When I was in 7th grade, I thought Mega Man Star Force’s themes about friendship and brotherhood were profound. Its villains were cartoonishly evil, spouting lines like, “who needs friendship when you have power?” I ate all of that up! Playing through the Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection almost 20 years later, I now couldn’t help but wince at the cringy dialogue. That’s not a shock given this Nintendo DS series was tailormade for kids like me back then, but it was still fun to get a chance to reexamine these games on a deeper level two decades on. And when taken as a whole, Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection has a still-poignant story arc about gaining confidence through camaraderie packed alongside exciting card battling, newly restored content, and welcome quality-of-life improvements.

This collection contains the entire Star Force trilogy, consisting of seven games when you tally up all their different versions. While purists can play them as simple remasters, they’ve also been updated with helpful features that can be toggled to enhance the overall experience, like toning down incoming enemy damage or making Mega Man’s Buster power stronger. There’s even a rearranged soundtrack, redrawn card art, and a gallery filled with concept art and scrapped ideas to celebrate its history. Online functionality like PvP and card trading are supported too. Much of the feedback from 2023’s Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection is incorporated here, making Star Force Legacy Collection even more of a robust package.

All of the Star Force games follow the adventures of a young boy named Geo Stelar, who becomes reclusive and anti-social after his father disappears in space. That is, until an alien named Omega-Xis (Mega) convinces Geo to merge with him to fight off other aliens that are coming after him in exchange for information about his father. Thus Mega Man is born. The first Star Force uses this setup to tell a touching tale about how Geo comes out of his shell and learns to make friends thanks to Mega’s headstrong personality.

The main cast is strong throughout, in part because each of them is going through their own personal issues. Class president Luna’s commanding personality comes from her strict parents, while the idol Sonia deals with the pressures of the music industry. The other aliens hunting Mega down prey on these negative feelings and merge with them to create monsters, which Mega Man then has to defeat – all while Geo learns that he’s not alone. That “monster of the week” structure works well in the first Star Force because it gives more characters an opportunity to grow alongside Geo. It’s an, ahem, stellar introduction.

The monsters themselves also standout. The Mega Man series often borrows bosses from its different incarnations, but Star Force’s bosses are based on constellations like Taurus, Cancer, and Gemini, resulting in something much more original. This gives Star Force its own identity that differentiates it nicely from other Mega Man series like Battle Network.

Unfortunately, Star Force 2’s story takes a bit of a tumble as it tries to mimic the same structure as the first entry. It’s about an evil scientist who wants to bring back an ancient civilization, but this time the alien bosses merge with forgettable side characters instead of the main cast. As a result, there’s not nearly as much emotional investment, and the main villains don’t live up to their full potential either. Mega Man’s rival, aptly named Solo, is his antithesis and rejects all bonds and friendships. He’s the most compelling of the new villains, but his backstory isn’t fleshed out enough, which is unfortunately a running theme in Star Force 2.

Star Force 3’s story, however, is a terrific rebound. While its bosses are still mostly side characters, the main villains surrounding them are much more interesting. The bond between orphans Tia and Jack evolves throughout the story, giving them proper redemption arcs by the time it ends. Additionally, the “latest advancements in technology” finally make Mega visible to Geo’s friends, allowing for fun interactions that weren’t in the previous entries. Although Star Force 3 likes to beat its themes over your head with a hammer, the main concept centers around “purpose.” Basically, friends who work together towards a common goal can achieve anything, like stopping a giant meteor from crashing into Earth. Sure, it’s corny, but it’s a fitting cap to a trilogy that’s all about the power of friendship.

Each game also has expansive post-game content, adding more lore whenever you’re finished playing the main story. Star Force 3 has the most impressive of them all, bringing back characters from the previous games and fleshing them out even more. And that includes offering harder enemies to fight and optional super bosses.

Playing Cards

Mega Man Star Force’s combat is a blend of mostly real-time action with some light turn-based card battling. When Mega Man’s Custom Gauge is full, the fight pauses and brings up a screen with randomly assorted Battle Cards that can hit enemies, bolster his moves, or guard against enemy attacks. After confirming which cards to use, Mega Man moves in real-time as he positions himself to either strike or dodge incoming assaults. It’s not dissimilar to today’s roguelike card battlers such as Slay the Spire 2 or Monster Train 2, but with a twist that makes it fun and exciting in its own way.

Since Star Force takes place approximately 200 years after the end of the Mega Man Battle Network series, their combat systems are similar. But Star Force separates itself from its progenitor by having Mega Man only able to move left and right, with his back facing you instead of having you look down at a grid. That makes the series feels very familiar if you’ve played Battle Network, but this simple change is surprisingly refreshing.

In battle, Mega Man can only pick cards that are identical or in the same column on the selection screen. This encourages you to strategize and prioritize certain cards in order to create combos. Depending on your performance in battle, enemies can drop currency or even new Battle Cards to customize your deck, called a Folder here. There are certain rules you have to follow, such as having a maximum of 30 cards per Folder, with up to five Mega-class cards and one Giga-class card. The deckbuilding elements in Star Force are engrossing as there’s so many different possible combinations to choose from.

If you hit an opponent right as they’re about to unleash their own attack, you’ll perform a counterattack and draw an extra card from your Folder, so you’re incentivized to play thoughtfully and not just spam attacks. And if you’re in one of Mega Man’s transformed states, you’ll even have the chance to execute a Big Bang instead, which are ultimate attacks that inflict massive damage. Counterattacks are satisfying, and seeing the Big Bang rip enemies to shreds is the cherry on top.

Where Star Force and Star Force 2 are mechanically similar, Star Force 3 takes the extra step to add some more combat features. Here, Battle Cards can sometimes land behind others on the selection screen and can’t be picked normally. Instead, they have an alternative effect, like how electric elemental cards will add paralysis to another card regardless of whether they’re in the same column. It’s an interesting yet polarizing wrinkle that allows you to switch your tactics on the fly if your current selection isn’t showing much promise.

Alternatively, you can choose to use that background card for its normal effect, with the drawback being that it’s the only card you can use for that turn. You can always just choose to use a different card too and the background card will eventually come to the foreground, letting you select it normally for its primary effect. That alleviates the randomness of the mechanic if a card you really needed ends up being behind others first.

Pick and Choose

Each game in the Star Force trilogy has multiple versions, just like how the mainline Pokemon series approaches it. Depending on the version you pick, Mega Man gets different transformations and types of Giga-class cards. In the first Star Force, the version differences aren’t too drastic. You have your choice between Pegasus, Leo, and Dragon, each with an exclusive boss fight and unique Big Bang attack. Although these transformations are mostly aesthetic changes, they still shake up battles a bit while providing a solid foundation for the subsequent Star Force games to iterate on.

Thankfully, if you go online and add people to your in-game friend list with a different version than you, you get access to that version’s transformation. That means you won’t need to play all three versions just to see everything for yourself. Unfortunately, the Legacy Collection doesn’t support crossplay, so you can’t battle against or trade cards with players on other platforms. It’s a huge missed opportunity, and kind of ironic given Star Force’s themes about forming connections between people.

In Star Force 2, there are also three different transformations for Mega Man: The lightning sword-wielding Zerker, the wood Ninja, and the flaming dinosaur-head Saurian, all of which are a step up. You can combine two of them to gain the benefits of each, making the transformations much more interactive and engaging compared to the first game. You can also combine all three to become the powerful Tribe King, which has all of the glorious powers of each, but only lasts for three turns. It’s hard to pull off, but incredibly gratifying when you do. Plus, its tremendous Big Bang attack can completely turn the tables during boss battles, making the effort worth it.

Star Force 3 is the most similar to traditional Battle Network games, yet simultaneously the most innovative, making it the best of the trilogy. It introduces “Noise,” where Mega Man can mutate into different forms based on enemies from previous games, giving him unique abilities. It’s reminiscent of the Style system from Battle Network 2 and 3 in that these forms are permanent but can be switched whenever a new one is unlocked. And like Star Force 2, you can also combine two of them. There are 10 different Noise forms between both versions, resulting in a staggering 100 possible combinations. It was fun to experiment and see which one fit my playstyle the most.

There's also a Noise percentage gauge that builds up during battle by using strong cards to overkill enemies. The bigger the card’s attack power and the opponent’s HP, the higher the Noise level rises. Noise also gradually drops over time, so Mega Man has to remain on the offensive, as well as avoid incoming attacks. Playing well and ending battles with that gauge over 100% grants you certain rewards like Illegal Battle Cards. They’re much more powerful variants of their normal counterparts, and are well worth getting to strengthen your Folder’s firepower.

Upon reaching 200%, Mega Man can transform into his Finalized Noise form, either the hulking Red Joker or the speedy Black Ace (depending on your version) similar to Mega Man Battle Network 6’s Gregar and Falzar transformations. Like the Tribe King, he’s granted immeasurable power. I was only ever able to achieve this transformation during boss fights, which hammers the point home that it’s Mega Man’s trump card. As always, the Finalized Noise form’s Big Bang attack is utterly devastating and feels rewarding to execute, especially considering its narrow three-turn limit. Plus, it looks absolutely badass.

Retrofitting for the Future

As a remastered collection of Nintendo DS games, things that were originally displayed on the bottom touch screen of the handheld have now been relegated to a smaller screen off to the side, and you can swap between these two screens freely. It’s an elegant solution that works most of the time. There are a few awkward instances where certain minigames require completely different screen formatting, and touch controls have been replaced with cursors. However, these changes don’t have a negative impact in the grand scheme of things and the transition between different screens is handled smoothly.

Some very helpful quality of life features have been added as well, such as a much needed auto-save. It’s a feature that we take for granted in 2026. In the original DS games, if Mega Man got deleted in battle, you’d have to start from your last manual save – so if you forgot to save for a long period of time, well… you’re out of luck! There’s also a slider for random enemy encounters, solving Star Force 2’s atrociously high rate that contributed to the original’s sluggish pacing and obnoxious backtracking.

Mega Man’s running speed on the field can also be increased, which further alleviates backpedalling, and you can adjust different difficulty parameters such as increasing the amount of money earned after battle, fully restoring HP after battle, and guaranteeing escape from battle. This helps make the series more approachable than ever. Cut content from the original English versions has been restored in this collection, too. That includes the Boktai crossover event in Star Force, Wave Command Cards in Star Force 2, and Noise Cards in Star Force 3. Even if you’ve already played the originals, these reinstated features are more than enough to draw you back in, giving Mega Man even more ways to customize his Folders and abilities.

On top of all of these additions, bonus Battle Cards throughout all three entries that were only available through special in-person events or real-life toys and peripherals can now simply be downloaded into your Folder from the get-go. Many of these are hilariously overpowered, especially if you redeem them at the beginning of a playthrough, but their inclusion is a fitting bow that ties the entire collection together.

Project Hail Mary will be released in theaters on March 20.

When Phil Lord and Chris Miller departed Solo: A Star Wars Story mid-production in 2017 due to “creative differences,” it left a lot of people imagining just what a space epic from the directors of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie would have felt like, and whether the duo were up to the task of levelling up the scale of their filmmaking to that degree in the first place. In that sense, Project Hail Mary, their first live-action directing effort since 2014’s 22 Jump Street, feels like vindication for Lord and Miller. The pair and star Ryan Gosling prove perfectly suited to each other’s sensibilities, opening the door to an exciting interstellar adventure that, even through some occasional pacing hiccups, remains emotionally engaging throughout thanks to the crackling chemistry between Gosling and the most wonderful little rock person you’ve ever met.

Waking out of a coma in a plastic bag with a feeding tube down your gullet, a ZZ Top hairstyle, amnesia, surrounded by dead crewmates and also, you’re in space… it’s a tough way to start a day. Indeed, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) gets off to an inauspicious start aboard the Hail Mary as he struggles to remember why he’s there in the first place. Project Hail Mary uses Grace’s amnesia to motivate flashbacks to Earth that explain how and why a middle school teacher gets recruited as humanity’s last hope on a mission to nearby star Tau Ceti to save not just our Sun, but every star in the galaxy from being snuffed out by an extraterrestrial microorganism called Astrophage. For the first hour of the movie or so, these breaks from the Hail Mary go a long way to shaking up Grace’s isolation as he gets his footing aboard the ship, while also introducing us to the project’s steely administrator Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) and the rest of the ill-fated Hail Mary crew.

Even with the stakes as high as they are, it should come as no surprise with Phil Lord and Chris Miller at the helm that Project Hail Mary is hilarious. Drew Goddard’s script, based on the book by Andy Weir, maintains the affable snark of Weir’s writing well, and Lord and Miller delight in taking the air out of tense moments with a laugh - Grace’s discovery of what looks to be an alien ship may be terrifying for him, but the straight-up cartoonish sight gag that follows really sets Project Hail Mary apart from other similarly-budgeted sci-fi epics.

That tone works so well here thanks in no small part to Lord and Miller’s choice of leading man. Ryan Gosling’s mug may dominate the vast majority of Project Hail Mary’s screentime, but he’s a proven ego-free performer - some say his shrieks from the arm break scene of The Nice Guys ring out over the San Fernando Valley to this day - and Lord and Miller latch onto that sensibility and ride it to the stars. Things don’t always go right for Grace, and Lord and Miller go out of their way in how they shoot and cut Gosling’s performance to embellish Grace’s frustration to consistently funny effect. Gosling is just as strong in Grace’s low moments, whether that’s communicated through silent tears or anguish, like when he moans that he’s “wrong about everything, and everything’s wrong” after discovering the belief he staked his academic career on was completely off-base, or when he has to impart a eulogy to crewmmates he can’t remember based only on details gleaned from their personal effects. Not only does this double as a nice illustration of Grace’s problem-solving instincts but these shades of Grace are given equal weight in Gosling’s performance. They’re near to the surface throughout, so that when things go wrong (or right), all of Grace’s big reactions feel natural and easy to connect to.

Project Hail Mary’s plot may be focused on stopping every star in the galaxy from going out, but it’s also squarely about something that, for Grace, is just as daunting: making friends. Gosling’s Grace is only half of Project Hail Mary’s team of heroes, and he’s matched wonderfully at every turn by the other spacefarer he meets on his way to Tau Ceti: Rocky, voiced and principally performed by lead puppeteer James Ortiz. The Eridean mechanic mirrors Grace in being the surviving member of his own crew as well as the one least-suited to his plight, and likewise in his enthusiasm for creative problem-solving. Ortiz is an acclaimed puppeteer, and channels the magic of that art form into an expressive and dynamic performance that demonstrates the range of emotion puppet performers can evoke through even the most subtle movements.

Lord and Miller’s choice to maintain Ortiz’s voice for Rocky’s computer-translated vocalizations pays off, too, creating even more parity between Ortiz’s on-set work and the final performance. Grace and Rocky’s respect and affection for one another constantly reinforces the benefit of honoring the perspectives and abilities of others different than yourself, and Project Hail Mary is at its most joyous when building out their relationship, first through the trial-and-error early days of their partnership and later through how comfortable they are being blunt and cutting with each other… moreso on Rocky’s part. That little guy’s a hell of a trashmouth for not having a mouth.

The connection theme bears out all across Project Hail Mary, with Lord and Miller establishing it early on in the Earth storyline through Grace’s ability to befriend his surly government handler Carl (Lionel Boyce), leading to a pretty delightful montage of the two going to Home Depot to stock up for a DIY xenobiology experiment. But things are much more complicated between Grace and Stratt, whose inscrutable demeanor and seemingly infinite authority to marshal the world’s resources how she sees fit makes her a good foil to the comparatively hapless Grace. Sandra Hüller embodies the strength of someone capable of shouldering that responsibility and the weight of the resultant hard choices very well, but Project Hail Mary doesn’t invest quite enough in the character to make later moments like her melancholic karaoke performance of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” resonate as clearly or feel as earned as moments where Grace is letting his guard down.

For most of its considerable 156-minute runtime, Project Hail Mary roars ahead, but the third act does suffer from some structural issues which keep it from ending as strong as it could’ve. On its own merits, the final leg of Grace and Rocky’s mission is a thrilling set piece which sees every aspect of the production at its most impressive… but by the time it’s tailed off, there’s still a lot of Project Hail Mary left to go, leaving the rest feeling a little anticlimactic, even if the film does land on its feet in how it pays off Grace and Rocky’s relationship.

These pacing problems are significantly compounded by the flashback structure, which remains consistent throughout Project Hail Mary and really starts to lose its luster by the end. The initial jumps back to Earth feel like they’re giving what’s to follow a thematic bedrock to pay off down the line, once Grace has to decide how to relate to the idea of self-sacrifice, but the late ones feel a little more focused on tying up plot threads which by that point have little relevance to the most critical part of Grace and Rocky’s mission. We do get some of the more interesting work between Gosling and Hüller in their later scenes, but similar to how Project Hail Mary rushes in some characterization for Yao (Ken Leung) and Ilyukniha (Milana Vayntrub), the final pieces of the puzzle falling into place for Grace feel a little less impactful when what’s going on in present day has such huge ramifications.

But even through third act sputters, Project Hail Mary looks incredible, boasting top-notch production design and some truly stunning cinematography from Greig Fraser, who brings the rich sense of texture from his Oscar-winning work in the Dune franchise to bear here with work that consistently elevates Lord and Miller’s film. With the outsized emphasis on light in the story - Astrophage is discovered on a beam of infrared light in space - Fraser finds all kinds of ways to refract and bend it to create incredible depth in the frame, highlighting dazzling spacescapes and engrossing human moments alike. Fraser’s work hits its spectacular apex when Grace and Rocky reach their destination, as both the planet itself and the swarming Astrophage as seen through the Hail Mary’s IR scopes create a majestic sense of beauty and terrible danger right when the movie needs it most.

Scott Pilgrim EX is a game about the past. It’s a beat ‘em up revival based on a 2010 video game adaptation (which released alongside the film of the same name that year) of a graphic novel (which itself ran from 2004-2010). Put simply, Scott Pilgrim as a series is now old enough to drink, and it’s one that was already steeped in both nostalgia and dealing with the passage of time. It’s fitting then, that Scott Pilgrim EX also deals with time travel while being a damn good modern beat ‘em up in the midst of the genre’s own resurrection.

The story here is pretty simple: the setting is Toronto, 20XX. Scott’s band Sex Bob-omb is practicing for their latest show when Metal Scott, who looks like he stepped out of Mega Man X, bandnaps Sex Bob-omb and their instruments (except for Scott, naturally). Major bummer, dude. Your job is to save the band, recover their instruments, make it to the big show on time, and maybe save the city in the process. To do so, you’ll have to go through the three gangs that have taken over the city – the Vegans, the Robots, and the Demons – traverse time and space, and take down the mysterious forces manipulating all of this from the shadows. It’s standard beat ‘em up stuff, but it does lead to some extremely funny conversations in which your co-op partner, in complete seriousness, will ask “Do you want to fight the Vegans?” The answer, by the way, is always yes.

What makes the conceit interesting is the playable cast developer Tribute Games has assembled here. You’ve got Scott and Ramona, of course, but you’re also joined by former villains like Robot-01, as well as several of the Evil Exes, specifically Roxie, Matthew, Lucas, and Gideon. Everyone's a little different: Scott's your all-arounder, Ramona's big hammer makes her a mid-range monster, Lucas is a big beefy boy who plays exactly how you'd think, Gideon is all about pressure and big damage, Matthew is a puppet character (in a beat ‘em up! So cool!), Robot's a zoner, Roxie is a ninja. If you've ever played a fighting game, you're probably feeling right at home.

What's cool is how different everyone plays. The whole gang has light and heavy attack strings – the former excels in combos, while the latter is great for stunning Vegans, Robots, and Demons alike – but they've also got several metered and un-metered special attacks that really separate them, whether that’s Gideon's spinning sword parry, Romona’s subspace sucker punch, or Robot’s grenades. Scott Pilgrim EX is one of the few beat ‘em ups that lets you block attacks, and there are several advanced techniques like quick stepping, several kinds of wakeups, and using a metered super to avoid an attack, which doesn’t cost your Guts Points as it normally would. You’ve also got equippable assist attacks (which also cost GP) that can be as simple as calling a couple guys in to rock out and restore your health, breaking out Ramona’s cat Gideon who flies around the screen and cause problems, or my favorite, bringing out Sex Bob-omb superfan Young Neil to stampede across the screen. Many a boss has met their demise at the hands of Young Neil, let me tell you.

The result is a pretty complex beat ‘em up that rewards you for messing around with its systems. Is it as deep as something like Streets of Rage 4? No. But there’s a lot here, and all of it feels good. I cannot overstate how important feel is for a beat ‘em up, and you’ll recognize it immediately when one just doesn’t have the juice. Scott Pilgrim EX feels good. The original Scott Pilgrim didn’t feel bad, but it was a much slower, simpler game; you had fewer options, and getting hit meant standing there for a moment and realizing someone had just punched you in the face. EX is much faster with far more freeform, and it’s better for it. I wouldn’t quite put it up there with Tribute’s own Shredder’s Revenge, which is one of my favorite beat ‘em ups of the last 15 years, but it’s close.

The other neat thing is that EX is kind of an RPG. Defeated Vegans, Demons, and Robots will drop coins you can spend in shops to buy equipment that boosts stats and badges that offer special effects – two of my favorites are Big Nickel, which boosts the amount of money you pick up, and the Wallace plushy, which gives you GP when you land hits, perfect for making sure Young Neil (I seriously cannot overstate how good he is) is ready when you need him.

Enemies will sometimes drop permanent stat upgrades, too, which you can also buy from shops in the form of things like food and video tapes. Be warned, however: not all things are equal. If you’re playing co-op, one of you buying a piece of equipment unlocks it for both of you, but if you want a stat-boosting video tape, that only buffs the person who bought it. I learned that the hard way when my co-op partner, who had much more money than I did, bought them all and I struggled to keep up afterwards. Thankfully, you can drop coins (and health) for your teammates if they’re low on funds, need a boost, or have been KO’d (though this is difficult to do in the heat of battle; I almost wish I would just lovingly tussle their hair, as God intended). And if you’re worried about dying, grab some walking around food to heal on the go. You never know when you might need it.

