lot more than a disguised military shooter with finger guns.

The finger guns are a fun touch, though, and they’re essentially split into three categories. Blue magic attacks function as a large calibre pistol, green magic attacks manifest as rapid fire SMG rounds, and red magic attacks are essentially a sawn-off shotgun. Red attacks are reloaded by fist pumping, by the way. Now we know what Tiger Woods is doing every time he sinks a putt.

However, if you’re worried this means there are only three basic “weapons” in Aveum, don’t be; there are variations on each that change their damage, fire rate, and shots per reload depending on the associated “sigil” you equip to Jak’s arm, and there’s also another layer of secondary attacks – from damaging blastwaves to snaking volleys of magic missiles. There’s even an extremely potent beam that combines all three magic colours in a single, destructive torrent – gushing forwards like someone just knocked Cyclops’ sunglasses off. I really enjoy how powerful this attack makes Jak feel, and it’s crucial in some of the tougher boss battles.

Aveum does motivate us to engage with discovering and experimenting with new sigils, although it also didn’t punish me for settling with the ones I had already fully upgraded and sticking with them until the end of the story.

There’s a significant degree of controller gymnastics required to get the most of Aveum’s combat. I would also say that, as a man with the multitasking abilities of a peanut, it certainly grazes the upper limit to the amount of systems I can effectively juggle at once. At its most hectic I was nursing multiple ability cooldowns, boosting both my health and mana levels, switching sigils depending on which enemy poses the most immediate threat, and slinging special spells to deal out the fastest damage I can – all while building my big beam attack.

At times, I felt on top of it; at other times things descended into panicked blasting. The strength of Aveum is that it all looks rather spectacular either way. Whether you’re efficiently and ruthlessly carving through enemies with focus and finesse – or wading into battle spamming spells and seeing what works – combat is a wild storm of shattering shields and colourful fireworks at a welcome 60 frames per second on consoles. Movement is smooth, and Jak feels agile and responsive compared to the bulk of his foes. Jak is by definition one of the most dangerous battlemages in all of Aveum, and I certainly felt like that most of the time.

Every once in a long while, a game comes along that is so memorable, exciting, fresh, and well-written that it sets a new high-water mark for an entire genre. Baldur's Gate 3 is such an achievement for the tabletop roleplaying-inspired, swords and sorcery adventuring that its BioWare-made CRPG predecessors helped popularize decades ago. Larian Studios has turned this corner of Dungeons & Dragons’ Forgotten Realms into a beautiful, detailed world stocked with too many fully-realized, powerfully written, and skillfully voiced characters to count. There are heart-wrenching choices to be made, alliances to be forged, bears to be romanced, and a vast diversity of interesting, challenging turn-based combat encounters. I didn't merely enjoy my 130-plus hours on this journey. I fell in love.

One issue video games have often run into when trying to adapt the experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop is that it’s almost impossible to achieve the freedom and imagination you get to express in overcoming problems using real-world logic. It's hilarious in other RPGs when you have a spell that can blow an ogre to kingdom come, but is no match for the might of a wooden gate. And while it’s doubtful that any game will ever match that level of flexibility, Baldur's Gate 3 is a big step forward from what we’ve been able to do in the likes of Skyrim or Dragon Age. Those gates aren't going to stop a determined warlock.

If something looks flammable, you can probably light it up with a fire spell. If you want to save on lockpicks, most doors can be hacked down with a big enough axe. You can get to a lot of secret areas that other games would’ve blocked off with invisible walls by climbing and jumping. I was able to skip a huge boss fight by challenging a terrifying zombie guy to a drinking contest and, thanks to having a high enough Constitution score, I goaded him into drinking himself to death while I was still roaring for more. This is a world that will rarely tell you, "No," if you wonder if something is possible.

And you can even bring up to three friends along with their own custom characters in co-op, both online and on the couch. I was impressed with how smooth and seamless this experience was, as joining or leaving a session regardless of where in the campaign your friends are is very easy, and I never ran into any significant connection issues or other online hiccups – though I’ve definitely seen reports that other people have. Given how complex Baldur's Gate 3 is, that's impressive. It only gets better, and funnier, when you realize you can have one person distract a guard by talking to them while the other steals everything that's not nailed down behind their back.

