Like the man himself, a James Bond game should ooze style and swagger. There’s no point in a timid tie-in with neither the balls nor ability to bring the Bond fantasy to life, and I’ve never particularly wanted one that simply gaffer tapes all the loudest bits of Call of Duty together and stuffs them into a tuxedo. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game that’s confident and charismatic; one that both ebbs patiently and peaks violently as it segues between social stealth, dangerous infiltrations, gadget-driven shenanigans, and destructive, never-tell-me-the-odds action. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game like 007 First Light – and what we got is the best Bond game I’ve ever played.

First Light’s greatest success is just how impressively developer IO Interactive has executed on its mission to create something it can call its own within a very established universe. What we get is something that’s unmistakably Bond – and respectfully adjacent to everything that has come before it – but confidently occupies its own space as a uniquely separate take.

That is, it never seems like a situation akin to 2001’s 007: Agent Under Fire – which felt like the series was in a holding pattern before EA cut another cheque for Pierce Brosnan. No, this is a fastidiously assembled world of its very own – inspired in all the key ways by the work of creator Ian Fleming and the expectations bred by the films, but tailored for IO’s take on the series like a bespoke suit. First Light has its own M, its own Q, and its own Bond – and, after playing it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

First Light doesn’t rush this world building, patiently moving through Bond’s first encounter with MI6 as a Royal Navy aircrewman in the wrong place at the right time, to his initial double-0 training, and onto his transformative first field mission that sets up the core story to come. In another developer’s hands all of this may have been smooshed into a single opening tutorial, or partially handwaved off in a cutscene. Not so in First Light, which unfolds much more like a prestige TV series than a film. While I’ll stress vehemently that this is absolutely the last thing I’d want from current screen rights owner Amazon when it comes to Bond’s live-action future, for First Light’s purposes it works splendidly. It feels perfectly suited to sit back and play, say, a chapter at a time. There are 17 overall, and it took me around 18 hours to reach the end without rushing too much. The writing is excellent, blending a world of serious consequences with a steady supply of on-brand one-liners. The music is impeccable, too; a masterclass of restraint that sensibly limits the use of Bond’s iconic musical stinger to major moments, meaning I got chills each time it occurred.

The chapters are lengthy and rich with peripheral detail to explore, and this significantly bolsters First Light’s ability to build a world I can feel properly immersed in. The pace of both the action and the story is excellent, crescendoing brilliantly in its final act as the stakes explode (along with everything else) and IO takes a moment to fulfill one last Bond fantasy I’d feared it may have forgotten.

While I always felt properly propelled along, I have enjoyed the fact that – beyond a few time sensitive sequences and chases – First Light is more than happy to let you linger and absorb the detail. This is great as, since the world around Bond has been so thoughtfully and convincingly fleshed out, I found it largely impossible to blitz through. Whether it’s Bond’s London apartment, or the bustling MI6 headquarters packed with staffers, the iconic secret agent is seated in a believable world that doesn’t fall to pieces the second you try to scrutinize it. As a Bond fan, it’s delightfully immersive, and Easter eggs abound. You try moving through Q-Lab without pressing every button. Q’s helpless lackeys aren’t going to temporarily blind themselves, after all.

Perhaps above everything, I just adore the attention to detail – from the big-picture consideration of giving Bond the long, vertical scar on his right cheek the character boasted in his literary origins, to tiny embellishments like the scratched rims and ziptied trim on the busted-up, 2006 Aston Martin that acts as a test mule at MI6’s Malta-based training camp. If you don’t walk around and ogle it like I did, this car only spends about a minute or two on screen during the chapter. Yet the fact that IO saw fit to weather, damage, and field repair it like a teenager’s taped-up, track-day drift toy speaks volumes about where the studio set the bar for the level of authenticity it wanted to capture here – and I love that. Aston Martin is here with multiple models, as is Jaguar, Land Rover, and Triumph, and that’s meaningful. It doesn’t feel cynical; Bond is a British institution, and First Light surrounds him with others.

First Light is in rare air in this regard; it’s a licensed game built with an obsessive desire to faithfully bring an existing property to life. As its own take, it’s on a slightly different track to famously brilliant movie tie-ins like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Warriors, or even RoboCop: Rogue City – but IO’s commitment is the same. There are too many seamlessly embedded references to moments from various Bond films to argue that the movies aren’t at the bedrock of what the studio has built here.

First Light’s pace also allows us to marinate with these new riffs on the characters for a lot longer, which helps immensely. There’s no doubt that coming out of the gate with such a young version of Bond was a risk. Irish actor Patrick Gibson’s portrayal of a Bond in his late 20s – and brand new to the world of international espionage – is not initially the one we know. He’s an archetypal hotshot, cocky and inexperienced. He’s a successfully suave ladies man already, but encumbered with a little too much misplaced confidence elsewhere. However, this gives Gibson’s Bond room to grow as he becomes a product of all the new role models he’s suddenly found himself surrounded by.

These include Q (whose patient and more fatherly attitude makes sense in this context, because it now leaves room for him to potentially become a little more hilariously exasperated as Bond continues to break or lose everything he ever gives him) and Bond’s training mentor John Greenway (ably portrayed by British actor Lennie James in a similarly strong performance). The upshot here is that the Bond we get by the end is the patriotic, heroic, and appropriately horny man of mystery we’re very familiar with, but watching him get there was something we’d never seen before.

With IO Interactive being the home of the Hitman series since its inception way back in the year 2000, First Light admittedly shares some very obvious DNA with its bald-and-barcoded stablemate. Running on the studio’s in-house engine, the look and feel are immediately familiar to me as a veteran player of the Hitman series. For the most part, this is a strength; Bond feels weighty and grounded as he smoothly moves, climbs, and vaults around, and First Light typically looks quite fabulous, from its crowded clubs to its wide-open natural spaces. Playing on a standard PS5, there were occasions where I found myself staring at a texture that seemed far murkier than it ought to be at such close proximity, but it’s otherwise sharp and packed with fine, granular detail.

The sandbox nature of Hitman’s level design is also here to a certain extent, albeit in the more managed fashion of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. That is, First Light stitches together open areas that have multiple approaches with linear sequences you need to play the way the developers dictate.

There are levels here with large, crowded areas akin to those like the Paris fashion show in 2016’s Hitman, or the German nightclub in 2021’s Hitman 3, while other sections are a little more adjacent to something like the Uncharted series. The latter sequences are occasionally guilty of limitations that look a little silly in practice – like Bond’s inability to clamber up a small, rocky slope or duck under a waist-high booby-trap string. However, this is the kind of seam you can typically pick at in even the best third-person shooters in the business.

First Light also repurposes a lot of Hitman’s distraction-based sneaking. For instance, you can still turn on loud items and such to lure guards from their posts – only in this case it’s something Bond can do from afar thanks to the embrace of gadgets. Gadgets are obviously a core component of the 007 fantasy, and First Light features an array of them (my favourites are the laser and the missile pen). The only thing that gives me pause is IO’s solution to restrain their use. Gadgets are a consumable, so there’s a requirement to shuffle around and gather up battery power from loose phones, and replenish your chemical supply by scooping up gobs of hand sanitizer. The fact that there’s always so much of this stuff laying around means gathering it is just an arbitrary task, which arguably could’ve been easily replaced by a cooldown timer.

At any rate, I should note that this isn’t simply Agent 47 by way of His Majesty’s Secret Service, and there are a bunch of bespoke tweaks here that imbue First Light with its own, very distinctly Bond-branded flourishes. His abilities as a brawler put 47’s to shame, and there’s a layered system of dodges, counters, and satisfyingly devastating environment attacks. Melee combat is perhaps a little clunky at times, particularly when Bond finds himself swarmed, but it is nonetheless a major distinction from the Hitman series.