All these systems work together quite well, but Scott Pilgrim EX’s biggest accomplishment might be its world. This isn’t a “choose a stage and play it” style beat ‘em up. Toronto is an interconnected world that you travel around, whether you’re taking a portal to the Ice Age on the beach, checking out the distillery district, or just walking down the street of the shopping area. It feels like a place, and I enjoyed learning its ins and outs as we explored it. And you’ll never get lost, because you’re always told where to go next if you just want to get on with it. And if you don’t, there’s always something for you to do. Toronto is full of side missions, whether that means breaking a bunch of barrels, finding all the coins in an area within a time limit, or whatever else you stumble across.

So much of what you find calls back to days past. Checkpoints look like they’re straight out of Sonic. There are legally distinct Scorpion-Kung Lao matchups, complete with spear and hat, and legally distinct piranha plants. The place you’ll fight most Demons is called Casa Vania, and the nearby store is Cold Topic. One of the movies you can rent from No-Account Video is called Army of Bones. The tagline: “Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.”

Several of the storylines – such as the one where Kim is kidnapped by Simon Lee because he couldn’t have her in high school, or the one where Matty travels back in time where big band sound was all the rage so he could live his dream, or the one where you help fix Young Neil’s broken Game Goose – reinforce the idea that time has moved on in Toronto… and here, too. The stuff Scott Pilgrim references was much newer when the original graphic novel debuted in 2004. At the time, Mario was 19. Now, he’s over 40 years old. Time’s passed. Several of the Evil Exes are helping Scott and Ramona out instead of fighting them. Even the genre Scott Pilgrim occupies is the product of arcades, once an institution, now largely long gone.

This is a sequel to a game that was released 16 years ago. The developer, ironically named Tribute Games, is probably best known for making the Turtles in Time sequel everyone always wanted and never got. Scott Pilgrim EX doesn’t directly grapple with a lot of this – it’s mostly small moments and asides – but, in the last 16 years, the series has transformed from something that references older art into older art that is referenced. It must be a strange thing to realize that what you made is emblematic of a moment in time, and how that moment has passed. To go from the new kid on the block riffing on the classics to the subject of your own retro revival. It’s something I thought about often during my time with Scott Pilgrim EX, and while it doesn’t go out of its way to draw attention to this concept, it's hard to argue that it isn’t grappling with it, at least a little. And that makes it more interesting.

You may have clicked into this review thinking, “A review of Under Night In-Birth 2 Sys:Celes? In the year of our Lord 2026?!” And you know what, that’s fair. This fighting game came out at the beginning of 2024, and it’s one that builds off a foundation laid by the 2012 original, which we also never reviewed. Well, I’ve decided better late than never, because Under Night In-Birth 2 is quite simply one of the best 2D fighters on the market right now – especially for fighting game fans that pine for the days of fast-paced anime fighters but with all the modern conveniences we’ve come to expect. It’s full of gorgeous pixel art and completely outlandish character designs alongside things like exceptional netcode and the ability to take control of a character during a replay, making its satisfyingly steep learning curve a joy to try and overcome, and its online play a staple of my fighting game rotation well past its initial launch.

For those completely unfamiliar, Under Night In-Birth (or just UNI for short) is the first wholly original series from Japanese developer French Bread, which was previously known mostly for Melty Blood, a 2D fighter based on the world and characters of the visual novel Tsukihime. The UNI games are four-button fighters with light, medium, and heavy attack buttons, as well as the Exs Action button, which has a number of uses ranging from short hops, to defensive shields, to meter management, etc.

What’s really cool about this fighting system at a basic level is that while most fighting games have a linear sort of logic to their combo system, allowing you to chain lights into mediums into heavies, UNI kind of just says “screw it, do what you want, it’ll work.” You can chain heavies into lights and lights into heavies, or convert big combos off of little pokes. Anytime you land any sort of touch in UNI, you can get big damage off of it, which is a very liberating feeling.

It also makes jumping into the shallow end of a new character very intuitive, even though they’re all so different from each other. I wouldn’t dare take a brand new character into online play and try to get by using simple combos alone, but if all you’re going to do is play through Arcade mode or mash some buttons against a similarly skilled friend, UNI’s flexible fighting system makes it very easy to do so on a casual level without relying solely on auto-combos.

Don’t let any of that fool you into thinking UNI is easy, though. The game speed is lightning fast, its zoning can feel utterly oppressive if you don't know how to deal with it, and the mixups certain characters can do will make you feel like you just got utterly blended. You really need to make use of its many different mechanics to be able to fight on an even playing field, and learning those is going to take some time – and for the more casual fighting game fan, it may even feel a bit like homework.

At the heart of UNI is the GRD system, and there’s really nothing else quite like it in the expansive world of 2D fighters. Basically, imagine it as a tug-of-war-style minigame that runs parallel to the actual fighting, with the winner being granted a pretty massive advantage for a limited amount of time. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a meter comprised of six diamonds on either side. You fill your side of the meter by moving forward, landing attacks, blocking, using the riskier (but more rewarding) shield block, and by holding down the Exs Action button to sit still and charge it up like you’re a Dragon Ball Z character raising your power level. You can also lose meter by moving backwards, getting hit, or having your own attacks blocked by the opponent’s shield block.

While this push and pull is happening, a timer will continue to circle around the middle of the meter, and once it’s up, the person with more of that meter filled wins the minigame and will enter the Vorpal State. While in the Vorpal State, you deal 10% more damage and gain the ability to use a technique called Chain Shift, which allows you to cancel the recovery of any move – much like a Roman Cancel in the Guilty Gear series – and also convert some of your diamonds from the GRD meter into your EXS meter, which governs your ability to use super moves and EX special moves.

It’s unusual, it’s complicated, but it’s also kind of brilliant. It encourages aggressive play while equally rewarding skillful defense; it’s largely negligible at lower levels of play, so newcomers don’t even have to worry about it, while more skilled fighters must split their focus between attacking the opponent in front of them and consider how their actions affect the GRD meter. It also further encourages careful meter and resource management, which is something every great modern fighting game benefits from.

I love the way fighting games look these days; Arc System Works, in particular, does an incredible job of blending 3D characters in 2D environments and reaping the benefits of both dimensions. But I’m also just a huge sucker for incredible 2D sprite art, and UNI’s characters rank up there among the best. Whether it’s the wild flowing hair and flailing limbs of Minerva, the lightning-fast speed and rapid slashes of Seth, or the hilariously gargantuan arms of Waldstein, the 24 characters (plus three more as paid DLC) of UNI2 absolutely brim with personality and flair.

I’m a big fan of rushdown characters, so Linne was the first one I gravitated towards, and I was initially taken aback by just how “rushdown” she actually was. Her run speed is incredibly fast, allowing her to close the distance from full screen in basically the blink of an eye. Even without learning her big damage combos, it’s a ton of fun to look for that slight opening to get in and then utterly blitzing my opponent with a fairly basic strike/throw gameplan. I’m at the point now where I definitely need to dig a little deeper into her moveset and find better ways to open people up, and fortunately, the teaching tools that UNI2 provides are stellar as well.

There’s a mission mode that gives you a basic overview of how to play each character, along with a wide variety of combos that cover just about every situation you could imagine sorted by difficulty. You’ve got quick, low-hitting combos you can use from point-blank range, overhead combos, combos that come out of your farthest reaching poke, anti-air combos, corner combos, and better versions of previous combos that build upon what you’ve already learned to squeeze out just a bit more damage. Once you get all the way down to the bottom, that’s where you’ll learn the big damage combos that incorporate Chain Shifts, super moves, and other high level techniques. It’s pretty much everything you need to build a full game plan with a character, all packed within the actual game itself, which should be the standard for any modern fighting game.

The unfortunate thing for anyone looking to learn about these characters by playing through their story mode, however, is that you’re going to feel buried under a mountain of jargon and names that won’t mean anything to you if you didn’t play the previous games in the series. The world and lore of Under Night is extensive, and there’s no effort made in this version to catch new players up on what “The Hollow Night” is, what the heck “EXS” is, or even what an “In-Birth” means. You are getting dropped into the supposed final chapter of a story, after all. Still, some sort of index or compendium would have gone a long way toward making these otherwise fairly dry arcade mode stories a bit easier to follow.

In general, UNI2 is lacking in content outside of its central modes. If you’re not a serious fighting game player who wants to grind online play and make use of its fantastic teaching tools to get better, there’s not going to be a ton here to hold your interest. Fortunately, if you are one of those people, UNI2 does have a feature that many AAA fighting games still don’t: Replay Takeover. While watching a replay, you’re able to take control of one of the characters at any point. This allows you to repeat something that gave you trouble in a match and try to find a way to learn from it. Like, for example, an offensive sequence that you got hit with that seemed air tight when you were in the moment – when you run it back, you might be able to find a spot where you could use an invincible reversal attack, or maybe your shield to push the opponent back far enough that their next attack wouldn’t have landed. Just like in Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and the scant few other fighting games that have this feature, it’s an absolute godsend when it comes to improving your matchup knowledge.

After last year’s swashbuckling Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii triumphantly hoisted the black flag, this year developer Ryu Ga Gotoku has set its sights on elevating the Yakuza series’ black sheep. While well-received critically upon its original 2009 release, Yakuza 3’s sluggish combat and uneven story pacing has seen it age about as well as leftover sashimi, leaving it to linger at the back of the pack while the Like a Dragon series has pushed forward into exciting turn-based twists and experimental spin-offs. Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties, then, is a much-needed retooling that ratchets up the fun factor of its fighting and smooths out most of its unwanted story creases, resulting in an enjoyable return to the largely underused island setting of Okinawa – even if not all of its changes and additions were powerful enough to uppercut me off my feet.

Although it received an HD remaster in 2019, I must admit I haven’t revisited Yakuza 3 since it first debuted on PlayStation 3 because I couldn’t bear the thought of once again battling my way through its annoyingly block-happy hordes. The bulk of Yakuza 3’s enemies were so stubbornly resilient to Kazuma Kiryu’s attacks that getting further than a few hits into a combo was a struggle; instead of gleefully breaking jaws, Yakuza 3’s fighting felt more like painfully pulling teeth.

Thankfully, that has all changed with Kiwami 3, which dramatically speeds up enemy encounters and endows Kiryu with two flexible fighting styles to cover all his thug-bashing bases. His default stance is classic Dragon of Dojima, a mix of satisfyingly weighty combo attacks and wrestling-style grapples that hit harder than a shotgunned can of Suntory Highball. As entertaining as that is, however, I found myself largely relying on his secondary stance, which arms him with eight different weapons. Those range from the baton-like tonfa to inflict stun, a pair of scythes to inflict bleed, brass knuckles to break guards, a shield to deflect blades and bullets, and a pair of nunchucks to regularly look like a total badarse with.

It’s a versatile and violent fighting style that transforms Kiryu into a lightning-fast, leisure suit-wearing shinobi, and it’s supremely intuitive to pick up. There’s no manual weapon switching or inventory management to fiddle with, since everything in his sharp-edged arsenal is triggered by a seamless combination of tapping and holding the three main attack buttons, allowing you to go from slapping a group of gangsters with a wooden boat oar to flinging a pointy pair of sai at their throat without even the slightest pause in the action. The original Yakuza 3 may have ultimately had more weapons to choose from, but given how quickly they would break I rarely bothered to actually use them, and thus I found Kiwami 3’s Swiss Army Knife-style fighting stance a vastly improved method for dealing out wanton destruction using the contents of a Ninja Turtle’s toy chest.

Kiwami 3’s combat doesn’t just feel smoother and more satisfying, it looks a lot flashier too. As was the case with the previous Kiwami remakes, Kiwami 3’s visual design has been boosted to bring it inline with the more modern entries, from the vastly improved character models to the firework-like particle effects that spark off Kiryu’s furious fists. This aesthetic overhaul extends to the environments too, and I was particularly pleased to explore the remodelled slice of Okinawa that features heavily in Kiwami 3’s opening half, since it’s a region that’s rarely been revisited in subsequent Yakuza and Like a Dragon adventures. Its sun-kissed coastal town vibes contrast nicely with Kamurocho’s hustle and bustle, making it akin to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth’s Hawaii – albeit on a significantly smaller scale.

What’s the Story, Morning Glory?

While Kiwami 3 broadly retains the same outline of the original game’s story, which centres on a spiteful turf war in Okinawa, the developers have treated the plot like a street thug and given it a good punch up. In the original Yakuza 3, certain chapters confined Kiryu to the Morning Glory orphanage he runs for lengthy periods of time, presenting precious little beyond slowly paging through text-based conversations with its pint-sized residents. Thankfully, Kiwami 3’s structure has been reshuffled to make these sleepy seaside sections entirely optional beyond an initial set of mandatory tutorials, meaning you now have the choice of either taking the time to forge bonds with these little Okinawan Oliver Twists, or just hurrying back to black-belting the Pocari Sweat out of every mobster yakuzin’ for a bruisin’ in the world outside the orphanage’s walls.

If you’d have given me the option of skipping these slice of life segments in the original Yakuza 3 I’d likely have taken it, yet surprisingly in Kiwami 3 I found myself growing more invested in the plight of Morning Glory’s munchkins than I ever did before. That’s thanks to a smart use of snackable mini-games that transform humdrum domestic chores into stimulating diversions. You can complete the kids’ algebra homework against the clock, go spearfishing for flounder and then transform those ingredients into a meal in an energetic burst of Cooking Mama-inspired culinary chaos, or, my personal favourite, steer a sewing machine needle around a Super Hang-On style circuit made of fabric in a delirious bout of high-speed hemming that regularly left both me and the handcrafted tote bag onscreen in stitches. As I ticked off each enjoyable household task, I found myself bonding with these little wide-eyed waifs in a more organic manner. That meant the stakes felt appropriately heightened later on when Kiryu’s criminal past inevitably catches up with him.

That’s not to say that Kiwami 3 completely sharpens the original’s storytelling, and there are still some of the series’ signature attention span-stretching conversation cutscenes present here – including one marathon meeting room exposition dump in its ninth chapter that’s so comically drawn out it actually gives you the option of taking regular breaks for Kiryu to stretch his legs by walking around a tiny office he can’t leave. There’s also a surprising twist in Kiwami 3’s post-credits epilogue that will likely raise a few eyebrows among series purists (though was really neither here nor there for me), but by and large Kiwami 3’s main story has been reworked for the better and it kept me hooked for the 17 hours it took me to reach its cathartic, combat-heavy climax.

Japanesey Rider

Elsewhere Kiryu goes from playing daddy to slaying baddies in Kiwami 3’s other major addition to its main story, Bad Boy Dragon. This biker gang-based riff on the Devil Flags subquest from Pirate Yakuza tasks Kiryu with rescuing new recruits from bullies on the streets, splitting them into squads, and accompanying them into large scale clashes against other rival leather-clad clubs, from the easybeats of Okinawa’s streets to the more fierce fighters from Tokyo’s Night Terrors outfit. In between battles you can hold gang rallies to boost the XP of your members, customise your gang colours, and invest in special attacks to unleash in a scrap, from humble hand grenades to spectacularly silly stampeding bulls.

However, Bad Boy Dragon’s novelty wore off far sooner for me than Pirate Yakuza’s equivalent seafaring mode did, because Kiwami 3’s gang-based brawler is considerably more repetitive by comparison. Whereas Pirate Yakuza featured a healthy mixture of cannon-based naval warfare and on-land scraps, Bad Boy Dragon is mostly just a series of samey skirmishes held in copy-and-pasted warehouses that quickly blur into each other. Despite the fact you’re in a biker gang, there’s very little actual biking to be done – you can’t get stuck into Road Rash-style battles on Tokyo’s expressway like in Lost Judgment, for example. Kiryu’s chopper is strictly used to rapidly ferry him between the four squads under his command before resuming the button-mashed biker beatdowns. Bad Boy Dragon ultimately feels a little half-baked – if you’re going to build a mode around biker gangs, you really need to go the whole chrome-covered hog.

Still, even though I parked Kiwami 3’s biker mode fairly early on, I found plenty of other things to do outside of the main story. In one moment I’d be struggling to deliver towering ice cream cones through streets lined with waddling sumo wrestlers, while in another I’d be customising my 2007-era flip phone with dangling tchotchkes to boost Kiryu’s health and damage. Later I found myself posing as a host at a cabaret club and disappointing the customers with terrible jokes, as well as indulging in optional mainstays like karaoke and the baseball batting cage. Sure, at this point a lot of these amusements have been repurposed more than the fabric of Marge Simpson’s pink Chanel suit, but I was pleased to find that collectible Game Gear games have been included for the first time in the series – even if it is a bit odd that handheld Sega classics like Columns and Sonic Chaos can only be played back at Kiryu’s hideout rather than pulled out of his pocket on the fly. (Perhaps that’s a tacit admission that the Game Gear’s godawful battery life made portable play too impractical?)

Admittedly I was surprised to find the substory count in Kiwami 3 had been whittled down to 31 from the original game’s 100 or so, but then I remembered how many of Yakuza 3’s optional quests were just clones of the same small handful of ideas. Kiwami 3’s substories focus on quality over quantity, and I have no objections to that approach.

The Ties that Grind

Outside of its remodelled main campaign, Kiwami 3 features an entirely new story mode called Dark Ties, which puts the player into the shoes of the sharply dressed and amusingly sardonic antagonist, Yoshitaka Mine. Dark Ties explores Mine’s first steps into the Tokyo underworld, his reluctant alliance with the lecherous Tojo clan heavy Tsuyoshi Kanda, and the complex motivations behind his devastating actions in Kiwami 3’s main campaign. It also allows us to let loose with his ferocious ‘shoot-boxing’ fighting style, which blends fast flurries of punches with acrobatic flip-kicks and the ability to pinball off one enemy and completely redirect your attack towards another to seamlessly continue your combo. He can also unleash devastating ‘Dark Awakening’ special attacks, such as spiking an enemy’s skull into the ground and dragging their faces along the pavement like a bloodied bowling ball.

Mine is limited to the one fighting stance, however, and his skill tree is stumpier than a yakuza’s left pinkie. That’s because his quest simply doesn’t last long enough to allow room for any real evolution of his abilities. Dark Ties has been marketed as a fully-fledged game in its own right, but that seems slightly disingenuous given it only features three chapters versus Kiwami 3’s 12, restricts the action to the same Kamarucho setting that Yakuza fans know better than the calluses on the back of their face-mashing fists, and pits you against just two bosses in two fights a piece.

To be fair, it still took me just over five hours to roll credits in Dark Ties, but that runtime didn’t feel as substantial as it sounds since Mine’s mode regularly gates its story missions behind the arbitrary completion of agonisingly menial tasks. During Dark Ties’ prolonged middle chapter in particular, the advancement of Mine’s story is dependent on performing good deeds for Kamarucho locals in order to slowly boost the reputation of his unlikeable cohort Kanda. A few of these are genuinely entertaining, like being asked to pose as a bouncer outside an adults-only club and evaluating the clientele, but the bulk of them are boring chores like legging it to the nearest convenience store and back so that you can bring a hungry man a bento box.

Tasks like these are made all the more arduous given that Mine isn’t equipped with the same segway-like Street Surfer that Kiryu can whip out on a whim to speed things along in Kiwami 3. I wanted to enjoy Mine’s calculated ascension towards the top of the Tojo clan, but for extended periods, Dark Ties made me feel less like a dragon and more like a dogsbody.

Mine does have one ace up his pinstriped-suit sleeve, however, and that’s the dungeon-brawling roguelike minigame unique to his adventure. Dubbed ‘Survival Hell’ – despite the fact that ‘Roguelike a Dragon’ was sitting right there – this strictly-timed dash for cash and collectibles takes place across five underground arenas, each consisting of four floors of increasingly challenging goons and culminating in an imposing boss fight. Die during a run and you lose it all, but each floor has an optional exit point should you wish to bank your winnings early and invest them into buffs like special weapons and CPU-controlled bodyguards to better your chances of survival on subsequent runs. It’s compelling, chaotic, and stuffed with countless surprises. Having rolled credits on both Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties, Survival Hell is the one feature of either story that is still calling me back for more.

When a series such as Trails lasts as long as it has, sometimes things start to get weird. We’ve seen giant mechs, supernatural beings, and even multiversal time travel. After all of that, where else is there to go? Oh yeah, outer space! The vast, unknown territory of the final frontier is filled with possibilities, and The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon breaks through the atmosphere in order to tell a compelling sci-fi fantasy story filled with deception and intrigue. It also continues to refine the Daybreak saga’s hybrid action/turn-based combat system, with battles that are more engaging than ever before. The cliffhanger ending could make for a rocky re-entry for some, but when the dust settles, Trails beyond the Horizon manages to safely touch down as another enthralling RPG.

Picking up where Trails through Daybreak 2 left off, Trails beyond the Horizon sees the nation of Calvard attempt humanity’s first manned spaceflight, called Project Startaker. Like Trails into Reverie, the roughly 60 to 70-hour campaign is split between the perspectives of three characters: Rean Schwarzer, the Trails of Cold Steel saga’s protagonist, Kevin Graham, the lead of Trails in the Sky the 3rd, and Daybreak’s mercenary hero Van Arkride. Trails beyond the Horizon manages this balance well, but (unsurprisingly) it does mean this isn’t a good starting point for new fans – Van is the star, but it treats each of the three as a “main” character in their own way, so you’ll need to have played the two previous Daybreak games and be familiar with the Cold Steel saga, Reverie, and the third entry in the Sky trilogy to really get everything that’s going on.

That said, this story is still good on its own merits. Rean’s route kept me glued to the screen as he uncovered the real objective of Project Startaker and the conspiracy surrounding it. Kevin’s storyline is just as captivating as he picks up the mantle of “Heretic Hunter” once again,learning more about who his assassination target is and how to come to grips with it. Surprisingly, Van’s section is the most boring of the three (at least at first) as he and his crew fight off a mysterious new faction called the Vestiges. Van’s path is as long as the other two combined, and while that makes sense since Trails beyond the Horizon is his story, the first half of his route takes too long to build up, making the faster pacing of the other protagonists’ tales much more exciting by comparison. However, the way their stories tie in with Van’s towards the finale ultimately redeems it.

