The fifth mainline entry in the series still maintains key aspects of Onimusha's distinct identity, mixing Japanese history and mythology with the studio's penchant for inventive creature design, but infuses these aspects with layered melee skirmishes shaped by the past 20 years of action games. The shift to a semi-open-world structure is a stumbling block, but Way of the Sword still marks an excellent return for the long-dormant series by evolving its swordplay with captivating aplomb.  

Musashi himself is, of course, known for his combat prowess: a legendary samurai from Japanese history who's widely regarded as the greatest swordsman who ever lived. Much like previous protagonist Samanosuke Akechi–who's loosely based on the Sengoku period's Akechi Hidemitsu–Capcom was influenced by the fables, legends, and real stories of Musashi when creating the character. 

While he's only in his early 20s in Way of the Sword, the cockiness, confidence, and swagger of someone who would eventually go undefeated in 62 sword duels is immediately apparent. There's a Harrison Ford-esque roguishness about him that's easy to fall in love with, and this is aided immensely by not just Yoshimasa Hosoya's voice performance–I played the Japanese-language version–but also the game's excellent facial-capture animation. Every subtle raise of an eyebrow, smirk of the mouth, and clench of the jaw is evident and lends Masashi a ton of character even when he's not speaking. 

It also helps that he's modeled after the late, great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, best known for his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa on films such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, and who also played Musashi in Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai trilogy.

Onimusha has a long history of using the likenesses of real actors, including Yusaku Matsuda and Jean Reno, but the leap in quality over the past 20 years is undeniable in Way of the Sword. I'm not overly familiar with Mifune's earlier work, yet his mannerisms shine through both in cutscenes and gameplay, from his wide-eyed intensity to the way he shrugs his shoulders and scratches the back of his neck. 

At the beginning of the game, Musashi arrives in Edo-era Kyoto, looking to prove himself as a warrior without equal. After defeating a clan leader in a fierce duel, he's set upon by an invading force of demonic Genma and is only able to fight back after being granted an Oni gauntlet by a mysterious figure. 

Unlike previous protagonists such as Samanosuke and Jubei Yagyu, who wanted to use their Oni powers to save the world, Musashi wants to rid himself of the gauntlet. The way of the sword is traversed on one's own strength, so Musashi feels having these powers at his disposal is essentially cheating and doesn't represent his true skill as a swordsman. 

Watching Musashi navigate this stance while newfound allies are relying on him to save Kyoto is one of the more compelling aspects of the game's narrative. Musashi has his own ethos, but he's also not the kind of samurai who adheres to a strict bushido code. When it's a matter of life or death, he'll break the rules, which feels very human and fits his rogueish attitude. 

The rest of the story is fairly straightforward, with some comically evil villains adding entertainment value and impetus to the game's many battles. It's standard popcorn fare–not quite as corny as Resident Evil, and there are some killer lines, but it's not something you'll remember for long outside of some of its performances. There are some pacing issues early on, too. Control is frequently wrestled away from you during the first couple of hours as you're dragged from one exposition-heavy cutscene to the next. It's not a great first impression but does eventually relent, settling into a decent groove with conflict at the forefront.

Any action game worth its salt lives and dies on how good its combat feels, and in this regard, Way of the Sword positively thrives. It's not a combo-laden action game like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden, nor is it as punishing and methodical as the many souls-likes that have emerged since Onimusha last appeared. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle.

You've got your standard light and heavy attacks, and transitioning between them to create various combos is seamless and feels suitably hefty. Musashi moves like a regular person–you can clearly see him swinging his katana like he has to put some muscle behind each strike–and this makes his swordplay very deliberate, emphasizing defense as the ultimate key to unlocking your full offensive arsenal. 

You can block and parry almost any attack, with the latter opening up your opponents for swift retribution. You can also deflect attacks, which doesn't create the same opportunity to counter but does take a decent chunk out of the enemy's stamina meter. Once this is fully depleted, your foes enter an exhausted state where you're able to deal significant damage–even slowing down time so you can select a specific body part to target during boss fights, such as a pesky tail that you can slice off to prevent certain attacks, or a limb that grants a confluence of souls for you to absorb.

You can dodge attacks, too, performing a stylish Reflex Dodge if you evade an unarmed enemy strike at just the right time. This is also the only way to reverse grab attacks, just as deflecting is the only way to counter unavoidable attacks. Way of the Sword's combat is built around reading and reacting to the enemy's various tells and then responding in devastating fashion. Button mashing is quickly punished, but once you've got a handle on its slower cadence, there are stylish thrills to be had in each and every battle. 

If you're feeling particularly brave, you can even utilize an Onimusha mainstay: the Issen attack. By striking just before an enemy attack lands, you'll hit back with a deadly counter that instantly kills most regular enemies. The timing on this is much more precise than either parries, deflects, or Reflex Dodges, but the reward is much greater, especially once you've unlocked the ability to chain multiple Issen attacks in a row by rhythmically timing your button presses. 

All of this feels incredibly satisfying in action, mixing nuanced depth with some of the best animation work in the genre. As someone who loves parries, Way of the Sword executes them like no other game I can recall. Rather than enemy attacks simply bouncing off Musashi's katana, you lock weapons with a palpable heft, sending a barrage of sparks flying as they slide against each other before Musashi uses the enemy's momentum to reposition them. It's very much coded in classic samurai cinema, producing these dramatic sword clashes within the flow of combat. 

Chaining together parries and deflects also builds a meter that activates Blazing State, coating Musashi's katana in a blue flame that boosts your attack power and causes enemies to drop more souls when they die, such as yellow ones that replenish your health and blue ones that power your Oni Armaments. While the younger Musashi hasn't yet created the Niten Ichi-ryu style of dual-wielding he's famous for, his familiarity with multiple weapon types is well realized. 

You gradually gain access to more Oni Armaments throughout the course of the game, letting you unleash temporary attacks with a varied pool of weapons. The Two Celestials , for instance, are a pair of blades that deal straight damage and extract yellow souls from the Genma, while the Wind-Whipper is a naginata that conjures whirlwinds to wipe out groups of enemies. Elsewhere, the Earth-Shaker hammers excel at inflicting significant stamina damage, and the Firebird Flute summons flaming birds when played, allowing you to launch them at enemies. 

Choosing which Oni Armament to utilize for each situation becomes a key part of your approach to combat, although Musashi isn't opposed to using unconventional means either. Tables can be flipped and deployed as large shields before being booted at enemies, food carts can be rammed into startled mobs, and you can parry Genma into standing torches, setting them on fire in the process.

Unfortunately, the sheer excellence of Way of the Sword's combat is also the only thing keeping the game afloat when mired in its disappointing structure. Eastern Kyoto is established early as a semi-open-world hub, and while there are traditional levels, a large chunk of the game takes place within this open area. You'll find side quests, collectibles, and upgrade materials, and while the map starts small and gradually opens up, it's never particularly large. This works in the game's favor, however, as the side quests therein are dull and uninspired. 

A subset of optional missions called "Mysteries of Kyoto" has you helping citizens and relaying their stories to Murasaki Shikibu, the historical author of The Tale of Genji. These yarns are rooted in Japanese mythology, covering the likes of the Three Worms, the Faceless, and the Night Parade, but calling them mysteries is a glaring misnomer. 

The culprit is always just another Genma you need to kill, and the same rings true in the rest of the game's side quests as well. Someone asks for your help, so you head to a location and dispatch every enemy you can find. The worst of these is a series of archery quests where you return to previous locations to shoot down specific Genma using your bow. You're rewarded with upgrade materials for completing these quests, so skipping them puts you at a huge disadvantage. The one saving grace is that there aren't many side quests, and engaging in more combat isn't inherently bad, but Way of the Sword's optional excursions are still incredibly formulaic and make the entire hub feel superfluous. 

The game's traditional levels are much better, often evoking a specific mood or atmosphere. One sees you venture into an underground lab where a particularly twisted Genma is conducting experiments, fusing humans, animals, and her own kind together to create unsettling monstrosities. Here, Capcom leans into its horror tendencies, casting shadows across the lab's shoji to highlight the mutations happening just out of sight, while kimonos hang from the rafters as evidence of the people who were kidnapped and brought to this malevolent place. It's an eerie and atmospheric location to explore.

Elsewhere, you'll make the gradual trek up the slopes of Mount Oe during twilight, fighting through smaller forts and dodging giant, rolling logs to reach the palatial castle nestled at the top. If the whole game was just more levels like these, I would have very few complaints. Way of the Sword's combat is exceptional, and it features some of the best boss fights I've ever seen, but there's always this nagging feeling that it could've been even better.

It feels odd to be disappointed by a game with so many moments I absolutely adore, but that's what happens when the potential to be greater is so obvious. The uninspired semi-open-world is a misstep that doesn't justify its existence, yet Way of the Sword is still a fantastic and welcome return for the series, led by outstanding combat that firmly places it in the upper echelon of modern action games. Fighting is everything, after all, and there's nothing else quite like Musashi's brand of calculated violence.

Dawnwalker is composed of what feels like a ridiculous number of quests. Due to its structure, they seem haphazardly constructed at first, with no dedicated throughline; only a story you construct by taking on whatever tasks you think are worth your limited time. What's shocking is that these quests, from the intricate stories of rebels fighting to free the valley and vampires following shadowy agendas, to the momentary tidbits of setup from a group of soldiers by the side of the road before you start hacking them apart with your sword, are so well-written. To the game's credit, there's a good chance you'll want to do everything in Dawnwalker. The fact that you can't is part of what makes it so compelling.

Dawnwalker's story is built on a ticking clock, and that feature is among the game's best ideas. You play as Coen, a human who loses his family to Brencis, the valley's vampire sovereign. Coen quickly comes to realize that Brencis is set to host a feast in 30 in-game days, so you have that long to make preparations and storm the castle to free the captured humans, doing whatever you can to strengthen yourself, gather allies, and figure out a plan before time runs out.

Time advances when you take on or complete quests and activities. Each of these takes an allotted amount of time, so you're always weighing whether you want to dedicate time to one quest over another. Dilly dallying with other activities while a quest is active can change the situation or even cause it to end in failure, so stacking up 50 things to do is a bad idea. While you have enough time on your hands that you're not forced to consider every single hour you spend along the way, the sense that the clock is against you gives everything you do in Dawnwalker the feeling of weight and importance. It also might make you think twice about stopping to lend a hand to a minor character you meet, or choosing a merciful but time-consuming option over a more expedient but harmful one.

Time also dictates the way that you address quests. At the end of the tutorial section, Coen is forcibly turned into a vampire, but thanks to this world's supernatural rules, he unexpectedly becomes a Dawnwalker--he transforms into a vampire when night falls but reverts to a human under the sun. During the day, the human Coen can do things like interact with shopkeepers or make his way into occupied settlements, looking like any other person; if he gets into a fight with Brencis's soldiers, he does it with a sword. At night, Coen is more deadly in a fight, but often more noticeable, and enemies tend to attack on sight. An area might be public during the day and off limits at night, so when you decide to solve a problem can change how you do so. And of course, some events only take place during the day, while others only happen at night.

The smartest way time is deployed against you is in Dawnwalker's progression system. Leveling happens passively as you gain experience points for completing quests and defeating enemies, kicking up your overall stats, but to unlock new abilities in combat or enhance elements like your life total and stamina bar, you need to do more. To add skills for the human Coen, you'll need to find and read books and manuals; for the vampire Coen, your skills unlock as you consume the blood of humans, animals, and other vampires. And unlocking perks costs points you'll earn from leveling, as well as time. 