First Light is also far more suited for run-and-gun shooting. I initially found the shooting a little clumsy – and did find myself wondering about the worth of a mechanic that allows Bond to toss an empty gun right at the face of the nearest goon. Eventually, however, I almost started to relish running out of ammo, hurling an SMG like an oversized shuriken into some hapless bloke’s head and snatching his own weapon. The times I got it right, which increased the more accustomed to the action I got, were incredibly satisfying.

For clarity, there are also parts of the Hitman formula that haven’t crossed over into First Light’s universe. Disguises, for instance, are limited to only when they’re scripted necessities for the story, and Bond can’t hide or drag the bodies of guards he’s knocked out – which does leave the stealth feeling a little archaic in 2026. I’ll certainly concede that the idea of James Bond collecting a big pile of corpses doesn’t pass the sniff test, but it would’ve been nice to be able to at least yank a knocked-out bad guy behind cover in order to allow me to remain undetected a little longer.

Bubsy was one of several video game mascots that tried to nip at the heels of Mario and Sonic in the ‘90s, but this quick-witted feline’s oddball, comical nature ended up being more memorable than the actual games he was in. Still, Bubsy has an endearing appeal – if maybe as a meme more than a mascot – which makes the go-for-broke energy of his next game, Bubsy 4D, all the more admirable. It tries to recapture the fast and fierce reputation of those early platformers, funneling that energy into a modestly sized, meta-level redemption story that gives Bubsy his proper due.

Equal parts parody and legit legacy sequel, Bubsy 4D sees the washed-up video game mascot clumsily make a comeback. This time, he reluctantly has to save the galaxy from another invasion of the returning Woolies, along with a new enemy known as the BaaBots. Guided by his friends, along with his Gen-Z-coded niece and nephew, he'll once again take to being the main character of a video game platformer – whether he likes it or not. While many retro-inspired 3D platformers these days tap into nostalgia, Bubsy 4D's take is a bit more self-deprecating and aware of the series' shaky legacy, but not to the point of feeling mean, and its portrayal of a down on his luck video game character is very charming.

Bubsy 4D plays out exactly like you’d expect a classic 3D action-platformer from the '90s to, with that added edge and charm of a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Made by developer Fabraz – known for great platformers like Slime-San and the more recent Demon Tides – it really leans into freeform platforming as you skillfully chain different maneuvers together to barrel through a variety of stages. It's the type of flow that rewards you for understanding the physics and rhythm of the action, which is a welcome new direction for the Bubsy series. Across three unique worlds with their own sets of stages, Bubsy uses his various skills and quirks to barrel through enemies and some wily obstacle courses in style

I really liked the energy of Bubsy's movement, which is brought to life by his anxious whining and mannerisms. It actively leans into that comical style he’s known for, and Bubsy 4D has a particularly compelling, dynamic flow to the action. My favorite moments came from darting through worlds built around computer e-waste, where I was climbing tall towers and using Bubsy's ball form to zip through the air in order to make it across the map.

Unlike 1996's Bubsy 3D, 4D is all about building up speed through these levels with his dash and rolling abilities. He's not quite Sonic when it comes to going fast, but it is particularly satisfying to find a quick pace with the ball maneuver. At its best, Bubsy 4D nails that slick, satisfying sense of mastery over your character, especially one as fun and whimsical as Bubsy.

However, I was a bit disappointed with the activities in these stages. While they do focus on the collectathon variety of 3D platformers, where you have to grab all of the knick-knacks and hidden items to score upgrades, the stages themselves feel rather sparse upon deeper exploration. With very few enemies to fight and side-activities to take in across the relatively few stages in the main campaign, it makes the more open-zone levels feel uninteresting and like a bit of a slog to clear compared to the tighter, more focused stages.

Still, there’s generally a flow to the action that I found satisfying. When it was firing on all cylinders, it made me feel like I was in deep as a 'speedrunner' with how well I could build up momentum and bypass massive gaps between explorable areas. However, it did take me some time to come to grips with the movement style, which can feel slippery and imprecise when trying to nail precision jumps. Most of my failures came from those awkward moments of falling off the ledges, using up all my jumps and leaps to attempt to save myself. During the higher-end stages that require a bit more precision, this was a frustrating hurdle to overcome.

What I found most disappointing was the brief campaign, which I finished in under four hours. While I can appreciate Bubsy 4D’s bite-sized nature, what's here doesn't quite feel as complete or ambitious as it could have. Just as it was building to a cool peak, I unexpectedly hit the final stages, and then came the ending. It results in a conclusion that’s both unfulfilling and a bit disappointing, as I was finally reaching a rhythm with the rise in quality of its late-game level design and encounters. It does provide opportunities to revisit previous levels to find missing collectibles and secure time trial finishes at least, and there's even a permadeath mode called 9 Lives that limits your hits before a permanent game over, but the overall package does feel a bit light.

Still, Bubsy 4D's charm and stylish tone really elevate it in many ways. It's packed with nods to classic Bubsy games, and many video game tropes in general, making it a full-on parody of 3D platformers. Though the characters never directly break the fourth wall to acknowledge they're in a video game, they totally lean into the heightened, cartoon reality of an action-platformer. The pause screen also includes occasional gags, with Bubsy momentarily panicking when he finds himself whisked away from the action and left to sit in a menu.

Along with some unlockable moves that poke fun at the “Coyote Time” game design concept that lets you linger in the air for a moment after running off a ledge, which is a must-get, there are also some great costumes for Bubsy, which include the retro-3D skin from his ill-fated first trip into the third dimension. There's even a neat option to turn on the classic Bubsy 3D tank-style controls for full authenticity – or if you're feeling especially daring for a challenge. While this style of referential humor can wear thin at times, I really appreciated how tongue-in-cheek the writing was. A standout is Bubsy's niece and nephew, who always poke fun at his attempts to appear cool.

Tonally, what makes Bubsy 4D so different from other games of the series is that it fully embraces the style and atmosphere of early 3D action-platformers in the vein of N64 classics like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. At the same time, however, it leans into modern flourishes that give it an extra bit of energy, elevating it beyond being just another homage to that genre. And while Bubsy's first 3D game was not particularly great three decades ago, Bubsy 4D still includes some rather fun and even respectful nods to it, including a tribute to the classic Bubsy developers in the ending credits.

After 2024’s Vessel of Hatred expansion left me dangling off a narrative cliff like a hapless Sanctuary peasant, Lord of Hatred had quite a lot riding on its ability to deliver on that momentum and give me a reason to become hopelessly lost in its loot-filled grind once again. The good news is that it’s done exactly that thanks to a tight, satisfying campaign, two new classes that I’ve already spent dozens of hours experimenting with and min-maxing builds for, and an endgame that’s so loaded with things to do that I occasionally forgot some of the systems even existed. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to dive back into Diablo 4’s particular brand of misery, Lord of Hatred has plenty of compelling reasons to do so.

As a proper end to the demonic battle that’s been building since 2023, Lord of Hatred’s cutscenes are unsurprisingly jaw dropping, but it’s the writing and pacing of this short and sweet 8ish hour campaign that stands as some of Blizzard’s best work yet. It had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end with all sorts of twists, turns, and tragedies, references to deep Diablo lore, and motivations for even its most irredeemable characters that had me debating demon philosophy with my friends in party chat as we smashed our way through gobs of imps. Sure, the campaign is only a tiny part of the inevitable hundreds of hours that will be spent mindlessly exploding loot goblins into sparkly treasures, but part of the reason I’m so attached to this depressing and violent world is precisely because of the mysteries, drama, and unforgettable characters that occupy it. Lord of Hatred takes full advantage of all of those things, making it easily one of my favorite Diablo campaigns to date.