Trails beyond the Horizon also successfully manages the character bloat that plagued some previous Trails crossovers. It only includes a few key cast members from Rean’s Thors Academy days as both student and instructor, such as the lively student council president Towa Herschel and the calm but calculated Altina Orion. Kevin has Reverie’s Rufus, Nadia, Swin, and Lapis in tow, and new additions to both his and Van’s casts are smartly kept to a minimum as well.

Don’t fix what ain’t broken

If you played Daybreak 2, this review might sound familiar in spots, as Trails beyond the Horizon sticks quite close to that formula outside of combat. For instance, the Marchen Garten roguelite dungeon returns in the form of Grim Garten, and it’s the same drill as usual. You navigate it by playing a minigame, moving across a board and fighting monsters until you reach a floor’s boss. Only the first half of the dungeon is required for story purposes, with the second being entirely optional, but it’s a shame that Grim Garten isn’t available to continue playing through after the credits roll like Marchen Garten was. That’s a slight downgrade, as Marchen Garten gave a satisfying “post-game” feeling to Daybreak 2, letting me clean up other tasks as I prepared to jump into New Game Plus, that’s now missing.

Thankfully, Grim Garten still has the same worthwhile incentives to explore it periodically throughout the story. You can earn valuable skill points to level up your party’s attacks, as well as unlock cosmetics and useful items (all of which are earned in game, with no microtransactions involved whatsoever), and even learn more about the backstories of certain characters, which was particularly interesting for some of the antagonists.

Optional activities like this have always been an important part of previous Trails games, and deep side quests and fun bonding events make a return to Trails beyond the Horizon as well. Not only do they reward you with useful and rare items, they also provide a vast amount of insight into the world and the people who inhabit it. It was fun to see how Rean contacted Van, asking if he could accept requests from the city bulletin on his behalf in order to experience the mercenary life. One of my favorite quests involved busting an illegal casino chip trade, with the culprit behind it being a recurring character who has been cooking up schemes since the Crossbell games, Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, 16 years ago. It’s a nostalgic touch that showcases how expansive this series is.

The LGC morality system from the first two Daybreak games makes a return, too: Sometimes when Rean, Van, and Kevin finish quests, they have the option to decide the outcome, which increases their affinity to either Law, Gray, or Chaos. In the first Daybreak game, your affinity determined which allies joined Van towards one of the later chapters. Disappointingly, like Daybreak 2, there’s no such impact in Trails beyond the Horizon, which made me once again question why the LGC system still exists in its current iteration at all. It was initially a standout feature that separated Van from other Trails heroes, so it’s disheartening to see the mechanic has actually regressed instead of evolved in any meaningful way, especially since it’s now tied to other protagonists as well. For example, what would a “chaos” aligned Rean look like, similar to his berserk “ogre” form from Cold Steel III and IV? Ideas like this could’ve been cool to explore.

At least the bonding events, called Connections, remain consistently delightful and charming, letting you hang out with other party members during major story beats. Not only do they offer fantastic character development, but they can also increase a character’s parameters, such as their attacking stats or chance that they’ll initiate a follow-up attack in battle. A favorite bonding event of mine was when Rufus reflected with Kevin about where he’s at in life – introduced all the way back in the first Cold Steel game, Rufus was a high-tier noble at the upper echelon of society, being recognized and revered wherever he went. A fall from grace and several (in-game) years later, he now spends his days in the shadows with his hair down looking after kids, but is content with himself. It’s a satisfying full-circle moment that had me reminiscing about my college days when I started playing the Trails series on my PlayStation Vita.

Teaching a new dog old tricks

Like the previous Daybreak games, Trails beyond the Horizon uses a hybrid turn-based/real-time action combat system. Out in the field, you can wail on enemies in real time in order to stun them. After successfully doing so, you can then transition to the turn-based battle system with an advantage, dealing extra damage right out of the gate. This was an imperfect but exciting system I liked when it was first introduced, and further refinements here make the field battles feel more fleshed out.

There are now ZOC abilities that let you temporarily stop time and get a few extra hits in, but the biggest game changer is the Awakening mechanic. Van, Rean, and Kevin can power themselves up to dish out more damage before going into turn-based combat. These Awakenings include Rean’s Spirit Unification, Van’s Grendal, and Kevin’s Stigma, which are clever ways of marrying a story-based power up and a previously turn-based exclusive-mechanic into a real-time action one. Even if the turn-based combat will always be where Trails thrives the most, it’s admirable that developer Falcom is continually iterating on the real-time elements to make them equally engaging.

The bulk of the turn-based combat is the same as previous Daybreak and Trails games at large. At the top of your screen sits a turn order timeline that you can plan around and manipulate. There are several bonus icons that will randomly align with either an ally or enemy on the timeline, which can range from bursts of healing or bypassing the casting time for magic to let a character fire off a spell right away. It’s important to pay attention to the timeline order as these bonuses can change the flow of battle, which makes for a compelling combat puzzle.

While “stealing” bonuses was possible in Daybreak 2, you could only do so when enemies were stunned or unconscious, and Trails beyond the Horizon slightly revised this mechanic to make it more accessible. If you activate a Shard Boost from your Boost Gauge to power up your next attack and then strike an enemy, you’ll grab whatever bonus was aligned with it and transform it into a more powerful “Plus” version, increasing the effectiveness of it for yourself. Steal a Zero Arts bonus? Not only will your next spell be cast immediately, but its power jumps up by 50%! This adds an extra layer of clever planning to an already well-thought out battle system.

Alternatively, you can still use skills that can inflict Delay on an enemy, pushing a bonus further down the timeline to hopefully land on an ally. In fact, this tactic has even gotten an update in Trails beyond the Horizon as successfully delaying an enemy while under a Shard Boost will also spawn a “Plus” version of that same bonus on the timeline during the next turn. These minor yet impactful boons make the combat more strategic and engaging. They can mean the difference between victory and defeat, especially against the hardest enemies later on.

Positioning, once again, is also crucial to combat. Each skill has a certain attack pattern, whether it’s a circle, cross, or a straight line. Maneuvering your characters so that you can hit as many enemies as possible ensures you get the most out of each action you take. Skills also have secondary effects. For example, Rean’s Sixfold Gales skill inflicts Delay, but also gets a damage buff if the enemy is struck from behind. Even if Rean can’t get behind an enemy, the skill is still useful as the Delay effect can help push a timeline bonus away from it. Trails has always had these mechanics, but the consistent quality and improvements between all of the entries is impressive, and a big part of what makes this combat system unique.

The biggest addition to Trails beyond the Horizon’s turn-based combat is the introduction of Shard Commands. These are basically upgraded versions of Brave Orders from Cold Steel III, IV, and Reverie. By consuming portions of your Boost Gauge, you can apply party-wide buffs that last for a limited number of turns. They can drastically turn the tide of battle, with effects like reducing incoming damage down to 30% or decreasing casting time for spells. Shard Commands are also more flexible than Brave Orders. In previous Trails games, bosses could enact their Brave Orders, called “Disorders,” to overwrite your own, but you couldn’t do the same thing back. You’re now able to overwrite boss Anti-Shard Commands with your own, but it’ll consume an extra bar in your Boost Gauge on top of the normal cost. It’s a smartly implemented trade-off that levels the playing field and feels fair.

Additionally, using two bars of your Boost Gauge activates ZOC and lets characters act twice in a row. In previous Daybreak games, you were incentivized to mainly conserve your Boost Gauge to fire off a character’s S-Crafts (ultimate attacks), so between Shard Commands and ZOC, as well as the aforementioned new bonus stealing mechanics, you have exciting new choices for how to spend it.

Finally, the customization options remain largely unchanged from the two previous Daybreak games, but that’s not a bad thing since it provides the same kind of fun as tinkering in a toybox and getting lost for hours while optimizing your party’s full potential. Slotting elemental gems, called Quartz, into one of four available lines for a variety of perks is still a clever system. It’s fun to experiment with different elemental combinations and values in order to unlock more potent Shard Abilities, including ones that can help outside of battle – like Golden Eye, which marks every treasure chest on your map in the area, ensuring that you’ll never miss any useful items. The Quartz system has been polished over the past two decades and has become one of the most flexible in any modern RPG.

Great RPGs can live or die by their final chapters – what's been built up through a long journey could pay off with major revelations that leave a lasting mark or fall flat with cliches that undermine its best ideas. I spent over 100 hours with Octopath Traveler 0, and although I'd say about 80 of those are pretty good overall thanks to a fair share of ups and downs, it's those last 20-or-so hours where it ascends to true greatness. If that sounds far too daunting, I get it, it's a big time investment – but what you get in return is something that only games of this scale can pull off, making good on its various story branches and stunning you with one moment after another as you approach its wild conclusion. While Octopath already had a brilliant turn-based combat system, this iteration adds its own quirks to freshen things up as the HD-2D art style delivers its unique brand of modernized nostalgia yet again. And along with an outstanding soundtrack to beautifully frame both pivotal and quiet moments alike, Octopath Traveler 0 shows that this series can and has pushed the genre to new heights.

Octopath Traveler 0 is largely a repackaging of the mobile game Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent, which is a prequel to the original entry. But by axing the microtransations and gacha elements used to recruit party members, as well as introducing some very important additions to story and gameplay, it has become a fully fledged RPG worthy of this wider release. I'm a bit shocked that this game in particular was once a mobile exclusive because it's built as a traditional RPG, and I'm thrilled it exists in this form since I would have otherwise missed out on some of my favorite moments from any recent game.

However, it's not always a smoothly paved road, and I'm not terribly surprised as any 100-hour game leaves plenty of room for valleys between its peaks. Story is where I had most of my reservations in the first half-or-so, and while I wasn't expecting the most beautifully written script or deepest character study, I found some of the dialogue and plot beats rather shallow. Comically evil villains made for bosses who were satisfying to take down, but when their unabashed cruelty and simple thirst for power is the primary hook without much nuance, I didn't feel quite as compelled by them as characters. But despite the inconsistent quality of its storytelling, Octopath Traveler 0 still runs at a decent pace and doesn't sit on any one thread for too long.

That's mainly due to how the main quest is structured. After a tragic prologue where your hometown is burned to the ground, you're given three story branches in order to pursue the trio of villains who were responsible. Themed around power, fame, and wealth, those three paths then converge into a conclusion for what is roughly the first half of the overall story (at about 40 hours). And don't be fooled by the fakeout credits roll, because you've barely seen what Octopath Traveler 0 has up its sleeve. It then splits into three new questlines that pick up those themes once again, and although they retread similar territory, the stakes get higher as more of Octopath's world gets involved and your understanding of it deepens. Warring kingdoms and corrupt religious institutions across the land of Orsterra, where betrayal is more common than loyalty, start to face greater consequences as the full picture comes into focus and the story gains real momentum.

Rather than trying to build eight separate stories for characters that have to run in parallel, this game is able to tell a tighter tale by weaving its themes together, putting your custom character at the center of it, and elevating the important figures when needed. While your silent protagonist may seem like a typical "chosen one," having the story revolve around the world's eight rings that grant godly power turns a cliche setup into a strong foundation for its deeper messages. Octopath Traveler 2 was very successful with its cast of eight and made for one of my favorite games of the last decade, but this change of pace is a smart direction. Unfortunately it does mean most of the 30-plus party members you can recruit through sidequests feel rather disposable, but the dissonance that creates is worth the trade-off.

And like many of the seemingly frivolous features of Octopath Traveler 0, that roster eventually means something important in the grand scheme. There's a reason why you want to recruit as many of these characters as possible, and this pays off in unpredictable ways that even had me – someone who's played nearly every major JRPG under the sun – absolutely stun-locked. That's a powerful example of how this game makes you care about the seemingly mundane things in retrospect and earns its big moments. Perhaps it could've benefitted from trimming its lesser parts (especially where it runs into problematic tropes or naive politics), but the time you spend along the main questlines builds an intimate understanding of the people who embody Orsterra and the leaders you collaborate with in earnest.

Avoiding any specific spoilers, once you hit the "final" questline, Octopath Traveler 0 mashes the gas and does not stop; it almost felt like I was playing a whole new game. Dungeons get more intricate, boss fights get a lot tougher, character arcs come full circle, and motives begin to make much more sense. Plenty of stories go for the complex and sympathetic villain or antihero, but the true antagonist of this tale represents an incredibly thoughtful, fully realized, heartwrenching, and intense exploration of this archetype. I was floored by the revelations therein because of how they're grounded in things that feel real, with both gameplay mechanics and music wielded as storytelling devices to paint a complete picture without having to explain itself out loud. The more I peel back the layers that make its final chapters so moving, the more it's stuck with me well after I rolled credits on the 0-exclusive true ending after 106 hours on the dot.

I've been on record saying Octopath Traveler 2 has one of my favorite turn-based combat systems ever; it shines here as well and for slightly different reasons. The Boost and Break systems give the typical dynamic of hitting elemental affinities some extra depth to devising how turns should play out. Playing the guessing game of discovering what enemies are weak against gets a little tiresome, but once that part is solved, scheming for your plan of attack based on turn order to Break enemies and tee up the big hits is oh so satisfying. Building each party members' Boost points to add extra hits or increase spell potency gives you something to plan around for turns well in advance. And lining up all these variables while juggling the threat of hard-hitting bosses, who can impose some impactful status ailments or wipe party members in one turn, had me feeling like a genius tactician. Octopath might be playing on our nostalgia with its HD-2D retro-style visuals, yet this series has continually set a high bar for turn-based combat systems in modern gaming.

Party composition is quite different this time around since you have eight active party members at all times – four in the front row and four in the back. With well over 30 characters in my roster, it's an overwhelming amount to process and manage. While the fundamentals of Octopath's combat system are familiar, matching character duos for the row they occupy is a unique strategic layer that allows for a lot of flexibility. And because they all build Boost points individually, you can dole out the big hits more frequently and keep up a brisker pace in battle compared to previous entries. You sacrifice individual character depth, however, as each party member has just one Job to progress through (aside from your protagonist), but you can at least master specific Job skills to then equip on other characters to diversify their moveset.

I found Octopath Traveler 2's character progression more meaningful, especially as it tied to their individual stories, but Octopath 0 offers a welcome change of pace that hits the turn-based highs that've made the series special. The slow-motion cinematic camera cuts for Max Boost attacks and each party member's tide-turning limit break still get me hyped up, giving combat the visual flair that truly makes the HD-2D style stand out when the action picks up. The tactical considerations you need to make in order to inflict damage well past the 9,999 soft limit requires effort and foresight that isn't spelled out for you, but figuring out how to wield these systems and mechanics yourself is as satisfying as it is necessary to stand a chance in late game fights. Random encounters throughout dungeons and the overworld get overbearing, but that tedium pales in comparison to the gratification of landing a Break and busting out every full-powered ability to overcome a boss you had no business defeating.

While that turn-based combat supports much of the A-plot I’ve already praised, there's also a B-plot that revolves around reconstructing your hometown of Wishvale. In the process of bringing it back to life narratively, you actually rebuild it with a town-building system in a similar vein as Fallout 4 or Ni no Kuni 2. You collect crafting materials naturally throughout which then allow you to build housing, shops, and decor within certain parameters on a grid-based layout. It’s an enjoyable side activity, with tangible benefits that come from new buildings and recruiting new residents, such as discounted shop prices, a self-sufficient flow of materials, and a training ground for inactive party members to continue leveling up. Town building may seem optional at first and isn't particularly deep, but it becomes almost essential the further you get, especially when you consider the story's broader message about what home means to you and the people you care for. And seeing the town you put together yourself in the background of cutscenes is a heartwarming touch that is its own small emotional reward.

This questline's story can be a bit cheesy at times, but its heart is in the right place as it gets sentimental about what it takes to rebuild after losing everything. Like the previous game, the way poverty shapes a person and going from nothing to something remains a prominent motif, and even though it fumbles the messaging at times here, it's willing to talk about those topics with clarity. In the same way the branching questlines eventually converge sensibly, the town-building system and story attached to it enrich the main quest in tangible ways. By having you take the actions necessary to pick up the pieces and offer survivors some semblance of the past lives of your hometown, Octopath Traveler 0's overarching themes about holding onto your humanity comes across as more genuine.

After 100-plus hours, I look back on this journey often teary eyed. Its prevailing messages and star characters really resonated with me, offering perspectives on how tragedy changes people. That hits hardest when I listen back to my favorite songs on the soundtrack that evoke those feelings. Series composer Yasunori Nishiki has a particular style that lends itself extremely well to the genre, but is an absolute madman when you break down the musicality of his work, especially here in Octopath Traveler 0. A rock orchestra with swelling strings, horns, and drums (sometimes backed by opera vocals and chanting choirs) boss battle themes make me feel like I can run through a wall; hell, even the initial normal battle theme slaps hard. It's also in the softer town themes that round things out, and specific motifs that punctuate important moments and work their way into the most impactful songs. Twice during late game bosses, I had to put my controller down absolutely stunned by what I was hearing before picking it back up and using the power of music to propel me to victory – so yeah, Yasunori Nishiki deserves to be mentioned alongside the GOATs.

Millions of digital horses were clad in armour on April 3, 2006. The survivors of this phenomenon called this downloadable content purchase a “microtransaction.” They lived only to face new nightmares: season passes, live service models, always-online single-player, loot boxes, pay-to-win, ship-now-fix-later patches, and more. Make no mistake, the team at Terminator 2D: No Fate developer Bitmap Bureau has seen this future, and they clearly don’t like it. As such, Terminator 2D is an unapologetically nostalgic sidescroller, specifically designed to send players directly back to the 16-bit era of the ’90s to experience the greatest T2 game we never played. Exceedingly short by modern standards but brimming with love for James Cameron’s indisputable sci-fi classic, Terminator 2D is part time machine, part uncommonly terrific movie tie-in. In an insane world, it’s the sanest choice.

Terminator 2D’s main story mode – which follows the events of T2, with a few expanded diversions – takes roughly an hour to complete successfully. However, it took me a few runs to actually achieve this. Admittedly, this is incredibly short by contemporary standards – but it’s nonetheless authentic to an era where a game’s perceived girth was significantly inflated by the amount of times you’d need to play through nearly the entire thing in order to reach the end.

This philosophy feels pretty heavily baked into Terminator 2D and, even though I no longer have the time, the patience, or the sugar-enhanced reflexes of a 12-year-old with no job, I do respect the format. Sure, burning through my continues on an encounter I didn’t quite understand immediately was frustrating, and needing to start all over again is never fun. However, pushing past punishing sections that gave me grief on previous playthroughs is undeniably rewarding. I only wish you weren’t limited to accumulating a maximum of just nine continues. Whenever you have nine in the bank, any further ones you collect are converted to bonus points instead. Failing on the last level does sting a little harder knowing I could’ve easily had a few more cracks at it.

Are We Learning Yet?

On account of Terminator 2D’s modest length, I’m hesitant to drill down too specifically on how and when it shifts up its various mechanics, because encountering and learning this stuff for yourself is really all part of the process. What I will say, however, is that Terminator 2D doesn’t stagnate as a one-speed sidescroller, and there are tweaks throughout that typically require a slight adjustment to your approach. That is, one moment you might be cutting a plasma-fueled path through a Skynet-ravaged future in an overtly Contra-inspired run-and-gun action section, and the next you’re sneaking through the Pescadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, engaging in mild stealth and hiding from the T-1000. This level loses its suspense on subsequent visits thanks to its scripted nature, but the tension the first time around was palpable thanks to the excellent use of T2’s original music and the predilection of the deadly T-1000 to pop up out of nowhere.

T2’s music is actually used to incredible effect all throughout. It essentially does all the heavy lifting in terms of atmosphere in the absence of voice acting, with the dialogue relayed through on-screen text. The power metal version of T2’s main theme is a major highlight, and there’s a fabulously engineered bit of licensed music available in the biker bar that had me grinning like a cybernetic organism in a well-stocked weapons bunker – just be sure to punch that jukebox.

Happily, Terminator 2D is as fabulous to look at as it is to listen to. Its pixel art isn’t just brilliantly handsome, either; it’s also silkily animated. It oozes character at every opportunity, from the way the T-800 disdainfully tosses that unlucky biker onto a burning grill, to the desperate backpedalling of Sarah in the shadow of her worst nightmare, to the final flailings of the T-1000 as it cycles through its most recent shapeshifts in the pool of molten metal.

I Know Now Why You Cry

My biggest disappointment overall is the surprising lack of T-800 sequences, resulting in a Terminator game where you unfortunately spend limited time as the Terminator itself. When playing the core story thread – that is, the one that runs faithfully to the film – you’ll only play as the T-800 during the biker bar beatdown and the canal chase. It’s true that, in the spirit of the film, Bitmap Bureau can’t simply turn the T-800 into a mass-murdering WMD. After all, as we all know, it’s under strict instructions from John not to kill anyone. As regularly as ’90s movie tie-ins coloured outside the lines – present company included – it would’ve been quite discordant to have the Terminator arbitrarily massacre his way through a few levels.

Nonetheless, it does feel like there are some missed opportunities here. For instance, the biker bar beat ’em up gameplay could’ve made a very logical reappearance in, say, a mall level where the T-800 was forced to slap down some security on his way to rendezvous with John for the first time. This could’ve crescendoed with the T-800 blasting at the T-1000 with his shotgun. As it stands, this iconic encounter occurs in a brief still screen before the motorcycle chase, with no associated gameplay. It feels brushed over considering just how mega that moment is in the context of the movie.

It’s odd, too, that the T-800 blasting the cop cars assembled outside Cyberdyne Systems is only a playable portion in runs destined for one of Terminator 2D’s alternate endings. We actually don’t get it in a regular canon run. It’s stranger still that the T-800 is a passenger for the entire final showdown at the steel foundry with the T-1000. You get a glimpse of the fight between the two as you hustle through the area as Sarah – and the part of the slugfest you can watch does contain some terrific fan service – but I feel like it would’ve been nice to be able to participate in that. I’m not sure whether or not the slight sidelining of the T-800 is related to the fact Arnold Schwarzenegger's likeness is not actually featured in Terminator 2D, while Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong, and Michael Edwards are.

The T-800 does get some minigun action if you dabble with the decision options that become unlocked after completing the main story for the first time. These decisions send the story on a split path towards new endings that are bespoke to Terminator 2D. They’re an interesting novelty, and these paths result in some different riffs on previously completed levels, but I wouldn’t say they’re a massive boost to proceedings.