This means that making yourself stronger forces tradeoffs. Do you want to power yourself up at the risk of failing or delaying a quest? I found that I was always sitting on perk points in Dawnwalker, waiting for when I was sure they wouldn't cost me key opportunities. As a result, sometimes I undertook quests without maximizing my capabilities. That push and pull makes leveling up a deliberate and important decision about how it might impact Coen's overall goal.

Where this leveling system falls down is in what it actually offers. Coen has three different skill trees from which you can purchase perks, each keyed to a different part of his character. Coen's a gifted swordsman and can use his claws as a vampire, while he gets access to witchcraft powers when he's human. 

The system presents you with a lot of options, many of which can be upgraded several times, and it feels purposely designed to create choice paralysis. Since you probably aren't investing in everything due to the time it'll cost, you're forced to think about what upgrades are going to matter most to you, and whether you're leaning too hard on one set of perks over the others, which might leave you vulnerable during certain times of day.

The trouble is that the trees are filled with upgrades that don't always feel meaningful. Part of the weakness is that abilities are equipped into slots in your menu, and in order to equip more of them, you have to also unlock new slots by spending perk points and time. The limitation can incentivize you to equip a couple of active and passive abilities and never change them, effectively making the ones you don't equip dead spots on the tree. And since, for most abilities, you need to first find books to unlock them, you might be barred from a perk forever, or long enough that it doesn't matter enough to pursue it. 

Requiring so much thought about how you build Coen makes it easy to disregard a lot of your options, not out of purposefully constructing a character, but because of the quests you might choose arbitrarily throughout the game. I never did much with his witchcraft abilities, for instance, since they required me to spend health it often felt like Human Coen couldn't spare, and because their books weren't as easily available. I spent perk points on witchcraft abilities I never actually used much, and in the end wound up ignoring a lot of that skill tree in favor of the more practical sword skills.

And while you'll unlock some fun combat abilities, the fact that you might only use a couple of them for huge swathes of the game weakens Dawnwalker somewhat, because you'll be doing a ton of fighting. Brencis's soldiers dominate the valley, and while you'll talk your way through a lot of situations, combat is the main thrust of Dawnwalker's gameplay, so the rhythm of using the same few abilities can get stale.

Dawnwalker's combat is pretty good nevertheless, bolstered by its focus on being directional. Coen swings his attacks in a particular direction, depending on where you hold the left analog stick, and the idea is that you want to beat an enemy's guard by swinging to avoid their blocks. In practice, directional swings are more haphazard and tough to use well, but also don't really matter. Where the directional combat really shines is in your defense--if you push the analog stick in the direction your opponent is swinging from and hit the block button at the right time, you can parry their blow and counterattack. 

How you fight is dictated by a stamina meter, and you use stamina for attacks, dodges, and Coen's "omniblock," which deflects any incoming blow. Blocking directionally, however, uses no stamina and actually kicks off its recovery, so in order to keep up the speed of a fight you need to be executing skillful blocks, lest you run out of stamina and get overwhelmed. Enemies often come at Coen in groups, too, so you have to watch out for people coming from the sides, who you can deflect away and hit briefly before returning to your main target.

It's a great system that gives fights the rhythm of a duel, with the back-and-forth between you and your opponent requiring quick reactions on your part, and all happening fast enough that you're rarely waiting for an attack to parry. With multiple enemies, you have to pay close attention, and I genuinely felt like a world-class swordsman as I turned away opponent after opponent. Trading blows and parries builds up "activation points" that can be spent on special abilities like stunning enemies or hitting several at a time. And even though you'll play through hundreds of battles, the focus on quick reactions and executing on openings keeps them exciting, even when you're facing groups of soldiers who have been fighting more or less the same way for 40 hours.

What irritations derive from combat come from the fact that you do so much of it, and how it feels is mostly dictated by the kinds of enemies coming for you. The directional combat approach is engaging, but it also means that fighting as Human Coen and Vampire Coen are very similar in function, despite their differences. As a vampire, Coen can fight with his claws, but they deflect blows from soldiers and monsters the same way a sword does. The major differences come from which special abilities you can use, which are often unblockable or interrupt enemy attacks. That fact can downgrade their use from being a tactical deployment at a key moment, to something you hit as soon as an activation point pops up and a move's cooldown runs out. Even though the human and vampire are intended to feel different, one more calculated and the other more aggressive, they wind up playing more or less the same way, especially over a long time.

Another big difference in the two sides of combat comes from how you manage health. Vampire Coen has a bunch of perks that increase his survivability. You start with an ability that lets you briefly chomp on an enemy's neck to suck some of their blood and restore your health, which is a huge boon in the early game. The vampire side also has some extremely powerful perks like passive health regeneration, as well as ones that give health back when you parry and when you attack with your claws. You also get bonuses from weapons and armor that passively boost a bunch of traits, including health. By the end of the game, I felt functionally unkillable as a vampire as my health often regenerated faster than enemies could damage me.

As a human, fights are much more harrowing, since your healing options are limited to eating food between fights and using items equipped to quick slots during combat. You can't refill your quick slots while fighting, so you have to manage them carefully, and food is less effective in combat, pushing you to rely on medicines you can craft. Where you can restore health through combat abilities reliably as a vampire all game, as a human, you have to wait for openings to use a medicine, and make sure you pack enough to stay alive. This makes fighting as a human tough and active in interesting ways, but also incentivizes you to take on whatever battles you can with your safer and more powerful vampire abilities.

Dawnwalker does include a decently granular difficulty system that you can adjust throughout the game, and it's definitely something you should mess with. You can separately adjust combat difficulty, dictating things like parry windows and the damage enemies inflict, and RPG difficulty, which governs elements like Coen's stamina costs and healing. At the default difficulty settings, it felt easy for the balance to get thrown off, so adjusting both was useful to keep Dawnwalker from getting frustratingly difficult or feeling too easy.

While they don't always fire on all cylinders, what's notable about all these systems is how intricate and deliberate they are, how much the game wants you to think about the ways you interact with them, and how many cool swings they take. It's fun to think so deeply about how and when to level up, what armor and weapon bonuses are most important to your build, and what preparations you're going to need for a fight before you undertake it. Those elements give Dawnwalker's RPG systems a lot more depth and thoughtfulness than games in the genre often have.

Holding it all together are the many, many cool stories you'll find along the way. The valley is absolutely littered with quests, and to their credit, they all feel like they're worth doing. What's more, you have a ton of freedom about what you actually get up to as you push toward your goal of saving people, and you won't always know how a quest might provide you with friends who can help you later, or unlock new information and further steps. But the fact that they so often do helps stop most quests from seeming like detours, and instead, weaves them together to tell Coen's story through your very specific path through the game. Everything has an air of being consequential, especially because Coen and others are constantly mentioning important tidbits gleaned from other quests, or the consequences of past actions.

Writing and voice acting is also strong throughout the game, making so much of what might otherwise be mundane open-world content unexpectedly compelling. Brencis has three lieutenants who run his operations in the valley, doing things like recruiting soldiers, gathering the blood of peasants, and keeping the masses entertained and docile. Disrupting those operations can eventually draw them out, triggering quests that give you opportunities to kill them so you won't have to face Brencis at full strength. And even a lot of these activities, which are ostensibly of the base-clearing variety, throw in interesting little stories. You might run into a mother trying to convince her soldier son to desert, and then get the choice to try to talk him into it through reasoning, intimidation, or bribery, lowering the difficulty of the battle against his remaining squad. Or you might find that, after clearing a few camps where peasants are paid to gather leeches to help store blood for the vampires, the commoners you're ostensibly trying to help at the remaining camps have taken up arms to help defend their livelihoods against you.

The quests tied to each of Brencis's lieutenants are some of the best in the game, giving you opportunities to catch each one when they're vulnerable, and giving you a deep look into who they are. They're also full of tough, interesting choices, like when you're approached by a vassal of one lieutenant who wants to help you win a duel against him by poisoning the blood he drinks--which means poisoning an innocent person. How you deal with situations has material consequences and creates some great, small-scale dramas. A lot of the quests in Dawnwalker are still sticking with me days later, and I want to dive back in to follow the many plot threads that I missed or cut short.

Dawnwalker also throws in a very good idea to mess with the formula of giving you all these tough choices to make: the fact that you're a vampire. Often when talking to people, you'll see an option on your list of responses: "Give in to the hunger." As your health gets lower and you get hungrier, that option becomes more prevalent. It might hop around the list to try to trick you into selecting it, and other options might briefly change into the hunger option. If your health is low enough, you might not get the choice at all--the hunger will take over and your murderous nature will take out that character.

It's a great idea that creates interesting and serious consequences. Killing someone, either on purpose or by accident, might wall off a quest you needed that person to complete, or change its circumstances. At the very least, people who would have played a larger part in the story won't be around later if they're dead. It injects a fun, unexpected drama into a game where you're already constantly choosing how you want to deal with people and what you're willing to do to achieve your goals.

What's disappointing about the idea is that it's so easy to circumvent. I experienced Coen losing control during a Dawnwalker preview event, but playing it for review, it never happened again. The game puts up plenty of guard rails to help you avoid being forced into that situation, whether it's animals or other people you can briefly feed on, health bar enhancements that make it tougher to fall so low you can't stop yourself, or passive healing that lessens the risk. So I never got challenged by my vampire nature in a way that was out of my hands. It's a shame, because being forced to balance your health or perform well in a fight because of the risk you might pose to regular people is a great idea, and I wish Dawnwalker leaned into it more.

The game can also be a bit technically shaky, although its issues never reached above minor frustrations for me. Objects and textures pop in frequently, animations can hitch in conversations, some platforming sections see Coen slipping off walls or falling through the ground haphazardly, and hit boxes are occasionally a little finicky in combat. The limitations mostly result in briefly irritating sections, but they happen often enough to be notable, if not dealbreaking. Rebel Wolves has already patched out a lot of issues and plans a Day One update that should help things even more, but it's worth noting that you're going to see some jank that will affect the experience, so save often.

Overall, The Blood of Dawnwalker is an incredibly ambitious, deeply interesting first game from Rebel Wolves. Not every good idea lands and not every envelope is pushed as far as it could be, but the potential of the game is vast, and there's a huge amount to lean into and love. And it's all bolstered by excellent writing that makes for one of the deepest and most interesting game worlds I've run across in some time. The Blood of Dawnwalker is the kind of RPG that feels great to get lost in, that digs into your mind and stays there, and which is worth scouring and savoring.

Set in 1334, about 15 years prior to the first two A Plague Tale games, Resonance follows Sophia instead of series protagonist Amicia de Rune. As a young girl, Sophia was forcibly injected with blood that causes her to have visions of a long-lost civilization. Wanting to cure her of these visions, her father eventually finds and travels to the island that she has seen in her visions, but in his attempts to uncover the island's history, he is killed by a mysterious and terrifying beast. Wanting to discover what her visions mean and learn about what truly happened to her dad, Sophia travels to the island with her best friend, Leni, in tow. 

The story, especially in the first half, is very good. This series has consistently done a fantastic job of quickly building up characters or situations in its introductions to be narrative buy-ins that are solely there to be destroyed or yanked away early on and create emotional stakes: Amicia's happy family life in the first game, the hope that Amicia's life had returned to some degree of normalcy in the second game. Resonance does the same. You actually spend quite a bit of time getting to know Sophia in Europe and the fairly happy life she has with the adopted family of smugglers she grew up with before a tragic event forces Sophia to go to the island. There's a real sense of desperation in her tale, and the stakes of what may happen to her or Leni if she were to return to her allies empty-handed and without answers are abundantly apparent.

