Before Palworld’s Early Access debut in 2024, I remember eagerly wanting to review the completely unhinged-looking “Pokemon with guns” game, mostly as a joke. Hilariously, the joke was on me when it not only became one of the biggest games of the year, but also one of my all-time favorite survival games. Two years later, with more than 160 hours spent in its 1.0 update catching colorful Pals and battling massive endgame bosses, I’m happy to report that it’s improved in almost all of the ways I hoped it would. The worst of the technical rough edges have been smoothed over, progression has been smartly streamlined, and loads of missing bits and baubles have been added. There are still plenty of parts that feel like they never got the attention they deserved during Early Access – most areas are largely empty, settlements can feel downright lifeless, and base building is still fairly janky on its best day. But on the whole, Palworld is more compelling than it’s ever been, and something I’d highly recommend for those with a taste for both creature collectors and tree-punching survival games alike.

If you’ve never played Palworld before, there’s very little I can say to prepare you for this completely bizarre adventure. You’ll recruit a roster of colorful critters who make Nintendo’s legal team furious and use them to perform unpaid labor in your work camps as you explore an increasingly dangerous world filled with gun-toting maniacs. This mix of creature collecting, open-world exploration, RPG-adjacent leveling and questing, and survival mechanics that have you building up a base to store your pals and conquer the wilds probably shouldn’t work. But it really does. And if you did play Palworld during Early Access, know that the 1.0 update fleshes out this world and the kinds of activities you tackle within it, so this over-the-top adventure now feels a lot more complete than the proof-of-concept version from two years ago.

You might assume Palworld is just a straight Pokemon ripoff at a glance, but it actually has more in common with the likes of Valheim or Grounded. After inexplicably finding yourself dropped practically naked into a world filled with magical creatures called Pals, you’ll have to build up a base and craft gear before you starve to death or freeze out in the cold, then level your way through an irresistible upgrade tree that unlocks better equipment and amenities. That climb makes it extremely easy to lose a dozen hours without noticing, as my friends and I found ourselves doing numerous times. You’ll go from swinging a club like a caveman, to crafting leather clothes and hunting with a bow, to building literal guns and ammo. Compared to your humble start, you’ll be almost unrecognizable by the endgame, sporting sci-fi armor that looks like something out of Tron and firing laser cannons at enemies from atop the back of a giant dragon.

Palworld’s twist on the familiar survival formula is how it cleverly blends in components of a creature collector, as you’ll find yourself wholly unable to survive in these harsh lands without the invaluable assistance of the critters who occupy it. By capturing Pals and putting them to work, either at your side as battle companions or at your base where they use their specific powers to perform manual labor, you quickly raise up a legion of workhorses that allow you to turn your barren campsite into an epicenter of industry. For example, a plant-based Pal named Gumoss can use its green-thumbed abilities to plant crops, while the water-based Pengullet waters them, and the sharp-clawed Cattiva harvests the produce and stores it in a nearby chest.

That automation is incredibly well-thought out and works surprisingly well, even if your dumb Pals can be a bit imprecise at times, dropping valuable materials on the floor when it’s time for bed or walking as slowly as possible to come assist you… only to turn around when they suddenly realize they’re hungry instead. So it’s not as awe-inspiringly smooth as something like Satisfactory, but what it lacks in efficiency, it makes up for in silliness and charm. The more creatures you collect, the more things you can automate at your base – but the harder you push these poor creatures, the faster their sanity will drop, until they eventually crash out and refuse to work for you. Then again, if you ever want to make an example of a slacker, you can straight up butcher your Pals for parts, squeezing the last drop of useful resources out of them in the process. Like I said, this is a super weird game, and I mean that as a compliment.

That said, while growing your base is a ton of fun, the actual act of building it has plenty of room to improve. It’s ridiculous that Palworld still lacks the ability to move items around or snap them into alignment, so you have to completely dismantle and rebuild objects if you want to move them somewhere else or just don’t like the angle they are at. The rules for structural integrity are pretty opaque as well – sometimes you’ll be told a structure lacks support despite placing down a foundation and pillars for it, and on at least one occasion I made a minor slip up by deleting the wrong piece of wall and caused my entire base to disintegrate in front of my eyes, costing me hours of progress. I seem to complain about building limitations in practically every survival game I review, so this is par for the course in a way, but it’s still aggravatingly cumbersome at times.

When you’re not putting Pals to work at your base and evolving your headquarters from a wooden shack to a high-tech factory, you’ll be venturing out into the world to capture new Pals, brave increasingly dangerous regions, and hunt for loot as you contend with psychotic human factions who often attack you on sight. Instead of just letting your party do all the fighting for you, you’re able fire pistols and stab spears into hostile Pals and human NPCs alike while your team blasts them with fireballs. It’s surprisingly fun to dodge magical blasts and then grab one of your fire-based Pals to use as a living flamethrower, especially when your friends are doing the same alongside you in co-op. It’s also a fair bit more challenging than you might think, as hostiles (especially bosses) pack a serious punch, which gives you yet another reason to excited about that new shield or piece of armor you’ve been saving all your crafting material up for.

The storyline that accompanies your climb from “naked barbarian with a stick” to “industrial sweatshop proprietor with godlike power” adds some appreciated context to what you’re doing: You’ve gotta defeat the most powerful Pal tamers in each region, then battle a vague, unspeakable evil within the center of the world tree. Sadly, this setup is mostly just used as set dressing – a stream of generic and entirely forgettable characters who direct you toward your next quest or ask you to go tick some errand off a checklist. It’s truly the bare minimum needed to string a questline together, giving you amusing tasks to complete but never actually making you feel like a part of this world. Unless you bring some friends along for the ride, you’re in for a pretty isolating adventure.

It certainly doesn’t help that Palworld has a tendency to feel fairly barren while exploring. The handful of NPC villages you’ll find are little more than small camps with a few samey merchants and quest givers hanging around, and you only really have cause to visit them either during specific quests or to buy supplies before rushing back out. The absolutely massive wild areas suffer from this same issue – although they are always filled with Pals to catch, eggs and treasure chests to hunt, and materials to collect, they otherwise feel like entirely unsettled landscapes. You’ll only rarely find NPC Pal tamers exploring the islands, aside from the generic enemy camps where poachers shoot you for no discernable reason. It’s especially weird that some vast islands exist without any clear purpose, covered with low level Pals but no real reason to explore them aside from filling out your map, which can make that process a bit of a slog at times.

But while the story and exploration can’t carry Palworld on their own, the actual action and the progression systems that drive it more than pull their weight to make up for that. This is a huge campaign that took me over 150 hours to complete (with plenty more left to do), and that marathon is paced brilliantly. It gets you into the action fast and points you toward clear objectives that push you out of your base to explore, fight bosses, and capture pals. You’re given loads of XP and access to better equipment by simply following the path in front of you, and I always felt like I was just a tiny bit ahead of the difficulty curve without needing to do much grinding. Occasionally I’d run into a high level boss that’d kick my teeth in, forcing me to regroup and work on my build, but this was a pretty rare occurrence, and one I was never annoyed by since crafting new items to overcome those hurdles was usually a fun challenge.

And although much of the map is more empty than I’d like it to be, certain areas at least have interesting barriers you’ll need to overcome before continuing your march ever outward. For example, one region is dominated by a giant volcano, so you’ll need to craft heat-resistant items to avoid catching on fire and slowly dying to the heat. Another area is suspended high in the air, accessible only by those who know a secret method to reach it. There are some cool boss fights to gate your progress, too, like one against a giant whale that throws massive tidal waves at you, requiring you to have a flying Pal at your side that can outrace the insanely tall walls of deadly water. That said, the number of memorable boss fights like this is dwarfed by the amount of forgettable ones, as most are just a matter of you and your Pals slapping around some oversized creature until it dies.