That campaign primarily takes place in Sanctuary’s latest locale, Skovos, a mediterranean-style island that plays an especially interesting role in Diablo’s lore as the birthplace of humanity. This new region has many of the things we’ve come to expect from the series, like an incredibly alarming human-to-horrifying-monster ratio and destroyed places that are covered in disgusting fleshy blisters (and whatever the heck a “corpse clot” is). But plenty of things here are a breath of fresh air, too – namely, beautiful and not-yet-destroyed areas that reflect the fact that this ancient place has been spared the worst of the horrors the mainland has faced all these years. The region has also got lots of diversity to it, from Lovecraftian-coded foggy shorelines to volcanic hellscapes, each adding new reasons to keep on trekking around in search of loot. Skovos isn’t nearly as densely filled with new dungeons, but the stuff that is there, especially the new Strongholds to conquer, are all well worth doing.

Aside from the finale to the story and some new places to explore, Lord of Hatred also introduces two very cool character classes to shake things up. The returning Paladin is about what you’d expect if you journeyed across Sanctuary as one in Diablo 2, with loads of protection abilities and ridiculously powerful build options like the aura build my co-op mate designed so he could just walk around destroying everything in his path without even having to lift a finger. The Warlock, on the other hand, is completely new to the series (not counting Diablo 2 having recently retroactively added it in for the 30th anniversary, of course), which has you claiming Hell’s power as your own in a wide variety of diverse builds. That ranges from the Necromancer-like Legion options that are all about summoning demons to do your fighting for you, to the Vanguard build that turns you into a demon yourself, for those who prefer a more personal touch to their wanton destruction. The Paladin is pure nostalgic comfort food that I’m glad to have added to the roster, but I prefer the new hotness of the Warlock, especially just how diverse you can get with it by going down each of the four disciplines or by mixing and matching them together to create something unexpected.

What’s even bigger than these two new skill trees, though, is that the six already available have been completely reworked. The changes are mostly centered around the fact that, instead of having a bunch of highly attractive passive perks that did simple yet incredibly efficient things like increasing the damage you deal or the attacks you can withstand, they’re now built around making more meaningful choices. For example, in the Warlock tree you can pick between making your defensive wall of demons encircle your enemy, trapping them within, or breaking apart into a pack of vicious sluggers after a period. As the Sorceress, you can now decide to take your fire hydro snakes and turn them into ice snakes instead if that elemental effect is more your speed, or if it works better with whatever mad scientist build you’re concocting.

These changes are really awesome, as they push you away from picking the boring, passive upgrades and instead help your character feel much more unique, even when playing alongside those using your same character class. Still, there’s also plenty of fat to cut, like how skills now allow you to sink up to 15 points into them versus the previous five. After you’ve picked your base skills and modified them to your liking, the rest of the leveling experience is pretty much just deciding which ones to focus your points into, recreating a lot of the same uninteresting decisions we were making with the previous trees. I still like the changes they’ve made here, especially the added freedom to augment how these powers work in more meaningful ways, but I do wish they’d have gone a bit further in that direction.

Once you’ve bested the campaign and maxed out your character level, you’ll quickly find yourself in the all-important endgame loop, which involves navigating an absolutely staggering number of upgrade mechanics, the gathering materials you’ll need to farm for them, as well as scooping up the best gear you can find and obsessing over every little stat they rolled. This is the crux of the Diablo experience, and Lord of Hatred is its most dense, meticulously customizable version yet. That means you’ll have to contend with truly some of the most obscenely complicated menus around, which have only grown more cumbersome over the years, but you’re in for a relentlessly rewarding ride if you go through the trouble of learning it all.

Having been along for the ride from the start, I love obsessing over every little detail and finding tons of ways to maximize my lethality. Finally finding a piece of gear that perfectly fits your build or saving up enough materials to re-roll a stat that gives you that extra DPS you need to break through to the next world tier is exactly what chunky ARPGs like this one are all about. Rolling into an endgame activity to watch all your careful preparation and planning turn into you absolutely stomping all over enemies and melting the boss in half a second is downright awesome, and knowing that there’s plenty of runway with 12 tiers of endgame difficulty (up from just four previously) is just insane.

The latest addition to that min-maxing meta is the Talisman system, which allows you to collect magical runes that slot into yet another loadout menu. Practically speaking, this is a clever way of offering set bonuses that are usually found on specific armor sets, except here you can use whatever armor you want while Talismans stand on their own. It took me a while to wrap my head around it honestly, just because I’m so used to the entire idea of a set bonus being a reward for collecting and sporting armor pieces that belong together, but decoupling the need to use specific pieces of equipment ends up being a pretty smart move – though it does add another thing to optimize and obsess over, and frankly Diablo 4 already has so many of those that I sometimes forgot about Talismans altogether. Still, they’re a neat addition and I’m glad they exist, especially since it gave me another thing to squeeze a few extra stats out. That’s always welcome!

There’s also the Horadric Cube, a nifty magical device that does everything from turning common items into uniques(!) to adding yet another stat boost to your best masterworked gear, at the cost of locking it out of any and all future augmentation. After spending hours tinkering around with this thing, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with all it can do – but it’s already quite the game changer, offering numerous new ways to squeeze even more power out of all that grinding you did. Combined with the loot filter, which allows you to target specific items with specific affixes as you continue your climb toward ever-greater power, the endgame journey has fewer annoyances than ever before. Now you can create rules to automatically filter through the loot you earn down to the most minute details, removing the need to sift through all the junk you don’t need (so long as you have the strength of will to figure out how to configure those rules to your exact specifications).

Speaking of the endgame grind, Lord of Hatred takes yet another stab at providing a more compelling laundry list of activities to engage with while you carry out that search for loot. To be fair, I also praised Diablo 4’s vanilla endgame based on my pre-release review time with it, but the benefit of hindsight and a couple more weeks of playtime on the live servers ultimately saw it wear pretty thin shortly thereafter, so it’s hard to say for sure whether or not this attempt will fare any better after a few months. What I can say is that the system Blizzard built in this version has the least friction and the greatest variety of things to do so far, and the dozens of hours I’ve spent with it have been really enjoyable.

The main tool Lord of Hatred uses to get you into that long road of grinding is called War Plans, which works like a curated playlist of activities that you’re directed to one after another, all of which offer compelling rewards. The best part of this is just how easy it is to jump from activity to activity, since you no longer need to hunt for Nightmare Dungeon keys or manually walk over to Helltide events – you can now teleport to the next activity on your playlist in a matter of seconds and keep the good times rolling. One moment you’ll be blasting your way through the Pit, the next you’ll jump over to go stomp out a lair boss, before returning to the war table to collect a batch of rewards. As you progress, these trees will offer more branching paths for you to pick from and will start offering modified versions of these events that target specific rewards. Even cooler are the new perk trees associated with each of the endgame activities included in War Plans, which allow you to modify how these events work and lets you customize your loot for doing so. Again, it’s still hard to say whether or not this will have legs after we’ve been running War Plans for a few seasons, but I like their chances of keeping my attention – or at least not annoying me with weird barriers to entry just to run these activities.

That said, though the premise of the entire War Plans system seems to be reducing the headache of accessing endgame content, it has a pretty fatal flaw in how it works when you’re playing with friends. Since your War Plans playlist is randomized each time you run it, and your friends each have their own specific things to tackle in their own orders that are unlikely to align with yours, if you’re tagging along with a buddy to run through them, you’ll almost instantly feel like a second-class citizen when you see a fragment of the rewards they get. You still get “credit” for tackling these activities, including loot at the end of each bested challenge and some XP to go towards your various War Plans skill trees, but your actual progress toward your own War Plan will only advance if your next activity just so happens to align with theirs. When I wasn’t the party leader picking the next activity, I felt like I was wasting my time and playing inefficiently by not making progress on my own playlist, and when I was the party leader making the picks, I felt guilty that my co-op buddies weren’t seeing the same level of progress as me. It’s one of those small details that completely undermines an otherwise good thing, and weirdly disincentivizes even doing War Plans in co-op altogether, since it’s more efficient to just work on your own playlists in parallel. Truly, a massive oversight that will hopefully get corrected in short order.