There's a huge amount of freedom in who you can be in this world, as well. This character creator is one of the best I've seen outside of MMOs in a long time, featuring 29 different subraces with unique abilities and models (if you count all the different colors of dragonborn, at least). Each of the 12 classes have at least three specializations that play quite differently, with wizards and clerics getting even more to choose from. And I just love the art direction on every humanoid, enemy, and even the outfits. I've rarely experienced so much joy just looking at the beautiful, flame-haired elven ranger I designed outside of Final Fantasy XIV. It's not just the static model, either. The variety of high-fidelity, performance-captured, expressive faces everyone can make is shockingly good for a game of this type, with hundreds of characters rather than a small, core cast who can be directed like they're in a live-action production such as The Last of Us. There's not a bit of awkward lip-syncing to be found.

Larian’s incredible attention to detail also extends to the area design and writing. That’s exemplified by the city of Baldur's Gate itself, a hub full of life and adventure that came around to awe me anew, even though it took me 90 hours to reach the titular setting. Almost every citizen you’ll encounter there has something to say about the unfolding events, and nosey exploration is consistently rewarded with new lore, new loot, and new quests. It's downright astounding how much voice acting Larian has crammed into these streets, and how good nearly all of it is. There are dozens of random gossipers on street corners who are just as enthusiastically and professionally portrayed as the main cast, and rarely sound too similar to each other. I assume many of the actors involved must be responsible for more than one of these bit parts, but I can't tell just by listening like I can in some areas of Skyrim.

Let's Party

First among this delightful cast are your companions, a motley crew of multilayered, interestingly flawed characters who both grow and sometimes regress over the course of the campaign. The cheerful, eager tiefling Karlach, who has basically a demonic bomb instead of a heart, quickly became my best friend. I had flings with the dour cleric Shadowheart, the arrogant wizard Gale, and yes, the stoic Halsin, who can turn into a grizzly bear, among other creatures. There are plenty more where they came from, and they all have elaborate background stories and the capacity to significantly grow and change. The main villains, about whom I will spoil as little as possible, are just as richly written, with complex motives and their own individual brands of malice that inject new and greater threats into the last third of this epic-length adventure.

I also really enjoyed Larian's approach to romance. Years of Mass Effect memes have proven that it's almost impossible to make 3D video game sex that's actually, well, sexy, and Baldur’s Gate 3 hasn’t changed the game there. We're just not there yet, as a society. Instead of trying to do that and failing badly, they build a lot of the magic into sensual wordplay, and most of the carnal encounters you can engage in are either really funny (I mean, everyone's seen the bear scene, right?), or serve more broadly to tell you something new about your partner, how they see the world, and what they value rather than simply flashing what’s underneath their armor. That's so much better than showing two naked elves awkwardly humping over some unintentionally laughable mood music like you're Dark Helmet making his action figures kiss.

When it was time to put our clothes back on and roll for initiative in combat, Baldur's Gate 3 never failed to impress me with the care and thoughtfulness with which the encounter design was set up to torture me. It's like each one is carefully crafted to make me want to scream at the Dungeon Master, "You bastard!" And I mean that in the best possible way. One fight involved teleporting imp creatures who garrote my party members before carting them off to separate locations, preventing spellcasting and forcing everyone to fend for themselves. The next might be against some terrifying insectoids who leave everyone literally petrified with fear, so I have to find a way to win without being able to move. The AI can be cunning and savage, especially on the top-level tactician difficulty. At no point have I been able to fall back on a repetitive, grinding routine. You think on your feet or you die and reload your latest quicksave.