Thankfully, there is at least a good amount of choice for which Pals will do that slapping. You can battle alongside any Pals you want in order to power them up, and various consumables will upgrade them even further. It’s definitely a lot easier if you abandon your favorite Pals for ones that are naturally stronger, like the options that appear later on – legendaries and whatnot – but as someone who prefers to reject the meta and use whichever creatures I connect most with, I was impressed by how many ways Palworld provides for you to raise lesser Pals up to be viable even through to the endgame.

For example, I caught a fiery Blazamut early on in my adventure that I bonded with immediately and wouldn’t have parted with unless faced with no other option. As I leveled up, I kept finding new ways to improve my buddy’s stats, give him more powerful attacks, and buff him in various other ways – such as grinding up duplicate copies of the Pal to increase his star rating, and increasing our bond just by spending time with him in my party, both of which increased his stats. He even got strong enough that I was able to bring him into battle against post-game bosses without issue. It’s pretty awesome that this is an option, because a pet peeve of mine in other creature collectors is when everyone’s teams look identical by the end as personal flair gives way to the inescapable gravity of raw stats.

You’ll need to develop those Pals quite a bit, too, because Palworld’s endgame kicks the difficulty up to 11. It has some seriously challenging versions of each of the existing boss fights, plus raid encounters where you’ll fight alongside practically every Pal you’ve ever captured to take down a massive, deadly monster. To aid you in the effort, there’s quite a bit of equipment to unlock and rare resources to grind for even beyond the main story, and the Ancient Relic Recycler that spits out high-end resources and equipment when you claim victory against Pals in the endgame region is a particularly nice touch for speeding up the grind as you get even deeper. Some of that grind can be a bit of a pain, like hunting for randomly dropped duplicates of a schematic so you can craft a better version needed to take down a raid boss, which becomes monotonous fairly quickly. But on the whole, there’s quite a bit to chase if you’re looking to extend your time past the credits, and I happily lost way too much time doing just that.

Finally, although the 1.0 update cleaned up most of the worst technical issues that were present during Early Access, Palworld’s performance is still a bit rocky even now. Framerates are quite jittery, especially when loading into a new area or if you’ve got a lot going on in your base, and there’s tons of pop-in while flying around the map. These problems were rarely bad enough to meaningfully hinder my experience, but they can definitely make the whole thing feel quite janky.

You can tell a single-player campaign is truly great when revisiting it sparks a similar joy as your very first run, even when you remember how it all plays out beat-by-beat. Pistol shots on scrambling Grunts, sticking Elites with plasma grenades, popping Flood like bubble wrap with an Assault Rifle; Halo: Campaign Evolved rekindled the familiar feeling of playing the original on a rented Xbox at my grandma's house in 2001. But as much as I adore Halo's campaign, with its simple yet thoughtful combat design, you can only play the hits so often. When the base game, the Anniversary Edition, and the Master Chief Collection are all readily available in 2026, it's easy to see this remake as more of an Unreal Engine test than anything. There’s a new batch of Skulls and three prequel missions to sweeten the deal, which are a fun few hours to blast through – but the changes outside the graphical overhaul are otherwise subtle, and as a whole, neither definitively improve nor detract from what I played 25 years ago. So, while it's great to see how well Halo has aged, we've been down this road many times before.

There aren't really any surprises here for those who've played Halo before; Master Chief awakens as the UNSC flagship is invaded by the alien Covenant and he escapes by landing on a mysterious ring-shaped planet. In its twists and turns through various biomes and chromed-out Forerunner halls, you uncover the truth about Halo itself, paving the way for the rest of the series. It's a clean, no-nonsense story that's refreshingly simple in retrospect. And let's not forget Master Chief, alongside Cortana, embodied the sentiment that dudes rock, especially when you're going full speed in a Warthog as the classic theme song starts kicking in.

Campaign Evolved includes some brand-new cutscenes that teeter between kind of hokey to just fine. Pulling up to the beachfront in a Pelican for The Silent Cartographer has a little extra gravity but I do miss that original first-person fly-in, and the scene at the bow of the Pillar of Autumn for the opening mission kind of kills a sense of urgency. While these are efforts in being more cinematic and detailed with the story, they're sometimes missing the natural flow of they replaced.

Overall, there's beauty in how quick Halo is to the punch, and it's this initial setup of a distinct sci-fi world that set the stage for some of the best designed shootouts of its era, which revolutionized first-person games on console at the time. The sense of wonder when trying to figure out which direction to go upon exploring Halo itself as Covenant ships constantly drop Grunts, Elites, and Jackals made for encounters that felt organic and varied. That mix of enemies alone was strong enough bread-and-butter for basic encounters, and when they're accompanied by armor-clad Hunters or cloaked Elites lurking with energy swords, I'm reminded that Halo was so much more than a scripted shooting gallery. And it's still a hearty challenge on Legendary runs, rivaling FPS campaigns of the modern day. As annoying as it may be to wipe from something like a pesky suicidal Grunt running around with two plasma grenades in-hand, you just have to accept it and play a little smarter next time. Positioning, grenade placement, and making the most of whatever weapons are available are part of why Halo's combat calculus remains solid all these years later.

Certain stretches do rely on repeat corridors for a little too long. Working your way through The Library alongside Guilty Spark, grinding through Covenant ship hallways, or backtracking during Two Betrayals; these aren't the most exciting parts of Halo. However, the fundamentals of its iconic, satisfying gunplay still make the repetition enjoyable at least. Moments like being able to take a Banshee or Scorpion tank through snow-covered valleys and approach open firefights with Halo's sense of freedom make the lulls a little more forgivable.

The Unreal Engine 5 makeover is technically impressive in the way that high-fidelity games built on Unreal often have an approximation of photorealism. Those finer details are definitely noticeable, which is all the more apparent since I replayed this campaign in the Master Chief Collection just before this review. Fidelity alone isn't really what made Halo enduring, though, and the change in atmosphere is also a change in personality. It's like every surface has a glossy sheen to it, as if it was weirdly buffed out with gallons of Brasso. Now, I remember the same debate when the Anniversary Edition came along, but at least it did have the instant visual swap button and of course, Campaign Evolved doesn't since it's a rebuilt game. The change in aesthetic doesn't hurt the experience, and while it's nice to see the modernization, it isn’t always a stylistic improvement necessarily.

There's this odd fuzziness in the image quality I notice in some UE5 games that's present here, almost like a weird film grain you can't turn off, and some weird distortion around weapons models when you're in motion. That said, there are moments where the visual overhaul had me taken aback. The way the setting sun beamed through the cracks on the Pillar of Autumn in The Maw fed into the bleak, melancholic feeling of the final mission. The way plasma weapons lit up cavern walls as the Covenant and Flood duked it out added some depth to the tight spaces and chaotic battles therein. Along with the mood lighting and slimy biomechanical motifs of later missions, it reinforced the idea that the original Halo could have a slight horror edge to it at times.

Campaign Evolved also sort of Frankensteins parts of other Halo games together. The physics and controls seem to be based largely off of Halo: Reach, while character models are borrowed from a mishmash of others. Those are some of the more subtle examples, but the inclusion of several weapons that weren't usable in the original is a much more noticeable one. The purist in me wasn't always a fan of this move, but when I was launching Fuel Rods into enemies, lunging with Energy Swords, or plucking out Flood with a Sentinel Beam, I really couldn't complain since they feel incredible to use and add variety to combat.

I feel similarly about the addition of sprinting, which changes the cadence of the campaign in key parts and makes long stretches of corridors easier to blast through (and let me run past encounters I'd rather not engage in altogether). Medkits have been scrapped in favor of regenerative health, the Rocket Launcher can lock onto vehicles, and you can also keep equipment tucked away to activate when you want – these aren't huge tweaks per se, but I, for one, value being able to hit the Overshield just before pulling up on two Hunters at the same time.