The other major endgame activity is Echoing Hatred, effectively a horde mode that throws every enemy it can find at you and asks you to withstand the onslaught for as long as you’re able. It starts out at the lowest world tier difficulty, then climbs as you push through waves of enemies until it inevitably reaches absurd levels of challenge that lead to your inevitable loss and rewards you relative to how well you performed. Interestingly, access to this activity is locked behind a fairly rare (at least in my experience) consumable drop you’ll need to get every time you want to test your mettle, but this mindless, brutally challenging marathon is exactly the type of activity I love in ARPGs, and I also found it pretty useful as a way of gauging which world tier your current build is ready to withstand. It is a bit weird that so much of the endgame (specifically the War Plans system) is about removing barriers to getting back into the endgame action, while Echoing Hatred appears to be a super fun mode you’ll only get to play every once in a blue moon for whatever reason.

Finally, Lord of Hatred adds the feature we’ve all been asking for: Fishing. Don’t be fooled by the tidal wave of apocalyptic monstrosities that surround you – Diablo 4 is a cozy game now. In between killing demon lords and being driven to the brink of madness by the horrors you’ve been forced to witness, you can pull out a fishing rod and just chill out, my friend. Frankly, there really isn’t much to this bizarre minigame, as you kinda just fish for a bit in each region to complete your collection and then have no reason to ever fish again. But it’s kinda hilarious that they bothered to add this in at all, and as someone who loves dense ARPGs and relaxing cozy games in equal measure, it speaks to me personally. Here’s hoping they add dating mechanics next (Blizzard, feel free to call me about this – I have suggestions).

I love noir. I’ll take all kinds: the hardboiled detective, the seedy crime story, neo noir, classic pulp – you name it, I’m buying. So when Mouse: P.I. for Hire sauntered onto my screen the way Ilsa walks into Rick’s in Casablanca, I was pretty excited about it. But noir isn’t just an aesthetic to be thrown on like an old coat as you’re leaving your office at the behest of a leggy blonde. While Mouse: P.I. for Hire clearly understands the style and tropes of classic noir films and novels, as well as 1930s cartoons more broadly, it doesn’t seem to get why those things are there, or how they are used to tell compelling stories. By fusing a hardboiled detective mystery with a fast, retro-style FPS, developer Fumi Games has made a shooter that is thematically incoherent, with the apparent aspirations of its story contradicted at every point by the actual action. Of all the Steam Libraries in all the PCs in all the world, Mouse: P.I. for Hire walked into mine. And I wish I liked it more than I do.

Mouse follows Jack Pepper, a private eye in a world where everyone is a mouse, after Wanda Fuller from the Mouseburg Herald sets him on the case of a missing magician. As you’d expect, that spirals into a much larger conspiracy that includes an attempt on a mayoral candidate’s life and racially motivated mouse-on-mouse violence as bigger mice oppress the smaller shrews. Same as it ever was, even in Mouseburg, and the requisite twists and turns you’d expect from any good detective story make this tale solid enough.

What bothers me, however, is how overly-referential so much of it is. This is a world of mice, so everything is about cheese. Everything. A bad guy? He’s a cheeselegger. Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice? It’ll be described as “gorgonzola piccante slapped on a mozzarella platter.” Someone need to assure you they’re telling the truth? They’ll swear on Maw-Maw’s cottage curds. This is charming initially. Then it never stops. Everything is a reference to the fact that everyone is a mouse and mice like cheese – and when it’s not, instead it’ll be a reference to an old cartoon, or the fact that this is a video game. I should have probably guessed the former when one of the first things I saw was a steamboat named Willie, but at least that and the spinach power-up that gives you Popeye arms is cute. Recalling the Igor/Eye-gor joke from Young Frankenstein? Not so much.

And it doesn’t end there. Run into a series of robot boss fights? Jack will say that he hopes they don’t "rule of three" this thing, which, of course, is exactly what happens. If you’re looking for the Cheeselegging Foreman, Jack will quip that he doesn’t look like much of a boss… more like a mini-boss, and then laugh at his own joke. The voice actors, led by Troy Baker, do an admirable job with what they have, but nothing in Mouseburg is allowed to just be. It has to be a mouse reference or a (literally) cheesy one-liner or a reference to something else. It’s hard to care about anything in Mouse: PI For Hire because it never stops making jokes about everything. It just wants to remind you of other, better things. Surely that’s enough, right?

At least the shooting is better. This is the latest in a wave of “boomer shooters” inspired by old school FPSes like Doom or Quake, and it’s a decent one at that. You start with a pistol and Jack’s fists, but you’ll soon acquire a shotgun, dynamite, a James Gun (which is just a Tommy gun), and more unique stuff like the Devarnisher, which shoots what looks like Elmer’s glue that melts the flesh from your enemies’ bones, leaving only a skeleton. Throw in stuff like a double jump, dash, spinning tail for hovering, and a slide, and Jack’s got some stylish moves when the bad guys show up. This ain’t Quake, but it does feel good. It doesn’t hurt that all of it, from reload animations to random conversations, is rendered in an absolutely gorgeous black and white mix of spritework and 3D models. The worldbuilding may be thin, but Mouse: P.I. for Hire is still dressed to the nines.

Even here, though, I have issues. Weapons can feel weak, especially the shotgun – it’s got the audio kick of a popgun, and there’s a strange disconnect to seeing something that sounds like a kid’s toy blow off some poor mouse’s head as you paint the white of the world with the black ichor that spews out of his neck. Enemies mostly come out of doors marked with a skull that you can’t enter, robbing those areas of anything remotely resembling a sense of place. Levels also really like to pull the “we’re going to lock you in a room and throw baddies at you until they’re dead or you are” schtick a little too much for my taste. None of this is ever gamebreaking, mind; the combat is fundamentally good enough to carry you to the end of the roughly 12-hour campaign, but sometimes it feels like being at a show that’s never quite bad enough to leave. And at least on the normal difficulty, health items are so generous there’s rarely a challenge.

Like any good boomer shooter, there are plenty of secrets to find – newspapers, cash, weapon upgrade schematics, baseball cards, and so on – fragile walls to blow up, and even locked safes to open with your tail, which pulls double duty as a lockpick. Some of those locks are on a time limit or must be solved in a limited number moves, and you only get one shot at the good stuff they hold; others are so easy you could probably solve them by letting an actual mouse run across your keyboard. It’s very jarring.

Once you’re done with a level, it’s back to the hub, which encompasses Jack’s office, the local bar, store, weapon upgrade shop, and so on. My favorite thing here is the baseball card minigame you can play at the bar. You’ll switch between pitching and being at bat, using the cards in your hand (players and abilities) to try and score as many runs as you can. It’s fun! What I like less is the whole “being a detective” thing, mostly because I never got to actually do it. Any clues you find will be pinned to Jack’s caseboard, and once you get them there, Jack will just intuit where to go. No work on your part required. What’s the point of being a gumshoe if all the answers are handed right to me?