Leni and Sophia have an odd dynamic. Narratively, it's pretty good. There's some angst beneath the playful banter of the two friends that implies there could be romantic feelings pushing the two together, and the two play off one another in cutscenes incredibly well with their very different skill sets--Sophia is a fighter who can muscle through problems that require strength, and Leni is a pickpocket who is adept at getting in and out of places she doesn't belong.

But that's never reflected in the gameplay. Leni can hold her own in a fight just as well as Sophia can (she even one-shots whichever enemy she's dealing with as soon as you handle the second-to-last foe) and regularly helps out with pushing open heavy doors and moving partially stuck levers. And at the same time, Sophia can squeeze into any spot Leni can and is usually the lead on how to solve puzzles (because she's you, the player!). The story does a great job of framing that these two are only succeeding because they have one another, but then this framing is repeatedly struck down whenever the cutscene ends and control returns to you. Again, it all feels very odd, like Resonance is holding onto its partnership framing for no other reason than that the first two games used it.

The mysterious, newly discovered island that Sophia and Leni find themselves on is quickly revealed to be Crete, what was once home to Minoan society and, if the myths are to be believed, a minotaur-inhabited labyrinth. The characters don't know that--it's 1334, so all of those stories have yet to be uncovered again.

This is a terrific framing for a puzzle game. As Sophia, you carry a book loaded with drawings from your childhood visions, your dad's early attempts to explore the island, and all the follow-up expeditions that the smuggling gang undertook after his passing. There's no writing--it's all a series of drawings. And using those drawings, you have to figure out how to retrace the steps of those who came before, while also finding your own way forward when unexpected roadblocks pop up. 

To aid in her and Leni's exploration, Sophia possesses an artifact that dates back to the Minoan society that once lived on the island. The sphere can redirect light to reveal hidden symbols left behind with invisible paint, and also open doorways that require lining up beams of light to hit certain points on a wall. These puzzles centered around the use of light are rarely complicated, but contribute to the feeling of Sophia and Leni being intelligent dungeon delvers who are uncovering long-lost history. 

The process feels as I imagine archaeology to be--I don't believe Sophia's journey is in any way accurate to uncovering forgotten ruins and unraveling ancient mysteries, but the idealized fantasy of it is well represented here.

Crete is also a beautiful place to explore. The island is brightly lit and full of vibrant greens, reds, and blues, while the faded bronze of statues, broken weapons, and simple machinery mark Minoan society. Resonance also has the best soundtrack of the series, sticking to strings to frame most of Sophia's journey as a grand adventure or odyssey, and crucially plucking at the tension once the supernatural terror begins to rear its head.

It takes Resonance longer than any other A Plague Tale game to reveal its monster, but once it does, any semblance that this will be a fun couples adventure for Sophia and Leni is gone. The beast is creepy, slinking through the darkness of the island's underbelly in search of any and all life. In these darkened areas, Sophia becomes covered in softly glowing blue lights, and she leaves a trail of luminescent tracks whenever she's not crouch-walking. The beast can use these trails to track her, but it also will pause to take a hauntingly raspy sniff of the air--if Sophia is not behind cover when this happens, the beast will sniff out the blue lights on her and pursue her. The beast's only weakness is light. It burns away upon touching any light source, and so encounters with the beast are a series of tense stealth sections as you bravely venture into the dark to reach the next source of light.

These sections are terrifying, especially the first one as the beast is introduced and you finally get to see what killed Sophia's father. These moments stay pretty consistently creepy too, with the sound design of the beast's methodical movements and desperate breathing creating a tense and frantic atmosphere whenever it shows up. And Resonance continues to raise the bar with each encounter, adding new types of obstacles to consider (like how to find safety in areas where the beast can dim the light, or there's no light whatsoever) and more types of enemy terrors for Sophia to encounter in the dark. It's certainly the most memorable take I've ever seen of Crete's infamous minotaur.

Figuring out what the beast is and its motivations becomes the biggest driving mystery of Resonance. As Sophia ventures closer to the minotaur's lair, she encounters more and more that is unfamiliar to her but very much understood for us as the player, but the game's reframing of these long-familiar myths is an enticing draw. Sophia soon starts having visions of being Theseus, the Greek hero who we know slayed the minotaur, but their story feels quite different from the tale we know. They don't seem to be a divine adventurer, but are instead a gladiator who rose to fame by participating in some sort of competition; and they have a secret agreement with Daedalus, the famed inventor of the labyrinth. 

These visions are beautiful, reimagining what Minoan society might have looked like at the height of the Bronze Age. They're also wonderful power fantasies as Theseus is a far stronger warrior than Sophia.

Combat is merely fine in Resonance. Sophia can strike, block, dodge, and parry, and also has a grappling hook to grab and yank enemies toward her. The soldiers that followed Sophia and Leni to the island come in your typical variety of standard, nimble, shield-bearing, spear-wielding, and heavy enemy types, each of which has a singular tried-and-true method of taking them down. The challenge of combat comes down to crowd management, ducking and weaving and parrying long enough for an opening to present itself. Sophia (and Theseus) can take two hits before the third kills them, and health is only regained by executing an enemy, encouraging you to fight aggressively and end conflicts swiftly or to keep a weaker enemy alive for an easy stab-and-heal while whittling away at a much stronger foe. 

These brief and violent dances are a fun break from the puzzle-solving in the first half of the game, but in the latter half--especially the final few hours--Resonance starts throwing huge groups of enemies at you, and that's when the combat system falls apart. Resonance doesn't have a lock-on feature, so dealing with especially large groups of enemies clumped together is a pain, and I found myself frustratingly dying often because I was trying to attack a specific enemy I had just stunned, only for Sophia to wail against the impenetrable shield of a healthy target instead. 

The ending of Resonance is also just far weaker than the first half. Sofia either travels alone or with a far less interesting NPC. The decision to have her travel solo I can understand--it ups the tension during moments when the beast is hunting Sophia, and also ensures that those tense moments aren't ruined by the companion messing up and breaking stealth. That would have probably sucked. But Sophia's other companion is a poor tradeoff for moments when Leni isn't there--the game does such a good job of villainizing this other character up to that point in the story, that for Sophia to then be forced to work with them for several chapters feels off-putting. 

The decision to make Sophia travel with a companion at all, again, feels like the lingering ghost of the older games dictating what the formula needs to be. The moments where Sophia is traveling solo clearly showcase that she can carry a game on her own, but if we had to have her talk out loud to someone else to progress the story, I'm baffled that the dev team didn't go for the far more intriguing choice of somehow making the ghost of Theseus work.  

Resonance also starts going a little too far into the physical trauma porn in the end, even giving Lara Croft from the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy a run for her money. There comes a point where seeing a character survive getting tossed around, beaten, and bloodied makes you start to wonder if the character is superhuman. When that occurs, the fantasy of this being a story of an ordinary woman grappling with the ramifications of discovering a supernatural power begins to crack, and you stop worrying about a protagonist once you've seen them survive a near-death experience half a dozen times.

Perhaps worst of all, the final moments of Resonance have a lore problem. If you've played these games, you'll be able to start piecing together what's going on in the latter half of the story, and the final big reveal will ultimately hit you like a freight train. If you know the ramifications of Resonance's mystery and absolutely awesome conclusion, it might be the best finale in the series. But if you have no idea what, as an example, the Prima Macula is, the last five hours of this game's story will make very little sense to you and the finale will probably be a confusing dud. You'll still get the emotional payoff of Sophia having acquired the answers she was seeking, but the game doesn't provide the necessary context to fully understand what those answers mean.

So, as strange as it is to say, if you want to play Resonance and you haven't played both of the previous A Plague Tale games, you have homework. This is not a prequel that tells a story that can stand on its own, nor is it an ideal on-ramp for the series.

Overall, I liked Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. I think it adds a valuable chapter to the overall mythos of the series, and manages to carve out its own identity in several places without continuing to rely on fan-favorite Amicia or the terror of contending with waves of rats. But you have to be such a fan of the series already to enjoy it to the same extent as I did, and even then, shortcomings in combat and the companion system hold the game back, especially in a latter half that seems to drag as you get closer to the conclusion. I want people to play Resonance, but I can't ignore that any game that requires doing homework beforehand to enjoy is a bit lacking. If you do that homework though, Resonance easily stands besides the other A Plague Tale games as a great AA, story-driven experience.

Set in 1334, about 15 years prior to the first two A Plague Tale games, Resonance follows Sophia instead of series protagonist Amicia de Rune. As a young girl, Sophia was forcibly injected with blood that causes her to have visions of a long-lost civilization. Wanting to cure her of these visions, her father eventually finds and travels to the island that she has seen in her visions, but in his attempts to uncover the island's history, he is killed by a mysterious and terrifying beast. Wanting to discover what her visions mean and learn about what truly happened to her dad, Sophia travels to the island with her best friend, Leni, in tow. 

The story, especially in the first half, is very good. This series has consistently done a fantastic job of quickly building up characters or situations in its introductions to be narrative buy-ins that are solely there to be destroyed or yanked away early on and create emotional stakes: Amicia's happy family life in the first game, the hope that Amicia's life had returned to some degree of normalcy in the second game. Resonance does the same. You actually spend quite a bit of time getting to know Sophia in Europe and the fairly happy life she has with the adopted family of smugglers she grew up with before a tragic event forces Sophia to go to the island. There's a real sense of desperation in her tale, and the stakes of what may happen to her or Leni if she were to return to her allies empty-handed and without answers are abundantly apparent.

Leni and Sophia have an odd dynamic. Narratively, it's pretty good. There's some angst beneath the playful banter of the two friends that implies there could be romantic feelings pushing the two together, and the two play off one another in cutscenes incredibly well with their very different skill sets--Sophia is a fighter who can muscle through problems that require strength, and Leni is a pickpocket who is adept at getting in and out of places she doesn't belong.

But that's never reflected in the gameplay. Leni can hold her own in a fight just as well as Sophia can (she even one-shots whichever enemy she's dealing with as soon as you handle the second-to-last foe) and regularly helps out with pushing open heavy doors and moving partially stuck levers. And at the same time, Sophia can squeeze into any spot Leni can and is usually the lead on how to solve puzzles (because she's you, the player!). The story does a great job of framing that these two are only succeeding because they have one another, but then this framing is repeatedly struck down whenever the cutscene ends and control returns to you. Again, it all feels very odd, like Resonance is holding onto its partnership framing for no other reason than that the first two games used it.

The mysterious, newly discovered island that Sophia and Leni find themselves on is quickly revealed to be Crete, what was once home to Minoan society and, if the myths are to be believed, a minotaur-inhabited labyrinth. The characters don't know that--it's 1334, so all of those stories have yet to be uncovered again.

This is a terrific framing for a puzzle game. As Sophia, you carry a book loaded with drawings from your childhood visions, your dad's early attempts to explore the island, and all the follow-up expeditions that the smuggling gang undertook after his passing. There's no writing--it's all a series of drawings. And using those drawings, you have to figure out how to retrace the steps of those who came before, while also finding your own way forward when unexpected roadblocks pop up. 