I'd be remiss not to mention Skulls, the secret little modifiers you'll find in the most unlikely places in each mission. This is a carryover from the Anniversary Edition, with a batch of new ones added on top. To me, Skulls have been one of the more interesting ways a campaign adds replay value in both having to hunt for them and then redo missions with them active. Runs can get pretty bizarre with goofy changes like Grunt Birthday Party or challenging ones where you can only charge your shield through melee kills. The Remix modifiers are a welcome addition, where you can either randomize the types of enemies you encounter or weapons you pick up throughout the campaign. I like how off-the-rails these things can be, and in the absence of PvP multiplayer, these can liven up a co-op playthrough with absolute chaos – mostly the good kind.

The big attraction, however, are the three new prequel missions that take place a year before the events of the main campaign. Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson tag-team rescue operation to save UNSC Marines held captive on a Covenant ship, and while they're not exactly revolutionary levels, they fit the mold of a traditional Halo campaign in terms of encounter design and challenge. That also means a chunk of time is, again, spent on bobbing and weaving through ship hallways as you mow down the usual suspects.

A handful of moments do shine as bright as the new blinding flash of a plasma grenade in UE5. The gilded halls of the ship's high-class rooms give a retrofuturist aesthetic akin to Destiny's Leviathan raid, and the outdoor combat arenas have a clever way of working into the story of these prequel missions while providing a little more room for those open encounters Halo has historically been good at.

The lore implications add a little extra depth to our understanding of the Covenant, even if they don't move the needle in terms of what's established in the existing Halo story. The storytelling itself leans into more cheesy action movie tropes, but I'm not one who's precious about that part of the series. And if it means more time with Chief and Johnson together, I'm not going to turn my nose up at it.

Fights include your typical wave of Covenant foes, but the new Brutes present a fun little twist to combat encounters. They have a glowing chip on their chest and will go berserk and attack anything in sight if you shoot it out, which can be an asset in tougher battles. It's also fun to plink the chip and just watch them go to town on defenseless Grunts. As imposing as they may be when they're rushing you down, keeping the overpowered Needle Rifle on hand made short work of them, or any enemy for that matter. I was also hyped for the dogfights that were showcased in the leadup to release, and while it was a neat little diversion to take a Seraph into the stars for actual space combat, it was short-lived and wrapped up just as it was starting to take off.

I appreciate the roughly two hours the bonus missions add given that it's more Halo (and technically new) Halo, and I'm glad co-op is seamlessly woven into the experience. But when a good chunk of Halo's legacy lies in PvP multiplayer (and perhaps a bit with PvE Firefights), I can't help but feel something important is missing in a campaign-only remake. So, who is this for? Well, it's for Halo Studios; a gesture of good will that it has figured out the technical path forward for a franchise that's been underserved in recent years and one that's expected to be part of Xbox's increasing reliance on revitalizing legacy franchises. With that in mind, Campaign Evolved proves that while the original Halo didn't really need a remake, this at least still has some spark left in it with the hope is that it leads to fresher ideas.

Okay, we’ve got a bit of a good news/bad news situation here. Good news first: Without hyperbole, Avatar Legends is one of the most fun fighting games I’ve ever played. There’s something special about the way these characters move, the variety in their playstyles, their incredible animations, the flexibility of their combat options, and the satisfying ways they can execute some of the sickest combos I’ve ever seen. In so many ways, this is the game Avatar: The Last Airbender has deserved, as well as the old-school 1-on-1 fighter that hardcore fighting game fans have been clamoring for recently. But now the bad news: That stellar gameplay does some pretty heavy lifting, as the package around it is lacking in surprising ways. From an inability to change the difficulty level of the AI in single player, to a cumbersome training mode that’s missing standard features, to lobbies that can only support two players, the list goes on and on. Like Aang and Korra at the beginning of their stories, Avatar Legends is rough and unpolished, but beaming with potential.

The best way to describe Avatar Legends in fighting game terms is that it’s a fast-paced, mobility-driven 1v1 fighter, focusing on creative combo expression, a high bar of execution, and the uniqueness of each character as opposed to powerful, universal system mechanics. All of that to say, this is one of the most difficult 1v1 fighting games to learn, but the payoff once you’re able to actually perform even a fraction of what these characters are capable of is extraordinary.

The fundamentals of the fighting system are simple at a glance: there are three attack buttons, covering light, medium, and heavy strikes, and then a “Flow” button that is generally tied to each character’s unique movement options. As is the case with many anime fighting games, there’s a basic logic of being able to combo a light into a medium into a heavy into a special move, and there’s even an auto-combo for those that just want to mash one button and get some respectable damage.

But it’s that Flow button that really opens up Avatar’s fighting system and makes it truly special. Every character has a very particular way of moving around the screen, and these mobility options can be absolutely wild. Aang, for instance, can press forward-Flow for a quick forward hop that has three different follow-ups, all of which have wildly different uses. Or he can press Flow and a direction in the air to take out his glider to attack from unpredictable and awkward angles, control the direction of the wind to affect his momentum in the air, or fast fall from the sky, just to name a few of his techniques.

Meanwhile, Azula can air dash in eight directions twice before touching the ground (in just one of her forms); Toph can shift the earth to pull opponents towards her, or herself towards opponents; Katara can charge special moves while being able to slide across the ground – and that just scratches the surface of what these characters can do. Each of the 12 fighters on the roster has their own way of breaking the rules of this system, and it makes each one feel incredibly powerful and satisfying to learn.

In addition to the Flow meter that governs all of those crazy movement techniques, there’s also a well designed energy meter governing EX special move and super usage. Instead of being a bar that fills up as you take or receive damage, the energy meter is segmented into individual points, and you only get a maximum of one point per combo. There are other ways to gain energy as well, including character specific “critical hits” that reward you for performing certain skillful feats. I love having to make on the fly decisions about how to build and spend resources, and between both meters, Avatar Legends’ fighting system is one of the very best when it comes to that aspect of fighting games.

As a big Avatar fan, another aspect of the design that I love is how closely each kit embodies the spirit of the character. In the show, Korra is highly skilled and powerful from the very start, but she’s also reckless and tends to wind up in bad situations after acting without thinking. Here, that’s reflected with a very hard-hitting playstyle that can deal a lot of damage, but also comes with a lot of risk. Her high damage combo routes can cost of lot of meter, she has risky tools that most other characters don’t (like a meterless invincible reversal), and her special moves can all be enhanced for more damage at the cost of even more meter, which makes it very easy to accidentally wind up in the highly detrimental “unbalanced” state that’s caused by emptying your entire Flow meter.

Azula, on the other hand, has two completely different forms: Focused and Firelord. Focused embodies Azula’s calm and collected demeanor that we see throughout most of the show, and that’s reflected with a fighting style that requires a lot of precision, with much of her damage locked behind special move extensions that require button presses within a one or two frame window. That’s contrasted by her Firelord form, which represents her total meltdown toward the end of the series. Her precisely timed special move extensions go out the window, her air dashes become slower but cover more distance, she does more damage with fewer hits, and ultimately just becomes an absolute close-range monster that can smother you with overwhelming force.

That’s not all, as the entire roster also has three support characters that can be chosen before a match begins to change up elements of their kits, much like the character variations from Mortal Kombat X. These can empower specific special moves in ways that open up new combo routes, grant you new special moves entirely, or improve your movement techniques. All of these systems work together to make what is a fairly small roster on paper feel much bigger.

Then The Fire Nation Attacked

Avatar Legends’ story mode is an original tale outlined by series creator Michael Dante DiMartino and written by Tim Hedrick, who has written many episodes of both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, along with several other pieces of canonical Avatar content. Despite that authenticity, however, it mostly feels like fanfiction fluff. It begins with Aang waking up in an alternate universe where he doesn’t exist, people who shouldn’t exist in the same time period are best buds, and everyone is basically the polar opposite of how they normally act. There are a handful of fun callbacks, and the voice acting is quite good despite not featuring almost any of the original cast, but the overall story never sank its hooks into me, which made the whopping 27 chapter campaign overstay its welcome by the time I hit chapter 15 or so.