That brings me to one of my major problems with Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Look, I hate to be the guy who brings up “ludonarrative dissonance” in a video game review in The Year of Our Lord 2026, and if you’re rolling your eyes right now, I can’t blame you. But it’s an actual issue here. Jack Pepper is a P.I. who kills more people in a single mission than Phillip Marlowe has in every book Raymond Chandler ever wrote combined. I don’t care how corrupt the cops are: a private detective can’t break into a police station and slaughter them en masse and then go about his day. In one particularly nonsensical scenario, Jack inadvertently burns down an opera house to save a guy running for mayor, and he ends up fighting… an opera singer? And shoots her? Is she dead? Did I just kill an actress for being angry I burned down her workplace? If I didn’t, have I left her alive and unconscious inside a burning building? Mouse: P.I. for Hire doesn’t tell me, and doesn’t seem to care either way.

None of this is to say that noir cannot or should not be violent, but that violence usually has a purpose. Much of Elliot Chaze’s seminal novel Black Wings Has My Angel is about robbing an armored car, but the book builds to that – it’s a big deal when it finally happens, and the characters have to reckon with the fallout once it does. Jack Pepper, on the other hand, is a walking catastrophe and nobody in Mouseburg seems to care. He largely gets to go about his business and is portrayed as a down-on-his-luck everyman P.I., like the characters who inspired him, when he is, at best, a mass murderer. Does that make for a more fun video game? Maybe. But it’s bad noir, and a worse detective tale. In the stories Mouse: P.I. for Hire references, violence is an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the human experience that shatters the people it touches. Here, it’s just entertainment, and that weakens the whole concept.

“But Will,” you might say, “this is a goofy, Looney Tunes FPS. Why should I care about any of that?” And the answer is because Mouse wants you to. It wants you to believe that this is important. You spend a lot of time talking about these characters, about putting together the clues you need to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and about Jack’s motivation for doing the work (he allegedly needs the money, which both leads to him taking cases and doesn’t track when I’m super rich from all the killing). All of that makes a lot less sense after you’ve gone to Tinsel Bros. Studios and single-handedly eradicated the mob hanging out there, all while doing a bunch of Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones/Conan the Barbarian impressions as everyone says you should be an actor. Give this guy a week on the job as chief of police and Mouseburg would be the safest city in the world because nobody would be left alive to commit crimes in the first place. It’s hard to buy into Jack as the regular guy who needs to gather evidence I’m told he is when he’s just wiped out the local police department, you know?

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.

[Editor’s Note: Minishoot' Adventures was first released on PC in 2024, but we did not review it at that time, so we have taken its recent port to Nintendo Switch 2 as an opportunity to do so now.]

Minishoot’ Adventures answers a question I never would have thought to ask in a thousand years: What if you mixed classic Zelda with a twin-stick shooter? Developer SoulGame Studio’s take on that combination is an absolute delight. Between the silky smooth controls, your spaceship-shaped hero’s growing repertoire of abilities, and a top-down world that opens up at a satisfying pace, I loved all 10 hours it took me to roll credits. That felt like a perfect length, even though I would’ve gladly kept playing if it had offered more.

SoulGame Studio makes absolutely no effort to hide Minishoot’ Adventures’ Hyrulean inspiration. Just like Zelda, the overworld is populated with enemies, caves, trees, waterways, and areas you can see but can’t reach until you unlock a new ability. Your health is displayed as a row of hearts in the upper corner of the screen, and you can add more by finding heart pieces hidden around the world. If that’s not proof enough, just travel one screen down from your home base and you’ll find an exact replica of the starting screen from The Legend of Zelda on NES. While an uncharitable interpretation might consider this stealing from Nintendo, it all comes off as a loving homage. The developers have used familiar ingredients to create a new, twin-stick shooting-infused dish that’s different enough to stand on its own.

Instead of an elfin boy, you play as Minishoot’, a small beige ship that exhibits a surprising amount of personality thanks to the cartoonish art and animation. That odd apostrophe in the ship’s name is actually to abbreviate “Minimalist Shooter Adventure,” and that minimalism extends to the story, which gets maybe a minute of total screen time. Basically, you and your fellow sentient ships are enjoying your lives together when an invading force comes in with guns blazing to break up the party, flinging ships to all corners of the map and encasing them in crystals. Your job, once you break free of your own gemstone prison, is to find your Shipling friends and “restore balance to the Great Crystal,” whatever that means. It’s not Shakespeare, but it sets you off on a fun adventure.

If you’ve played top-down Zelda games before, then you know exactly what to expect here: You’ll poke around the overworld, delving into caves, fighting enemies, and solving light puzzles. This is all extremely pleasant, thanks in no small part to the controls. Minishoot’ glides along so smoothly that simply moving across the screen feels satisfying.

Some areas are blocked off by obstacles like pits and water, but you can explore these regions later, once you obtain the right equipment. For instance, you unlock a surf ability that lets you glide over water, and a boost that lets you use ramps to leap over pits. These upgrades are a joy, both because the controls are so good and because they let you explore further into the map. This is a tried-and-true formula, and it works particularly great in Minishoot’ because of how frequently the upgrades are handed out during the adventure. The pacing feels just right, so I never felt like my progress had stalled.

The only major aspect that’s not inspired by Zelda is the twin-stick combat, which (if you’re using a gamepad, as is highly recommended) has you move around with the left stick while firing bullets in any direction with the right. This addition is incorporated so seamlessly into the otherwise recognizable framework that you might wonder if Link should’ve been a little ship all along.

Your starting weapon is as weak as a peashooter, but as you take down enemies and blast through gemstones scattered throughout the world, you level up, earning points you can feed into 11 different enhancements — things like fire rate, damage, range, and bullet speed. Each of these enhancements can be upgraded numerous times, making any single upgrade feel a little too incremental, which is somewhat disappointing. Worse, the cost of the upgrades increases as your enhancements become stronger. That means, for instance, you need to spend three levels’ worth of currency to gain the second damage upgrade.

Thankfully, you’re also picking up new abilities as you bolster your damage output, so I always felt like I was making progress regardless. And your attack upgrades do eventually add up; by the time I confronted the final boss, I could unleash a bullet hell barrage of my own.

Unlike Zelda, the enemy designs are largely forgettable in Minishoot’ Adventures, at least when it comes to their looks. Like the Shipling protagonists, the bad guys you’re blowing up are all mechanical constructs. Most are beige ships that come in different geometric shapes – this one’s a circle! Here’s a triangle! Lynels and moblins these are not.

On the other hand, these enemies do have a nice variety of attack styles, and they’re strategically placed around the environment to pose different kinds of challenges, making them far more interesting to fight than they are to look at. For instance, stationary turrets might snipe at you from a distance while a cluster of small enemies swarms your way, giving you plenty to consider as you try to kill the cluster while avoiding the incoming bullets. Many rooms lock you inside while spawning increasingly difficult waves of enemies. (There are even a handful of races for you to compete in, complete with a starting block and finish line.)

Bosses are also mechanically interesting, big and challenging battles divided into phases – and it’s here that this twin-stick shooter veers into bullet hell territory. You usually have to thread your way through a maze of projectiles, all while directing your own stream of bullets at the boss. It’s a blast. I died a lot in these fights, but just like in top-down Zelda games, the dungeons are designed to give you a short route back to the boss room from your respawn point, so I was always excited to try again rather than getting frustrated.

Every inch of Minishoot’ Adventures is packed with smart little details, like hidden paths hinted at by gentle indents in the walls, or how enemies gradually turn redder as they take damage so you can tell when they’re about to die. There are plenty of collectables to seek out, from red coins and heart pieces to chunks of the overworld map. As you progress, various symbols start to appear in unexplored regions to point you toward new areas of interest, so I never felt aimless or lost.

It’s all set to a charming and engrossing electronic soundtrack. The sound effects are full of little bloops and plooks and ASMR-friendly tinkles, as well. Combine that soundscape with surprisingly cute animations (an especially impressive feat for a game about faceless ships) and you get a cozy vibe, even when you’re sweating through an onslaught of bullets.