Completing these other paths is the key to unlocking several bonus modes, like a Boss Rush and one dubbed Mother of the Future (which focuses exclusively on Sarah). However, they’re really just slightly altered ways of playing the same thing over again – which is something I’ve done a whole bunch already just pounding through Story Mode. There’s also an ‘Arcade Mode’, which appears to just be Story Mode without continues. This one doesn’t interest me at all, and I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to emulate. Going to the arcade with a hole in your pocket?

At any rate, T2 is already a perfect film with a perfect ending, so any perversion of it is naturally going to be pretty unsatisfying in comparison (which is a lesson I thought we all learnt watching the first five minutes of Terminator: Dark Fate).

Destiny has always been the “we’ve got Star Wars at home” looter shooter, and with Destiny 2: Renegades, Bungie has decided to lean into that directly with a crossover expansion. Weirdly enough, that decision has worked out for the most part! Renegades doesn’t solve many of Destiny 2’s longstanding issues, including the fact that it’s been awkwardly spinning its wheels for over a year now (reminiscent of the MCU post-Endgame), but embracing the cheesiness and over-the-top drama of Star Wars is at the very least a surprisingly nice change of pace for what has otherwise become quite a predictable universe. Sure, the story is as corny and derivative as can be, and the new activity you’re encouraged to grind repeatedly starts to feel thin before that tale even concludes, but the few new mechanics, vehicles, and weapon types we do get are interesting enough, and the endgame activity is well-worth setting aside a few hours to run through. If you were waiting for a game-changing expansion to warrant diving back into Destiny 2, this isn’t it, but it’s not the worst way to pass your time if you’ve got a hankering for some looter shooter goodness or just love Star Wars.

If you’ve read any of my previous expansion reviews (of which there are a lot), then you’ll already know I am a weirdo Destiny fan who has stuck with this game through thick and thin – so it should mean something when I tell you that saying I am also a Star Wars fan would be such a massive understatement that I’m actually too embarrassed to elaborate further publicly. But even with my undying love of space wizards, I was initially mortified to learn Destiny 2 was planning a crossover with it. For me, it was the ultimate sign that Destiny was out of ideas, had gone “full Fortnite” in a way that seemed cheap and tacky, and was making one last desperation play during the slow death it’s been suffering for a number of years now. And, yeah, that all pretty much turned out to be true. But when I found myself watching two lightsaber-wielding foes square off in an epic cutscene while listening to the John Williams-esque music this expansion makes heavy use of, I’ll admit it won me over… at least a little.

Renegades does go out of its way to include every little Star Wars reference to a degree that can feel a bit forced – a crutch that’s continuously leaned upon in lieu of original ideas. For example, in the very first mission alone, you’ll find yourself trapped in a garbage compactor, rescuing someone from off-brand carbon freezing, and making a jump to lightspeed while a brooding, laser sword-wielding masked villain angrily watches you escape his grasp. It’s extremely on the nose stuff, and I was just as likely to experience a full-body cringe as I was to smile about it. But the complete “screw it” energy at play here as it full-throatedly embraces all the corniness and drama for which Star Wars is known does have a certain kind of refreshing charm that’s at least a distinct direction for Destiny 2. I’ve been complaining about this game feeling stale for at least five years now, so I’ve got to give Bungie a bit of credit for trying something new here.

Sadly, the neat Star Wars-inspired story is weighed down by quite a bit of added fat that presumably is there in hopes you won’t notice how short Renegades would be without it. In between the precious few story missions, you’ll be sent off to run the new Lawless Frontier activity (more on that later), which drip feeds little bits of info before the next real mission actually moves the plot forward. Many of the non-filler quests use the same maps as the Lawless Frontier as well, but they’re at least filled with more unique stuff to do, like one quest where you blow up what looks an awful lot like Jabba’s sail barge in front of what looks an awful lot like the sarlacc pit (also known as the Great Pit of Carkoon). To its credit, it does introduce some interesting characters like Aunor, who is basically just a Jedi Knight, and Dredgen Bael, our emotional red leather daddy Sith Lord, who spends all his time aura farming and making my wife squeal with alarming delight. The whole thing wraps up with a pretty satisfying ending, too, despite doing very little to move the actual overarching story in Destiny 2 forward at all.

The Lawless Frontier activity that Renegades repeatedly pushes you towards works like an extremely barebones extraction shooter. You and two others are dropped into one of three maps and directed towards a series of the typical combat-heavy chores for which Destiny is known, like carrying objects to a drop point while under fire or defending a zone while standing on a plate. Along the way, you collect loot boxes you then need to try and extract with before time runs out or you run out of the finite number of revives your team is given. And, of course, no extraction mode is complete without rival players being able to come in and ruin your day, which is accomplished via a solo invasion mode where you jump into someone else’s game and try to score a few kills to grab some quick loot.

The three map options are great, as each reworks an existing location within the Destiny universe to fit with the Star Wars theme. The icy Europa now looks a whole lot more like Hoth, with anti-aerial canons and frozen bunkers; Mars has been turned into the dune seas and canyons of Tatooine, but is sadly missing Banthas; And Venus has been transformed into a part-swampland, part-forest that plays off of Dagobah and Endor/Kashyyyk, respectively. For Star Wars fans of all stripes, seeing stuff like this is just rad, though it would have been nice if they’d put as much work into the baddies we’re fighting – aside from the Cabal wearing white Stormtrooper-adjacent armor, we’re basically just fighting the same handful of enemies we’ve been blasting for years.

As a non-invading player, Lawless Frontier is initially a strong game mode that gets less exciting each time you’re asked to do it (which is a whole lot). At first, the idea of killing loads of baddies in levels that are extremely enemy-dense and getting a whole lot of loot is pretty great, but once you’ve played each of the three maps and extraction scenarios a couple times, you’ll pretty quickly have these regions and all their secrets down to a science, leaving you to rinse and repeat the same handful of encounters ad nauseum – in other words, pretty typical Destiny stuff. It gets even worse when you realize that means you’re going to have to hear the same handful of conversations and one-liners so frequently that you’ll find yourself hearing them in your sleep. The good news is that the grind actually comes with some pretty stellar rewards this time, as I was able to get a whole bunch of cool stuff, like my first complete set of Tier 5 armor, after only a handful of hours grinding. If there were a bit more variety to the maps and encounters within Lawless Frontier, the grind to greater power and weapon rolls would have been a lot more enjoyable.

Helping break up the monotony though are Renegade Abilities, a new mechanic that lets you call in helpful support ordinances to assist you in battle. These could be things like a dome of healing light for you and your teammates or an airstrike that bombards the battlefield with explosions. As you level up your reputation by playing the Lawless Frontier, you’ll unlock new abilities along the way, including one that lets you summon a massive AT-ST-inspired mech called the Behemoth – a tool that can completely change the tide of battle during a high-level encounter. All of these are really nice, although they only work while in the Lawless Frontier extraction mode, and I’ll admit it made me pretty bummed out every time I was off doing something else like the story missions or the Dungeon activity and no longer had access to them. It’s probably too much to ask that something this powerful be available all the time, but it’s convinced me that we could use something similar to this across Destiny 2 more generally. After all, it’s sorta hard to go back to not having these cool toys after you’ve spent a dozen hours relying on them and leveling them up.

As for invading, as much as I had fun showing up and ruining other players’ games, the entire feature feels pretty out of place, as though it was only included because PvP is an obligatory element of an extraction shooter. When invading, it’s usually easy enough to score a few kills and make off with some quick loot, which is a really efficient way to gather gear, but it just feels wrong interrupting other players who are distracted with the mission before them and surrounded by NPC enemies.

And as the person being invaded, there’s not really any incentive to sweat it anyway – although you have a limited number of revives, you’re also given extra revives when you get invaded to offset any potential loss, which makes the stakes basically nonexistent. Sure, you can get a couple extra loot boxes by killing your invader, but it’s a pittance given how much loot this activity generates regardless. And since each match can only be invaded once, it’s extremely common for an unwelcome guest to appear early on, getting the PvP distraction out of the way right off the bat before proceeding with the actual extraction regardless of the outcome.

If invaders were incentivized to kill players until their run fails, or the people being invaded were given something more substantial for successfully fending off their attacker, I could see this mechanic being extremely cool, but it mostly just feels tacked on right now. Don’t get me wrong – I still spent enough time invading others to earn my red lightsaber crystal, because I’m a terrible person, but the whole system could have been executed better.

Speaking of which: lightsabers! Yeah, those are in Destiny 2 now (though they’re called Praxic Blades), and they’re basically as cool as you’d think. You can throw them like Vader trying to decapitate his own son, use them to deflect incoming fire back at your enemies like you’re picking off clankers in the Clone Wars, or just get in close for good ol’ fashioned Kylo-Ren-sticking-it-to-dear-old-dad action. The quest to unlock your very own saber is also one of the best in the expansion, and a lot of the endgame in Renegades revolves around unlocking various saber colors or mods to make your laser sword even cooler. Are they hugely different from the swords that already existed in Destiny 2? No, not really. But they’re enough of a tweak to be interesting while also just being way cool. Hard for me to get mad about that!

Luckily the Praxic Blade isn’t the only fresh tool in your arsenal, as Renegades also introduces a new weapon type called Heat Weapons. The idea behind these is that they’re Star Wars blasters that don’t need to be reloaded, but generate heat that occasionally requires a cooldown. I hate reloading in games, so this is a nice option for the impatient among us, even if waiting for heat to dissipate is effectively the same thing. Either way, they’re an interesting new wrinkle to Destiny 2’s growing arsenal of weapons, plus they make cool Star Wars pew-pew blaster sounds when you shoot them, which I think is the real headline here.

Once you’ve completed the brief story and run enough Lawless Frontier to be sick of it, the final hurdle is the raid-lite activity called Equillibrium. It’s the endgame finale filled with challenging mechanics and beautiful setpieces you’d expect, and awards some absolutely awesome loot that I won’t spoil here. These so-called Dungeons are some of Destiny 2’s best content, and Equilibrium is certainly no exception, with the Star Wars flair adding a much-needed change in style and tone. The bosses, which include a dual-saber wielding ninja badass, are memorable and fun to figure out, and the enemy-dense areas and platforming sections were a joy to explore. It’s worth noting that the entire thing is pretty short, and can be comfortably beaten in under two hours without much issue (it felt a lot easier than some of the previous dungeon activities), but I don’t have many complaints overall – it was time well-spent and I’m likely to play it again with friends in pursuit of the unique loot.

Depending on who you talk to, beat ‘em ups are either repetitive, button-mashy coin munchers or a deceptively simple vehicle for absolute combat mastery. Me? I’m in the latter camp. But how do you get people who aren’t sickos like myself interested? How do you lure them into taking the first steps down Sicko Road? This year’s Absolum tried by merging a mechanically excellent beat ‘em up with a middling roguelite. Marvel Cosmic Invasion developer Tribute Games – the cats behind Shredder’s Revenge, the best TMNT game since Turtles in Time– takes a different approach. It looks to the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games of old and asks one of the boldest questions I’ve seen a beat ‘em up pose in a New York minute: what if it was a tag game where you controlled multiple heroes? The answer, as it turns it, rules, even if the actual execution of Cosmic Invasion doesn’t quite live up to that concept.

I’ll be real with y’all; I’m not a Marvel guy. My dad’s into comics, and he got me into them, but DC was always his bag (he owns every Wonder Woman comic ever published, and no, that’s not an exaggeration), so I’m a DC kid at heart with a soft spot for indie comics. But I love the weirder parts of Marvel, especially the million conflicting X-men timelines and the cosmic stuff. It’s not the most popular thing Marvel publishes (that is and always will be Spider-Man, though X-men is no slouch), but it’s the most interesting. Give me that over the MCU stuff any day.

If the title didn’t give it away, that’s what Marvel Cosmic Invasion is about. The story here is real simple, almost like it has been ripped straight from the pages of a multi-issue event series. Big Bad Annihilus’s Annihilation Wave (listen, it’s comic books, okay?) is sweeping the galaxy! All life hangs in the balance! So it’s up to a rag-tag assortment of Marvel heroes, whether Earthborn or cosmic in origin, to bring him down. That’s all you gotta know. And you know what? It works.

A lot of it comes down to the team of 15 heroes that Tribute Games has assembled. Yeah, you’ve got the icons, the regulars who absolutely, positively accept-no-substitutes gotta be there. You know the ones: Storm, Wolverine, Spider-Man, Captain America. Then you’ve got cats that were B-listers before the movies elevated them to prominence: Black Panther, Iron Man, Rocket Raccoon, She-Hulk, Nova, Phoenix, Venom. And then there are the weird and wacky inclusions. Thor isn’t here; instead, you get Beta Ray Bill. Real ones know. How do you feel about Cosmic Ghost Rider? Then there’s my girl Phyla-Vell. Oh, and because this is cosmic Marvel, the Silver Surfer is also here, and he is caked up. To the Silver Surfer degenerate at Tribute Games: I see you, and I appreciate you.

But the reality is that everyone here looks stunning because the pixel art spritework is absolutely gorgeous. Whether it’s Phyla-Vell’s hair blowing gently in the wind, how Wolverine always looks like a coiled spring, or the subtle transformations that sometimes reveal Eddie Brock beneath the symbiote as Venom, Cosmic Invasion captures the essence of these characters, right down to their voices. Go ahead and watch one the videos on this page, tell me that doesn’t sound exactly like the way Wolverine or Storm or Iron Man sound in your head. True believers, the vibe is immaculate.

Structurally, Cosmic Invasion is a pretty standard beat ‘em up. Not counting the tutorial, there are 15 stages, including old Marvel standbys like New York City, Wakanda, the Savage Land, and Genosha, as well as more exotic environs like Fort Galactus, each with a fun little sub-description (Genosha’s is Heavy Metal; the Savage Land’s is Rumble in the Jungle). Stage selection is mostly a straight line, but occasionally the path will split before reconverging and you’ll have to complete both branches before moving on.

Levels themselves are good but unremarkable beat ‘em up fare with the occasional environmental hazard. There is a collectible to find to liven things up, as well as three challenges in each stage – two are hero specific, such as defeating a certain number of enemies with a certain character’s special attack, while the final one is related to the stage itself. All of this is good: the challenges encourage you to use new characters and learn the intricacies of each arena, and stages are well-designed, snappy (each one takes around 10-15 minutes), and visually distinct in cool ways – you’d never mistake Savage Lands for Klyntar or Genosha – but nothing here is going to redefine your expectations for what a beat ‘em up can be.

What makes Cosmic Invasion special is its characters. Up to four people can play Cosmic Invasion at once, each controlling two characters, and it’s impressive how different each character is, even if they might not feel that way at first. Take Nova and Iron Man; sure, both of their unique attacks are ranged energy blasts, but Nova’s can pass through and hit multiple targets at once. Iron Man’s don’t. Nova’s special attack is an energy field that only hits foes at close range, while Iron Man’s giant, Marvel vs. Capcom 2-esque laser can hit anyone standing anywhere on-screen, but it does require you to line up your enemies and aim well.

Meanwhile, Rocket is a ranged powerhouse, but his charged heavy attack does massive damage, while Phyla-Vell’s, who is more melee focused, can stun – and no one else has anything like her sword, which she can throw and then teleport to in order to start combos and then keep them going across the screen. Beta Ray Bill and Cap can both throw their weapons, too, but Cap’s shield returns to him automatically; Bill’s will spin in place, potentially juggling anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it until you manually call it back. Even She-Hulk and Wolverine, both up-close-and-personal bruisers, play differently. Logan is faster and all about chaining long stabby-stab combos together, while Jen is a powerhouse who focuses on short combos that launch her victims into the air for potential follow-ups. They both have grabs, but they operate in very different ways.

Some characters have dodges, while others can block and parry if they time things right, opening up more defensive options. Characters that fly have a much easier time dealing with winged foes than those who don’t, and it’s easier for them to avoid stampedes. Everyone is a little different, and that can have a massive impact on how they play.

What’s really cool, though, are the tag team elements. You only actively control one character at a time, and you can summon your tag partner for various assists to keep laying on the hurt, opening up cool new offensive possibilities – that could be a launcher, a standard combo, their unique ability, their metered “I want these guys dead” special attack, and so on. Figuring out the best combinations and how movesets interact is a lot of fun, especially since you don’t start with everyone unlocked. It’s possible to lose a character mid-level (they have separate health bars), but even then, all isn’t lost. You continue on with your remaining hero, and if you stumble upon some floor food, a time-honored beat ‘em up tradition, they’ll come back with a little health.

Characters also level up as you use them, gaining more health, passive abilities, and so on, encouraging you to experiment, especially in co-op. I played the whole game with my wife (a single run through the campaign took three hours), and while I think Cosmic Invasion is a good time solo, like basically every beat ‘em up, it’s better with friends.

If this beat ‘em up has any black eyes, it’s the lack of enemy variety. You’ll see the same core cast of baddies a lot in Cosmic Invasion, and while that’s not a huge problem (this happens in most beat ‘em ups), it can get a little old. It’s also hilariously obvious when you’re fighting a boss that will become a playable character later on because it feels like you’re fighting someone you’ll be able to play later. It can lead to some really funny moments, like when we were fighting the Silver Surfer on an elevator and kept knocking him into the abyss. Eventually, he’d levitate back up to us for more, only to get knocked down again. It wasn’t bad, but it was as goofy as Rob Liefeld-drawn feet or pouches.

If you get bored of beating on Annihilus’s minions, you can head to the Vault, where you can see each hero’s progress in the Hero Lab, learn about their history and the history of your foes in the Nova Corps Files, and listen to some of Cosmic Invasion’s excellent tracks. You can also spend Cosmic Cubes you earn to unlock nodes in the Cosmic Matrix for more color palettes, hero profiles, tunes, and Nova Corps Files. It’s a cool little system, and it even doubles as a neat way to make art if you unlock the right nodes in a way that forms a pattern. I made an adorable little bug, and I’ll miss him when I fill everything out and he’s gone.

Ladies, gentlemen, beloved they/thems, the Zombie-curious, wretched undead, at last, my watch is over (mostly). After two weeks of ups and downs with Call of Duty Black: Ops 7’s Zombies mode, my feelings are mixed. I think this version has all things that make Zombies good – a cleverly designed quest line, a cool map, the joy and despondence of the Mystery Box and Call of Duty’s consistently fun gunplay. But those returning strengths don’t shine this year in the way they usually do, with an Easter Egg hunt that’s too big, too time-consuming, and too unwieldy to wholeheartedly recommend. It’s not bad, per se, but it can be frustrating in a way that might make you bow out early. And that’s lousy.

First, I come with a confession, one that serves as the foundation for the thesis of this review: my squad and I, brave souls who conquered Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Zombies mode last year, and several others before, have not beaten Black Ops 7's signature Ashes of the Damned map at the time of this writing. Instead, the attempt fractured our group, perhaps permanently. One member threw up his hands and simply walked away after a particularly devastating loss, leaving us down a man and his not-insubstantial institutional knowledge and skill. Another was temporarily banned from our Discord after our last, best run. We were so close, friends. So tantalizingly close. And we came up short.

“Well, Will,” you might reasonably ask, “why issue a review if you haven’t finished it?” A few reasons, dear reader. First, we always try to learn the map and discover the process for ourselves, because that is how the average person will do it; second, because our failure mirrors what I feel many other teams will experience playing Ashes of the Damned, making it a crucial part of both this year’s game and this review; and third, because I have seen damn near everything the mode has to offer except the finale itself, and I already have a good idea of what Ashes of the Damned is: a very good map that can be exceptionally frustrating, especially if you use matchmaking to team up with random players, that often doesn’t work as it should.

Before we get started, allow me a chance to tee off on Black Ops 7’s PC anti-cheat system. This is Call of Duty. We will not be playing this game in a year because there will be a new one, and requiring me to flash a new BIOS to my computer and then go into my BIOS so I can flip the right switches until the Powers That Be decide I can play Call of Duty is ridiculous, even if this anti-cheat requirement remains in next year’s game, as Activision claims it will. You will never create an anti-cheat so good that it can’t be beaten, and whatever is gained from requiring all this is likely not worth it, nor the access it requires you give Activision to your computer. It is ludicrous, frankly, and the battle is unwinnable. If you create a better shield, the other guys will simply craft a better spear. Okay, rant over. Back to Zombies.

There is allegedly a story here – your characters are dropped somewhere into the Dark Aether where they run into a guy called the Warden who looks like the sexy ghoul from the Fallout TV series. After transmogrifying you into the semi-living by having a weird skull in a birdcage sap some of your life essence away like he’s the six-fingered man from The Princess Bride, you’re dropped into Ashes of the Damned and left to figure out what the hell is going on. All of it is very well-produced and so goofy that the only thing I could do was watch the introductory cutscene while emulating the face that I imagine a cow would make if you gave it cocaine, chuckle a little, and get on with it. Yeah, choosing certain characters gives you more story dialogue, but there’s nothing crazy here unless you’re already far too invested in Zombie lore. If that’s your bag, Godspeed. I’m here to shoot stuff.

Many of the pain points from last year remain early on – for instance, you can’t make your loadout until you hit level four, which means if Zombies is all you want to do in Black Ops 7 (and for me, it is), you’re stuck with a pistol and whatever you can earn by buying stuff on the walls after you’ve dispatched enough undead. Remember when games just let you have fun from the outset instead of unlocking it?

Otherwise, the underpinnings of Zombies feel much the same. You’re on a map, you open up new doors and paths with currency you earn, and you’ve got Pack-a-Punch machines to upgrade your guns. There’s additional armor you can apply plastered to the walls, an Arsenal to really crank up specific aspects of your weapons, Gobblegums for a little flavor if your mouth is lonely and you want a mid-battle pick-me-up that can make your run easier, and so on. And of course, while you’re managing all of this, the undead rise and hunger for flesh. Ghouls, man.