To aid in her and Leni's exploration, Sophia possesses an artifact that dates back to the Minoan society that once lived on the island. The sphere can redirect light to reveal hidden symbols left behind with invisible paint, and also open doorways that require lining up beams of light to hit certain points on a wall. These puzzles centered around the use of light are rarely complicated, but contribute to the feeling of Sophia and Leni being intelligent dungeon delvers who are uncovering long-lost history. 

The process feels as I imagine archaeology to be--I don't believe Sophia's journey is in any way accurate to uncovering forgotten ruins and unraveling ancient mysteries, but the idealized fantasy of it is well represented here.

Crete is also a beautiful place to explore. The island is brightly lit and full of vibrant greens, reds, and blues, while the faded bronze of statues, broken weapons, and simple machinery mark Minoan society. Resonance also has the best soundtrack of the series, sticking to strings to frame most of Sophia's journey as a grand adventure or odyssey, and crucially plucking at the tension once the supernatural terror begins to rear its head.

It takes Resonance longer than any other A Plague Tale game to reveal its monster, but once it does, any semblance that this will be a fun couples adventure for Sophia and Leni is gone. The beast is creepy, slinking through the darkness of the island's underbelly in search of any and all life. In these darkened areas, Sophia becomes covered in softly glowing blue lights, and she leaves a trail of luminescent tracks whenever she's not crouch-walking. The beast can use these trails to track her, but it also will pause to take a hauntingly raspy sniff of the air--if Sophia is not behind cover when this happens, the beast will sniff out the blue lights on her and pursue her. The beast's only weakness is light. It burns away upon touching any light source, and so encounters with the beast are a series of tense stealth sections as you bravely venture into the dark to reach the next source of light.

These sections are terrifying, especially the first one as the beast is introduced and you finally get to see what killed Sophia's father. These moments stay pretty consistently creepy too, with the sound design of the beast's methodical movements and desperate breathing creating a tense and frantic atmosphere whenever it shows up. And Resonance continues to raise the bar with each encounter, adding new types of obstacles to consider (like how to find safety in areas where the beast can dim the light, or there's no light whatsoever) and more types of enemy terrors for Sophia to encounter in the dark. It's certainly the most memorable take I've ever seen of Crete's infamous minotaur.

Figuring out what the beast is and its motivations becomes the biggest driving mystery of Resonance. As Sophia ventures closer to the minotaur's lair, she encounters more and more that is unfamiliar to her but very much understood for us as the player, but the game's reframing of these long-familiar myths is an enticing draw. Sophia soon starts having visions of being Theseus, the Greek hero who we know slayed the minotaur, but their story feels quite different from the tale we know. They don't seem to be a divine adventurer, but are instead a gladiator who rose to fame by participating in some sort of competition; and they have a secret agreement with Daedalus, the famed inventor of the labyrinth. 

These visions are beautiful, reimagining what Minoan society might have looked like at the height of the Bronze Age. They're also wonderful power fantasies as Theseus is a far stronger warrior than Sophia.

Combat is merely fine in Resonance. Sophia can strike, block, dodge, and parry, and also has a grappling hook to grab and yank enemies toward her. The soldiers that followed Sophia and Leni to the island come in your typical variety of standard, nimble, shield-bearing, spear-wielding, and heavy enemy types, each of which has a singular tried-and-true method of taking them down. The challenge of combat comes down to crowd management, ducking and weaving and parrying long enough for an opening to present itself. Sophia (and Theseus) can take two hits before the third kills them, and health is only regained by executing an enemy, encouraging you to fight aggressively and end conflicts swiftly or to keep a weaker enemy alive for an easy stab-and-heal while whittling away at a much stronger foe. 

These brief and violent dances are a fun break from the puzzle-solving in the first half of the game, but in the latter half--especially the final few hours--Resonance starts throwing huge groups of enemies at you, and that's when the combat system falls apart. Resonance doesn't have a lock-on feature, so dealing with especially large groups of enemies clumped together is a pain, and I found myself frustratingly dying often because I was trying to attack a specific enemy I had just stunned, only for Sophia to wail against the impenetrable shield of a healthy target instead. 

The ending of Resonance is also just far weaker than the first half. Sofia either travels alone or with a far less interesting NPC. The decision to have her travel solo I can understand--it ups the tension during moments when the beast is hunting Sophia, and also ensures that those tense moments aren't ruined by the companion messing up and breaking stealth. That would have probably sucked. But Sophia's other companion is a poor tradeoff for moments when Leni isn't there--the game does such a good job of villainizing this other character up to that point in the story, that for Sophia to then be forced to work with them for several chapters feels off-putting. 

The decision to make Sophia travel with a companion at all, again, feels like the lingering ghost of the older games dictating what the formula needs to be. The moments where Sophia is traveling solo clearly showcase that she can carry a game on her own, but if we had to have her talk out loud to someone else to progress the story, I'm baffled that the dev team didn't go for the far more intriguing choice of somehow making the ghost of Theseus work.  

Resonance also starts going a little too far into the physical trauma porn in the end, even giving Lara Croft from the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy a run for her money. There comes a point where seeing a character survive getting tossed around, beaten, and bloodied makes you start to wonder if the character is superhuman. When that occurs, the fantasy of this being a story of an ordinary woman grappling with the ramifications of discovering a supernatural power begins to crack, and you stop worrying about a protagonist once you've seen them survive a near-death experience half a dozen times.

Perhaps worst of all, the final moments of Resonance have a lore problem. If you've played these games, you'll be able to start piecing together what's going on in the latter half of the story, and the final big reveal will ultimately hit you like a freight train. If you know the ramifications of Resonance's mystery and absolutely awesome conclusion, it might be the best finale in the series. But if you have no idea what, as an example, the Prima Macula is, the last five hours of this game's story will make very little sense to you and the finale will probably be a confusing dud. You'll still get the emotional payoff of Sophia having acquired the answers she was seeking, but the game doesn't provide the necessary context to fully understand what those answers mean.

So, as strange as it is to say, if you want to play Resonance and you haven't played both of the previous A Plague Tale games, you have homework. This is not a prequel that tells a story that can stand on its own, nor is it an ideal on-ramp for the series.

Overall, I liked Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. I think it adds a valuable chapter to the overall mythos of the series, and manages to carve out its own identity in several places without continuing to rely on fan-favorite Amicia or the terror of contending with waves of rats. But you have to be such a fan of the series already to enjoy it to the same extent as I did, and even then, shortcomings in combat and the companion system hold the game back, especially in a latter half that seems to drag as you get closer to the conclusion. I want people to play Resonance, but I can't ignore that any game that requires doing homework beforehand to enjoy is a bit lacking. If you do that homework though, Resonance easily stands besides the other A Plague Tale games as a great AA, story-driven experience.

At first glance, it's easy to underestimate Zero Company, though. By all appearances this is simply XCOM, set in the world of Star Wars. You have a similar overhead perspective, commanding a small squad of commandos in turn-based combat as they take cover, flank and maneuver, and work together to take down formidable armies. And while that isn't inaccurate as shorthand, it would also sell the game short. Partly by capitalizing on the rich world of Star Wars itself, Zero Company finds ways to iterate further on XCOM, rather than merely imitate it.

First, some table-setting. Zero Company is set during the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, the tumultuous time seen in the prequel trilogy when the Republic was just on the verge of collapse into the Galactic Empire. Your player character, Hawks, is a down-and-out former Republic commander who started their own mercenary outfit after a disastrous mission gone wrong ruined their military career. The mercenaries, called Zero Company, are having money problems and struggling to find work, when a young Republic officer named Bennic offers steady, not-technically-Republic wet work in exchange for settling your debts. 

It would be easy to make Bennic sinister or conniving, dangling cash to desperate mercs, but this is one area where Zero Company excels. The characters are well-rounded and feel alive with humanity. Bennic is actually an honest broker for the Republic--a true believer who quickly folds himself into Zero Company and acts as the Republic's emissary. At first he seems like an assigned babysitter, but the friendship between Bennic and Hawks grows and changes in believable ways. The same could be said for the other members of Zero Company, like the decommissioned clone Trick or the grizzled old boxer Kabb Uppercut. 

The one slight exception is Cly, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who presents herself out of the blue to Zero Company as an asset they can't afford to refuse. Her story is the thinnest of all the named characters, and while it ultimately gets mildly more interesting, her inclusion felt perfunctory. Mandalorians are a popular piece of the Star Wars franchise, and her power set makes her a great inclusion to the tactical combat, so it makes sense to represent the Mando clan. I just wish her individual story and characterization were as strong as the rest.

As the adventure progresses, Zero Company finds itself facing a crisis flying just below the Republic's radar--a strange cult called the Coil that inducts new members with superhuman abilities, all rallied under the banner of a leader named Fathom. Bennic helps the team prioritize this threat, which feels appropriately sized for this story. In this era of Star Wars, the threat needs to be small enough that it doesn't attract much attention from the Jedi or the Grand Army of the Republic, but frightening enough that it could snowball if it isn't contained. Zero Company is punching above its weight taking on a galactic threat like this, and that gives the story real stakes while still retaining a sense of belonging in the Star Wars universe.

For me, the named characters were the stars of Zero Company, and I used them almost exclusively. Like an XCOM game, though, you can also recruit randomized soldiers to your army and develop them on their own, modeling them after your friends or your favorite Star Wars OCs. And as the story develops, you slowly open new options for the types of operators you can recruit, eventually gaining the ability to recruit droids and clones, which have their own specializations. Those specializations, and especially the ones for the named Zero Company characters, are really the secret sauce that makes Zero Company stand out from other tactics games.

As it happens, Star Wars is an especially fertile ground to have lots of differentiated power sets, so you aren't just limited to the usual archetypes like soldiers, heavies, and medics. By the time you finish Zero Company, you'll have access to clones, droids, a Mandalorian, a Jedi, an Umbaran, and whatever the heck a Kabb is. Each of them has their own attributes and most have abilities that are specially tailored to their unique identity in Star Wars lore. 

Take Cly, for example. She has the Mando's signature jet pack, making her an especially nimble operator who can cross great distances easily and ignore many height restrictions. If she lands in the middle of a set of enemies, she'll even knock them back and inflict burn damage, and by default her weapon is a pistol with three shots. It just feels so perfectly Mandalorian to rocket-drop into a scrum of weakened enemies and pick them all off with three quick blaster bolts. 

Your Jedi, meanwhile, excels at up-close melee combat, dealing heavy damage with her lightsaber, pushing and pulling enemies with the Force, and then dropping into a defensive stance that blocks many blaster bolts. And true to their Star Wars identity, droids are an incredibly useful support tool, able to grant your teammates extra moves and carry more equipment than anyone else. They're all so fun to play with. I often wished the squads were bigger so I could bring more of them along on missions, and picking and choosing which ones to make my core crew was difficult. 

Most of these abilities cost Action Points--three per character, per turn--which are well-tuned to balance your movement and attack abilities. My Hawks was a sniper, for instance, so I quickly had to internalize that since her main attack cost 2 AP, her movement was severely limited compared to the rest. She had just enough to reposition slightly, but couldn't move across the map like the others. And if I were already in an advantageous position, I could fire off a shot and then use her extra-long Overwatch ability to restrict enemy movement. Jae or Cly, meanwhile, could move much more effectively, but were much less accurate and powerful. Successful actions also build up a shared pool of Advantage (ADV), which enables extra-powerful moves like Trick's Rocket Strike, which does a ton of explosive damage in a concentrated location. I got in the habit of saving that little beauty for when enemy reinforcements showed up and crowded around an entry point. But ADV also has a lot of utility for giving you occasional access to moves with specialized use-cases, like Cly's aforementioned jetpack.