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.

Intelligent, stylish, and brutally hands-off, Routine is one of the most terrifying — and at times terrifyingly frustrating — horror games I've played for some time. Confident and cruel, it's a masterclass in show-don't-tell horror that freaked me out far more than I'd like to admit… and that's coming from a bona fide horror veteran.

All five of my senses are permanently on high alert. My ears constantly strain for the sound of stomping footfalls and humming electronics. My eyes dance about in the darkness, looking for a place to hide. My hands — misshapen and perma-clawed from clutching the controller so tightly — genuinely ache from stress. And yes, I can almost smell it here, too. Dust. Decay. Decades-old recirculated air lying over an unmistakable note of fried circuits. When I feel this overwhelmed, I'd typically cower behind a Pause screen to bring my blood pressure back down, but I can't even do that: bringing up the menu doesn’t actually pause anything, which means you can die — and I have — while adjusting your settings. Thanks, Dead Space.

There are only two horror games I've never been able to complete: Alien: Isolation and the very first Outlast game. Both scare the bejesus out of me, chiefly because there's no way to predict when a jumpscare is coming, but also because I absolutely hate being chased by things I can't kill. Routine delivers all of this and more, ratcheting up the fear through the very clever, very intentional design choices it makes, such as manual save points (NO!), randomized puzzles so you can't cheese them or look stuff up (ARGH!), and some truly devilish creature design that feels as though it's been plucked directly from my own nightmares (HELP ME).

Announced way back in 2012 — two years before the release of Creative Assembly's aforementioned Alien: Isolation, with which it shares much of its DNA — Routine is one of the most atmospheric games I've played in ages (and I do mean all games, not just horror ones). You, a software engineer dispatched to resolve a malfunctioning security system, arrive at Union Plaza, a tourist resort on the Moon, although there are no tourists, no staff, and barely even a functioning facility left. And despite the technical accomplishments that apparently got us to the Moon, everything in Union Plaza is gloriously old-fashioned. Like The Jetsons or the original Alien movie, it presents a dated, almost naïve vision of the future, with green-hued CRT terminals, limited technology, and fabulously 70s-esque patterned wallpaper.

Take your trusty CAT, aka your Cosmonaut Assistance Tool. Yes, it lets you overload electronics, track clues, see in the dark, and gain important security clearance, but it's also a boxy gizmo that kinda looks like an 1980s video camera, complete with a cripplingly bleak battery life. Using it requires manual interaction — modules need to be physically slotted into place, and connecting to the short-span wi-fi requires a manual button press. All of it is delightfully fiddly, right up until you realize you may need to manually change out your modules while a Type-05 (a deeply unpleasant mechanical facsimile of a humanoid) is gunning for you, or you can't save until you find a wireless access point, which may or may not have a murderous robot patrolling just in front of it.

And Routine gives nothing away. Absolutely nothing. No hints, no clues, no flashing items, no "Stuck? Click here!" lifeline. Admirably reserved, it's content to leave you fumbling in the dark for hours if need be, utterly unfazed by your frustration until you, say, accidentally spot a vent you somehow didn't notice before. It's deliciously cunning game design that I hate every bit as much as I admire, only elevated further by its careful use — or sometimes lack thereof — of sound effects and unsettling bangs and thuds in the distance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, there's also no HUD. You never really know what state your health is in, which means you’re never certain how many times one of the creepy automatons can grab you before it's game over. You only know how many shots you have left in your CAT by "physically" picking it up and looking at the battery life. You don't helpfully zoom in when you're reading a dimly backlit screen, which can make reading memos and emails on flickering displays pretty tricky. Logging into things takes time you may ill afford thanks to 1980s engineering and a groaning dial-up system… especially when you learn that, yes, enemies can drag you out of your hiding place if they see you get into it.

It's those emails and memos that really flesh out the story here, though, which is surprising given how missable they are (and how easy it is to get turned around and think you've already explored somewhere that you haven't). I can't say I thought it all made sense, or was wonderfully satisfactory or unique at the end — too many loose ends and unanswered questions meant it didn't quite stick the landing for me — but Routine's curious story certainly kept me hooked.

But even for me — someone absolutely terrified of being stalked in the dark by unkillable machines — Routine loses a little of its luster partway through its roughly six-hour campaign. What once freaked me out began to wind me up instead. Manual saving is novel right up until, say, your PC crashes, and the hands-off puzzling is impressive all the way until you're fully, palpably lost and have no idea how to progress. You cannot reacquaint yourself with your current objective unless you are at a save station, or choose when to activate your flashlight, or even carry a spare battery with you. There's no map which, for someone with the directional sense of a turtle spinning on its back — also me! — is woefully cruel. And not being able to pause is an interesting wrinkle right up until you get an important phone call or the dog stands in front of the TV.

From this point on, even the Type-05s feel a little humdrum. The stomping of their feet means it's impossible for one to sneak up behind you, and they're outrageously stupid, often unable to find you even if they chase you into an open elevator and you're crouching behind a box six inches away. Half the time, all they do is interrupt you, like a puppy with a new ball. That doesn't mean I don't often wish I could permanently disable them — knocking them temporarily offline just doesn't make me feel safe enough, which is obviously why permakilling them isn't an option — but there's so much "ammo" around (read: batteries) that you can often neutralize them and slip away without incident. Nor does it mean they don't freak me out (they do) or that I got acclimated to the tension (I didn't), but given that the enemies just aren't that clever, they're pretty easy to lose. (That said, I can't help but wish for a SOMA-esque 'Safe' mode to allow me to explore to my heart's content.)

As for the puzzles? Few stumped me for long — it's fear that held me back, not the puzzle design — but I think some will be confused by them, not least because developer Lunar Software's lack of signposting means it's easy to overlook clues. If you take nothing else from my words today, though, you owe it to yourself to try to get through as much of Routine as you can without succumbing to a guide. Most puzzles are logical, sometimes maddeningly so, and it's always a rush when you realize the solution can be found by fiddling with the settings on your CAT. And that's what I loved best, I think. Those intelligent puzzles, intuitive tools, and a deeply unsettling atmosphere may not work for all, but they sure did impress me.

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.

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.

Given that the LEGO brand has been slapped onto almost every kind of family-friendly multiplayer game you can think of at this point, from kart racers to Super Smash Bros clones and even a Rock Band spin-off, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for the world’s biggest brick maker to construct its own monument to Mario Party. LEGO Party is something more than a block-based knockoff of Nintendo’s long-running virtual boardgame series, though. Sure, it might use Mario Party’s fundamentals as a baseplate to build upon, with a host of wacky minifigs in place of the Mushroom Kingdom’s finest, but every last piece here is absolutely pulsating with personality and there isn’t a single stud-based dud in the 60 minigames on offer. If lots of laughter is what you’re after, LEGO Party has all the right parts for assembling a fun night in with friends and family.

If you’ve ever played one of Nintendo’s party-starters before then the basics of LEGO Party will be as easy to grasp as a tiny coffee mug in a minifig’s fist. In this instance, the goal is to collect gold bricks and studs instead of stars and coins, as you and three other players move around four uniquely themed game boards littered with various stud-sapping hazards and potentially lucrative event spaces to land on. Depending on the board you choose, each session can be as short as six rounds or roughly 45 minutes but can be extended all the way up to three-hour-long, 24-round epics, and each round pits all four players against each other in a minigame designed to be easy to pick up for LEGO Juniors and old-timer Technic fans alike, but tricky to master.