The gameplay here is similar to last year’s – I still love sliding at a group of zombies and firing off a shotgun until they’re just paste and all that. No, what’s new are the maps. Vandorn Farm is there for your classic, round-based survival attempts on a smaller map, Dead Ops Arcade for something a bit more ridiculous, and Cursed for the ultra hardcore (there’s no guidance here, loadouts and your HUD are limited, and you can equip Relics for additional difficulty). But the seven-course dinner of it all is Ashes of the Damned, the Easter Egg-heavy, “how does anyone figure any of this out?” gauntlet that you’ll have to clear if you really want to say you’ve beaten this year’s iteration. Ashes of the Damned is utterly massive, a monstrous figure eight with several different sub-sections (including Vandorn Farm) that, in years past, might have stood alone as a single map. Now they’re all connected by roads you’ll travel in a truck called Ol’ Tessie.

I love Ol’ Tessie. You can stand on the roof and lean out her windows, and if she takes too much damage, she’ll explode and you’ll have to repair her. She’s your way to and from places without dying (short of the jump pads you can activate), but early on she also becomes your Pack-A-Punch machine (which juices any gun you use it on, essential for the tougher zombies of later rounds), so something as simple as where you park her becomes a lot more important because you might need that boon or to get going in a hurry. You can also slot her with a turbo booster and three monster heads that shoot lightning. Tessie forever.

A lot of our runs began the same way: get Tessie outfitted, pray to pull the Ray Gun at the randomized Mystery Box (we had a shockingly good track record here; my friend Thomas kept pulling one on on his first or second try, and I am baffled by his power), and then start doing the rest of the Easter Eggs. Part of this becomes something you can brute force – you can use certain extremely rare Gobblegums to make it spawn a Ray Gun or the map’s Wonder Weapon – but it’s kind of essential for your long-term survival. Doing the map right means doing it quickly, before the round count gets too high and the Zombies get too strong, and there’s a fun sense of progression that comes with that. Not in a “yay, we’re getting more/better stuff” sense, although that is true, but in a “look at us mastering this” sense that I appreciate, especially since so many games now are about making your numbers go up and not actually improving as a player.

All the wacky Zombies stuff is still here. At one point, you have to throw an axe at the foot of a zombie hanging from a barn and then use a molotov cocktail to turn the severed foot into bones you can use for something else. At another point, you’re killing zombies inside of an old diner until one of them drops a key to the refrigerator in the back carrying a pretty grotesque surprise. It’s goofy and fun and I don’t know how anybody solves this stuff through anything other than trial and error, much less how the dev team comes up with it every year.

This is what makes Zombies so hard. Not only do you have to figure out all these steps, but you have to do them in order and remember where everything is on the map, and do all of it without your team dying. A full Zombies clear will take you several hours, and if you screw up and your whole team buys the farm late in that process, you’ll need to restart from scratch. You will lose every Gobblegum you spent, every weapon you jacked up with a Pack-A-Punch, every Perk you guzzled from a soda machine. Do everything you just did all over again.

It can be demoralizing, but I don’t actually mind this stuff. I’m a fighting game sicko, an action game degenerate, a beat ‘em up guy. I play in a competitive Madden league. I like learning the ins and outs of a system, mastering it, and watching what felt impossible become routine. That is one of the joys of playing games for me. But one of the crucial things you have to understand is that my Zombies group has never been made up of other game critics. It’s regular guys with nine-to-fives in fields like accounting and medicine and law and IT who play games only for fun. It’s always been something I’ve felt is necessary to review something like this: playing it with regular people. And this year, it was too much for some of them.

Part of that is how big Ashes of the Damned is. It’s a well-designed, varied map with a ton of different environments, but its sheer size means it can take a minute to get from Point A to Point B, even with Ol’ Tessie or a jump pad, and you’ll have to go all over Creation to finish it. The other issue is the number of steps involved to get things done. It’s a lot to remember! A lot to figure out! A lot to execute! And you’re expected to do it all in one run without all of you dying.

Even the rare Gobblegums that feel necessary for a good run are limited with the $250 Vault Edition, which was the version of Black Ops 7 we were provided by Activision for review. Using one of the rare ones that essentially makes the Mystery Box spawn a Ray Gun or loads you up with every perk at once and then failing on a run feels bad because you’ve lost a limited resource with little to show for it aside from whatever progress you’ve made in learning the map and whatever experience you gain for meta progression. Naturally, you can buy Gobblegum packs for real money, because of course, right? But the whole thing feels exploitative, like it’s hard because it wants you to give in and open your wallet and just buy the stuff that will make it easier.

And that’s assuming the map works properly. At one point, you have to use stun grenades to wake up a robot named Klaus. He’ll join up with you afterwards, and you can command him to interact with a computer that will then trigger a retinal scan that someone in your group has to stare at until a meter fills up. The problem is you’re being attacked by zombies the whole time. If everything’s working right, you can just have someone do that while the rest of the crew defends them. But we ran into an issue where Klaus simply wouldn’t activate the control panel no matter how many times we commanded him to. Instead, he’d stand dumbly in front of it like “Well, what do you want me to do?” while we fought off zombies before peacing out, requiring we spend valuable currency to bring him back. That time, he did activate it, but no matter how hard I stared at the retina scanner, the little bar wouldn’t go up. Needless to say, we died.

And that’s the thing, right? You’re going to die. You’re going to die because someone forgot to get an item you needed and you weren’t high enough level to craft it at the bench (this, for the record, is extremely dumb; just let me make a throwing axe! Yes, you can find one on the map if you know where to look; that isn’t the point); because OI’ Tessie took a bunch of damage and exploded, stranding you in the No Man’s Land between proper segments; because somebody got knocked off a truck and you had to go back for them; because you got cornered and made a mistake; because you forgot what to do for step 227 and had to look it up; and on and on and on. You will have to start over again, and remember, a full run takes hours and must be done in a single sitting.

And yeah, I know the tricks to make it easier. Kill all but one zombie that you kite around so the next wave doesn’t spawn, make sure everyone has a self-revive, load up with perks and armor, and so on. All of that adds interesting depth. But if you screw up and you all die, it doesn’t matter how good that run was because, aside from whatever account progression you earned during it, it all gets wiped away when you fail. After a ton of attempts, I understand why some folks just throw up their hands and spend their limited time on this Earth doing something else.

Again, this doesn’t personally bother me; failure is part of the gig, and I fully intend to finish this year’s Zombies mode at some point in the next few weeks. But it did break up a group that has a long history of doing this, and I get why they were demoralized. After our best run, where we got really close to the end before someone screwed up and it all came crashing down, one of our best guys just refused to play anymore. “I already have a job and it's really stressful,” he told me afterwards. “The last thing I need is to come home and have to deal with this nonsense.” I wonder how many people are going to try Ashes of the Damned and come to a similar conclusion.

That sentiment feels like an indictment of this year’s Zombies to me. It is so big and so long and so unforgiving that a lot of people simply won’t be able to complete it naturally even if they do know all the steps because they’ll either have bad teammates or get unlucky or just get discouraged after failing several times and give up. It also feels more than a little pay-to-win with the Gobblegum situation, and with how much simply grinding levels improves your chances because you have better stuff. If all you want to do is play Zombies, both of those things drag the experience down. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a challenge, but it probably shouldn’t have people comparing it to their job, either. I fear the good folks behind this year’s Zombies mode have gotten so lost in the sauce that attempting to please the hardcore Zombies community may have come at the cost of letting regular people complete the map.

Honestly, the biggest problem we ran into on most runs was other people. We had teammates that didn’t speak English (I don’t hold that against them at all, it just makes communication difficult), teammates that ran off and left the rest of us to die, teammates that barely contributed or didn't collaborate at all, and so on. In fact, basically every good run we had early on was derailed by our matchmade fourth player; we normally roll with a full squad of four, but not everyone was available to play every night. I cannot imagine trying to do this with an entirely matchmade group. Eventually, I just turned off auto-fill and we ran a group of three when our fourth couldn’t make it, which was better than adding another random player to the mix.

When I fired up Cricket 26 for the first time and hopped into a quick five-over game to get my eye in, I was pleasantly surprised by how substantially smoother it all seemed in contrast with the messy launch state of 2023’s Cricket 24. Cricket 26’s lighting and player models all really pop, the inputs feel far snappier, and the fielders all seem like they actually know there’s a game being played – unlike the dawdling doofuses in Cricket 24 who all seemed to stand around with their hands in their pockets. Then my match between the Mumbai Indians and the Delhi Capitals crashed at the change of innings. At which point I reloaded it, and it crashed again. And again. In fact, the longer I played Cricket 26, the more obvious its numerous technical flaws became, to the point that I’d have to say that my experience with Big Ant Studios’ latest has been a bit like playing on a cricket pitch in Perth – the grass looks greener on day one, but it’s not too long before the cracks start to show.

Still, there’s no question that when it works, Cricket 26 presents a much more enjoyable representation of the sport than Cricket 24 was ever capable of. Batting, in particular, feels far more responsive and natural – whether you’re using the arcade-style button controls or the more intuitive dual-stick setup. For the first time in a long time with this series, I feel like I’m able to consistently direct my strokes where I actually intend them to go, unlike Cricket 24 which often felt a bit predetermined in the way I’d keep knocking off-drives straight to the same cover fielder no matter where I aimed or how well I timed it.

That’s not to say that scoring runs has become too easy, however, and I’ve found myself playing down the wrong line and getting beaten on the inside and outside edges of the bat, which also feels far more true to life. Even on the default difficulty setting, batting in Cricket 26 has provided an absorbing challenge for the most part. I’m yet to feel the need to dig deep into the menus to painstakingly fiddle with the various timing and physics sliders in an effort to make it feel more realistic like I did with Cricket 24, which takes a lot of the trial and error out of the experience.

Bowling, on the other hand, hasn’t changed quite as much but it still feels engaging. I had hoped that the wobble seam delivery would have been added to Cricket 26, especially given that it’s become such a common variation these days that Pat Cummins has basically made it his stock ball, but sadly that’s not the case here – and the floaty knuckleball that a number of Indian pacers have added to their arsenals over the past decade or so hasn’t been included either. However, while the delivery types themselves remain the same, there has been some added nuance introduced in the form of the effect of wind on the ball. An arrow on the edge of the pitch map indicates the direction and strength that a gale is blowing, and that can be used to enhance the amount of swing on a delivery (or if you’re batting, how much further a lofted shot will travel should you aim it downwind). It’s a thoughtful addition that brings some extra strategy to each ball you face or deliver.

There’s clearly been a lot of work put into player animations too, especially as far as unique bowling actions are concerned. It’s great to see Nathan Lyon’s signature right-handed flick to the side as he leaves the top of his mark, or Mitchell Santner’s shark fin-like front hand carving through the air above his head as he’s about to release the ball. Some of these unique bowling actions aren’t just for show, either – I’ve found facing Jofra Archer to be noticeably more awkward than other fast bowlers, not just because of his speed on the ball but also the way he seems to lumber in so casually before suddenly exploding through the crease. It’s kept me more conscious of making subtle adjustments to my shot timing as the opposing team rotates from one bowler to the next.

Elsewhere, fielding has been substantially overhauled, although certain frustrating quirks still remain. There’s now much less of a delay between a fielder gathering the ball and making a return throw, and there are some new catching animations that see them diving and sliding around in a more agile fashion than they ever did in Cricket 24. However, the slow-motion runout system almost always makes me throw to the opposite end that I intended, and wicketkeeper behaviour is erratic. One moment they’re stubbornly refusing to swipe the bails off during a genuine stumping chance, the next they’re taking a superhuman catch around their ankles down the leg side. Yet, by and large, Cricket 26’s fielders display a level of alertness that more closely resembles the real thing, and it’s nice to see them run in pairs for relay throws or dive towards the rope for a tap-back.

Un-urned

Given that it’s been branded as ‘the official game of the Ashes’, you’d think that Cricket 26’s special mode dedicated to the freshly reignited Australia-England rivalry would have been given extra attention from the developers to ensure that it really capitalised on what has been one of the most hyped test series in recent memory. However, there appears to have been about as much thought and effort put into it as England’s approach to batting on day two of the recent first Ashes test. Sure, you do get to play all five test matches in the series in all of the relevant Aussie venues, including a day-night pink ball test at the Gabba, but there really is little else here to distinguish the mode from just building a series yourself using the tour creator that returns from Cricket 24.

There are no practice matches to play for the touring side, although given English coach Brendon McCullum’s ‘it will be alright on the night’ philosophy for player preparation, perhaps that’s true to life. Instead, the build up to each of the five matches in the series goes like this: you press a button to travel to the city hosting the match, complete a fairly modest and non-tailorable training minigame that involves bowling precisely three deliveries and a handful of batting strokes, select your final 11 from your squad of 16, mindlessly spam your way through painfully generic answers in a press conference, and then play the match itself. Repeat that four more times and you’re done.

There is a team confidence meter to maintain, and optional match objectives to complete as well, but it all feels a bit nebulous. Team confidence fluctuates depending on match results, success or failure in the training minigames, and your responses to press conference questions, but it’s all applied so inconsistently and absolutely none of it seems to have a measurable effect on anything. I failed my first training session and my team confidence took a dive, meaning I went into the opening test at Perth with my Australian team seemingly flagging at 55% confidence. It clearly didn’t make much of a difference, though, since I still ended up smashing England inside three days.

The pre-match press conferences are particularly hard to engage with, given that the questions you have to field are often factually incorrect. I kept getting asked about how I felt about securing a draw in a previous match, even though I’d won it, or I’d be asked to reflect on my performance at a certain venue even though I hadn’t played there yet. It feels less like facing a press room full of proper sports journalists and more like being punked by a crowd of teenage TikTok pranksters.

Successfully completing optional match objectives also gives team confidence a boost, but these goals seem to veer wildly from the realistic to the ridiculous. In one match I was tasked with scoring 64 combined runs with the tail, which was tricky but ultimately attainable, while in another my objective was to bat at above eight runs an over, which is an insane demand for a test match innings. You could field a team of 11 Harry Brooks and still struggle to score at that rate. You couldn’t field a team of 11 Brendan Doggetts, though, or even a single Brendan Doggett for that matter, given that he’s disappointingly absent from Australia’s Ashes squad in Cricket 26 despite making his international debut last week.

Armchair-man of the Board

So the Ashes mode is more slapdash than fierce clash, and Cricket 26’s only other new mode of note, the management career, is equally as half-baked. To be honest, I’m typically not one to dabble in the front office side of sports simulations, so perhaps I’m not best equipped to evaluate this series’ first crack at allowing players to run a cricket club. However, after investing several hours into this fairly superficial squad management sim let’s just say I’m unlikely to become a convert any time soon.

There’s just not an enormous amount to it. You don’t get to manage the budget for player salaries, or hire a coaching staff, for example. You basically just pick your team and either play the matches or simulate them, not unlike the existing player career mode minus the training minigames and net sessions in between. It also seems a shame that there’s no option to watch a generated highlights package when you simulate the result like you can in the Football Manager series. Unless you want to be fully hands-on with each match, your only exposure to the team’s performance is via static scorecards and text-based match reports that pop up in your email inbox, which feels pretty dry.

If you do opt to play the games yourself, there doesn’t appear to be any management options during a match that make it feel any different to the general gameplay featured elsewhere. You can’t, say, run tactical team instructions out to the middle with the 12th man during a drinks break, or send a substitute fielder on because your ageing opening batsman injured his back playing a golf tournament the day before the game. Strangely enough it also doesn’t seem to factor in the unavailability of players with national team duties either. I was able to steer the NSW Blues to the top of the Sheffield Shield, largely because the likes of Australian test team stars Steve Smith, Pat Cummins, and Mitchell Starc were inexplicably available to be picked for every match of the domestic summer.

Cricket 26’s management career just feels underdone and, in some aspects, partially broken. You can adjust training schedules for each of your players, like assigning them recovery sessions to reduce fatigue or team bonding sessions to boost their individual morale meters. However, I struggled to really get a feel for the impact of these options given that the training section of the management menu often just completely failed to load. I also encountered a bug that would cause Cricket 26 to crash everytime I tried to finalise my line-up. The irony that the design of Cricket 26’s dedicated management mode appears to have been somewhat mismanaged certainly isn’t lost on me.

Elsewhere, Cricket 26 possesses most of the same feature set as Cricket 24, from the largely unaltered player career mode to the microtransaction-riddled card collecting of Pro Team – with the latter featuring a new mode called Centurian. At the time of writing this just has a ‘Coming Soon’ message posted on it, leaving me completely in the dark as to what it might actually entail. The robust suite of customisation tools for everything from players to bats to stadia remain present and useful, while the actual number of licensed teams stays more or less the same. On the upside, all but one of the 10 IPL teams are now officially included, but on the downside you still need to rely on the talents of community creators to import Indian and South African squads into Cricket 26, and New Zealand’s Dream11 Super Smash competition has seemingly been ditched entirely.

Patches Fix Matches

In every area in which Cricket 26 excels, though, the shine is regularly taken off it as though it’s been polished with a piece of 60 grit sandpaper pinched from David Warner’s kit bag. It feels exhilarating to setup a batsmen by pushing a few straight balls across him before pulling the trigger on a hooping in-swinger than cannons into his pads, but it’s infuriating to slave away in search of a wicket only to watch a thick edge sail into the keeper’s gloves and have it given not out for no clear reason, with no option to challenge the umpire’s decision (at one point, this happened to me three times in the space of one over). It’s satisfying to swivel-pull a short ball into the crowd for six, but absolutely deflating to hook it down to deep backward square and get caught on the boundary, only to watch the fielder very clearly step on the rope, and still be given out anyway.

I like that matches can now be affected by rain and outcomes can be decided by the Duckworth-Lewis method, but so far my only exposure to it came when I was a mere three overs into the first innings of a T20. Without warning, the game was abruptly called off due to rain and my team was declared the winner – even though I was the only one who’d had a chance to bat. This is not to mention the regular crashes I’ve experienced during the 20 hours or so I’ve invested into Cricket 26 on the PlayStation 5 so far, or the many UI glitches – like the scoreboard for The Hundred that seems to be a placeholder hastily cobbled together in MS Paint. Or the many unrealistic AI behaviours, like bowling a bunch of short stuff in the opening over of a test – or indeed opening the bowling with one of its batsmen.

Meanwhile, and as has long since become customary with Big Ant’s cricket games, the in-game commentary is about as accurate as often as a broken wristwatch. I welcome the presence of cricket luminaries like David Gower and Adam Gilchrist to bring their insights to the game, but not when it seems like they’ve been blindfolded and spun around in a circle before they entered the commentary box like they’re playing a verbal game of pin the tail on the donkey.

In spite of these issues, I find myself far more invested in Cricket 26’s future because the core experience out in the field is such a major step up from the previous game that I’m willing to live with the noticeable rough edges. Assuming that Big Ant can stamp out most of the bugs, this could yet turn out to be one of the best cricket simulations the Aussie developer has ever produced. Yet even though the developer does have a track record of providing plenty of post-release support to its cricket games – and there have already been four patches for the PlayStation 5 version in the first week since launch – it’s hard at this point to be confident that it will rectify all of my complaints. As if to justify my slight pessimism, I fired up Cricket 24 this week to compare it side by side with Cricket 26, only to discover that Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett’s facial textures had disappeared completely. I know the English batting order has a tendency to lose their heads, but this is ridiculous – and then my test match crashed before I could even bowl a ball. To be clear, that’s after more than two years of post-launch patching.

Note: This review specifically covers the Multiplayer modes in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our Zombies review or our campaign review.

It's autumn, 2025, and I have played enough of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 multiplayer to settle into my annual camo grind. I have prestiged, both in character level and my assault rifle, and after about 20 hours I feel confident declaring that the multiplayer portion of Black Ops 7 is great. I've had an absolute blast thanks to solid maps, the awesome updated omnimove system, and the choice to play either skill-based or traditional matches. It’s not without flaws: mid-match leavers have been a real problem in the default matchmaking, and while all the guns feel really good, none of them are standout stars – but the things I like, and some parts I downright love, far outweigh the things I don't this year.

Since skill-based matchmaking is the most contentious subject around this year's Call of Duty, I'm going to address it right here at the start. I believe swapping out SBMM as the default setting is great… and also it sucks. It's a real Schroedinger's CoD situation here. The biggest win for everyone, however, is the fact that you have a choice. Treyarch could have only done it one way or the other, but it gave us both, and the freedom to switch between these modes whenever you want is fantastic – especially because I often found traditional, non-SBMM to be a very humbling, and sometimes even frustrating, experience as a CoD player of medium skill.

First, a little background for those unaware: SBMM has been the default matchmaking mode for a while now, and very vocal portion of the CoD faithful hate it. When you'd queue up in a lobby for a multiplayer match, some Activision supercomputer somewhere would run the numbers and match you up with people of roughly the same level of skill. The criticism of this system is that you don’t really know whether or not you are good or bad, because SBMM made it so players never had to face too great a challenge. If you dominated for a few matches, you just got moved up to another lobby to match your skill, and lobbies weren't persistent. Same thing if you stunk up the joint, you'd drop down, but there was no real way to tell where in the power ladder you were at any given time.

So, this year, Treyarch made lobbies where "skill is minimally considered" be the default, but kept the option open to still play SBMM in the matchmaking menu (though it's not really apparent unless you know what to look for). Again, I really like that they give you the option for either, but I do wish the distinction was made a little more obvious, because the difference in terms of play experience is substantial. My gut tells me the vast majority of CoD players don't even know about this change, and there are surely a lot of non-competitive people wondering why in the hell they suck all of a sudden this year.

I've been playing both modes but using the default non-SBMM lobbies the majority of the time, and let me tell you: you don't know what the hell you're in for when you first enter a new match. You might find yourself in a lobby of complete boneheads who you can easily dominate for the win. I found this situation to be a frequent enough occurrence to be noticeable, but not a majority one. No, most of the time, I'd seem to load into a lobby with the god-tier Call of Duty players who this matchmaking change had in mind. And when that happens, it tends to not be very fun.

There is something to be said about playing against people above your skill level if you want to get better. Michael Jordan didn't get so good at basketball by only practicing against a high school team. But on the flipside, I am the high school basketball player, and now I'm loading into a lobby with the 1996 Chicago Bulls.

It's quite hard to learn what you’re doing wrong when you're facing people with skill levels that completely dwarf your own. By the time my reflexes register an opponent, I'm already dead. Don't get me wrong: I love being able to witness this level of play. It's super human. Sometimes I'll watch a replay of my own defeat just to be amazed by how good the other player is. In some instances, getting completely smoked has opened my eyes to what's possible and given me something to aspire to. But all that promise of self-improvement is short lived, because after a match or two of coming in dead last, I'm ready to find a new lobby.