Each combat encounter also has a rotating backup ability, which alternates between the members of your squad randomly each turn. Selecting your backup before starting your attack action will let another member of the squad take a shot too, doubling your effectiveness. But that also means you need to carefully position your squadmates and consider which ones have a clear line of sight before you choose a backup partner, adding another tactical wrinkle to combat. And it awards Bond XP between operators as well--more on that in a bit.

You use these abilities on a wide range of enemies, from regular humanoids to Clone Wars-era battle droids, including deadly droidekas, to the cultist Coil. The Coil is not quite a hivemind, since it doesn't have one shared consciousness. Instead, its fanatical followers all work individually but collaboratively toward a goal in perfect unison. (If you've seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, you'll have the general idea.) It's unnerving from a story standpoint and has neat applications in gameplay. Since the Coil are all linked, defeating one will often empower the next-closest Coil member with some special ability like extra defense or even cloaking. That adds yet another dynamic element, forcing you to carefully plan which ones to pick off and in which order to maximize your advantage over the rest, knowing that they'll be steadily ramping up in difficulty as you do.

And those Coil advantages are partially influenced by the mission briefs, where you'll sometimes be given a choice of which Coil upgrade to stop. There's no way to prevent both--the Coil abilities will get stronger in some way no matter what--but these decisions let you shape the types of challenges you'll face in the tactical missions. Your home base is where you'll spend mission cash on upgrades that apply to your whole team and black-market gear for your individual units. You'll also be able to upgrade your team's bonds, which start to unlock powerful upgrades across both operators when they reach the highest levels, manage their ability loadouts with unlimited free refunds to toy with different builds, adjust equipment and weapon mods, and more.

If that description hasn't made it clear, there are choices upon choices upon choices in Zero Company, but it never feels overwhelming or obtuse. Everything is digestible and clear, which is quite a feat for such a dense tactical game with so many options. I always felt fully in control of my decisions and knew exactly what I was doing.

While there was a great variety of abilities, enemies, and satisfying tactical choices, though, some of the missions did start to feel very familiar over my 30-hour playtime. I attribute this to similar objectives, which made many missions play very similarly. You often have to wipe the battlefield of all enemies, of course, but missions would often then end with getting to an extraction point, usually after a dose of reinforcements. The tactical combat itself is very fun, so it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of variety in mission objectives stood out as a weak spot.

While Zero Company uses cameos sparingly, the ones it does include are effective. Anakin Skywalker shows up briefly, so you can be completely overpowered for a handful of missions, and in the context of the Clone Wars cartoon, this is believably just another mission he was tangentially attached to for a little while before jetting off to other Jedi missions. I wasn't too sorry to see him go, because by that point I was developing such affection for my squad that I wanted to spend more time with them anyway. That's what makes the story so effective. The story of the Coil cult is a somewhat typical sci-fi threat, but I wanted to overcome it with my squad, as I had shaped and gotten to know them. We built bonds as a game mechanic, but I built bonds with them myself too. 

Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM, but it is more than just an XCOM-like. Developer Bit Reactor set higher ambitions than simply slapping a Star Wars skin on a template. Star Wars is a rich playground for games, with loads of differentiated hero and enemy types and powers baked in, and Zero Company takes full advantage of that to make an excellent tactics game in its own right. In doing so, it has made the next great evolution of the genre.

At first glance, it's easy to underestimate Zero Company, though. By all appearances this is simply XCOM, set in the world of Star Wars. You have a similar overhead perspective, commanding a small squad of commandos in turn-based combat as they take cover, flank and maneuver, and work together to take down formidable armies. And while that isn't inaccurate as shorthand, it would also sell the game short. Partly by capitalizing on the rich world of Star Wars itself, Zero Company finds ways to iterate further on XCOM, rather than merely imitate it.

First, some table-setting. Zero Company is set during the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, the tumultuous time seen in the prequel trilogy when the Republic was just on the verge of collapse into the Galactic Empire. Your player character, Hawks, is a down-and-out former Republic commander who started their own mercenary outfit after a disastrous mission gone wrong ruined their military career. The mercenaries, called Zero Company, are having money problems and struggling to find work, when a young Republic officer named Bennic offers steady, not-technically-Republic wet work in exchange for settling your debts. 

It would be easy to make Bennic sinister or conniving, dangling cash to desperate mercs, but this is one area where Zero Company excels. The characters are well-rounded and feel alive with humanity. Bennic is actually an honest broker for the Republic--a true believer who quickly folds himself into Zero Company and acts as the Republic's emissary. At first he seems like an assigned babysitter, but the friendship between Bennic and Hawks grows and changes in believable ways. The same could be said for the other members of Zero Company, like the decommissioned clone Trick or the grizzled old boxer Kabb Uppercut. 

The one slight exception is Cly, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who presents herself out of the blue to Zero Company as an asset they can't afford to refuse. Her story is the thinnest of all the named characters, and while it ultimately gets mildly more interesting, her inclusion felt perfunctory. Mandalorians are a popular piece of the Star Wars franchise, and her power set makes her a great inclusion to the tactical combat, so it makes sense to represent the Mando clan. I just wish her individual story and characterization were as strong as the rest.

As the adventure progresses, Zero Company finds itself facing a crisis flying just below the Republic's radar--a strange cult called the Coil that inducts new members with superhuman abilities, all rallied under the banner of a leader named Fathom. Bennic helps the team prioritize this threat, which feels appropriately sized for this story. In this era of Star Wars, the threat needs to be small enough that it doesn't attract much attention from the Jedi or the Grand Army of the Republic, but frightening enough that it could snowball if it isn't contained. Zero Company is punching above its weight taking on a galactic threat like this, and that gives the story real stakes while still retaining a sense of belonging in the Star Wars universe.

For me, the named characters were the stars of Zero Company, and I used them almost exclusively. Like an XCOM game, though, you can also recruit randomized soldiers to your army and develop them on their own, modeling them after your friends or your favorite Star Wars OCs. And as the story develops, you slowly open new options for the types of operators you can recruit, eventually gaining the ability to recruit droids and clones, which have their own specializations. Those specializations, and especially the ones for the named Zero Company characters, are really the secret sauce that makes Zero Company stand out from other tactics games.

As it happens, Star Wars is an especially fertile ground to have lots of differentiated power sets, so you aren't just limited to the usual archetypes like soldiers, heavies, and medics. By the time you finish Zero Company, you'll have access to clones, droids, a Mandalorian, a Jedi, an Umbaran, and whatever the heck a Kabb is. Each of them has their own attributes and most have abilities that are specially tailored to their unique identity in Star Wars lore. 

Take Cly, for example. She has the Mando's signature jet pack, making her an especially nimble operator who can cross great distances easily and ignore many height restrictions. If she lands in the middle of a set of enemies, she'll even knock them back and inflict burn damage, and by default her weapon is a pistol with three shots. It just feels so perfectly Mandalorian to rocket-drop into a scrum of weakened enemies and pick them all off with three quick blaster bolts. 

Your Jedi, meanwhile, excels at up-close melee combat, dealing heavy damage with her lightsaber, pushing and pulling enemies with the Force, and then dropping into a defensive stance that blocks many blaster bolts. And true to their Star Wars identity, droids are an incredibly useful support tool, able to grant your teammates extra moves and carry more equipment than anyone else. They're all so fun to play with. I often wished the squads were bigger so I could bring more of them along on missions, and picking and choosing which ones to make my core crew was difficult. 

Most of these abilities cost Action Points--three per character, per turn--which are well-tuned to balance your movement and attack abilities. My Hawks was a sniper, for instance, so I quickly had to internalize that since her main attack cost 2 AP, her movement was severely limited compared to the rest. She had just enough to reposition slightly, but couldn't move across the map like the others. And if I were already in an advantageous position, I could fire off a shot and then use her extra-long Overwatch ability to restrict enemy movement. Jae or Cly, meanwhile, could move much more effectively, but were much less accurate and powerful. Successful actions also build up a shared pool of Advantage (ADV), which enables extra-powerful moves like Trick's Rocket Strike, which does a ton of explosive damage in a concentrated location. I got in the habit of saving that little beauty for when enemy reinforcements showed up and crowded around an entry point. But ADV also has a lot of utility for giving you occasional access to moves with specialized use-cases, like Cly's aforementioned jetpack.

Each combat encounter also has a rotating backup ability, which alternates between the members of your squad randomly each turn. Selecting your backup before starting your attack action will let another member of the squad take a shot too, doubling your effectiveness. But that also means you need to carefully position your squadmates and consider which ones have a clear line of sight before you choose a backup partner, adding another tactical wrinkle to combat. And it awards Bond XP between operators as well--more on that in a bit.

You use these abilities on a wide range of enemies, from regular humanoids to Clone Wars-era battle droids, including deadly droidekas, to the cultist Coil. The Coil is not quite a hivemind, since it doesn't have one shared consciousness. Instead, its fanatical followers all work individually but collaboratively toward a goal in perfect unison. (If you've seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, you'll have the general idea.) It's unnerving from a story standpoint and has neat applications in gameplay. Since the Coil are all linked, defeating one will often empower the next-closest Coil member with some special ability like extra defense or even cloaking. That adds yet another dynamic element, forcing you to carefully plan which ones to pick off and in which order to maximize your advantage over the rest, knowing that they'll be steadily ramping up in difficulty as you do.

And those Coil advantages are partially influenced by the mission briefs, where you'll sometimes be given a choice of which Coil upgrade to stop. There's no way to prevent both--the Coil abilities will get stronger in some way no matter what--but these decisions let you shape the types of challenges you'll face in the tactical missions. Your home base is where you'll spend mission cash on upgrades that apply to your whole team and black-market gear for your individual units. You'll also be able to upgrade your team's bonds, which start to unlock powerful upgrades across both operators when they reach the highest levels, manage their ability loadouts with unlimited free refunds to toy with different builds, adjust equipment and weapon mods, and more.

If that description hasn't made it clear, there are choices upon choices upon choices in Zero Company, but it never feels overwhelming or obtuse. Everything is digestible and clear, which is quite a feat for such a dense tactical game with so many options. I always felt fully in control of my decisions and knew exactly what I was doing.

While there was a great variety of abilities, enemies, and satisfying tactical choices, though, some of the missions did start to feel very familiar over my 30-hour playtime. I attribute this to similar objectives, which made many missions play very similarly. You often have to wipe the battlefield of all enemies, of course, but missions would often then end with getting to an extraction point, usually after a dose of reinforcements. The tactical combat itself is very fun, so it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of variety in mission objectives stood out as a weak spot.

While Zero Company uses cameos sparingly, the ones it does include are effective. Anakin Skywalker shows up briefly, so you can be completely overpowered for a handful of missions, and in the context of the Clone Wars cartoon, this is believably just another mission he was tangentially attached to for a little while before jetting off to other Jedi missions. I wasn't too sorry to see him go, because by that point I was developing such affection for my squad that I wanted to spend more time with them anyway. That's what makes the story so effective. The story of the Coil cult is a somewhat typical sci-fi threat, but I wanted to overcome it with my squad, as I had shaped and gotten to know them. We built bonds as a game mechanic, but I built bonds with them myself too. 

Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM, but it is more than just an XCOM-like. Developer Bit Reactor set higher ambitions than simply slapping a Star Wars skin on a template. Star Wars is a rich playground for games, with loads of differentiated hero and enemy types and powers baked in, and Zero Company takes full advantage of that to make an excellent tactics game in its own right. In doing so, it has made the next great evolution of the genre.