Everybody can carry up to three power-ups that can be bought with studs at the shop or collected from Wheel of Fortune-style spins, and these can have dramatic leaderboard-levelling impacts, like teleporting your minifig directly to a gold brick space, or slowing your roll so you can increase your chances of moving the exact number of spaces you need. Many of these basics have been established in the Mario Party blueprint several times over, and Lego Party takes an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fish the dog-eared instruction booklet out of the toy chest and rebuild it’ approach to keeping many of these proven core concepts intact.

However, there are some key elements to be found in LEGO Party’s Pirate, Ninjago, Space, and Theme Park boards that set them apart. For starters, each minigame is chosen democratically by moving your minifig in front of one of three options presented at the beginning of each round, and I liked that it meant my party was given a bit more control over which events we were able to enjoy in each evening’s session. (Of course, if you prefer a more randomised minigame experience like Mario Party, you can opt for that too.) I also prefer LEGO Party’s system of letting the results of each minigame determine the order of turns in each subsequent round, as opposed to Mario Party’s more rigid setup of dictating the order via a dice roll at the start and sticking with that all the way to the end. I find that LEGO Party’s results-driven method increases the ebb and flow of each board and brings extra incentive to do well in each minigame.

More notably, each of LEGO Party’s wonderfully candy-coloured and brilliantly detailed boards has a number of special construction zones to land on, giving you the choice of two structures to build on that space that can dramatically alter the map and introduce a variety of game-changing additions. For example, in the Theme Park board you might opt to build the Extreme Zone, which introduces a gauntlet run of twitchy stunt challenges to successfully pull off in order to earn a gold brick. Alternatively you could go for the Royal Ramparts, which brings with it a ballista-based minigame for quickly snaring studs, and a catapult for lobbing you at another random player and stealing one of their gold bricks. Mixed in with the various other board-specific features, like when the Space map briefly transforms into a turn-based battle against a giant green alien, and each go-around of these game boards has felt fresh and fun over the dozen or so hours of playtime my family and I have put in together so far.

Everything is Awesome

It’s also been consistently funny, and that’s largely due to the inclusion of Ted Talker and Paige Turner, LEGO Party’s own quip-cracking commentary team. Seemingly inspired by gag-making game show playcallers like those of Wipeout or Holey Moley, Ted and Paige provide colourful context to each turn taken, as well as responding in real time to each player’s performance in a minigame – either bigging them up when they’re on top, or hilariously dragging them when they’re struggling. Surprisingly, even after multiple playthroughs of each of LEGO Party’s four boards I’ve barely heard the same joke twice, although in fairness that could be because half the time the commentary has been completely drowned out either by fits of uncontrollable laughter or salty bickering as a hard-earned gold brick is ruthlessly snatched away from another player. Seriously, if you’re playing with a competitive group, that tends to sting harder than suddenly finding a lost LEGO brick with the fleshy part of your bare foot.

The rest of the comedy in LEGO Party stems from the competitive chaos of the challenges themselves, and developer SMG Studio – who previously entertained with the slapstick-based shenanigans of its Moving Out series – has really outdone itself as far as crafting a construction derby of morish minigames. From memory-testing challenges to physics-driven races and rhythm-based dance-offs, Lego Party’s roster of minigames is as diverse as it is diverting, dripping with personality and creative flair. Besides, it’s always a great indication for how immediately engaging multiplayer minigames are when players get caught up in the competition without realising they haven’t even left the pre-game practice screen, which has been a regular occurrence during my time with LEGO Party so far.

Some minigames are terrific, toybox tributes to other titans of multiplayer mayhem, such as the obstacle course dash that feels straight out of Fall Guys or the zero-gravity space shuttle soccer that’s very much in the same orbit as Rocket League. Others lean into the familiarly tactile feel of playing with LEGO itself, like the one that involves trying to build monsters out of a pile of different-shaped blocks without being provided any instructions. There’s one challenge with four soccer goals to defend from an ever-increasing number of balls that plays out like an inverted game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, and another that sits each minifig on a LEGO motorbike and challenges you to navigate an undulating course like a cutesy recreation of Trials HD.

Some of the most popular minigames amongst the contestants on my couch are the ones that feel like nothing else we’ve ever played. There’s the frantic, four-way battle to smash your opponents’ LEGO vase with a brick boulder that gradually speeds up as it’s deflected off each player, or the nightclub-themed showdown that sees each of you scramble to fling your minifig onto a floating dance floor with elastic grappling hooks. Of course, everyone in my party has their own personal picks: I love anything on four-wheels, my son’s really into the zero-gravity games, while my daughter’s favourite is… basically whichever minigame she won most recently. But the quality of challenges here is so consistent across the game board, that even when we opt for a random minigame choice we’re rarely disappointed with whatever comes our way.

Everything is Cool When You’re Part of a Team

I also appreciate that success in these minigames is mostly reliant on a combination of skill and luck. You won’t find any cheap button-mashing challenge types here like the ones that often pop up in Mario Party, which I always felt put unnecessary wear and tear on my expensive game controllers, not to mention seeming somewhat unfair to the younger players in my lounge room who haven’t had decades of button-pressing practice pumped into their biceps.

There also aren’t any lopsided three-vs-one match types to force the majority to unfairly gang up on an individual, as LEGO Party’s minigames are always evenly split – either every man for himself, or face-offs in teams of two on the occasions you land on a Brick Battle square. These team-based clashes range from the pure intensity of a doubles game of air hockey through to more ridiculous co-op tasks where one person aims a T-shirt cannon and the other fires it at an audience of shirtless minifigs, and all of them demand effective communication and coordination between duos in order to get the win. In fact, I enjoyed these Brick Battles so much that I was slightly disappointed to find there were only nine of them included in the roster.

Even so, I am happy that LEGO Party doesn’t bother with random participation awards at the end of each board, like many Mario Party games do. There’s still plenty of twists and turns as fortune-changing chance spaces are sprinkled across the map in the closing stages, and many games I’ve played have seen the lead constantly change hands all the way through to the final round, but the winner is always clearly defined by the time you reach the end – not unfairly elevated into first position after the fact purely because of some arbitrary, unseen statistic like they happened to land on the most event spaces. It makes victory feel like it was achieved through genuine merit rather than more mystifying means. That doesn’t mean that other players won’t take any opportunity to knock you off the winner’s podium, though – and I mean that quite literally, especially during the riotously interactive results screen that typically devolves into delirious slap fights, slipping on banana peels, and background breakdancing.

While LEGO Party’s lineup of playable minifigs might not feature anyone as iconic as Mario or Yoshi, it makes up for it in terms of sheer numbers and the substantial suite of options for character customisation. Playing through each of the game boards or one of the curated minigame playlists earns XP that gradually unlocks new minifigs along a series of simple progression paths, as well as awarding you carrots that can be spent unlocking a separate collection of minifigs in the shop. There are more minifigs here than you could shake a mini twig at – by my count well over 200, from goth kid minifigs to person-shaped pizza slices and stylish ninja warriors – and as you unlock each one their individual parts can be used to craft entirely new creations of your own. Want a minifig with tigerprint pants, a Miami Vice-style linen jacket, and an American football helmet? Weird combination but sure, it’s all yours.

Speaking of bolting things together, I’d love to see LEGO Party leverage the many pop culture partnerships that the Danish brickmaker has amassed over the years and bring them to the party either in the form of expansion packs or future sequels. A LEGO Star Wars board with minigames designed around lightsaber battles and Death Star trench runs would be a treat, as would a LEGO Indiana Jones board that had event spaces to trigger Raiders of the Lost-ark style booby traps and boulders. Given Nintendo’s cosying up with the LEGO brand in recent times, it’s not inconceivable that we could even see a LEGO Mario LEGO Party expansion, at least in the Switch versions, to really bring things full circle. To be clear, nothing of this nature has been announced and I’m merely thinking out loud, but I’ve had a blast with LEGO Party so far, and I really hope that it’s set the fantastic plastic foundations for a series that’s here to stay.