Outside of the lackluster story mode, there’s really not much else here to hold the attention of anyone who isn’t interested in competing against other people online. There’s a traditional arcade mode, but no ability to adjust the difficulty of the AI, so if the matches are either too easy or too hard, you’re out of luck.

On the teaching tools front, Avatar Legends is kind of all over the place. It’s great that there’s a frame meter turned on by default to immediately help you understand the frame data of a move, as well as an option to turn hit boxes on so you can understand the actual range and vulnerability of an attack. But on the flipside, doing simple things in training mode like setting a dummy to jab after blocking is extremely cumbersome thanks to a poor UI; and, shockingly, there is no way to set the dummy to block randomly, making it very difficult to practice hit confirms.

The combo trials at least are pretty good at teaching practical combos at the novice and intermediate ranks, and a clever “Breakdown” feature allows you to go through a combo step by step – the screen freezes for each input, allowing you to get the muscle memory of a combo down without having to worry about the timing. What’s really cool though is that in addition to combo trials, there are character specific tutorials that actually teach you how to best make use of a character’s tools to pressure opponents, open them up with mix-ups, or defend against their offense. I do think these tutorials could do a bit better of a job easing you into the nutty stuff that characters can do, but nonetheless, it’s a great idea and I wish more fighting games would spend as much time teaching you how to land the hits that enable combos as they do on the actual combos themselves.

Finally, my experience thus far with online play has been excellent, with smooth rollback netcode and a very snappy pace thanks to quick rematches, lightning fast load times, and instant returns to practice mode if the match drops due to a disconnect. That said, online also has some very surprising omissions that should be standard in a modern fighting game. The worst offender is the lack of lobby support for more than two players, which means you can’t set up a room to play with more than one friend where two people play and the rest watch and await their turn. This is apparently planned for a post-launch update, but it’s a glaring omission right out of the gate. Less shocking, but still worth pointing out, is the lack of replay search, which is used to find replays of high-level players so you can see how they handle specific matchups, nor is there replay takeover. Both features would be nice to have, especially in a game with so much variation in how its characters can be played.

I’ve always admired how much effort athletes put in to be the best at their craft. Those training montages in movies might be exaggerated, but there’s truth to them; you can’t stay stagnant if you want to improve. Sometimes, things click, and all those hours bear fruit. Others, it doesn’t, and the changes end up doing more harm than good. The new Backyard Baseball is the latter. While this series reboot from developer Mega Cat Studios retains the nostalgic charm of those classic kids' sports games, the rest of it falls victim to its own progress. The simplicity of pitching, hitting, and fielding has been needlessly refreshed; in their place are “optimized” versions that just don’t work as well. So while this new Backyard Baseball might pass the eye test, it falls short of home plate on the things that really matter.

It’s pretty ironic that many of the tweaks here don’t feel like they’re able to round the bases, because most of the actual hits I’ve gotten while batting have either been home runs or line-drive singles. I’m not tooting my own horn or anything – it’s just because of how offense and defense are set up now. Hitting in particular is easier than ever, at least compared to how it was in the Backyard Baseball ‘97 re-release from 2024, which isn’t exactly a good thing.

The swing spot assist was less specific in the original games; it would show you a large circle within the strike zone where the ball might land, but it was up to you to guess where exactly to swing the bat. Here, however, you always know the exact spot the ball is flying toward. The old method led to whiffs, of course, but at least the hits you earned were more satisfying and less routine. Now, it’s like these kids are in the MLB steroid era: way too many players going yard every at bat. If Barry Bonds were still in this version of Backyard Baseball, Rob Manfred might’ve already launched an investigation. Mark McGwire is still one of the included pros, though, so a probe from the commissioner might not be out of the question.

Hitting does at least get tougher once you unlock the highest difficulty option, Backyard Legend. That’s mainly because the opposing pitches fly at you faster, and since I initially played with a controller on PC, I often moved the reticle a hair too slow to account for the increased throw velocity. But after I switched over to mouse and keyboard, it’s like the difficulty change never happened and I started getting consistent hits again.

Really, the only way to make batting not be a complete cakewalk is to turn off the swing spot assist entirely, but that presents its own problems; it’s nearly impossible to hit a breaking ball because it’s very difficult to tell where it will land in the strike zone. I suppose that’s true to real life, but it means the only options are extremes: make things too easy with swing assist or unnecessarily hard without it. There is no middle ground. You’re either Babe Ruth or a dazed rec league player who just got caught looking at three consecutive right hooks.

Pitching goes similarly unchecked, so much so that anyone I put on the mound starts to look like Greg Maddux reincarnated. At first, I thought this side of the offense didn’t matter, that anyone on the other team could get a hit off no matter the type of throw I chose. They still can, don’t get me wrong, but it became less frequent after I got the hang of the new pitch release timing system. That’s when the blowouts really began. I’m talking about multiple games ending in either shutouts or landslide wins: 26-to-0, 19-to-3, you name it. It’s nice that it turns what used to be a one-dimensional position into one that requires a tad more skill, but you can reach the ceiling of it far too quickly.

It can get so out of hand that, once I reach a double-digit lead, I usually start to purposely hit grounders into opposing players just to end the game earlier. I’m a little baffled that Backyard Baseball still doesn’t have a mercy rule to account for this. When you’re up by double digits in the fourth inning of a six-inning match, it’s probably best to call it there, right? Do you really want to see little Billy Jean Blackwood curled up in the outfield while Kiesha Phillips hits another home run to put her team up 33-5? You’d have to imagine the losing team’s parents are in the stands yelling at the umpire to end the misery.

Fielding feels worse as well. If it was anything like it was in ‘97, ‘01, or even the GameCube version from 2003, I wouldn’t be as disappointed. In those games, you could at least throw a rocket from right field to first base to try to get an out. Now, it’s like your players don’t even try. Sure, you can turn off errors to try and minimize mistakes, but even that can’t make up for all the slow defensive throws that seem to be embedded in every character. You want your shortstop to throw it fast to second? Nope, can’t do that; how about a lob instead? Next thing you know, the other team has two runners in scoring position when a quick double play should have ended the inning five minutes ago.

What’s even more frustrating is that, for some reason, you can’t make your players run after line drives or pop flies, even though you can force them to sprint and slide when they’re baserunning. It’s as if these kids are programmed to make an effort on offense but not defense. Look, I get it; it’s more exciting to rack runs up than it is to prevent them. But scoring a lot is only enjoyable the first few times; over the course of a season in League Play, it becomes monotonous. Where are the defensive highlights? I’d argue there’s just as much excitement in turning a double play as there is in hitting a walk-off homer. Sadly, it’s hard to know because you can’t even make those types of run-stopping plays. Here, offense is king and defense is just the silly court jester everyone tries to ignore.

All of these issues are made glaring because the CPU can’t seem to adjust or use them to its advantage. Going up against your friends in local multiplayer can at least help keep things competitive, but that isn’t an option in the season-long solo mode that is supposed to be the main attraction here. An online PvP mode was delayed just before release, and these problems might not feel as bad if it were already accessible since going up against real players could help keep things fresh. But that’s only wishful thinking until it arrives.

Now, ask any little league coach what the most important quality a player should have is, and one trait they’ll probably always mention are good fundamentals. Unfortunately, right now, this Backyard Baseball’s issues are foundational, influencing the rest of its performance and play. Take the Wiggle Ball mode, for example – apart from the improved art and animations, which really are huge steps up from the originals, this is one of the most significant additions to this remake. It’s a very different option from the usual 9v9 matches you can find in Pick-Up and League Play, instead putting you into a fast-paced 4v4 game where you have to toss and hit a slippery wiffle ball; a decent alternative if you don’t want to worry about lineup management or pushing through an entire season.

But again, the problematic changes to hitting and pitching make it so that the result of each match is pretty much predictable before they begin. As always, I had to get used to things first, especially the ball’s erratic movement, but it was lights out after that. Oh, little Luanne Lui is serving me up a triple-loop left hook deluxe? Let me send that over to the neighbor’s front yard in right field with a quick contact hit. Then on and on it goes until the score looks like Chipper Jones’ career batting average.