And I know I'm not the only one – I at least finish matches like that, but others aren’t usually so courteous. In one extreme case, my team had multiple players of exceptional skill, one of whom had the Nuke calling card. You can't get that calling card without scoring 30 uninterrupted kills in a single match. You gotta be real good, and this person was truly incredible. So, rather than get shot down over and over again, the other team just quit. By the end of the match, it was six versus one, which turned an exciting win into a huge letdown, with the latter half of the match spent running around the map trying to find the one brave hanger-on.

Even when the imbalance isn’t quite that drastic, I see at least one or two people drop out frequently in the default lobbies. Some of those are going to be people who went AFK or lost their connection, sure. Maybe that's the case more often than I am assuming, but it sure does feel like other players are getting frustrated faster and more consistently than when SBMM was the norm, especially when it happens to five out of the six members of the opposing team – something I’ve never seen occur in a CoD before this one.

Does this mean I think including non-SBMM is a mistake? No, but only because you can still go back to the old style. The best part of the change is we can finally see what it’s like after years of debate, but better still, there's a choice between the two systems. I don't think having non-SBMM as the default has proven to be the right move, and I hope Treyarch decides to flip it back at some point in a post-launch patch. But at least the option means everyone can be happy. (Just kidding! This is Call of Duty, there's going to be unhappy people no matter what.)

One of the side benefits to this new system is that once you get your ass kicked a few dozen times and go back to the SBMM lobbies, you will feel like a god for the first few matches. The persistent lobbies carry through on both modes, so you can stick with the same group or back out to find a new lobby. It's actually super easy to swap around, which is a real time saver if you're burning a 2XP token.

Weapons and Loadouts

Black Ops 7 is the first CoD I can think of where I haven't gravitated toward a single dominant weapon for my playstyle. Last year it was the XM4 assault rifle. It just felt good from level one on up, and by the time I had all the attachments, it cemented itself as my go-to option. In the years before that, I gravitated towards SMG and even marksman rifles (I'm weird but I love the Kar98 in Modern Warfare). This year, none of the guns are really jumping out at me, nor giving me that past feeling of "oh yeah, this is the one I'm going to grind first." But that’s more a testament to how they generally feel really good across the board more than anything else..

One surprise for me, though, is the MK.78 LMG. I've always enjoyed the LMGs, but this one is ridiculous. I can score kills from halfway across a map like Retrieval with ease. The only real weakness is in those tight interior sections of a map, which is to be expected given its slow aim-down-sight speed, but even then I find myself getting the jump on people more often than not. It isn't until they're almost in melee range that it fails me. It's my favorite gun at the moment, and I expect some manner of nerf in the future honestly, as it feels a little too easy to use right now.

I feel the same way about the M8A1 marksman rifle, a burst-fire gun that I also really like and sometimes seems a little too accurate. A well-aimed three-round burst can usually dispatch an opponent with ease no matter where you are on a map. The same holds true for the Shadow SK sniper rifle. If you've read any of my past reviews, you know I hate sniper rifles and the people who use them – but, for whatever reason, I'm actually pretty capable with the Shadow SK. Sniper is a class of weapon I've historically only really played to satisfy some daily challenge or on the camo grind, but this year I find it to be well within my capabilities as a CoD player. I dropped on iron sights as an attachment and ended up getting Play of the Game at one point. It's fun and I'm good at it, which makes me naturally assume there's something wrong with it.

While even the best weapons don't really stand out to me like in years past, the notable exception are the SMGs, but they stand out because they feel bad. It's usually one of my favorite weapon classes, but this time none of them have felt like anything I want to use long-term. Traditionally they've always excelled at close-to-medium range, but this year's don't seem to work at anything but super-close range. I'm going to have to revisit them, but of all the unlockable SMGs, I didn't find a single one I’d consider for a daily driver. I'm hoping when I get deep into my camo grinds I'll find some combination that feels right, but for now, they're very uninspired.

Here's the thing about Call of Duty: the guns are always good. They figured this formula out a long time ago, which makes it hard to significantly improve on them. This year is no exception. With the exception of the SMGs, this relative equality of quality across the board is one of the more impressive parts of this series, even if it means there are no true stars this year. It's a ultimately good problem to have. "Oh no, I like almost all of these guns, boo hoo to me, they're nearly all fun and good."

Omnimovement Rules

Omnimovement is a relatively new addition to CoD, one that I liked last year but found generally favored controller players. The best thing about the addition of omnimovement, however, was the ability to functionally move and aim while prone. It's a very legit strategy in multiplayer to fling yourself backwards into a corner and reduce your target footprint while maintaining full aim. Before omnimovement, you'd lay prone and were extremely limited in how and where you could aim. All the cool stuff from Black Ops 6 is still here, and I do think for the most part it helps controller players more than mouse and keyboard nerds like myself, but that doesn’t mean I’d trade it away.

What's new for Black Ops 7 is the ability to wall run and wall jump, and that changes everything in the best possible way. When you come around a corner, you best be keeping an eye on the sky, because the move now is for people to try and get the jump on one another, literally. It's a whole new axis you need to be aware of, and it seems like it should be overwhelming to try and keep track of, but it's not. It's actually awesome, especially when the situation is flipped and you fly out from behind a wall and dispatch an opponent before you even hit the ground.

You can bounce up to three times, and there are precious few places where this can be consistently maxed out, but in Cortex I got smoked by someone who made full use of that to bounce back and forth between the giant sci-fi holding tanks. I even watched him do it in awe, something that no doubt cost me the L – but hey man, respect where respect is due.

The maps are purposefully designed with this new system in mind, and Blackheart and Imprint in particular have spots where CoD is practically begging you to wall run and jump. It doesn't feel tacked on or unnecessary, either. It feels as natural as any other movement on any other map in any other CoD. It's just done so well, and in some ways legitimizes traditional bunny-hopping. Now, instead of spamming jump like an idiot, you can parkour off the walls to both avoid getting hit and nail that perfect trick shot of your own.

What I find technically impressive is I've yet to encounter any glitches or exploits to the improved omnimovement system. It seems like letting players bounce 30 feet in the air would expose some cracks in the geometry, but so far, so good. It does feel a little weird when you jump higher than the top of a structure but an invisible wall keeps you from landing on it. I would like it if there were more areas only accessible with smartly timed jumps. Right now, there's a floating shipping container in Exposure that requires good timing to reach, but that's about the only one that springs to mind. And getting to it is so fun: timing your jumps with the sway of the container. Give us more hard-to-reach places, please!

More Multiplayer Modes

Skirmish, the 20v20 mode, is new this year – but outside of the purposes of this review, I don't think I'll play it again. It's just not fun. The maps are too small for Warzone-type play, but too big for the normal objective-based play. It's pure chaos, but not in a way I enjoy.

Since you respawn from the air in a wingsuit, you're a prime target to get shot out of the sky and go right back into a 10-second cooldown to spawn again. On the flip side, if a sniper has you pinned down, you can just respawn and fly toward wherever they are sitting to take them out. Either way, I can't figure out a strategic approach to Skirmish that’s any fun, which is something I value greatly in my multiplayer modes. The quick turnover rate means you don't get the opportunity to flank an entrenched player or team, or really make any strategic moves at all other than land, shoot, die, repeat.

Gunfight returns this year and it's another mode I don't really care for. They're 2v2 matches where you get random guns at the start of each round, taking place on small maps, and it's not for me. Playing with a random person isn't very fun, unless you end up with someone REALLY good. It just doesn't jibe with the way I want to play Call of Duty and, in my experience, whichever team gets the first win is going to be the one that wins the whole match more often than not. But I'll never advocate for fewer modes, and I know some people really enjoy Gunfight, so I’m at least glad it’s available.

Most of the more traditional multiplayer modes from last year are back as well, including Kill Confirmed, Domination, Hardpoint, Control, and Team Deathmatch, and I don’t really dislike any of them. Search & Destroy is also back, but I have not once been dropped into a map for it in regular matchmaking. In fact, I found myself dropped into Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed, and Overload way more than any of the other modes, and I’m not totally sure why that is.

Overload is new this year, and it's basically capture the flag. There's an EMP device that spawns on the map, and the goal is to pick it up and run it into the opposing team's zone to get the win. I actually really like this mode, especially on maps like Flagship. Unlike Skirmish, the chaos is fun, and doing a diving leap into the enemy team's zone when you have the EMP is an excellent feeling.

Overload is definitely my favorite objective-based mode, while Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All remain my favorite modes of all. When I'm on the grind, I'll uncheck all modes except those two, and only select them all again when I'm teaming up with friends for some generalized multiplayer chaos. Both of these modes have always been my favorites because the objective is simple: get as many kills as possible during a match to win. I'm a simple man of simple tastes. When there's only one thing to do, there's less chance your team will screw it up – especially since my occasional frustration with objective-based modes in CoD arises when people treat them like Deathmatch anyway. For example, you might have a team in Hardpoint that completely dominates the field, scoring kill after kill, but also ignores holding the Hardpoint, and you end up with a sour-tasting loss.

That's not the case in Team Deathmatch or Free-for-All. You just run around shooting people until the match is over. No pick-ups like Kill Confirmed, no holding an area like Hardpoint, no rushing the EMP device to the enemy's base like in Overload. They're my favorite modes because I can shut off my brain and focus on getting better with my weapons. And, best of all, any skill improvements made during Team Deathmatch and Free-for-All carry over to the objective-based modes.

Mapping it Out

Black Ops 7's first batch of multiplayer maps are really good. They all do an excellent job showing off the new wall run and wall jump mechanics, with some areas on the maps specifically designed to let you run and jump over pits or around corners. I don't think there's a dud in the bunch. Even the ones I didn't really care much for at first, like Scar or Homestead, I warmed up to quite a bit after a few matches.

I think my favorite maps are Retrieval and Hijacked. Retrieval is a medium-sized map with a melting glacier on one end, a frozen river on the other, and plenty of structures and different levels in between. It's where I was able to get my first "moonshot," an 86m shot with the MK.78 LMG. Apart from being a really fun map, it's also visually one of my favorites. I love the winding tunnels of sparkling ice inside the base of the glacier.

Hijacked takes place on a yacht with two lanes down either side, a middle area where they all meet, and different levels of the boat both above and below deck. It's a great map to rack up multikills, especially if you're playing against a team of less experienced players. You can post up on one of those lanes and wait for people to come around the corner in a group and just go crazy. At the same time, it's a snap to flank those positions, so you can't stay for too long unless you want to get smoked.

All of the maps are built expertly. There's no annoying sniper nest or hidey-holes in them, which means campers have a really hard time spending half the match in one little area. If you stop moving, someone's going to get you, because there's nowhere to hide that doesn't have some angle of attack. You might find a place to back into a corner, sure, but we all know to check the corners in Call of Duty. It boggles my mind to think about the know-how involved in designing maps like the ones here, with a level of expertise that brings the quality of all the maps to a consistently high standard. None of them rise too high above the pack but, just like with the guns, that’s not a terrible problem to have when I’m having such a good time with all of them.

Hot off of dozens of hours reviewing the sweatiest kind of game imaginable in ARC Raiders, wading into the cozy waters of Disney Dreamlight Valley once again was like stepping into a warm bath at the end of a hard day’s work. I’ve managed to mostly keep up with this charming, Disney-infused life simulator for the past three years, which has been content with adding a handful of new areas and characters here and there rather than innovating in that time. But with its latest expansion, Wishblossom Ranch, developer Gameloft Montreal promised a massive new region to explore atop the back of various recognizable steeds that seemed like a perfect reason to return for an extended stay. It’s without question the most ambitious update yet, with some interesting mechanical tweaks, like the focus on riding and building bonds with horses to unlock new abilities – but that ambition comes at the cost of this being the most buggy version of Disney Dreamlight Valley so far. Similarly, the new map has some of the most creative and unique regions I’ve seen in any cozy game, but that’s offset by new characters that I had a hard time connecting with and the usual, completely unnecessary grind to get through its main quests. All-in-all, I’m still glad to be back in the comforting embrace of this incredibly zen game, but the admirable risks Wishblossom Ranch takes only pay off some of the time.

If you’ve yet to visit Dreamlight Valley’s colorful, cartoonish world, this is a life simulator that’s centered around reconnecting with Disney characters from your childhood and the hopeful, optimistic sense of wonder you presumably had beaten out of you in the years since. You’ll run around performing low stress activities like gardening, cooking, and fishing while hanging out with the likes of Simba from the Lion King, Elsa from Frozen, and Goofy from… well, y’know, it’s Goofy. Wishblossom Ranch is the latest made up compound word followed by a location noun to be added to the mix, and it asks you to solve a mystery surrounding a place where one’s wishes are granted that seems to have run out of magic. While hot on the case, you’ll meet a handful of new Disney characters to befriend, explore and settle the biggest regions Dreamlight Valley has seen so far, and, most importantly, unlock a roster of iconic mounts to ride around on. When all of that is working, it’s some of the best-spent hours this chill adventure has offered me yet.

As the name Wishblossom Ranch implies, the main attraction this time around are the four-legged creatures you’ll tame, each with their own special ability to help you navigate the world and solve simple puzzles. The brave and bold Maximus from Tangled will let you leap across large gaps, while the mighty and battle-tested Khan from Mulan can kick apart physical barriers, and the goofy looking Pegasus from Hercules lets you fly to the highest heights of the mountainous area. You’ll also get to customize and name your own horse (mine was called Neighthan), which has the ability to push around heavy objects with its head like a big ol’ dummy. The puzzles you’ll solve using this suite of ponies are extremely basic, mostly serving as reminders that you can and should switch between mounts instantaneously and use their unique skills to push heavy blocks onto weighted pressure plates or kick obstructions to pieces, but they do a good job at giving you a reason to toggle between each of the loyal stallions and a good reason to level up your bonds with them.

The best part of these new companions, though, is the fact that they solve one of my least favorite things about Disney Dreamlight Valley since the very beginning: how insanely slow you move. I’ve had a bone to pick with this game for many years now on how painfully sluggish it feels to move around, even when aided by fast travel from zone-to-zone, but hopping atop a mount makes travel times so much faster it’s completely resolved that issue. And since you can also train your mount to help with things like stomping on ore deposits to mine for gems or dig holes in the ground for gardening, you can do lots of activities without ever having to dismount, which is a great touch. Really the only issue is that now the old areas feel so claustrophobic and small because you can sprint across them so quickly, and they could already be fairly tough to navigate on foot. Thankfully, the new areas have been designed with mounted travel in mind and are properly expansive, and getting caught in small environments in the old regions is still a lot less annoying than spending minutes on end slowly crawling through them.

Unfortunately, the process for actually improving your relationships with each of these guys can be a bit of a slog, and represents the biggest timegate you’ll find in Wishblossom Ranch, which otherwise does a pretty good job of getting rid of annoying grinds like the one found in A Rift in Time. Every time you unlock a new mount, you’ll have to spend an increasingly long amount of time leveling up your relationship with them until you unlock their unique ability that’s needed to get through the next step in the main story, and the primary way to do that is by waiting for real-life days to go by so that you can feed, pet, and brush them for large XP boosts… or do what I did and spend hours riding around aimlessly, jumping over random objects in the world to brute-force your way through it. I’m sure it would’ve been far less annoying if I would have just played more casually over the course of a few days or weeks as is likely recommended, but I’m really not a fan of arbitrary obstacles to progression that have no point beyond padding out how long it takes to finish the story, and this one is particularly silly. I’m okay with having to earn my social links with each of these quadrupedal friends, but it shouldn’t prevent me from unlocking the next area until I do, especially if the only way to speed it up is by doing meaningless busywork.

The good news is that once I did get through the grind and proceeded to the next region, I was rewarded with some of the most interesting places that Dreamlight Valley has featured to date. For example, the Pixie Acres is a magically-infused garden area with golden honey waterfalls in the distance and waterballoon fish swimming in the rivers, while my personal favorite area, Glamour Gulch, is entirely fashion-themed, and has pincushion fruit growing on trees, flowers that are made out of needles and thread, and mushrooms on the ground that are actually little buttons. The flavor and themes of these places are easily the most clever and compelling yet, and would probably even top the list of some of my favorite locales in any cozy game. It’s especially cool when you start gardening with seeds found in these areas to grow things like a vegetable made out of silk thread or cooking recipes out of those ingredients to whip up an entree called button stew. This is exactly the type of over-the-top goofiness Dreamlight Valley really needed, as opposed to the quite grounded options in the first area where you were harvesting regular ol’ tomatoes to cook tomato soup.

On the other hand, I personally was less enthused about the new characters than the environments themselves. Snow White, Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians, Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and Tinker Bell are the four new besties to befriend, only one of which didn’t completely annoy me over the course of the story. Snow White’s creepy cheeriness and impossibly high-pitched voice gave me the willies, Cruella de Vil was just straight up mean to me for several hours while I was forced run errands for her when I would have rather just told her to take a hike, and Tigger’s stretch of the story is so untethered from reality that I was just confused about what the heck I was doing the whole time, like one part where I had to reunite a family of balloons with faces drawn on them for some reason. Tinker Bell was genuinely the only one who was consistently helpful while also not boring into me with unnerving, wild eyes. I think this is probably the cast of added characters I connected with the least so far, even though Cruella de Vil did make me laugh by being such an irredeemable monster (as she should be). Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure lots of folks will enjoy adding these icons to Dreamlight Valley’s already impressive roster, and you can always just bring along an existing character you prefer, but man, Snow White is just not for me.

The main thing holding Wishblossom Ranch back, however, is the fact that it’s definitely the most unstable version of Dreamlight Valley so far, and that’s coming from someone who started playing during a preview period slightly before its Early Access debut back in 2022. I encountered all sorts of issues: I phased through an elevator that broke my ability to progress until I quit to the dashboard, my horses regularly hopped inside objects in the world in a super awkward and noticeable way, menus would randomly stop responding to me until I closed them and tried again, and quite a few other bizarre problems. And of particular annoyance, the absolutely atrocious camera problems Dreamlight Valley has always suffered from are amplified by the existence of bulky horses you spend a lot of time trotting upon, whose unwieldy nature cause the camera to clip through all sorts of pieces of the environment and cause a ton of issues. I appreciate that Wishblossom Ranch takes some really neat risks to make these maps bigger and add cool horse mechanics, but that seems to have come at the cost of everything feeling really janky at launch.

At one point I even found myself locked out of a critical quest line that would have resulted in me not being able to see the ending were it not for a developer-provided debug option that let me skip past the blockage. Were it not for the fact that I was working on this review, my journey would have come to a disappointing end right there. There were a few moments during the course of my adventure where it felt like I was walking on eggshells around the expansion’s bugs, and if I did a part of a quest too early or too late, I’d hold my breath hoping it wouldn’t result in a catastrophic error like the one I ultimately fell prey to. The devs at least know about this particular bug now, so hopefully they can fix it at some point, but I would recommend waiting for a round of polish or two before diving in yourself.

Note: This review specifically covers the Campaign mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. For our thoughts on the other modes, see our Zombies review or our multiplayer review.

Bucking the usual trend of breaks between numbered sequels, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is following just 12 months on from Black Ops 6, and you’d perhaps assume that meant only small tweaks to what was one of the series’ high points last year. But the teams at Raven and Treyarch evidently don’t see it that way, and have instead built one of the most unconventional CoD campaigns to date. In many ways, it doesn’t even feel like a CoD single-player mode. It’s more like a multiplayer experiment squeezed into a campaign shell, playing best when you’re accompanied by squadmates, echoing Zombies or the now-defunct DMZ at times. I recently criticised Battlefield 6’s single-player for playing it safe and not taking any risks, and to Black Ops 7’s credit, the same can’t be said here. The problem, however, is that not many of its big swings hit, resulting in one of Call of Duty’s most intriguing, yet flawed campaigns.

Its varied string of missions walks the tightrope between traditional military shooter and schlocky sci-fi nonsense, darting between worlds beyond our technological fingertips and deep within our most haunted of dreams. That spectacle is supported by sharp gunplay and a whole host of gadgetry and abilities that make moving around those worlds incredibly satisfying. But it all culminates in a brand-new endgame portion that stitches together aspects of CoD’s past open-world successes and failures in an attempt to become something new. In reality, that post-credits content is a repetitive shooting gallery that adds little to the excitement that leads up to it.

Much of Black Ops 7’s intrigue emanates from one fundamental design choice: for the first time in many years, a Call of Duty campaign is fully playable in four-player co-op, and it really does feel like it has been made with that in mind as the preferred method of play. This comes with both positives and negatives. Teaming up with friends is good fun, with fighting big bosses that have multiple weak points to fire upon simultaneously or stealthily working through an enemy area tactically, both coming with a good deal of satisfaction. But it also detrimentally affects the solo experience, from not having AI companions fill in for you if no buddies are online, or kicking you for inactivity if you’re idle for too long, to not even being able to pause due to its online-only nature. Its open areas and endgame portion seem catered toward a group experience as well, and can end up just a little lonely when zipping around by yourself. To an extent, it feels like Activision is finally admitting that most people come to its hallmark shooter for multiplayer fun, rather than the single-player story modes the series was founded on.

In fact, having played several missions in both co-op and single-player, I can confirm that playing solo is borderline tedious due to having to repeat multiple objectives, such as placing C4 on a building yourself four times rather than splitting them up as is intended. There are also no difficulty options this time around, meaning that, in theory, it should scale the threat depending on how many players are in your squad. In my experience, though, the number of enemies in a level remains the same, leaving me feeling overwhelmed by foes even in its earliest levels. By comparison, playing in a full squad makes these encounters a breeze, with not enough targets to go around sometimes. In fact, enemy numbers are uneven across the campaign as a whole, sometimes swarming you with dozens of rabid rushers, but at others, presenting you with a couple of soldiers wandering through a door when you’re expecting an onslaught. It’s, admittedly, a difficult balance to get right, but one that has not been achieved here.