Over the last few decades, soccer (or football, if you’re not from the US like me) hasn’t changed much. Sure, there are new rules, improved tactics, and so much more money involved in the modern game – but at its heart, it's still all about kicking a ball into a goal more than the other team. So how does a series like EA Sports FC improve each year when the sport it’s emulating isn’t introducing massive changes? For me, it’s about quality-of-life updates, and FC 26 has those in spades. It’s filled with small adjustments that make this one of the best versions of the beautiful game in the last several years, from stickier dribbling and crisper passing to smarter goalkeeper positioning. Unfortunately, the goodwill those changes garner have also been undercut by some of the most aggressive microtransactions EA has ever introduced. So while FC 26 is inching in the right direction, that progress is primarily kept to the pitch.

A phenomenal example of this is the new gameplay presets. In the past, everyone was using the same gameplay style, whether diving into competitive games in Ultimate Team or trying to win the league against CPU opponents in Manager Mode. This year, EA has split things between two different presets: Competitive and Authentic. With the Competitive preset, you can expect the fast-paced action and smarter AI teammates that you might be used to from previous FC/FIFA games. Meanwhile, Authentic will feel more realistic to what you see on the real-life pitch every weekend. Players are slower, and you need to use your tactical intelligence to get into scoring position.

The most important part of this change is that these two options do not impact each other. That means EA can tune Competitive mode however is needed without changing the balance of Authentic mode, something they couldn’t do in previous versions of FC. People come to FC 26’s various modes for different reasons: Career Mode players want a game that plays as close to real-life as possible, while Ultimate Team and Clubs players want fair and balanced online competition. Those two ideals have sometimes worked against each other in the past, so giving us two totally separate gameplay styles is a great way to serve both communities.

What’s strange about the implementation is that the Authentic preset is restricted to offline modes only. That means you can’t even use it in your Squad Battles matches despite them being the only single-player content in Ultimate Team. It’s something I hope is added in the future, as it feels odd not to include all of the single-player content by default, especially when it does exactly that with the new version of the Season Pass.

Before diving into some of the other positive changes, let's go over that Season Pass, as it’s one of the biggest points of contention for me. Last year, EA introduced a paid Season Pass into FC 25 toward the end of the cycle, so we knew this was coming, but seeing it drop on day one does sting. You can ignore it and stick with the free version of the pass, or even earn enough in-game currency to buy it without spending real-world money, but I would argue that this might be the worst version of a Season Pass we’ve seen in a sports game yet.

The issue with FC 26’s Season Pass is that you’re not just earning rewards for Ultimate Team, where people are already (unfortunately) conditioned to spend money. You’re also earning a ton of rewards for Clubs, Player Career, and Manager Career. The latter is where things really get icky, because one of the big draws for FC 26 is that Icons and Heroes are finally available in Manager Mode. For the first time ever, you can take classic players like Luis Figo, Toni Kroos, and Julie Foudy and put them into your Manager Mode saves. It should be a revelation, but instead, EA made the strange decision to lock many of these players behind the Season Pass.

There are several reasons this is frustrating. The first is that you probably won’t be able to acquire enough XP for them by playing either Manager or Player Career Mode alone. EA might implement more ways for non-Ultimate Team players to earn XP, but with how things are currently constructed, you’ll need to dive into that lootbox opening simulator or open your wallet if you want to finish enough of the pass to claim Career Mode rewards like Gianfranco Zola, Miroslav Klose, and Park Ji-Sung. Even as someone who primarily plays Ultimate Team, this change sucks.

And keep in mind, this is only the first Season Pass. If FC 26 continues to lock Icons and Heroes behind future passes, we’ll likely see desirable players like Ronaldinho, Toni Kroos, and Johan Cruyff tucked behind a paywall as well. It’s an unfortunate situation that reeks of EA trying to get even more money out of its playerbase than usual. It’s bad enough that Ultimate Team players are being milked dry, but now you can’t even enjoy your offline Career Mode without feeling the pull to spend money. Forcing this Season Pass on everyone feels like a bridge too far, even for EA.

What makes this situation all the more painful is that most of the modes feature fun updates on their tried and true formulas this year. For example, the new Manager Live Hub lets you dive into specific challenges and earn new jerseys for your club. These feel like the next step toward a historical mode like the Negro Leagues option in MLB The Show, as you’ll be challenged to recreate moments like Jamal Musiala’s double with Bayern Munich or take a mid-level club like SK Rapid or Strasbourg to European glory. The classic version of Career Mode is still there, but Manager Live gives you a rotating list of challenges that will test your skills in fun ways on and off the pitch.

Even Ultimate Team is home to several small yet meaningful changes. Everything from the return of tournaments to the ability to choose the cosmetics on your Evolutions feels carefully crafted to deliver the improvements fans have been asking after for years. EA has been actively working on making its online play more stable as well, and so far I haven’t run into many server issues. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still run into slowdown at peak times, but it’s never felt unplayable.

Unfortunately, EA also promised a slower power curve in Ultimate Team, and while it’s still early days, all that’s meant so far is that the mode has become even more pay-to-win than usual. Rewards from every mode have been nerfed, and slowing things down like this seems well-intentioned on paper, as it would theoretically allow your cards to stay viable for longer. But you can still buy the best card packs in the store for the chance to get top-end players, so those intentions look a lot less noble when they are placed next to $30 lottery tickets that’ll help you compete at the highest level right away. In the past, if you didn’t pay with money, you could pay with time and effort. That’s still true if you want to work the Transfer Market to make Coins, but average players are going to be stuck firmly in the rearview mirror until they open their checkbook. B

Elsewhere, Clubs have probably seen the least changes, though the Archetype system is a nifty new form of progression. I’m not much of a Clubs player but, to my untrained eye, the ability to pick a famous player from soccer’s past to emulate makes it a little easier to stick to a role and provides a better way to gauge forward momentum.. While a meta will surely settle over the mode in the coming weeks, it’s a change that has piqued my interest enough to make me wish I had a group of 10 friends to play with consistently.

Thankfully, the on-pitch gameplay might be better than it's ever been during the current console generation. Part of that is thanks to the split between Authentic and Competitive, but it’s more than that alone, as FC 26 is just generally more responsive than ever. There are dozens of ways this manifests, but the thing you’ll notice most is left-stick dribbling. The ball feels sticky to your feet, letting you make microadjustments as you dribble down the pitch. With the extra control, you’re better able to set up passes and find lines to cut through the defense.

Speaking of passing, everything is a bit crisper this year. You can’t ping up and down the field with no-look passes, but you can use positioning to tiki-taka your opponent to death while you look for an opening. Speed is still king on the wing, but in the middle of the pitch, it’s all about controlling the flow and looking for that one incisive pass to get in front of the goal for a shot. If that sounds like FC 26 could become a score-fest, especially online, with the faster pace of Competitive mode, you’d be partially correct. Defending can be difficult. Mistimed tackles will leave you even further out of position than usual due to the dribbling improvements, and your AI teammates tend to run out of position already.

However, EA has given goalkeepers an AI boost to help offset that. Your shot-stopper isn’t perfect, but they’re much more intelligent with their positioning. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still see a few weird bounces here or there – that’s soccer, after all. But goalkeepers are much less frustrating in FC 26. Not only do they set up better to close off shooting angles, but they’re better at punching and pushing the ball out of danger. Instead of blocking a shot directly into the path of an attacker, they’ll send it wide to give your defense a second to catch your breath. FC 26, especially in online play, is much more offensive than the real-life version of the sport, but goalkeepers will at least keep you honest this year.