It's that familiarity with the genre that has had me so excited for No More Room in Hell 2 over the past few years, even through some early-access growing pains, and why I'm glad to see the 1.0 release stick the landing.

It's been a long journey to this 1.0 build for Torn Banner, the team behind the PvP medieval combat series Chivalry. I've been playing No More Room in Hell 2 for about two years now in early access and have watched as its studio tried to strike a chord with the community, which at times seemed fed up with the sequel and preferred its under-the-radar original. Balancing issues, bugs, and overall design issues got in the way at times, but I feel as though most have been washed away in its current form.

No More Room in Hell 2 is a first-person zombie-survival game designed for teams of eight. Right away, that's a pretty cool feature, as zombie games tend to be made for massive lobbies of dozens, like DayZ; smaller co-op teams, like Left 4 Dead; or solo experiences, like Days Gone. The novelty of eight players is a boon to the game, but it wouldn't mean much if, ultimately, that's all it had going for it. Thankfully, it has a lot else that works well in its favor. 

In its purposely slower-paced story missions, you'll move through campaigns set on large maps in Pennsylvania with a lot of lateral space to explore, taking you from the woods to residential neighborhoods to downtown areas and more, completing objectives as a group and hopefully escaping with the same number of beating hearts you arrived with.

No More Room in Hell 2 clearly draws on timeless zombie-fiction imagery, with the undead springing from caskets, banging on doors and windows until they break their seals, and shambling through graveyards like someone should warn Barbara. While the new console version naturally doesn't look as nice as the PC edition I've been playing for the past two years, the game has a strong sense of atmosphere no matter where you're playing it.

In some campaigns, you'll start alone and must find each other through exploration. These missions are my favorites, as they feel especially desolate and dangerous, and that's always been what I look for in zombie games. Throughout early access, this was always meant to be a slow-burning, Romero-esque walk through hell, and it excels by achieving that vision.

Though nearly all zombies in the game are of the classic slow-moving type, even just one of them can spell trouble. They're relentless. In fact, on higher difficulties, there may even be too many, offering not enough breathing room for the highs to feel as high as they should. But on normal difficulty, the game finds a sweet spot. 

Killing just one of them often takes four or more swipes with a melee weapon, and that's if you're diligently hitting them in the head, chipping away at their skulls as their brains flop out like someone's stepped on a tube of toothpaste. Body blows will only serve to tire you faster than it will take out the restless ghouls--unless you happen to have a sharp weapon and cut off enough of their limbs to halt them. Letting them into your personal space is a tense affair, as it's important to let them get just close enough for you to hit them, but not close enough that they slash or bite at you. Learning to measure them up correctly is an early hurdle that will decide who lives or dies.

Managing stamina is a thoughtful and near-constant exercise in survival. A powerful kick ability allows you to gain some vital breathing space when you're being surrounded, but it also eats away a big chunk of your stamina. The same is true of running. Very early on, I learned to stay aware of my surroundings, because while running from the horde behind you may seem absolutely crucial, you may be heading straight toward another and won't stand to survive if you're exhausted when you get there.

Further demonstrating how seriously this game takes its zombie fiction, you can get infected mid-mission, and if you're not careful, you'll not only turn into one of them, but you'll become a speedier variant, losing control of your character as you're left to torment your fellow survivors from beyond the grave.

This element is No More Room in Hell 2's coolest, because it allows for some really fascinating social dynamics. Pills will temporarily keep the infection at bay, and anyone infected will give away their illness by coughing every once in a while. But what if you don't have pills, or what if no one is willing to share theirs? They're not abundant enough to go around, so I've seen some people choose not to share, opting to take their chances with the fast ghoul who will soon come charging toward whoever is nearby. 

On the flipside, the infected person could distance themselves and try to hide their illness, just like the selfish guy in any zombie movie's group of survivors. This may buy them time to find a cure, or just escape with infected status while keeping their character alive. If they're more altruistic, they can instead sacrifice themselves just before they turn--provided they have any ammo--sparing their fellow survivors from dealing with the mess.

It's a hard decision to make in either case when you're playing on difficulties higher than beginner, because permadeath is a part of the experience. Characters are re-rolled randomly, applying some basic stats and a backstory, and you can customize their clothing if you'd like. From there, you'll level them with each successful campaign, unlocking skills of your choosing at regular intervals that help you lean into particular builds. Knowing I had no plans to use guns all that much, I often grabbed skills that buffed my stamina and melee damage, and it's really satisfying to see a character come together over many hours. 

But should they die, they're lost for good. 

The stakes feel so high. Taking my level 20+ character into a round that quickly went into the gutter was nerve-racking. Thankfully, these lengthy campaign missions that typically take anywhere from 30-60 minutes offer a few early exits on your travels. If you're determined to just get out alive, you can extract early, even as an individual, at the cost of any character XP gains. But hey, at least you'll be leaving with your life.

While heavy, weighted melee combat helps sell this immersive experience even more, gunplay on controller leaves something to be desired. The aim assist isn't reliable enough, as it's quite sticky but then doesn't track zombie heads well, meaning you'll often waste ammo hitting them in the chest, while trying to correct for it feels hard to pinpoint, too. It's serviceable at closer range, but only barely, and partly because the zombies are attracted to noise, and you ought not be firing loud weapons unless it's the only thing keeping you alive in any given moment. 

This means you can, and probably will, get through some missions without ever using guns. I do wish my co-op partners understood that better so we could keep the hordes off our backs more often, but even these teammate frustrations feel authentic to what living in a zombie world might feel like. 

The teamwork required in this game is intense, and some would-be-selfish players must find themselves banding together at times, because the deeper you get into a mission, the harder it becomes, and you don't want to fight off that final horde with a deficit in your team size. There are plenty of times where you or a teammate could be totally gassed and about to be swarmed, only for an ally to save the day. But in this world, there's little time to celebrate, as the next horde likely isn't far off.

Another issue the game's newly implemented controller support suffers from is strangely janky menus. Exploring options screens or even different overlays in the main menu, like moving from character upgrades to the in-game store to the challenge system, often feels clunky; my cursor would disappear, and I'd need to guess where I'm clicking. 

It's merely an annoyance in the main menu but can become a bigger issue on missions, like if you have a teammate playing music that his headset is picking up and you can't easily get to the mute button. No More Room in Hell 2 doesn't let you stop and breathe very often, so when this happened to me, I didn't have time to fumble around in the social menu. Instead, I found myself wishing that guy would just get bitten. I'm not proud of it. It's sad what these apocalyptic times make of us.

Outside of the main campaign-style "Objective" mode, there's also a wave-based survival mode. I've never been nearly as interested in wave-based zombie modes--it's why I don't even bother playing Call of Duty Zombies these days--but I like No More Room in Hell 2's survival mode just fine as a shorter alternative to the lengthy missions. They're good for farming weekly challenges and leveling characters faster than the real attraction allows, but I'd sooner just decide to play when I have the time for the game's best version of itself.

Though No More Room in Hell 2 clearly leans into decades of zombie history, it feels, most of all, like a great mash-up of two of my favorite zombie games: It has the dread-inducing, life-or-death stakes of State of Decay wrapped in a tight co-op experience reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. Though some subpar shooting mechanics keep it from being as enjoyable as either of those, that's also a very high bar in my mind, and No More Room in Hell 2 still accomplishes a hell of a lot.

It's that familiarity with the genre that has had me so excited for No More Room in Hell 2 over the past few years, even through some early-access growing pains, and why I'm glad to see the 1.0 release stick the landing.

It's been a long journey to this 1.0 build for Torn Banner, the team behind the PvP medieval combat series Chivalry. I've been playing No More Room in Hell 2 for about two years now in early access and have watched as its studio tried to strike a chord with the community, which at times seemed fed up with the sequel and preferred its under-the-radar original. Balancing issues, bugs, and overall design issues got in the way at times, but I feel as though most have been washed away in its current form.

No More Room in Hell 2 is a first-person zombie-survival game designed for teams of eight. Right away, that's a pretty cool feature, as zombie games tend to be made for massive lobbies of dozens, like DayZ; smaller co-op teams, like Left 4 Dead; or solo experiences, like Days Gone. The novelty of eight players is a boon to the game, but it wouldn't mean much if, ultimately, that's all it had going for it. Thankfully, it has a lot else that works well in its favor. 

In its purposely slower-paced story missions, you'll move through campaigns set on large maps in Pennsylvania with a lot of lateral space to explore, taking you from the woods to residential neighborhoods to downtown areas and more, completing objectives as a group and hopefully escaping with the same number of beating hearts you arrived with.

No More Room in Hell 2 clearly draws on timeless zombie-fiction imagery, with the undead springing from caskets, banging on doors and windows until they break their seals, and shambling through graveyards like someone should warn Barbara. While the new console version naturally doesn't look as nice as the PC edition I've been playing for the past two years, the game has a strong sense of atmosphere no matter where you're playing it.

In some campaigns, you'll start alone and must find each other through exploration. These missions are my favorites, as they feel especially desolate and dangerous, and that's always been what I look for in zombie games. Throughout early access, this was always meant to be a slow-burning, Romero-esque walk through hell, and it excels by achieving that vision.

Though nearly all zombies in the game are of the classic slow-moving type, even just one of them can spell trouble. They're relentless. In fact, on higher difficulties, there may even be too many, offering not enough breathing room for the highs to feel as high as they should. But on normal difficulty, the game finds a sweet spot. 

Killing just one of them often takes four or more swipes with a melee weapon, and that's if you're diligently hitting them in the head, chipping away at their skulls as their brains flop out like someone's stepped on a tube of toothpaste. Body blows will only serve to tire you faster than it will take out the restless ghouls--unless you happen to have a sharp weapon and cut off enough of their limbs to halt them. Letting them into your personal space is a tense affair, as it's important to let them get just close enough for you to hit them, but not close enough that they slash or bite at you. Learning to measure them up correctly is an early hurdle that will decide who lives or dies.

Managing stamina is a thoughtful and near-constant exercise in survival. A powerful kick ability allows you to gain some vital breathing space when you're being surrounded, but it also eats away a big chunk of your stamina. The same is true of running. Very early on, I learned to stay aware of my surroundings, because while running from the horde behind you may seem absolutely crucial, you may be heading straight toward another and won't stand to survive if you're exhausted when you get there.

Further demonstrating how seriously this game takes its zombie fiction, you can get infected mid-mission, and if you're not careful, you'll not only turn into one of them, but you'll become a speedier variant, losing control of your character as you're left to torment your fellow survivors from beyond the grave.

This element is No More Room in Hell 2's coolest, because it allows for some really fascinating social dynamics. Pills will temporarily keep the infection at bay, and anyone infected will give away their illness by coughing every once in a while. But what if you don't have pills, or what if no one is willing to share theirs? They're not abundant enough to go around, so I've seen some people choose not to share, opting to take their chances with the fast ghoul who will soon come charging toward whoever is nearby. 

On the flipside, the infected person could distance themselves and try to hide their illness, just like the selfish guy in any zombie movie's group of survivors. This may buy them time to find a cure, or just escape with infected status while keeping their character alive. If they're more altruistic, they can instead sacrifice themselves just before they turn--provided they have any ammo--sparing their fellow survivors from dealing with the mess.