As for the structure of the campaign, Black Ops 7’s story is delivered at breakneck speed, taking me just about five hours to reach the endgame. Its 11 missions threw me from one exotic location to the next, from one time period to another, and deep into nightmare realms full of otherworldly horrors and delights. The year is 2035, and new threats are here to instigate a global collapse once again. The re-emergence of Black Ops 2 villain Raul Menendez thrusts the playable unit, Spectre One, into action and soon has them facing off against evil tech company The Guild. What follows is a set of missions that throws you in and out of reality thanks to a fear toxin being weaponised by The Guild, led by Kiernan Shipka’s Emma Kagan, who is trading in Mad Men for mad mechs here.

A combination of cliched evil sci-fi tech corp and Batman Arkham scarecrow-esque antics leads each level to interesting places from a visual perspective, as long-buried memories of our protagonists are dredged up and morphed into horror-filled mazes. It makes for a more varied campaign when it comes to art design, with an impressive number of locations and creatures thematically filling them to gun down. I do wish there was a little more in terms of mission variety when it comes to actual level and objective design, though, with corridor shooting taking the lead in most of these excursions. There’s nothing to rival the creeping intrigue of last year’s Emergence conceptually and its branching objectives and playful enemy design, for example, nor the spy-like cool of infiltrating an embassy fundraiser or high-roller casino.

If last year’s Black Ops 6 leaned more into grounded espionage and subterfuge, 7 is a much louder proposition, choosing to demolish the lobby of a complex to gain access to it rather than sweet-talking the security guard standing in front of it. As a result, there is no shortage of big moments justifying its blockbuster label. Dodging giant falling machetes like you’ve stumbled into a Looney Tunes cartoon is a one-off joy, as is taking control of a lavish luxury boat and ramming into the side of a building. Moments like this feel pinched right out of Christopher Nolan’s back pocket and sit perfectly in the Call of Duty mold.

And that’s just the opening section of one of the standout missions, which takes place in Tokyo and has you dipping into its subway systems and leaping across rooftops. There’s a great sense of forward momentum to levels like these, and I’m a massive fan of them. I just wish more of the campaign were like this Japanese chapter, as I’m not so keen on the ones taking place in the more open-zone areas of the fictional French city-state of Avalon (itself a huge battle royale-sized hub), which struggle to bottle the same exciting energy. These typically have you moving across wider rural patches of its map in order to chase the next cluster of enemies to take down, and essentially serve as tutorials for its endgame. They’re a little less authored than others and fail to capture the same thrills as a result.

In fact, much of the time, it doesn’t really feel like a ‘Call of Duty’ campaign at all. Yes, it has the militaristic hallmarks, but borrows just as much from horde shooters like Left 4 Dead and its own in-house zombie modes. It makes for an uneven set of missions, some of which really don’t work for me, but with others that do manage to hit the spot when they capture some of the CoD cinematic legacy. They’re a rarity, though, and for every one of these, there is also a bizarrely dull sequence, such as the time you’re asked to play Frogger on a twisted, upside-down LA highway.

As you might expect, the gunplay is snappy and satisfying, with SMGs delightfully ripping through armoured enemies and sniper rifles really coming into their own and popping out bits of brain in some of the campaign’s open areas. Each weapon has a good weight to it and is super-responsive when pulling the trigger. It’s Call of Duty, they’ve been doing this for a long time now, and how good its guns feel shouldn’t come as a shock as you rip through enemy healthbars and armor chunks. These extra layers to their vitality do present a slightly more drawn-out cadence to gunfights, though, with a few extra bursts of the trigger needed to take down each. The firearms are supported by a fantastic selection of skills and gadgets, too, with killstreaks making their way into single-player, such as the joyously destructive war machine, allowing for quick mob clean-ups.

I’ll admit, I was initially sceptical of the near-future setting and Call of Duty’s return to tinkering with near-future tech when it comes to movement, but on the whole, the experiment is largely a success. Wall jumping can be a little clunky, but the kinetic super jump is very fun to use as a quick flanking tool, as is my favourite of the bunch, the grapple hook. Swinging up to roofs to find a better vantage point before swooping down on a wingsuit to get back up close opens up each level’s architecture in interesting ways. It may never reach that Titanfall 2 gold standard when it comes to FPS mobility, but there are flashes of it here, which is always welcome.

This desire to experiment also carries into its approach to boss design, which is by no means revolutionary when it comes to FPS campaigns, but a relatively new thing for Call of Duty. I appreciate the efforts made in order to make each have its own gimmick, even if they all ultimately come down to draining an oversized health bar while dodging projectiles. They certainly aren’t complex, but hitting the glowing weak points of a giant, bile-spewing plant in a cave of nightmares is certainly a step up from just pumping bullets into a Juggernaut for the hundredth time, especially when multiple targets are offered up at once and really make the whole co-op nature of the campaign feel worthwhile.

In fact, enemy variety is quite impressive this time around, with human, mechanical, and hallucinatory foes offering different threats that challenge you at all distances. Guild forces include a robot army, as well as traditional militia types such as the machine-gun-wielding Raider, colossal armor-plated Titan, and other NFL team-name adjacent units. Yes, most can be handled with some well-aimed assault rifle fire to the head, but there are more effective ways to deal with them if you choose to explore your arsenal.

I particularly enjoyed one incursion into a robotics lab, which equipped me with a Black Hat hacking device. I liked how it switched up the cadence of the unrelenting bullets a little, and meant I could disrupt and destroy these Terminator wannabes from cover. It even made a miniboss of this zone — an admittedly unexciting rotating turret — easier to take down. I appreciate that, in a game of such ferocious speed as this, you’re occasionally rewarded for taking a breath and using your brain to overcome objectives rather than solely relying on pure firepower.

It’s kind of a shame, then, that once the campaign’s set of linear missions is over, the endgame borrows little of this philosophy. After the main story’s credits have rolled, you’re offered a chance to experience its epilogue, which takes place in the open region of Avalon that’s teased throughout. If you played Call of Duty’s DMZ mode, then you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect here: it’s an extraction shooter, except it's not. You and up to three friends can team up and drop into this battle royale-sized map and complete the activities that litter it with eye-soreing regularity. On every street corner are Guild checkpoints or zombie-infested buildings to clear out as you progress through its difficulty-tiered regions in order to reach its final boss, located at the epicentre of the island’s toxic smog. The catch? If your squad goes down, you lose all of your progress. That progress is mainly tied to your combat rating, a number that goes up the more killing and map icon clearing you do, and it's therefore up to you to know when to call it quits on a certain run and extract from the map within a time limit.

For each level you go up, you’ll get a skill point to plug into any of two given options. These can range from armor plates automatically regenerating when you get kills to overall movement speed or rate of fire increases. The idea is to keep building up your character until you’ve reached the minimum recommended level of 55 and shut down the toxic threat sweeping across Avalon. The progression feels genuine, too, with my character resembling a super soldier at higher ranks, thanks to the sheer amount of speed I harnessed and the damage I could absorb.

In theory, I like this idea and think there are the bones of an exciting mode here — something that could capture the magic the likes of Helldivers 2 has done in recent times — but as is, it unfortunately gets a little tired a little too soon. Objectives are almost all exclusively “go to this place and clear out the enemies there,” which I understand is part of the fundamentals when it comes to shooters, but I would’ve appreciated a little more variety and something that mirrored the minor puzzle-solving sections of the main campaign, or at least clever uses of the gadgetry it introduces. The enemy AI that walks Avalon’s streets is also dumb as bricks and pops out of cover freely, making each encounter a simple affair when you put enough distance between you and them.

Yes, zooming around on grapple hooks and transitioning into wing suit gliding mid-fall is still incredibly satisfying, as is plotting out methods of attack in a four-player squad, but all semblance of interesting level or mission design is traded in upon entry here for a few hours of relatively mindless shooting in order to watch some numbers tick up. In some ways, it sits somewhere between the campaign missions and Zombies in its design, but frustratingly borrows the least interesting aspects of both, neglecting the mission structure and mystery-solving that each mode thrives on. It results in a reasonably enjoyable, but not essential, second serving to the campaign. And don’t worry, if the endgame doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, or even sounds a little daunting (the ferocity of its bullet sponge hordes can get overwhelming in its latter stages, especially when heading in solo), the story does wrap up satisfyingly enough beforehand for it not to feel like you’re missing out on an ending completely.

It’s a story nowhere near as accomplished as last year’s effort, though. Effectively a direct sequel to Black Ops 2 that also ties into the events of Black Ops 6, presumed knowledge and the speed at which its setup is told can be a little disorientating, especially if you aren’t familiar with its 2012 predecessor. The themes are personal this time around, with David “Section” Mason, recast here as Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia, placed centre stage as he battles with his past – namely the loss of his father, Alex. There are some fun revelations along the way, as well as treats for long-term fans of the Black Ops series, but as someone who has never held those characters in as high regard as their Modern Warfare counterparts, the pulling of the heartstrings didn’t quite work for me.

It also means that the rest of the Spectre One squad doesn’t really get plot points of their own aside from flashes of resurfacing trauma, relegating them very much to support characters in David’s world, as Michael Rooker’s Harper in particular is given some truly dumb lines to scream as loud as he can. That being said, if you are someone who has always preferred the adventures of Woods, Mason, Adler, and co, I’m sure you’ll have a great time here. It does mean, though, that this revisiting of the past, combined with a thick layer of exposition, can make the early hours of the story relatively impenetrable to newcomers, so I’d bear that in mind if you’re coming in fresh. I’d really recommend a thorough recap of the Black Ops timeline to all if you wish to get the most out of it.

Even 33 years after its debut, the Mortal Kombat series can still shock and impress with its over-the-top violence and gory spectacle. That feels especially true with the latest game compilation and documentary release from developer Digital Eclipse, which not only brings the earliest Mortal Kombat games back for another round but also offers deeper insight into their history and how this brutal fighting series was brought to life. Though the collection falls just a bit short of executing a proper Fatality due to a few unfortunate omissions and some uneven balance and polish for the games that are here, it still offers enough of a comprehensive and engaging dive into the genre’s most infamous franchise to make for a killer package.

Focusing primarily on the history behind the games that defined the first 10 years of Mortal Kombat, the Legacy Kollection really leans into the formative hits. It starts from the first Mortal Kombat arcade game in 1992 and goes through the series' first steps into 3D with Mortal Kombat 4 and the handheld ports of Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, which tells the larger story of how Mortal Kombat co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias went on to shake up the genre.

Included in the Legacy Kollection is the original Mortal Kombat trilogy and its ports, MK4, the Mythologies and Special Forces spin-offs, and the various handheld releases of other MK games. You're free to jump into any game in the collection right from the start, and they are essentially as they were upon release, which includes the memorable quirks, secrets, and exploits that were present. Unfortunately, this also includes the infamous enemy AI from certain versions of the original trilogy, notorious for reading player inputs and snapping back with counterattacks.

It was very jarring to see how brutal and, at times, unfair CPU opponents can be. The arcade ladder for MK2 and MK3 and its variations in particular, even on the lowest settings, can be relentless – though it's at least a great way to see just what ‘90s gamers were up against. However, the collection does make efforts to balance out those hurdles by adding some firsts to the classic games, such as a fleshed out training mode with tuning options, a difficulty setting for most games in the main menu, a Fatality training mode to help nail down the timing of those pesky finishers, and online play for the arcade and even Sega Genesis and SNES releases (though I wasn’t able to test out server stability for this review, and will update it after release if that turns out to be an issue).

One of the more helpful features that the Legacy Kollection includes is the rewind option, which lets you roll back 30 seconds of playtime in every game. This rewind can be a super useful option for offsetting the often absurd difficulty, but it's also nice to have for trying to perfect your run when going for a particular secret in arcade mode. However, one strange quirk I noticed was that rolling back in the middle of a fight can often supercharge enemy AI, which already has the odds stacked in their favor. In some cases, I was left in a real death loop of attacks whenever I tried rewinding a few seconds, with the AI somehow countering my roll back with a brutal throw or special move.

To be clear, these are not total remasters. While some healthy new features come with the collection, the classic games are essentially as they were, with only quality-of-life updates and visual tweaks to dress them up for modern platforms. You can even add some neat visual filters and borders to simulate the old-school arcade or home experience, or just strip it back to the essentials. The collection offers a solid, well-made container for these classics, and I appreciated that it can even make most of them look sharp on my modern display.

The Legacy Kollection doesn't just focus on the key arcade games; it also includes many ports released after and alongside them, which is how many people in the '90s played them. It's such a great decision to include the supplementary ports for the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy as they help show just how popular Mortal Kombat was and how much work went into each release. I was too young to visit arcades on my own, so I ended up forming a stronger attachment to the Sega Genesis ports of the original MK games. Even though it's not totally up to the standards of the arcade releases, the ports still hit the spot when it comes to showing off that classic MK combat and spectacle. I couldn't help but feel nostalgic when I heard the Sega Genesis' scratchy rendition of the Dead Pool theme.

That said, parts of the package do feel more like curiosities, showing how early Mortal Kombat ran on more modest hardware. For instance, playing the Game Boy and Game Gear versions of Mortal Kombat 1 can be an eyesore. The handheld-sized experience is blown up to fit a larger screen, and the gameplay is so sluggish and unresponsive that it can feel disorienting. I would have preferred an option to shrink the screen to a more visually appealing scope, but that's not available in the collection. Still, I'm glad to have them for posterity's sake, as they are vital parts of MK history.

I especially loved to have a new way to play the PS1 edition of Mortal Kombat Trilogy, which is essentially the Super Smash Bros. of the MK series with its massive roster. The Legacy Kollection also improves it with greatly reduced load times, which makes it likely the best version of MK Trilogy available. It's a fantastic addition to the overall collection.

One of the most anticipated inclusions in the collection is the fabled WaveNet release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, an updated version of the arcade game that rebalanced the combat, featured Noob Saibot and Human Smoke as unlockable characters, and also had the then-rare opportunity to play online against other arcade players. This is such a tremendous find, making the collection feel all the more comprehensive as it allows long-time fans to play the 'lost' release of UMK3, and it runs incredibly well.

Unfortunately, the one game that feels the most unpolished is Mortal Kombat 4, which is appropriate given that it's the series' first crack at 3D combat in the arcade. The version included in the package is the finalized arcade release, which has some odd visual and gameplay bugs. Some of the new additions with the Legacy Kollection seem to magnify its quirks, too, such as stage geometry popping out of view or obstructing the action, or instances in the training mode with characters getting stuck out of bounds. In that way, it feels like a letdown given this is the only modern way to play MK4.

Interestingly, the Legacy Kollection includes playable versions of some of the franchise's early spin-offs, including Mortal Kombat: Mythologies - Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, which have not been seen since their initial releases. Instead of fighting games, Mythologies and Special Forces try to inject the over-the-top violence and spectacle into action stages. Unfortunately, the two spin-offs have not gotten better with age, even with some minor improvements to controls. They are easily the weakest games of the package, being both frustrating and unintentionally hilarious to sit through. But the inclusion of these games is still very much welcome because they were, at the time, ambitious swings for the series to try something different. It's commendable that the collection includes these misfires and gives them equal attention alongside the hits. It also highlights that they served as stepping stones for more well-rounded spin-offs that were to come.

We get to see the series' growth well in the documentary mode, which is where the Legacy Kollection truly shines as a fantastic celebration. Much like Digital Eclipse's work on The Making of Karateka and Tetris Forever, the documentary mode is displayed as an explorable timeline that shows factoids about the series, interviews, archival footage of development, deleted characters and special moves, and even classic commercials and arcade advertising for each of the key games.

The documentary mode is a fantastic history lesson, not just on the series but also on video game development and shifting pop culture during the 1990s. With new interviews of key creatives from Williams Entertainment, Midway, and Netherrealm Studios, the documentary offers a detailed account of the developers' roots in pinball games and how Mortal Kombat became a lightning rod for the backlash against violence in media during the ‘90s. My favorite details were seeing how Mortal Kombat became a pop culture hit and how the developers felt about fans who thought Mortal Kombat 3's run-button changed the meta too much. It's a fantastic dive behind the scenes.

All in all, the Legacy Kollection has some truly great inclusions and additional features, but I couldn't help but feel a little let down by some game omissions that would have helped round it out further. Along with the lack of the N64 release of Mortal Kombat Trilogy – which had a fun and experimental 3v3 mode – Mortal Kombat 4 Gold edition and the console versions of MK: Deadly Alliance not being included really make for an odd choice given that they were the series's more confident steps into 3D. This also results in the documentary mode skimming over certain details in the timeline due to the absence of these games. Though I recognize the core focus was on the main games within the first 10 years of the series, and that other outside or technical issues likely prevented these games from being included, it’s still a bit disappointing to see the package lose steam towards the end, even with how impressive the Game Boy port renditions are.

Do you remember the worst day of your life? It’s okay; you don’t have to answer. I do. I was doing something I loved, I made a mistake, and a story someone else told about it for their own purposes cost me almost everything I had. People I thought were my friends walked out of my life, doors slammed shut in my face, and everything I’d worked for evaporated. My family resorted to communication by postcard because I refused to answer the phone, and I spent the next two years contemplating suicide before finally finding some semblence of peace. Nearly a decade later, those moments, that mistake – such a little thing, really – impacts every aspect of my life. I spend a lot of time grappling with that, wondering if I’ll ever be the person I was before that moment again. I don’t know the answer.

The worst day of Clementine McKinney’s life reminded me a lot of my own, though it came inside the cockpit of a Raptor mech rather than behind a keyboard. She made a decision, one rooted in trying to do the right thing and defend people she loved, and it cost her everything she had. Clementine McKinney died that day, and Graveyard Clem was born from the ashes. Bounty Star is about who you are after the worst day of your life, about what you do when the only option is to climb back into the machine that put you there in the first place. I didn’t have a choice; neither does Clem. We don’t know how to do anything else.

Clem is a bounty hunter. Building and piloting a Raptor is all she knows, and it’s the main thing you’ll do across the roughly 15-20 hours it took me to finish Bounty Star’s story (though there is ample replayability if you want it). After her world collapses, her friend Jake Triminy, the local marshall of a post-plague future that caused the collapse of human civilization and the return of the dinosaurs, sets her up with an old workshop that has enough space to double as a farm. Nobody much trusts her after what happened, so the bounties she is offered are for small fry: local bandits and the like. You spend her money to buy food and cook it in her kitchen for stat increases before going out on a mission. The first time she gets into her Raptor after the decision she made inside one destroyed her life, she spends a long time staring at the ol’ girl, her heart beating fast. Then she closes her eyes, exhales, and gets to work. Clem sees the irony, but it might also be her only way out. Both she and I sit in that cockpit, but we are not in the same place.

Clem wears her battles on her body. There’s a nasty burn on the side of her neck, a deep scar on the right side of her face, and another on the opposite cheek. She’s not young anymore; if you leave her alone long enough, she’ll stretch and complain about the way her body is failing her, even though her physique tells the story of a woman who builds Raptors and welds steel. Her clothes are covered in engine grease and stained with sweat. Her accent bears the twang of the American South. She drinks, smokes, plays guitar, and swears like it’s going out of style – and yet, when she gets stuck on a problem, she’ll pull out a stuffed dinosaur named Jeremy and talk to him until she realizes the solution. After a completed bounty, Clem sits on her Raptor and writes down her thoughts in a small journal, a warrior poet hoping that she’ll find herself in the words she arranges on the page. She is a person, messy and flawed and glorious, and I loved her in the way you love a kindred soul, someone whose failings you understand and strengths you admire.

Once you've got your assignment, it's time to outfit your Raptor and get to work. Raptors are relatively tiny mechs – think an Armored Core’s AC, but smaller, less well armed, and faster. They have melee and ranged weapons that range from chainswords and giant hammers to assault rifles and grenade launchers. You can customize them to fit your playstyle even further by popping in things like a booster for quick dodges, a burst repairer for on-the-spot healing, or a thermal computer to restore your Raptor to its base temperature faster.

There's a lot to consider: each weapon has one of three types (Blade, Bludgeoning, Boom) that operate in a rock, paper, scissors style against different types of armor. Weapons and systems also build or reduce heat. Too much or too little, and your Raptor will shut down until it comes back under control, leaving you vulnerable. But there are benefits. High heat speeds up your melee weapon swings, while a cooler Raptor fires its guns more quickly.

Some bounties are only available in the morning, afternoon, or evening. It’s cooler at night, so weapons that generate heat are more viable than they would be in the afternoon, when you'll want systems to keep your Raptor running cool. The right build takes your targets, time of day, and heat into account, and there is a joy in stepping into Clem's mind, getting under the hood, and building a smooth-running rig.

In the field, a Raptor is nimble but purposeful, a force of fury and steel. It can dodge and run to avoid fire, but when you swing that chainsword, you commit to its weight and momentum. An assault rifle will kill a man in a single shot, but it will be less effective against a Driller mech built heavy for mining and repurposed by outlaws for combat. A double-barreled shotgun will chew through an unmanned Sieger, but you'll need to be more precise against another mech. The heavier enemies – Drillers, Raptors like yours – have stability that must be reduced before your melee weapons stagger them, but once it's gone, a hammer, chainsword, or flame gauntlet will rock them to the frame, steel grinding against steel until something breaks. But be wary of counter-attacks, which can stop your offense cold and send your Raptor reeling. To compensate, you have melee and dash tricks of your own. Cancel a swing of your hammer into an evasive maneuver while leaping backward and firing your shotgun, or dash forward into a swing of a built-for-a-mech baseball bat. To fight another Raptor is to tango, two gunslingers circling until one finds an opening.

It’s satisfying, though repetition does set in when you see the same Raptor, the same Sieger, the same group of enemies again and again, especially during the Low Priority repeatable bounties you’ll do between High Priority story missions. The environments Clem navigates, clearly a loving tribute to the American Southwest, are stunning at least. Though you’ll see some of the maps several times, many of them never lose their beauty, especially at night. Variety is found in optional objectives that offer additional cash and challenge you to take no damage, use a specific build, complete a bounty quickly, destroy objects scattered around the environment, find a hidden item, and so on. And it is always worth scavenging an area to find secret chests for additional rewards like world lore, resources, or even blueprints for new weapons or recipes for Clem to whip up in the kitchen.