There are, at least, some things that these fundamental problems don’t affect. No, not the tutorial or the batting-only modes; I’m talking about a pretty neat addition called the Card Shop. It’s where you can buy and open three different packs that contain various cards of different characters, items (Achmed’s headphones, Reese’s inhaler), and offensive moves (Line Drive hit, Slowball pitch). Don’t worry; there aren’t any real-money microtransactions in this version of Backyard Baseball. Instead, you can use Tokens you earn by playing through Season or Quick Play games to purchase them.

With the tears of so many defeated children turning the soil of Backyard Baseball’s field into salted earth, the Card Shop is like a patch of freshwater, flushing out some of that grief. Even though it occupies such a small plot, taking a dip every now and then was refreshing, especially because of the REMIX Cards, which I couldn’t get enough of. These feature unique character artwork created by several excellent artists, and since the thirty kids featured throughout the series are back (plus a few more), I’ll admit I may have taken too much time looking through each one.

And yes, you read that number right; you can choose from all 30 original Backyard Baseball kids as soon as you start a team. In addition to the always-popular mainstays (Pablo Sanchez and Jocinda Smith, to name two), you can also pick a few of the generic players from ‘97, such as Leah Wayne and Chico Pappas, along with a handful of MLB legends, like Vlad Guerrero and Jason Giambi. Although it isn’t quite at the same level of Backyard Baseball ‘01’s lengthy roster, these familiar names are always welcome and round out an impressive list.

Unfortunately, unlocking those special characters isn’t as straightforward as buying them from the Card Shop. They all have their own unlock requirements, like hitting a certain amount of home runs or stealing a specific number of bases. I wish the conditions were all laid out from the get go so I knew how much grinding I still needed to do, but getting these names into your roster is, at least, a cool little incentive to keep playing.

Sometimes, a game comes along that makes you think “man, this is so up my alley it’s like it was made just for me.” Denshattack is one of those games. It’s the kind of joint we used to get all the time in the PS2 era and is now only found in the indie space. Video games are serious business, you know, and we don’t have time for nonsense. Denshattack is definitely nonsense, but I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Here’s the pitch: What if Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater did the Dragon Ball fusion dance with Jet Set Radio, but instead of skating you pilot a train around a dystopian Japan in order to do sick tricks and take down an evil corporation? Sounds rad as hell, right? Turns out, it is. Two thoughts ran on a loop while I was playing Denshattack: “this rules,” and “this really has no business being this good. How are they doing this?”

Denshattack’s charming story is straight out of an anime, which is fitting since its stunning art style looks like one. It follows Emi, who lives in a future Japan ravaged by climate change and delivers ramen by train. Most of the country’s population (or at least those that can afford it) now lives in protective domed cities built by a shady megacorp (is there any other kind?) called Miraido, which also happens to operate the high speed VACTRAIN between the domes. We love a monopoly, and those who don’t live in the cities have a harder life, but at least they’re not under Miraido’s thumb. Emi’s one of them, and it’s not long before she meets a fellow misfit named Fernando and gets swept up into the world of Denshattack: an underground sport of sorts where the most skilled train jockeys in Japan compete against each other by doing tricks and races. Soon, she’s on a quest to be the best Denshattacker there ever was, and Fernando, who runs a Denshattack zine covering the scene, is tagging along for the ride.

Emi is basically Goku: an incredibly positive and generally likeable natural talent who seeks constant self-improvement. Inevitably, her quest to be the best leads her into contact with the various gangs scattered across Japan, as well as their leaders. After she’s earned the right to face the leader of a gang, Emi inevitably defeats them and, impressed by her skill, they join up with her. You’ve seen these characters before: the bubbly, supportive rich girl obsessed with fashion; the rival who joins because she wants to be a part of what happens next, not because she respects you or anything; the older rockabilly engineers who come out of semi-retirement because they finally meet someone worthy of their creations,and so on. None of this is new, but that’s not always a bad thing. Denshattack is playing the hits, but they sound good, and its punk rock mentality is infectious.

Really, the whole point of the plot is just to get you inside a train that can do ollies and kickflips. Denshattack’s Japan is broken down into tracks you ride, and your train is more than up to the task. You can jump, flip to new tracks, boost off ramps for big air, and a ton more. All the while, you should be doing tricks, which Denshattack smartly maps to the right analog stick. Flicking it to the left will get you an ollie, but if you want something like a 540 heelflip, you’ll have to do a half circle. More complex tricks require more complex motions, and if you want the really sick stuff (and there are a lot of tricks to learn) you’ll basically have to do fighting game inputs.

Chaining tricks together is Denshattack’s bread and butter, but the goal is not to use the same tricks too many times in a row, or they’ll grow stale. Style is everything, and racking up big scores means learning lots of tricks. It will take you a while to learn everything well enough to be able to pull off specific tricks on the fly, but Denshattack comes equipped with the excellently named and super helpful Tricktionary that you can access at any time if you need to remember how to do something. When I first started, I wasn’t hitting the cool stuff. Now I’m doing Impossible Cancels like they’re old hat. There’s a ton of depth to this trick system, and it’s a lot of fun to add new options to your repertoire as you play.

The real secret sauce on Denshattack’s burger, though, are the levels themselves. The roughly 10- to 15-hour campaign takes you all over Japan, and you’ll see some absolutely wild stuff. You’ll trick over some stone heads, ride a Ferris Wheel through an abandoned city, and knock down Miraido’s cell towers as you go. And those are the tame parts. I’ve ridden rails through a volcano, been eaten by a shark, and tricked through kabuki plays. The best part of Denshattack is how much variety there is. Some courses you just roll through. Others have you race against other characters (who you can often knock off the track), post a high score, or complete objectives scattered across the various splits that track takes. One had me clear a bridge, restore a Miraido-censored work of “rebellious” art, and deliver soba. I could control what part of the track I went to, and it was up to me to complete the objectives once I got there.

Every level has multiple paths depending on what routes you take, which can lead to new exits. If you’ve got style, you can chain together tricks to fill your energy bar, which unlocks the Yaoyorozuo, or 8 Million Roads, alternate, high-flying, elaborate rainbow-colored tracks that lead to new areas. Imagine if you could make Rainbow Road part of every other track in Mario Kart, and you’ve kinda got the idea.

It’s a lot, and the joy of Denshattack is combining everything – drifting, jumping, pulling off tricks, grinding on rails, wall riding, looping through tunnels, hitting manuals, honking your horn to interact with parts of the environment, and a lot more – without messing up or going off track. It’s not always easy to do, but the checkpoints are generous and your friends are always there to give you words of encouragement if you make a mistake. You’ll fail a lot, but it will never end your run, just cost you time. What’s truly impressive is that Denshattack keeps upping the ante throughout. You’ll think you’ve seen everything, and then it will be like, “by the way, you can attach your train to monorail tracks now,” or “hey, wanna ride these air currents?” It’s rad. That all of these levels are set to some of the slickest, catchiest tunes I’ve heard in a hot second certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Individual missions are usually short, but there’s a ton of room for replayability and mastery here, and lots of extra stuff to collect – like parts you can use to unlock new trains or spray paint cans and stickers to doll them up to suit your style. My favorites are the picture opportunities you can nail for Fernando, which you then place into an issue of his zine. The zines themselves are surprisingly detailed, offering background on a region, its characters, their trains, the story so far, and even Emi’s ramen reviews. It’s awesome.

Every level also has dares, optional objectives that may challenge you to complete it without crashing, derail a certain number of rivals, find an optional exit, perform specific tricks at a specific time, and so on. These are also rad, and I always wanted to go back and see what I had missed. Additionally, you’re scored on both time and tricks, so if score-chasing’s your bag (and it is mine), that’s there for you, too. I was mostly charting bronze and silver medals on my first runs, but I am excited to go back and try for better times and higher scores.