Tools of the Trade

The learning curve is helped somewhat by a clean and readable UI that lets you press T when hovering over any creature, object, or key phrase in a tooltip to get more information. It's not helped, however, by a pretty inadequate set of tutorials that takes a lot of knowledge about D&D for granted. I know 5th Edition well enough that it didn't really trip me up, but I can definitely see where others would completely overlook some critical concepts like how saving throws tied to specific attributes work, and Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't care to explain them in detail. You can get by without some of this knowledge, especially on the lower difficulty, but you certainly won't master combat without it. You could benefit a lot from reading the 5E Player's Handbook before you get started, but Larian shouldn't expect that of you.

Your character and companions also take some time and experience to develop as effective killers, and the first four levels or so can feel unnecessarily brutal due to how fragile you are when you start out. That's mostly a product of adapting 5th Edition D&D so closely, and Larian’s designers didn’t take it upon themselves to correct this long-running problem from the tabletop. They do, however, often give you ways to even the odds or avoid combat if you're clever – you’ll do well to watch the environment for things like heavy objects hanging from a destructible thread above your enemies, or prep for combat by finding some isolated guards and kicking them over a railing while no one is looking.

But once my party got beefed up with five levels worth of upgrades and some magic items, I was happily blasting, slashing, and shooting my way through fights using all of the versatile abilities and environmental options at my disposal. My favorite pair of boots let me teleport to anywhere I could see once per day (something normally restricted to the magical classes,) which was extremely helpful for setting up my ranger in inaccessible areas with a commanding view of the battlefield. I took out some of the later bosses much more easily than I would have in a head-to-head fight simply because there was nothing stopping me from having two invisible wizards walk right up in broad daylight and hit them in the face with Disintegrate before they even knew what was happening.

World of Wonders

The story spans over three acts that each took me around 40 hours to complete, playing like an obsessive completionist and finishing as many side objectives as I could. Each has a very distinct vibe and look, aided by an evocative and lively soundtrack. Act 1 is mostly idyllic wilderness, Act 2 is the spooky part, and Act 3 treats us to dense, urban adventuring. It can feel a bit slow at times, since the first act had me chasing down several different leads to solve the same problem, and Act 2 presents more questions than it answers right up until the final set of confrontations. But discovering exciting new areas, strong side quest writing, and those consistently fun combat encounters meant I never lost motivation.

The really amazing thing was not how big Baldur's Gate 3 is, though. Much has been made of its scope, but I would honestly not have minded if it were around half as long as it is. No, the magic is in how almost none of it feels like filler, no matter how far from the main quest you stray. Every random house I wandered into or side quest I picked up rewarded me with a memorable, unique, handcrafted roleplaying experience. Even a random note found on the body of a bandit might tell a heartbreaking story about their past, which gives weight to every decision to fight and kill. It’s all there for a reason.

And while the first two acts have plenty of difficult choices, the big ones I had to make before committing to a final plan of action in Act 3 are a work of devilish genius. Without spoiling anything, realizing my enemies were so many steps ahead of me by the time I reached the city was heartbreaking, but I still felt empowered by the opportunities that remained to alter my own destiny and assemble a truly impressive coalition of allies. Impressively, the last stretch often called back to things I did and characters I saved 80 hours ago, which tied the whole tale together and made the world feel even more authentic.

This is not a story that takes for granted that you are a hero; it's one that truly stares you down and demands that you prove it, if that's really what you're made of. The lead up to the finale backed me into a corner with a dozen ways out, but each one would require me to compromise on what I believe in in one way or another. This elevates the tension and the storytelling to new heights, which is impressive given how strong it’d been up to that point. There were quests that made me cry, quests that made me yell, "What?!" out loud, and quests that genuinely creeped me out. And the variations in not only the ending, but also so many other smaller stories, have me eager to play it all over again. And that's really saying something, when Baldur's Gate 3 has been my full-time job for the last three weeks.

It does need to be called out for some mild to moderate bugs here and there – nothing that stopped me in my tracks, of course, but enough to be annoying. There were also performance issues in Act 3 that required me to turn my settings down, even with an RTX 3080. But we’ve already seen many of the worst offenders addressed with the four hotfixes that’ve come out since launch, and what remains feels almost trivial next to the greatness of everything else. A game this complex will always have its share of bugs, especially at launch, and what I experienced was a more than acceptable tradeoff.