Between bounties, you’ll use the money Clem earns to build up her new home and improve her Raptor. Things start small. But soon enough, you’re crafting new weapons, unlocking additional slots or loadouts, producing your own fuel, making your own ammunition, growing crops, and raising chickens. As she rebuilds herself, a place she didn’t want to be becomes a home. These chores are minor – feed the chickens, water the plants, sow new seeds, make sure the fuel producing systems have enough water, cook a meal before you head out – but I found joy in the repetition of a life lived outside of the cockpit, of seeing the real, tangible progress Clem and I were making on our journeys of healing.

A I invested more time and money into the farm, I was able to do these jobs faster, more efficiently. Carrying water to each plant will get the job done. But it’s much more fun to build a firearm-activated irrigation system, to watch empty space get filled in by the work you’ve done, slowly, piece by piece. Isn’t that a life? And my Raptor was becoming fiercer, too, the bounties bigger. At the start, one feeds the other. The Raptor. The farm. Over time, they intertwine, and it’s harder to see where one ends and the other begins.

In one of her journal entries, Clem reflects on her relationship with Raptors, wondering if she should loathe them on principle as machines of war or lean into the power and joy she feels while piloting one. It’s a question not just for her, but us as the player, too. She opts for the latter, partly because she has no choice, and partly because she feels she is making the world a better place by removing bad men from it. You can thankfully take bounties alive or scare off dinosaurs with fireworks instead of killing them (and sometimes you are paid more for it), but you’re going to rack up a lot of bodies either way. The home she builds is the opposite of that. At first, she resents it, wanting out as quickly as she can find a way. But she comes to see its potential. Soon, I was making just as much money from farming as I was from bounty hunting. What was a chore became a way of life.

And as she builds a new life, other characters come to inhabit it. She befriends a reformed bandit who offers her a way to relive past battles, useful for completing optional objectives in bygone story missions; a former thief atoning for his crimes by wearing a ridiculous steak outfit and selling meat as Mr. Meat; a miner trapped inside his suit who has dedicated himself to building an ethical mine for other miners; a weapons dealer who becomes a confidant; a giant insect driven from its colony who becomes a friend (and, when fed and watered, a weapon to be mounted on a Raptor).

Each is a mirror that offers Clem a chance to reflect on her life, her choices, to show us who she is, and who she still might be. Shall she be a woman at war with herself, reliving the battles that brought her here? There are many kinds of prisons. Some you carry with you wherever you go. Clem’s Raptor could be a cell. But it could be armor, too, the key to something else. Something better. The past is prologue, but it doesn't have to define us. We choose who we are every day.

Bounty Star is a simple game. You would never mistake it for something with a ton of money behind it, though the writing and voice acting are excellent. And there were times it frustrated me, such as when it locked story progression behind building an engine I couldn’t afford. (Luckily, I had a pretty sizable farm at that point, and chicken eggs and corn command a premium.) It crashed on me a few times. It can be repetitive. I’m not sure I care about much of that, but it was part of my experience. But I did care about Clem, about her story, the people she loved and who loved her in return. This town takes in all kinds. I wanted her to rebuild her life, and that saw me through.

Call it the sentiment of an aging millennial, but I can't help but feel somewhat comforted while playing Plants vs. Zombies: Replanted. It not only updates the original's stellar blend of approachable tower-defense and puzzle gameplay, but it's also a reminder of how quirky and endearing games were in the late 2000s. Developer PopCap Games returns to give this classic another well-deserved moment in the sun, adding new content, quality-of-life improvements, and features from other ports to create a more complete package. That said, Replanted struggles to balance its updates with its attempts to preserve the look of the original. In doing so, it presents an uneven remaster that is the most complete version of Plants vs. Zombies ever released, but also one that feels less polished in the ways that matter most.

The charm of PvZ comes from its cheerful and fun vibes, which feel akin to an afternoon cartoon show you'd watch on Nickelodeon. In keeping with the series, Replanted never attempts to explain how this quirky side of the zombie apocalypse started, or, even more strangely, how the plants gained heightened sentience to fight back. And honestly, that still works out for the best, because vibes alone have helped the Plants vs. Zombies series go far. The tone always stays fast and loose with its premise to keep the absurdity ramping up, which it does plenty.

The Replanted edition brings back everything from the 2009 PC release along with nearly all of the additions from the various console and mobile ports that followed – including material from the discontinued Chinese release of PvZ. Even the local co-op and competitive modes from the console ports make a return, which I missed the first time around. This makes Replanted such a neat opportunity to get reacquainted both with why the original still holds up today and the many upgrades it got over the years.

What made Plants vs. Zombies so engaging was how it blended real-time strategy with the feeling of placing pieces of a puzzle onto a table. It really leans into the satisfaction of finding a particular approach and adapting your units as needed. When the action gets going, and your squads of peashooters and walnuts are holding the line against zombie quarterbacks, 'zomboni' drivers, and other oddball undead, it's so captivating to see play out. Even as someone who played it plenty 16 years ago, I still found myself immediately drawn back in, arranging my plants in the best tactical positions to keep the zombies off my doorstep.

The overall challenge of the original generally stayed fair and easygoing, but there were a few moments of unexpected difficulty spikes, and Replanted doesn't do much to fix that. Granted, many of the sudden challenges that arise are because of how breezy the campaign can be, which made the more difficult stages catch me off guard thanks to the tough new zombie units that came my way. I found the challenges to be reasonable overall, but the difficulty can still hit hard when you least expect it.

Replanted does make efforts to switch things up and add its own stuff that's not been seen elsewhere. One very welcome update for returning players is the ability to speed up battles. You can hit the fast-forward option to speed animations up three additional notches, which adds the challenge of making battles feel a bit more hectic at that heightened pace. It was generally helpful for clearing out the waiting periods in missions, which previously took up a lot of time. However, one downside of this is that changing the speed unfortunately alters the music, too. While I did like the remixed songs with faster beats, it means the classic music that ramped up as the battles escalated has been disappointingly removed from the soundtrack.

One of the more novel additions is the Rest in Peace Mode, PvZ's take on a permadeath run for the main adventure. With fewer defenses protecting your home, even one zombie breaking through your lines will result in an instant fail and send you back to the beginning of a run. As a concept, it fits perfectly with the style of PvZ, and I did feel that familiar tension that comes from the more intense missions. However, letting you bring in all your unlocked plants and seed slots at the start of a run does undermine a lot of the intended challenge, which is an odd choice if this is supposed to be the most difficult mode in PvZ. It's ultimately not as developed as I had hoped, so trying to make a go of the new mode mostly felt underwhelming.

The most interesting and inventive Replanted addition is the Cloudy Day mode, which combines elements of day and night gameplay into a single battle. This twist introduces an interesting change by making the sunny phase focus more on resource gathering and planning, while the cloudy phase is all about building units with the benefit of lower resource costs. It's a clever mash-up of the two battle styles of PvZ, and it kept me very engaged as I tried to maximize my moments in battle when the tide changed. It's by far Replanted's most impressive innovation.

This remaster generally looks great in motion as well, especially when the action heats up with zombie hordes in full force and your plants tossing everything they can to stop them. Unfortunately, the upgraded visuals often stick a little too closely to the style and structure of the original, and their expansion to larger resolutions can sometimes feel very artificial and uneven. This creates instances where the quality can be inconsistent and unintentionally below standard, such as blurry and rough character portraits or animations in menus, and the unsightly grim filter overlay in Rest in Peace mode.

This unevenness also contributes to one of the more bizarre changes: how the original iconic ending music video was handled. Without spoilers, instead of a rousing splash of an ending, this finale is shown as a video within another cutscene, condensed onto a classic tube TV set inside your character’s home. This unnecessary flourish diminishes the final sequence, which was previously on the same level as Portal's fantastic 'Still Alive' ending. It was an unexpected downer to see that celebration of the fun energy of Plants vs. Zombies instead turned into something that feels like I'm just watching a 16-year-old recording of the credits on YouTube in full 360p resolution. This type of decision is largely emblematic of the problems with Replanted overall, as it plays things overly safe as a remaster in order to avoid remaking elements of the main game, which has the downside of making it feel reductive in its attempt to preserve it.

Hot on the heels of Ninja Gaiden's own 2D revival with the excellent Ragebound, Double Dragon Revive comes off more like a tribute band for the series rather than a proper reunion tour. It doesn't play the hits how you remember it, instead putting its own spin on things – from how it looks, to how it sounds, to how it plays. All of those aspects not only fail to live up to my admittedly mild expectations for a new Double Dragon, but after hours of its out of tune meandering, started to cement the idea that maybe we should put a little more distance between attempts to revitalize this series.

Even though I've been playing these games for most of my life it's sort of jarring how straightforward Double Dragon Revive is. Side scrollers of this arcadey, "belt scroll" variety have found a lot of ways to spice up the “punch your way to the right” recipe, and Revive seems interested in keeping as much of that new seasoning away from its plate as possible. It's a basic protein packed with eight non-branching levels, accompanied by starchy combat that's filling but has barely any sauce.

Picking up any of the four playable characters is simple and intuitive, with normal attack strings that can be mashed out on one button alongside special attacks and hyper blows that can be used to punctuate these combos, or in some instances extend your offense into wall bouncing juggles. All of these actions are unique to each fighter. Well, Billy and Jimmy Lee have distinctions that don't translate into mechanical differences, but former damsel-turned-headkicker Marian and ninja frenemy Ranzo have attacks that are a little more flashy and utilitarian. I rarely felt it necessary to use more than basic combo loops on Normal difficulty, though. As long as an enemy didn't have an annoying shield or hyper armor protecting them as they wound up a big attack (something ubiquitous in the later levels), they were reliably vulnerable to a good old fashioned fist to the face.

There are limited options for those who do want to attempt to style on these street thugs, but they all rely on bouncing enemies off of walls to keep them in the air long enough to string more hits together as they come down. It often felt like enemies kind of just went wherever they wanted after a launch or a throw as opposed to where you directed them to go, making a laborious task out of trying to set up simple combo extensions, jamming enemies into background environmental hazards that take them out of the fight instantly, or taking advantage of the super powerful wall strike and wall crash options.

There's no air combos to be had either, so chasing a launched bad guy skyward only allows you a single, disappointing smash down to earth so you can wait for them to stand up and let you hit them again. Everyone can get a free hit on downed enemies, if you can finagle the finicky button prompt to do so that is unresponsive and unreliable. If there's the right kind of wall around – the right kind being the one they decide is right based on no reliable context clues – you can do a super sized air dropping attack, but even getting the wall kick off that's required to get the requisite height is a dice roll.

Everyone has powerful, screen clearing finishing blow attacks that are charged up by all the fisticuffs, with boosts given when you make a timely dodge, counter an enemy’s big attack, or grow your combo meter. But no playable character, not even with Ranzo's cool explosive kunai or Marian’s charging knee, can make Revive’s combat feel special, or even interesting, across long stretches of time. It took me around three hours to finish my first playthrough, and I lost interest well before then, with three more playthroughs after that, one for each playable character.

That said, enemy variety is at least diverse and effective at making you use the small menu of options you have. As levels progress, old bad guys show up to mingle with the newer ones to form a sort of street thug gumbo that can get a little spicy towards the end of your run. It’s largely a numbers game, with you often getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of incoming blows from all angles. I liked the little brain puzzle of having to identify the most dangerous threat to take out first, or needing to figure out the most efficient way to wrangle as many folks as possible into a big attack, but it wasn’t beguiling enough for me to forget that the process of breaking these dudes down was still rather dull. Even the array of limited use weapons, though strong tools usually worth the effort to grab if things get hairy, are your standard fare knives, two-by-fours, sledgehammers, etc.

As the challenge escalates, some of Revive’s jank becomes an enemy of its own. Small things, like the direction of your character sometimes defaulting to the opposite direction inexplicably, stops being a quirk to work around and starts being the reason you drop a combo or get punished.

Bosses break the monotony up a little bit, introducing slightly more engaging stage hazards and pattern mechanics, like Linda, who you need to shake off of the pillars she’s hiding on top off before you can attack her directly. These get pretty brutal towards the end, though, specifically the chapter seven boss, which has to be the most aggravating fight I’ve maybe ever played in one of these games – truly a test of endurance against a ceaseless onslaught of the most cheating cheaters Revive has to offer.

There’s not a lot of flash visually, either. Most character models look good, but the fire, wind, and dragon effects that come from their limbs when channeling their chi looks a step behind in quality. Camera work and sound design come together adequately to make big hits feel good and all that jazz. The sound track is decent, with a handful original riffy rockouts and remixes of old series jams that sound good in the moment but sort of leave your head immediately after they end. Overall, Double Dragon Revive lacks the visual identity that the 16-bit Double Dragon Gaiden and even pastel-punk Double Dragon Neon have, let alone its peers like Shinobi: Art of Vengeance and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound from this year.

The stages you bash your way through run a much broader gamut. A colorful Japanese pagoda-style tower with a fun little perspective shift mid-way through is simple but much more stirring than a non-descript highway level, even if there is a wrestling ring at the end of it. Some of these zones require some platforming that I was never happy to see but in mercifully short bursts. It’s a bit of an eye-roll that most of these stages are just takes on series staple locations without much novel flair added this time around, but it’s truly disappointing how many of these locations are just bland and lifeless.

And not to be one of those “the story in this beat 'em up sucks” sort of freaks, but I mean, it does. It's less that the plot is nonsense, the characters are bland, and the writing is lousy and more that Revive lacks the confident and chaotic energy that is necessary to sell this sort of thing to begin with. The post-apocalyptic villain of Neon was a gang-leading demon knight straight out of a heavy metal album cover named Skullmaggedon. The gang struggles in Gaiden made that version of New York City feel like Gotham City, complete with goons color-coded and themed after their outlandish bosses. By comparison, Revive is just a completely tame and underwhelming take on returning villains Willy and Raymond, who used black magic and the military industrial complex to experiment on people and make the Sousetsuken kid’s lives worse.

They say “insanity” is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but if I believed that, I wouldn’t play video games – and I certainly wouldn’t be playing roguelikes. They are, by definition, doing a lot of the same things over and over again and expecting that this time, this time, Steve, shall be different. This time, I am going to bash my head against that boss until that mother goes down. This time, I’m going to make it to the end of the run, and I’m going to look fabulous doing it. This time will be different. Those are the things I tell myself as I die for the umpteenth time in Absolum, a roguelite beat ‘em up that’s fun enough to convince myself it just might be true every single time.

There is, of course, the undeniable possibility that I’ve gone ‘round the bend, full on cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, lock-me-in-a-padded-room, Looney-Tunes-finger-on-lips bonkers. I’ll leave that up to you. The point, reader, is that if you’d put a gun to my head five hours into Absolum and demanded that I score it on the spot, it’d be a lot lower than the score you see on the bottom of this page. But I’m a professional, and you don’t turn the movie off halfway through. There are large parts of Absolum’s fusion of genres that don’t work, and those growing pains are most obvious early on. But if you push through that weak start and get to the point where you’ve got some permanent rewards, have opened up the map, and runs end with you operating with a full kit and making good progress, it comes together quite nicely, even if it’s still never quite the game I wanted it to be.

“Roguelite beat ‘em up” is a combination of words that I never expected to see, much less put in a sentence, but here we are. Because it’s a roguelite, you need a reason to die, and a reason to come back. The reason to die is simple: the land of Talamh, broken by a magical cataclysm (bro, what is it with mages and magical cataclysms? Why can’t they ever bumble their way into magical utopias?), has been taken over by Sun King Azra. Wizards are enslaved, and the general populace, still a bit miffed by the whole “breaking the world” thing, are understandably not super upset about it. You play as one of the rebels using that forbidden magic in an attempt to bring him down. That’s the “how you’ll die” part.

The “why you’ll come back” part is because you’re working for Uchawi, the last of the Root Sisters, and as you bite it, she swoops in and saves your ass from being condemned to a permanent end. Live, die, get saved by Uchawi, repeat. The Sun King must die. And you gotta kill him.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a good ol’ fashioned “somebody done somebody/a lot of somebodies/society/the world at large wrong and now that somebody gotta die” story as much as the next guy, but Absolum’s problem is that the story isn’t that interesting for a good chunk of its runtime, especially early on. Yeah, there are some compelling character moments, the general history of the world is cool, and some conversations enticingly imply more questions than they answer. There’s more going on here than meets the eye, but a lot of it is couched in a fairly generic fantasy setting. Dwarves live underground, they delved too greedily and too deep (figuratively), bad things happened; elves have a mythical, lost land; the strong rule in many places so you can gain entrance by beating up The Current Big Boss, blah blah blah. The story does go to some cool places eventually (and, like Hades, you really gotta play it to completion multiple times to see everything), but man does it take a while to get there.

It’s good, then, that the playing part of Absolum rules. In a lot of ways, it’s a standard beat ‘em up with four different characters to pick from (though you only start with the first two listed here): Karl, the bruiser dwarf with a gun; Galandra, the elven knight with a massive sword; Cider, a nimble thief who is almost more machine than woman; and Brome, the frog-shaped spellcaster. Each character has a standard combo, a throw, a strike unique to that character – Galandra uses her sword, Cider pulls herself to enemies, and so on – a couple of unique special attacks tied to a meter, and an Ultimate Attack.

The real sicko stuff comes when you combine everything to form long combos, bounce enemies off walls or each other, and chain moves together in a symphonic beatdown that would make the deepest action game aficionado blush. Absolum was made by the teams behind Streets of Rage 4, and, as you’d expect, it absolutely has the sauce. I particularly loved the way so many moves paid homage to the greats: Cider’s Gyro Drop is essentially Ryu Hayabusa’s Izuna Drop, many of Galandra’s moves recall Devil May Cry’s Dante, and so on. If you know, you know. If you don’t, they’re just cool moves.

The big thing separating Absolum from its beat ‘em up brethren, aside from the whole “man, can you get lost in this sauce and it tastes good” combo-mad gameplay, is its focus on defense. You can dodge, which is pretty normal for a modern beat ’em up, but if you dodge toward an enemy at the right time, you can deflect their attacks, potentially opening them up. If you’re feeling particularly spicy, though, you can time your strikes with an enemy’s attack to cause a clash and stun them for a hot second, allowing you to lay into them with a sweet, sweet punish combo. This is harder, but the payoff is huge. And it feels great when you land it against a boss who was kicking the crap out of you and then the timing clicks and they can’t hit you no more. On a moment to moment gameplay level, Absolum’s bona fides are unimpeachable.

Its problems instead stem from its structure as a roguelite. Unlocking new rituals that power up your attacks, deflects, clashes, dodges, and so on each run is fine. I particularly like the ones that spawn throwable knives and allow you to extend combos by locking dudes into a bubble or hitting them with chain lighting. Finding a mount to help you out? Awesome. Buying or finding some trinkets to boost your stats or hiring a mercenary (or finding a chicken) to follow you around and help out in combat? That stuff is great.

What sucks is that parts of each character’s kit have clearly been chopped up and segmented into upgrades called Inspirations for you to temporarily acquire during your runs. Galandra’s dive kick? Amazing. Life-changing. The same is true of her three-hit sword combo. She should always have it. She doesn’t only because this is a roguelite and we have to have something to upgrade, a reason to choose that path that you know will end in an Inspiration. When you go from that one hit sword attack to the three-hit combo, it’s like being struck by lightning. The same is true of Cider’s Legally Distinct Izuna Drop or her ability to dash through enemies. “Oh,” I said, after getting them once. “This is how it should always be.” These are core parts of these characters’ identities and kits. They shouldn’t all be locked behind random upgrades. Like, give me something here that I don’t have to unlock besides my strikes and special attacks, y’all. Just a little bit of fun, as a treat. Admittedly, once you learn what paths lead to upgrades (Absolum is a roguelike, but its map does not change), you’ll quickly learn what the optimal path is, and likely never deviate from it.

The other problem is the persistent progression. Absolum isn’t a game you’re meant to beat on the first run. You’re supposed to die – a lot – while you build up the currency needed to acquire permanent upgrades (and find new paths full of rewards) to get you through future runs. Yeah, sure, if you’re really good at Absolum, you might be able to progress faster, but the margin of error early on is very, very small. In both solo and co-op, I often felt like I was dying because my numbers just weren’t high enough. It doesn’t help that Absolum is pretty stingy on health pickups. This structure might work in a game like Hades, but there’s very little narrative meat to chew on between runs, and in a beat ‘em up – a genre where you’re traditionally able to get by on sheer skill – it feels bad to be a slave to the Evil God of Numbers. I genuinely hate it when RPG elements get in the way of my action game, and that happens a lot in Absolum’s early hours.

At the beginning, runs feel like you’re going through the motions. You always start at the same place, and you have very limited paths to choose from. That means seeing the same enemies, environments, and bosses over and over and over again with very little room for change. Yes, there are quests, and exciting new things do pop up from time to time – I’ll never forget the first time I went to [redacted] (trust me, you’ll know when it happens) – but there is a lot of repetition here, and Absolum doesn’t handle it the way the best roguelikes, like FTL, for example, do. In the early hours, I often felt like a broken record, testing that definition of insanity. Even the joy of finding a secret chest is dulled by the fact that it’s always there, in the same place, every time. While the stuff you’ll get changes and new things do get added, the map itself never fundamentally changes. There’s not enough Rogue to this roguelite. It can’t just be a progression system. It has to be everything around that, too, and implementing that clashes with the way beat ‘em ups work.

It does eventually click; around 8 hours in, my mastery and Having Enough Numbers dovetailed, and I started to make more and more progress on each run. The jump was pretty substantial, and once that happened, I began to enjoy myself a lot more. On the one hand, yay, less repetition! On the other hand, I think there’s something to be said for games using mechanics and structure to reinforce their narrative. Dying over and over again while you work to take down a tyrant would suck! It would wear on you! I think that decision helps Absolum’s story, but I don’t think that story is strong enough, especially initially, to earn that. It doesn’t feel intentional; instead, it feels like padding out a runtime that could (and should) be much shorter.

And it sucks to feel that way, because so much of Absolum is so good. When it hits, it hits, kids. It’s beautiful, the soundtrack is wonderful, the combat has the sauce, there are cool build opportunities, and on and on it goes. But man could I have gone without the repetition. There’s a better version of this game somewhere that’s about half of the 20 or so hours it took me to see the conclusion of the main story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one we got, and if I wasn’t reviewing Absolum, I probably would have bowed out before it ever clicked. My co-op partner did, and I can’t blame him for it.