Between missions, you can spend the collectibles you acquire to get new trains, each with unique advantages and disadvantages – I really liked one that upped my trick speed at the cost of my manual distance and another that amped up my energy bar fill rate in exchange for reducing my trick score, which overall meant I could get to the 8 Million Roads faster. This stuff rules. Certain levels incentivize you to use specific trains if you’re score chasing, but the choice is always yours, and the customization provides more reasons to replay older levels and get any collectibles you missed.

Denshattack’s real highlights, though, are the boss fights that come at the end of each area. You wanna square off with a group of trains that can combine, Megazord-style? You got it. What about a brawl against a train that doubles as a sand snake you can grind on? It’s there. Or is a moving castle sporting an enormous cannon more your speed? Good news, kid. Denshattack is absolutely at its most anime (complimentary) during these sequences, but each one feels different and they still work seamlessly with what you’ve learned in the regular stages. Boss fights in games like this often end up as disappointments, but Denshattack’s are as smooth as a high-speed train hitting big air and pulling off sick tricks before landing perfectly on another track. You don’t expect to see it, but you do love to see it.

The essence of The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu as a co-op survival horror game is best captured by a moment where I was yelling at my friend repeatedly asking what the hell he was laughing about before being brutally murdered. You see, this was not my friend at all, but a Faceless One using his character model and repeatedly playing back his recorded laughter from earlier in the match. But when it comes to making me feel like I've lost my mind, The Mound’s clever madness effects sometimes take a backseat to ruthless difficulty that doesn't always respect my time or make it easy to bring in new allies.

It took more than 50 expeditions and around 50 hours of scouring the beautiful Chilean wilderness to unbury all the secrets of The Mound's rich, mid-1600s setting. You and your friends take on the role of conquistadors ignoring every possible warning of danger to enrich themselves and the Spanish crown while avoiding the restless dead and trespassing on strange tombs to alien gods. As far as capturing the vibes of the Cthulhu mythos, developer ACE Team has done a fantastic job.

Of course, when I hear "Lovecraft" and "Conquistadors" in the same sentence, I immediately see the potential for a twisted kind of synergy between them we could maybe call "Advanced Racism." And for the most part, Omen of Cthulhu threads this needle pretty well, as many of the more recent adaptations of Lovecraft's work have also sought to do. The Mapuche indigenous to this region in real life are mentioned multiple times in the story, and very clearly aren't conflated with the strange cultists of the Elder Gods who live deeper in the jungle.

I would have liked to see a bit more of the Mapuche, and there's still the implication that the New World is an untamed wilderness of nightmares and dark magic, which plays into some colonial tropes. But it's certainly better than the original Lovecraft version of the story. The tale of The Mound and the secrets that lie beneath it are told in effective journal entries with great voice acting, too. I very much enjoyed discovering what was going on little-by-little, and the late game reveals are dramatic and satisfying.

Mortal Peril

Across 18 detailed maps that interconnect into a single large world (though you can only access one section at a time), you go forth on contracts that come with a goal, a potential reward, and a set amount of gear based on how many players are coming along, up to a max of four. I think this way of handling equipment is quite clever. Often there aren't enough weapons for everyone, for example, so you have to decide who in the party is going to be responsible for combat, who's going to hold the lantern in dark areas, and who might simply leave their inventory slots empty to carry more loot. It also makes you try out different equipment and not fall into the rut of bringing the same gear every time.

I ran into an issue with the way contracts work after about 20 hours, though, in that the random assortment offered seems to scale with the character level of the server host. That meant that if I wanted to bring a new friend in who hadn't played before, I might be totally out of Basic and even Medium-difficulty contracts to ease them into things. I appreciate that, in similar co-op horror games like Phasmophobia, I can farm the newbie missions over and over for resources and pick difficulty settings friendly to the allies I've invited along. Especially considering The Mound can be incredibly punishing even on Basic expeditions.

The group I've been playing with is an experienced co-op crew too, with hundreds of hours together in games like Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Abiotic Factor, and Valheim. We're no greenhorns. And we all came to the conclusion pretty quickly that, to put it bluntly, The Mound is really freaking hard. Some of this can be mitigated by learning how specific mechanics work. For example, there's a timer on most expeditions that we found doesn't really matter at all, and it's much more important to move quietly so as not to upset the deadlier creatures of the forest.
But even when we felt we were doing everything right, sometimes the number and deadliness of enemies simply scales way too quickly to provide a satisfying challenge without feeling overwhelming. When it's four of us against a dozen zombies and there's no room to sneak past or go around, even on the lowest difficulty, what exactly are we supposed to do? And that's assuming you even have Basic contracts left in the ledger to attempt.

The absolute worst are portal missions, which leave you without the usual ox cart to carry your stuff and require you to navigate a modified version of the map covered in purple goo that will kill you instantly if you stand in it for what feels like about three seconds, which then also prevents your friends from getting close enough to revive you. I can't recall ever having a good time on one of these missions, and eventually tried to avoid them whenever possible. We often found ourselves asking after seven or eight failed expeditions if this was really the intended experience or if we were missing some key mechanic that would make it feel fair, and it seems like the answer is the former.

The problem is not so much that Advanced and Legendary missions are really difficult. They should be! I want to have something to strive for. But more that there aren't enough options to tailor the difficulty to your group or mood. The floor is too high. That said, I should mention that there was a fairly big patch about a day before this review went live that tweaked the difficulty, among other things, but it arrived so late that I haven't been able to put that through extensive testing yet. However, it doesn’t seem to be wildly different after a couple expeditions.

Army of Darkness

There is some meta progression between contracts to ease the pressure, but most character levels simply unlock new knife skins that are purely cosmetic. Buying or upgrading gear ahead of a tough map is a nice option, but since you lose all those extras and upgrades on death, it's very easy to fail an Advanced or Legendary contract a few times, wind up broke, and not really have any way to go scrounge up some quick cash in calmer waters before trying again.

It's a shame, because when The Mound isn't being overly oppressive, the tense combat and horror elements work really well together. The variety of enemies is impressive, drawing from the deep corners of the Cthulhu mythos and going all the way from the simplest creepy possessed humans up to some very weird, reality-bending horrors that might not even be possible to kill, making your party navigate around them in specific and clever ways. Resource management is key, and the variable value of treasure leads to thrilling decisions in cases where you're not sure if you've picked up enough to meet your quota yet, but the jungle is getting angry.

It's also difficult to recommend The Mound if you want to play solo. It will spawn an NPC companion to help you out somewhat, but they're not as competent as a human ally, and trying to complete contracts on your own can be a serious trial even though the number of enemies is scaled down a bit. “The co-op game is better in co-op” isn’t exactly a shock, but since they give you the option to fly solo, it’s worth noting all the same.

It’s rare for a game to directly acknowledge you as a player – normally, we exist in a mutually agreed upon suspension of disbelief with its characters. We are asked to inhabit them, and put ourselves aside. Moss: The Forgotten Relic, a remake of the previously VR-exclusive Moss and Moss: Book 2, discards that notion. You may control its heroine Quill, but you do not become her; you are the Reader, and the distance between you is intentional. It is also what makes Moss remarkable.

The Forgotten Relic’s story starts simply – you are in an old library and pick up a book titled Moss. Inside, you meet Quill, a young mouse who dreams of adventure and finds it thanks to a piece of Glass, an artifact of great power and long history. Holding it means she can interact with you, the Reader, and you can change the story. From that moment, her fate and yours intertwine, but when she shows the Glass to her uncle – and he realizes what your bond means – he warns Quill that she is in danger and leaves to take care of something else. When he doesn’t return, Quill follows at the behest of a Starthing – mischievous beings who meddle in the lives of mortal animals – who claims to know where he is. She knows her uncle needs her help. And you go with her.