It's a hard decision to make in either case when you're playing on difficulties higher than beginner, because permadeath is a part of the experience. Characters are re-rolled randomly, applying some basic stats and a backstory, and you can customize their clothing if you'd like. From there, you'll level them with each successful campaign, unlocking skills of your choosing at regular intervals that help you lean into particular builds. Knowing I had no plans to use guns all that much, I often grabbed skills that buffed my stamina and melee damage, and it's really satisfying to see a character come together over many hours. 

But should they die, they're lost for good. 

The stakes feel so high. Taking my level 20+ character into a round that quickly went into the gutter was nerve-racking. Thankfully, these lengthy campaign missions that typically take anywhere from 30-60 minutes offer a few early exits on your travels. If you're determined to just get out alive, you can extract early, even as an individual, at the cost of any character XP gains. But hey, at least you'll be leaving with your life.

While heavy, weighted melee combat helps sell this immersive experience even more, gunplay on controller leaves something to be desired. The aim assist isn't reliable enough, as it's quite sticky but then doesn't track zombie heads well, meaning you'll often waste ammo hitting them in the chest, while trying to correct for it feels hard to pinpoint, too. It's serviceable at closer range, but only barely, and partly because the zombies are attracted to noise, and you ought not be firing loud weapons unless it's the only thing keeping you alive in any given moment. 

This means you can, and probably will, get through some missions without ever using guns. I do wish my co-op partners understood that better so we could keep the hordes off our backs more often, but even these teammate frustrations feel authentic to what living in a zombie world might feel like. 

The teamwork required in this game is intense, and some would-be-selfish players must find themselves banding together at times, because the deeper you get into a mission, the harder it becomes, and you don't want to fight off that final horde with a deficit in your team size. There are plenty of times where you or a teammate could be totally gassed and about to be swarmed, only for an ally to save the day. But in this world, there's little time to celebrate, as the next horde likely isn't far off.

Another issue the game's newly implemented controller support suffers from is strangely janky menus. Exploring options screens or even different overlays in the main menu, like moving from character upgrades to the in-game store to the challenge system, often feels clunky; my cursor would disappear, and I'd need to guess where I'm clicking. 

It's merely an annoyance in the main menu but can become a bigger issue on missions, like if you have a teammate playing music that his headset is picking up and you can't easily get to the mute button. No More Room in Hell 2 doesn't let you stop and breathe very often, so when this happened to me, I didn't have time to fumble around in the social menu. Instead, I found myself wishing that guy would just get bitten. I'm not proud of it. It's sad what these apocalyptic times make of us.

Outside of the main campaign-style "Objective" mode, there's also a wave-based survival mode. I've never been nearly as interested in wave-based zombie modes--it's why I don't even bother playing Call of Duty Zombies these days--but I like No More Room in Hell 2's survival mode just fine as a shorter alternative to the lengthy missions. They're good for farming weekly challenges and leveling characters faster than the real attraction allows, but I'd sooner just decide to play when I have the time for the game's best version of itself.

Though No More Room in Hell 2 clearly leans into decades of zombie history, it feels, most of all, like a great mash-up of two of my favorite zombie games: It has the dread-inducing, life-or-death stakes of State of Decay wrapped in a tight co-op experience reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. Though some subpar shooting mechanics keep it from being as enjoyable as either of those, that's also a very high bar in my mind, and No More Room in Hell 2 still accomplishes a hell of a lot.

There have been years when I, too, was very disappointed with Madden. It was taking the sport I love most and fumbling it every August. But for five years now, it's felt less true, and at this point, with Madden NFL 27, we just have to admit Madden is good again.

To be fair, I had even higher praise for Madden 26 than you'll find in this Madden 27 review, which takes a slight step back in some ways, but none of those shortcomings can be found on the virtual field itself. It's the continued gameplay improvements that keep Madden from succumbing once more to formerly reliable memes and criticisms. The Tiburon team has been building and iterating on its foundational gameplay in clear and beneficial ways on a timeline that, to my mind, began with Madden 23. It culminates with this year's game, which feels better than ever when you step onto the gridiron.

Defense is the key. Despite my career-high praise of last year's game, something shook it to its core a month or two after launch, breaking the pass rush for the duration of the game's time in the sun. It resulted in a Madden experience where games routinely went over 90 total points scored. In my competitive Madden league, I even saw some players score upwards of 70+ several times. Defense was sickly. Madden 27 is medicine. 

This year's game focuses intensely on giving players more control over their players and improving things like zone coverage and pass rushing, in particular. In last year's game, it felt like you needed a sixth sense as the user on D to make a stop. With smarter zone coverage, you can rely on AI defenders. Players won't spectate from the middle of their zone anymore, as they now "look for work," diagnosing a play's progression and playing proactively rather than reactively. Along with new tools to play conservatively, aggressively, or their ultra variants, you can now better prepare for what you think you know before the ball is snapped. 

These new shoulder-button commands are part of a complete remap of the pre-play adjustments. These take some getting used to, as they reconfigure years of muscle memory for longtime Madden players, but it's a worthy learning curve to run down, because the end result gives you not just more options, but options that are much quicker to activate. 

Things that may have taken four or five button presses in past games now take just two, and with new custom adjustments, you can create your own macro adjustments, bundling a set of would-be individual changes all in one go. For example, if you think you know what play your opponent is running, you can quickly activate a macro that adjusts your defensive line spacing, cornerback shading, and LB zone depth in ways that you feel counter that play correctly, all with the press of two buttons.

It's truly revolutionary and speaks to Madden's renewed energy spent on serving the diehard community first and foremost. Even if macros sound too sweaty, you can use those provided by default, never having to jump into the game's menus to create your own. It's not as sexy a feature as the awesome new holiday game presentation, but in my mind, these new tools are the defining feature of Madden 27.

As deep as these new tools go to help defense, many of them work on both sides of the ball, and the offense actually gets an exclusive new toy, too. Timing-based catching came to both of EA's American football games this summer, and Madden has the benefit of learning from College Football's launch-week struggles. Similarly to timing your NBA 2K shot release in the green zone, timing-based catching asks Madden players to snag the ball at the moment it hits your hands. I've taken about two weeks to make up my mind on this optional new mechanic, which you can toggle off. I was skeptical and worried at first, but I've settled on using it. It adds more player input to plays, removing some of the Madden Math--as those in my league like to call it when the game's attributes algorithm calculates who wins or loses any scuffle on a play.

My only concern right now is that finding the sweet spot will be a months-long quest for the studio, as it reacts to players saying it's too powerful or not powerful enough. I hope it can settle into something predictable and reliable. If it does, I believe we'll see the team iterate on the feature in welcome ways for years to come. If it never quite lands right with the wider community, it may go the way of QB Vision: quickly swept out of the game. But for me, and for now, I like it.

For many, including me, Franchise is the destination mode, and for the second straight year, the mode actually delivers some big changes that I enjoy. The marquee addition here is the Persona Engine, which assigns every player a number of personality traits, then makes dealing with them on your roster an interpersonal minigame. Players may have a team-first mindset, or they may be driven by money over all things. They may be quick to annoy or helpfully patient. They may be near the end of their career and seeking to close it out with a title, or they might demand a trade because you didn't offer them a contract that they felt respected their efforts. 

Something like this has been in Madden in recent years, but it's only been relevant during free agency, and even then, hasn't been very influential. This year, it's actually a big deal and will undoubtedly reshape your roster in unpredictable ways. A football team is 53 players, and for the first time ever, you'll feel like you're coaching 53 unique individuals. 

This is made better by an overhaul to how contracts are offered. For a long time, Madden's deals would reflect only one format: year-over-year pay increases. That might sound typical at your job, but it's not nearly true of the NFL, and now Madden captures these nuances. You can negotiate to add void years, rearrange the salary versus bonus money, apply no-trade clauses, and a number of other options that dynamically become available during contract talks, which now happen all throughout the season, rather than having a bunch of guys ready to discuss contracts in Week 3 like the old way Madden did deal-making.

It's important to note that, though I didn't see many head-scratching deals in my Franchise sessions, social media has featured several in the first few days since Madden's release. Computer-controlled teams are signing too many players at one position, re-signing much of their roster for mega-deals that would break the salary cap, and doing other things that suggest Madden's new Persona Engine logic is causing some headaches. It's a tricky thing for me, as I didn't see them myself, so it can't color my firsthand experience--and playing in a 32-player league means I'll be insulated from CPU tomfoolery such as this--but I see these stories and ingest them like headlines of viruses somewhere else in the world. For now, I'm apparently safe, but I'm mindful that such dangers are lurking elsewhere.

Kids would call this next part of my review a vibe shift. While the on-field and Franchise additions are great, if you're most interested in other modes, you'll be left wanting. Despite some fun in the custom-avatar career mode, Superstar, it was a frustrating experience overall. I played my career as a free safety, one of the new positions you can take on. But the play-by-play scoring system--a load-bearing pillar of this mode--is routinely faulty. When I'd make a tackle, it would score me as having made a tackle assist. When I'd engage in a block, it would downgrade me for having been pancaked, even as I remained upright. Even weirder, it would get game results wrong. With the Chargers, I beat the Rams to go 6-1, but after the game it said we were 5-2. Then next week, when I lost to the Texans, it gave me a win. 

Off the field, Superstar is still a fatigue-inducing affair of menus, corny brand inserts, and false choices. Often, dialogue options let me choose what to say in a text message or to the media, and the difference in outcomes is negligible. This mode also gets to something that is becoming worse in Madden, and probably only going to get even worse once the long-rumored PvPvE social mode, akin to NBA 2K's The City, finally arrives. Monetization is everywhere, and it's affecting gameplay.

You can buy levels to improve your avatar faster than playing, but you can also buy a Superstar Pass, which is just a battle-pass-style system that gives you even more skill points for leveling up. Neither precludes you from the other, and in fact EA seems all too happy to let you double-dip, since progression is slow either way, and especially painful if you try to play for free, even if you stick to the single-player story. 

The blowback NBA 2K gets over similar tactics hasn't really hit Madden yet because its half-measure of a social mode, Superstar Showdown, is largely ignored by the game's diehard players, whereas in NBA 2K, The City is the point for most players. But if predatory progression slowdowns like this still exist when that mode finally arrives, it'll be EA willfully stepping on a rake after having surely heard about these issues for years beforehand. At the very least, NBA 2K charges players a lot but delivers a fun game mode. For EA to both ask for so much of your money after the initial $70 (or even $150) and still not offer something enjoyable in exchange is mind-boggling.

All that spending doesn't even account for the mode-agnostic Team Pass, which is another $10 every few weeks if you want it. Like last year's game, the Team Pass includes some recycled rewards from the previous Madden, which is frustrating for paid content anyway, but especially bad when it means my Tennessee Titans cosmetics include the team's outdated branding, since they overhauled their logo and uniforms last winter.

Of course, you can't talk about overly monetized design without speaking to Ultimate Team, the decades-long undisputed champion of pay-to-win tactics in a fully priced game. For what it's worth, Ultimate Team (MUT) doesn't get much focus in Madden 27, which is what many Franchise and Superstar fans always hope for, as they feel it means more resources went to their preferred landing spots instead. 

What MUT does add this year is a bit more flexibility in how player cards crystallize, with "Evo" cards allowing you to over-level cards, change their archetypes, and more. To my eyes, this mode is a chore each year that demands you spend your free time playing nothing but MUT. I don't find that fun or rewarding and probably never will, so long as they keep throwing me into games against credit-card warriors who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to shred people online using the same small handful of glitched plays that emerge every year. Hard pass.