Moss’s story is a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, it grows with the telling. What starts simple rarely remains that way, and Quill’s quest strays far from its initial objectives. It is not a deep story; it will not make you re-evaluate your life or question your beliefs. But Moss commits so thoroughly to its premise and is so charming in its execution that it won me over completely. When you transition to a new screen, you can hear a page turning. A narrator reads prose and provides different voices for each character. Many dramatic moments are beautifully rendered on the book's pages, and you flip them yourself to advance the story. Plenty of stories proclaim to be inspired by fairy tales; Moss is one. You can almost hear the narrator wanting to tell you that nothing bad happens to Quill during scary moments.

There are plenty of memorable characters in Moss (I love the grumpy toad you often encounter), but Quill is this tale's beating heart; without her, there is no story, nothing to care for. She is brave, but not fearless; resolved, but aware that she cannot do what needs to be done alone; strong, but not stoic. I felt for her when she was sad or afraid, but she was not simply someone in need of my protection. We were a team. If I was stuck, Quill would point the way and show me what to do. If I accidentally piloted her off a cliff or into a pond, she'd re-enter the area and shake herself off, ready to try again. And when we triumphed, she would high five me or sometimes break into elaborate dance. Her joy is infectious, and I wanted her to succeed not because I wanted to keep playing, but because I liked her. It’s hard for a game to make you feel truly connected to a character, but Moss succeeds.

The game side of Moss is also simple enough, especially the first half of this two-part compilation. While you can see its VR origins in the small environments and your ability to interact directly with parts of the world, developer PolyArc has done an admirable job of turning this duology into traditional games. Had I not known that they started life as VR exclusives, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell. Occasionally, it can be hard to see whether you can interact with something, or you might deal with the odd awkward camera angle, but these are pretty minor qualms and I never met anything I couldn’t handle. I did have a weird softlock once when I opened a door before I was supposed to, but a quick restart fixed that, and Moss is generous with its checkpoints.

The action itself is smooth and straightforward. You can make Quill run, jump, climb, and dodge, and she is armed with a single sword to defend herself. As the Reader, you can hold the mechanical beetles she fights in place so they can't attack her or move objects to create paths and platforms for her to jump to. These are simple actions individually, but it’s when Moss combines combat and platforming, and requires you to control Quill and the Reader in harmony, that it triumphs. The best puzzles require you to pilot Quill while manipulating the environment and enemies to get where you need to go, and figuring out what you need to do (and finding collectible scrolls and dust along the way) is a joy. Maybe that will require you (the Reader) to use a bug to flip a switch so Quill can get to a new area, or simply activate a series of switches in the right order so you can use the environmental changes they cause to make a new path. Simple stuff, yes, but compelling.

Book 2 takes everything Moss did right and expands upon it. In addition to introducing more characters (one of which is playable) and a larger scope, this sequel adds additional weapons: a chakram (the key to understanding modern media is that everything is, in some way, indebted to Xena: Warrior Princess) and a hammer. The sword now has a dash that allows Quill to fly across gaps, the chakram can be embedded into walls and then called back to smite enemies or solve puzzles, and the hammer is, well… a hammer. There are even new enemies, like little metal pill bugs that you can send flying to open new pathways and smash other evil insects.

But probably the biggest change is Quill’s ability to climb vines. With that, the broken stone and overgrown ruins of Moss become more challenging and interesting to move across, which adds to the idea that this is a living world. As the Reader, you augment this with a power that can grow vines and verdant pathways, opening up new ways for Quill to travel and increasing the complexity of the world and its puzzles.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the original game is worth playing, though you don’t have to. There’s a nice little summary when you start Book 2. It’s a simpler game, but it’s incredibly charming and has some great moments that a recap just doesn’t do justice.

None of what either Moss asks of you is particularly difficult, but when everything is thrown together, it is compelling. I enjoyed solving its puzzles (especially when it took multiple steps and I had to combine all my skills), hunting for secrets, and generally just spending time with Quill and exploring Moss’s world. The Forgotten Relic invites you to live in this book, both a part of its story and separate from it, and I liked that. Moss doesn’t just throw lore at you; it tells its story and expects you to follow along. You won’t know, exactly, what a Reader is or why Glass is powerful or what the Cinder Night was from the jump, but if you pay attention, Moss will teach you, and things are more nuanced than they originally appear. There’s no codex to check and while exposition does happen, it’s generally because both you and Quill are ignorant of something and need to learn.

If your main problems with Doom: The Dark Ages were that you wished it was faster, harder, and took more cues from Doom Eternal’s mobility options, then oh boy do I have great news for you. The Revelations DLC ramps the intensity up to 11 by introducing a brand new sub-weapon that totally changes the flow of combat, doubling the amount of options you have to dispatch demons, and most importantly, giving the Slayer his dash back. All of this builds off the already enormous arsenal of weapons, techniques, and mods from the end of the base game which, admittedly, does make juggling all of these new options a little bit overwhelming. That said, if you can overcome the steep learning curve, this is quite simply the most exhilarating Doom’s combat has been since Doom Eternal’s The Ancient Gods DLC, and the clearest evidence yet that Id is the best in the business when it comes to single-player first-person shooters.

Revelations’ story picks up right where the main campaign left off, and while you can technically jump straight into it first, you’ll be missing out on some pretty important context. Of course, you don’t need much context to enjoy blasting an imp to pieces with the Super Shotgun or jamming a spear through a Mancubus’ skull. The bigger reason why you’ll want to make sure you play through the campaign first is to familiarize yourself with the Slayer’s arsenal of weapons and techniques so you know what tool is right for which job, because this DLC throws you into the deep end right from the start and demands that you know what you’re doing. Even as someone who did play through Doom: the Dark Ages on Nightmare difficulty more than a year ago, Revelations started kicking my ass right from the start.

And then, just when I started to find my footing again, Revelations did something truly bold and took away the defining element of The Dark Ages’ combat: the Shield Saw. In its place, I gained the Chain Spear, which has a lot of the same functions as the Shield, but all handled in very different ways that end up totally changing the flow of combat. For example, the Spear can still parry green enemy attacks, but now you have to time a strike so that you essentially clash with theirs. It’s uniquely satisfying to bat back projectiles and smack away swipes and slashes, but you do lose the safety net of having a shield to negate damage if you mistime the parry.

The biggest difference between the Spear and the Shield is how you get around. With the Shield, you were able to use a shield bash that let you zip towards and slam into any target at high speed, but you didn’t have much mobility outside of that. With the spear, you can no longer instantly close the distance between you and an enemy. Instead, you throw it into a foe and slowly pull yourself towards them, maintaining full directional control as you launch either above, around, or right in front of your target. It works almost exactly like the grappling hook on the Super Shotgun in Doom Eternal, which is appropriate, as the entirety of the Spear’s kit feels designed to inject Eternal’s focus on mobility back into the grounded and heavy feel of The Dark Ages’ combat.

Perhaps the best addition, though, is also the simplest one: the Slayer can dash again! I knew I missed the dash throughout my playthrough of the base game, but I didn’t realize just how much until Revelations gave it back to me. It completely changes how The Dark Ages plays. Instead of basically being required to stand my ground and parry a sequence of attacks, now I can slip past foes, use my grapple to leap over them, dash behind cover, and just stay more mobile overall much like I would in Doom Eternal. It’s an added layer of creative combat expression that was missing here, and while it still isn’t quite at the same level as Eternal, it gets pretty dang close.

These combat options only expand the deeper you get into the DLC, as not only do you get your shield back – with the ability to hot swap between the two sub-weapons at any time – but you can also collect hidden bundles of Platinum to purchase new abilities for the spear. These include a damaging stab, an aerial slam, or a damaging javelin toss, and each of those abilities come with their own upgrades that add either additional utility or a direct counter against specific types of enemies. For example, the stab will deal extra damage to heavy melee enemies; the throw will deal extra damage to flying baddies, and can be upgraded to pierce through the fence-like projectiles that Mancubi toss out; and the slam can be upgraded to make health pickups pour out of foes that get hit by the resulting explosion. It again calls back to Doom Eternal’s style of making different weapons counters against specific enemy types, except here you don’t have to worry about constantly swapping between them. Everything is tied to the many abilities of the Spear.