On top of the awesome holiday presentation packages that decorate broadcast-style elements to fit Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, Madden 27's presentation adds a few other welcome touches. This includes more numerous and detailed alternate field designs that are rolled out to match throwback and alternate jerseys whenever the home team equips them. The weekly recap and halftime shows go deeper than before, adding a Player of the Week segment. It's all still handled by Scott Hanson, too, who brings authenticity and electricity to each instance. 

With all of these new bells and whistles over the past two Maddens, I do wish players in PvP could opt into what the game calls "full" presentation. By default, if you're playing someone online, the game skips a lot of these awesome displays, like pre-game run-outs and highlights that mimic fading to commercial. These go a long way toward giving the game a more authentic feel, and it's too bad I rarely get to see them once my review sessions are over and the rest of my games are played in PvP league games.

Presentation is right up there with gameplay and Franchise as the three key pillars that determine whether I enjoy a Madden installment. While the gains here have been smaller than those on the field, in particular, they are still very noticeable, very appreciated, and very cool.

Madden 27 is the fifth consecutive year in which the on-field experience has been foundationally sound and improves on its predecessor. It's a heartening trajectory for a series I've spent my life playing, through both good and bad eras. Despite the still-glaring issues in arenas like Superstar and MUT, Madden feels cool again. It's past time we stopped applying outdated perspectives to a game that has evolved significantly over the past half-decade. Madden will continue to frustrate at times, patches will sometimes be slow to arrive, and monetization is still way too intrusive and seems likely to get worse. But if you stick to Franchise and take advantage of the many new tools at your disposal on the field, there's a game worth celebrating here.

There have been years when I, too, was very disappointed with Madden. It was taking the sport I love most and fumbling it every August. But for five years now, it's felt less true, and at this point, with Madden NFL 27, we just have to admit Madden is good again.

To be fair, I had even higher praise for Madden 26 than you'll find in this Madden 27 review, which takes a slight step back in some ways, but none of those shortcomings can be found on the virtual field itself. It's the continued gameplay improvements that keep Madden from succumbing once more to formerly reliable memes and criticisms. The Tiburon team has been building and iterating on its foundational gameplay in clear and beneficial ways on a timeline that, to my mind, began with Madden 23. It culminates with this year's game, which feels better than ever when you step onto the gridiron.

Defense is the key. Despite my career-high praise of last year's game, something shook it to its core a month or two after launch, breaking the pass rush for the duration of the game's time in the sun. It resulted in a Madden experience where games routinely went over 90 total points scored. In my competitive Madden league, I even saw some players score upwards of 70+ several times. Defense was sickly. Madden 27 is medicine. 

This year's game focuses intensely on giving players more control over their players and improving things like zone coverage and pass rushing, in particular. In last year's game, it felt like you needed a sixth sense as the user on D to make a stop. With smarter zone coverage, you can rely on AI defenders. Players won't spectate from the middle of their zone anymore, as they now "look for work," diagnosing a play's progression and playing proactively rather than reactively. Along with new tools to play conservatively, aggressively, or their ultra variants, you can now better prepare for what you think you know before the ball is snapped. 

These new shoulder-button commands are part of a complete remap of the pre-play adjustments. These take some getting used to, as they reconfigure years of muscle memory for longtime Madden players, but it's a worthy learning curve to run down, because the end result gives you not just more options, but options that are much quicker to activate. 

Things that may have taken four or five button presses in past games now take just two, and with new custom adjustments, you can create your own macro adjustments, bundling a set of would-be individual changes all in one go. For example, if you think you know what play your opponent is running, you can quickly activate a macro that adjusts your defensive line spacing, cornerback shading, and LB zone depth in ways that you feel counter that play correctly, all with the press of two buttons.

It's truly revolutionary and speaks to Madden's renewed energy spent on serving the diehard community first and foremost. Even if macros sound too sweaty, you can use those provided by default, never having to jump into the game's menus to create your own. It's not as sexy a feature as the awesome new holiday game presentation, but in my mind, these new tools are the defining feature of Madden 27.

As deep as these new tools go to help defense, many of them work on both sides of the ball, and the offense actually gets an exclusive new toy, too. Timing-based catching came to both of EA's American football games this summer, and Madden has the benefit of learning from College Football's launch-week struggles. Similarly to timing your NBA 2K shot release in the green zone, timing-based catching asks Madden players to snag the ball at the moment it hits your hands. I've taken about two weeks to make up my mind on this optional new mechanic, which you can toggle off. I was skeptical and worried at first, but I've settled on using it. It adds more player input to plays, removing some of the Madden Math--as those in my league like to call it when the game's attributes algorithm calculates who wins or loses any scuffle on a play.

My only concern right now is that finding the sweet spot will be a months-long quest for the studio, as it reacts to players saying it's too powerful or not powerful enough. I hope it can settle into something predictable and reliable. If it does, I believe we'll see the team iterate on the feature in welcome ways for years to come. If it never quite lands right with the wider community, it may go the way of QB Vision: quickly swept out of the game. But for me, and for now, I like it.

For many, including me, Franchise is the destination mode, and for the second straight year, the mode actually delivers some big changes that I enjoy. The marquee addition here is the Persona Engine, which assigns every player a number of personality traits, then makes dealing with them on your roster an interpersonal minigame. Players may have a team-first mindset, or they may be driven by money over all things. They may be quick to annoy or helpfully patient. They may be near the end of their career and seeking to close it out with a title, or they might demand a trade because you didn't offer them a contract that they felt respected their efforts. 

Something like this has been in Madden in recent years, but it's only been relevant during free agency, and even then, hasn't been very influential. This year, it's actually a big deal and will undoubtedly reshape your roster in unpredictable ways. A football team is 53 players, and for the first time ever, you'll feel like you're coaching 53 unique individuals. 

This is made better by an overhaul to how contracts are offered. For a long time, Madden's deals would reflect only one format: year-over-year pay increases. That might sound typical at your job, but it's not nearly true of the NFL, and now Madden captures these nuances. You can negotiate to add void years, rearrange the salary versus bonus money, apply no-trade clauses, and a number of other options that dynamically become available during contract talks, which now happen all throughout the season, rather than having a bunch of guys ready to discuss contracts in Week 3 like the old way Madden did deal-making.

It's important to note that, though I didn't see many head-scratching deals in my Franchise sessions, social media has featured several in the first few days since Madden's release. Computer-controlled teams are signing too many players at one position, re-signing much of their roster for mega-deals that would break the salary cap, and doing other things that suggest Madden's new Persona Engine logic is causing some headaches. It's a tricky thing for me, as I didn't see them myself, so it can't color my firsthand experience--and playing in a 32-player league means I'll be insulated from CPU tomfoolery such as this--but I see these stories and ingest them like headlines of viruses somewhere else in the world. For now, I'm apparently safe, but I'm mindful that such dangers are lurking elsewhere.

Kids would call this next part of my review a vibe shift. While the on-field and Franchise additions are great, if you're most interested in other modes, you'll be left wanting. Despite some fun in the custom-avatar career mode, Superstar, it was a frustrating experience overall. I played my career as a free safety, one of the new positions you can take on. But the play-by-play scoring system--a load-bearing pillar of this mode--is routinely faulty. When I'd make a tackle, it would score me as having made a tackle assist. When I'd engage in a block, it would downgrade me for having been pancaked, even as I remained upright. Even weirder, it would get game results wrong. With the Chargers, I beat the Rams to go 6-1, but after the game it said we were 5-2. Then next week, when I lost to the Texans, it gave me a win. 

Off the field, Superstar is still a fatigue-inducing affair of menus, corny brand inserts, and false choices. Often, dialogue options let me choose what to say in a text message or to the media, and the difference in outcomes is negligible. This mode also gets to something that is becoming worse in Madden, and probably only going to get even worse once the long-rumored PvPvE social mode, akin to NBA 2K's The City, finally arrives. Monetization is everywhere, and it's affecting gameplay.

You can buy levels to improve your avatar faster than playing, but you can also buy a Superstar Pass, which is just a battle-pass-style system that gives you even more skill points for leveling up. Neither precludes you from the other, and in fact EA seems all too happy to let you double-dip, since progression is slow either way, and especially painful if you try to play for free, even if you stick to the single-player story. 

The blowback NBA 2K gets over similar tactics hasn't really hit Madden yet because its half-measure of a social mode, Superstar Showdown, is largely ignored by the game's diehard players, whereas in NBA 2K, The City is the point for most players. But if predatory progression slowdowns like this still exist when that mode finally arrives, it'll be EA willfully stepping on a rake after having surely heard about these issues for years beforehand. At the very least, NBA 2K charges players a lot but delivers a fun game mode. For EA to both ask for so much of your money after the initial $70 (or even $150) and still not offer something enjoyable in exchange is mind-boggling.

All that spending doesn't even account for the mode-agnostic Team Pass, which is another $10 every few weeks if you want it. Like last year's game, the Team Pass includes some recycled rewards from the previous Madden, which is frustrating for paid content anyway, but especially bad when it means my Tennessee Titans cosmetics include the team's outdated branding, since they overhauled their logo and uniforms last winter.

Of course, you can't talk about overly monetized design without speaking to Ultimate Team, the decades-long undisputed champion of pay-to-win tactics in a fully priced game. For what it's worth, Ultimate Team (MUT) doesn't get much focus in Madden 27, which is what many Franchise and Superstar fans always hope for, as they feel it means more resources went to their preferred landing spots instead. 

What MUT does add this year is a bit more flexibility in how player cards crystallize, with "Evo" cards allowing you to over-level cards, change their archetypes, and more. To my eyes, this mode is a chore each year that demands you spend your free time playing nothing but MUT. I don't find that fun or rewarding and probably never will, so long as they keep throwing me into games against credit-card warriors who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to shred people online using the same small handful of glitched plays that emerge every year. Hard pass.

On top of the awesome holiday presentation packages that decorate broadcast-style elements to fit Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, Madden 27's presentation adds a few other welcome touches. This includes more numerous and detailed alternate field designs that are rolled out to match throwback and alternate jerseys whenever the home team equips them. The weekly recap and halftime shows go deeper than before, adding a Player of the Week segment. It's all still handled by Scott Hanson, too, who brings authenticity and electricity to each instance. 

With all of these new bells and whistles over the past two Maddens, I do wish players in PvP could opt into what the game calls "full" presentation. By default, if you're playing someone online, the game skips a lot of these awesome displays, like pre-game run-outs and highlights that mimic fading to commercial. These go a long way toward giving the game a more authentic feel, and it's too bad I rarely get to see them once my review sessions are over and the rest of my games are played in PvP league games.

Presentation is right up there with gameplay and Franchise as the three key pillars that determine whether I enjoy a Madden installment. While the gains here have been smaller than those on the field, in particular, they are still very noticeable, very appreciated, and very cool.

Madden 27 is the fifth consecutive year in which the on-field experience has been foundationally sound and improves on its predecessor. It's a heartening trajectory for a series I've spent my life playing, through both good and bad eras. Despite the still-glaring issues in arenas like Superstar and MUT, Madden feels cool again. It's past time we stopped applying outdated perspectives to a game that has evolved significantly over the past half-decade. Madden will continue to frustrate at times, patches will sometimes be slow to arrive, and monetization is still way too intrusive and seems likely to get worse. But if you stick to Franchise and take advantage of the many new tools at your disposal on the field, there's a game worth celebrating here.