It’s so much that it can honestly be a little hard to keep all of your different combat tools straight, and I often found myself getting tripped up by the fact that the button to throw the shield is different than the button to throw the spear – the buttons to parry are different between the two sub-weapons as well. This leads to lots of moments where my brain says “parry!” while using the spear, only to press the right mouse button (which is parry on the shield) to do a throw instead and launch myself into a terrible spot. Remapping the controls is something I can do, of course, but because so many abilities have overlapping functions, it's hard to find a control scheme that feels universally good. Ultimately, it’s a learning curve that I was able to overcome, but the road to retrain my brain was a rocky one, to say the least.

Instead of just dropping you into a series of levels one after another, Revelations introduces Purgatory, which is a new hub area that you can explore with minimal enemies, puzzles to solve, and plenty of secrets that those puzzles help to uncover. It’s a very welcome reprieve from the relentless action of the main levels. I always enjoyed coming back with a new ability so I could venture into a part that I hadn’t explored yet, or discovering a new code for the teleporter that would bring me behind one of the many gates that are locked from the other side.

The main levels themselves also do a good job of meeting in the middle between the acrobatics-heavy level design of Eternal and the wide open arenas where you face down a literal army of demons that were so heavily utilized in the base game of The Dark Ages. No longer are collectibles shown on the map when you get close to them, either. Now they only show up as a checkmark once you collect them. Yes, that’s right, even collectible gathering has been made harder in this DLC. The one bummer about this is the fact that there is no returning to previously completed levels, nor is there fast travel between checkpoints, until you beat the campaign. So if you miss a collectible and pass a point of no return, there is no way to go back for it until the very end. That’s pretty brutal in a game as tough as this, especially when it comes to the artifacts you must find all of the pieces of in order to reap a large platinum reward.

As far as new enemies go, Revelations brings back the notorious Archvile, who stays true to his name as a straight up vile nightmare. Like in previous iterations, he will summon enemies into the fight unless you’re able to stop his ritual. To do that, though, you need to first break through his cage of shields, then deal enough damage to him to interrupt the summoning. Sounds simple, only you need to do all of this while also avoiding getting mobbed by the surrounding enemies. Then there’s the Cosmic Elemental, who flies around and summons a bunch of smaller elementals that he sends one at a time to home in on you and deal big damage. As difficult as these big bads are, as mentioned before, they all have weaknesses, and identifying and attacking those weaknesses while still focusing on survival is a huge part of what makes Revelations’ combat so much fun.

Like my original playthrough of The Dark Ages, I made it through Revelations on Nightmare difficulty, and did it in about eight or so hours. Granted, I imagine most people will not attempt this DLC on the hardest non-permadeath difficulty setting their first time out, so your mileage may vary when it comes to length. Whatever the case may be, there’s a ton of game left to play after defeating the final boss and piecing together the Master Key.

The Master Key can be used to unlock purple doors strewn all across the four main levels, and even Purgatory. These doors open the way to more puzzles, more combat challenges, new challenge rooms, new currencies to unlock the capstone abilities for your spear and armor, and even classic Doom levels that reward you with a piece of the ‘93 Shotgun, a super powered version of the OG shotgun from the original Doom. Needless to say, there’s more than enough incentive to play through these levels again to try and complete all of the optional challenges, especially since it all culminates in one last battle against the true final boss of this expansion.

Junior year of college was when I finally had to start making decisions about my major, internships, all that jazz. A lot changed. I had to manage my time better, carefully consider the classes I would take, and try to plan for the future. For College Football’s junior year, all I have to do is step back onto the field, but there is still a lot of planning involved. This season’s team is playing better thanks to new offensive and defensive adjustments, giving you more freedom than ever to make a gameplan and bring it onto the field – but a lot of what’s new in College Football 27 comes down to menus and numbers and graphs, or what I call the Evil God of Numbers. It brings good, welcome additions. But man does it feel like I’m spending a lot of my season inside a spreadsheet instead of running a program or being a college athlete.

Before we get to all that stuff, let’s talk about practice. Good ol’ practice. Can’t have a game without practice, so the first place I went was the Skills Trainer. If you’ve played Madden, the Skills Trainer is old hat, but for the last couple years, College Football has sequestered this tutorial away inside of Ultimate Team. No longer. Here it is, standing alone in all its glory. Good teaching tools are essential in any game, and EA has figured out a consistently great version of them with the Skills Trainer, so I was stoked to finally see it right there on the main menu where it belongs. Props to the College Football team for listening to that feedback.

“But Will,” you might say, “you play this and Madden every year. Why are you going to the Skills Trainer? Shouldn’t you, like… know all this stuff already, chief?” I’m glad you asked, imaginary-person-I-made-up-so-I-can-structure-this-review-how-I-want. There are a lot of changes to pre-play adjustments this year, especially on defense, and they make for a bit of a learning curve when coming from College Football 26. If you’re already familiar with the Konami Code of inputs you have to learn to get your defensive adjustments just so, well, a lot of those are different now. D-line adjustments, for instance, used to be on the left D-pad. Now they’re left on the right stick. That’s one example of many. The benefit of this new system is it’s more intuitive and allows you to get what you want more quickly with fewer button presses, but that many years of muscle memory is hard to undo. I’m glad the Skills Trainer is here when I need a reminder, as well as to mention teach me new things like jumping the snap (awesome), wide receiver jostle (fantastic), and the new quarterback sneak meter (thank you, College Football team).

Another thing to learn is timing-based catching, which I’m of two minds about. See, when you throw a pass in College Football 27, and you can press down the button for the type of catch you want (Possession, RAC, Aggressive). That’s not new. What is new is that holding the button for the kind of catch you want now gives you a little meter with yellow, green, and red sections. Yellow means you’re attempting the catch early and the outcome will be based on your pass catcher’s catching stats and all the regular dice rolls these games use to determine what happens. Red means you ain’t catching that ball. Green, though, means you’re basically guaranteed a catch… unless you aren’t because the ball is overthrown or knocked away or your guy doesn’t survive the collision, which is incredibly annoying. Similar problems occur when you’re trying to use this system to make an interception, land that sucker in the middle of the green section and then… the ball sails over your head, right into the arms of the receiver.

Now, listen, I get it. A little minigame shouldn’t give you a guaranteed success/failure rate, but it doesn’t seem like you can turn the damn thing off. And, frankly, if I can hit the green and drop a pass, why can’t I hit the red and catch one if I’ve got a receiver with a high catch stat? Why would a defensive back who knows he can’t make a play on the ball (and would have a much better idea than I, who is looking down at the play) even get the meter? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it works. But when it doesn’t, you’re like “why is this even here?” Worse, it makes yet another part of College Football About Meters™, which is what you spend most of your time off the field staring at anyway.

Before we get into that, though, I do want to shower praise on a couple more on-field things. The presentation, which was already best in class, is somehow better. EA has added new traditions, trophies, stadiums – the whole nine yards. And Dynamic Weather, which can now change from play to play, is pretty remarkable (and can have a major influence on a game). All that of this is great, and it’s a testament to the team at EA Orlando that they have mostly solved the on-field gameplay and presentation while managing to add meaningful improvements each and every year. I just wish I was as jazzed about the other stuff.

All Hail John Block

Let’s start with Road to Glory. The big additions this year are three new positions: tight end, edge rusher, and free safety. Since I’d just spent a while learning the new defensive adjustments, I decided to throw all that in the trash and play tight end because EA has spent a lot of time talking up how fun blocking is. Sorry, Joe Throw. You’ll have to wait your turn this year. Instead, John Block takes the stage. I gave John a mohawk and Lemmy Kilmeister beard, then spent the points I had to establish his future maximum stats to make him both an incredible blocker (I mean, it’s in the name) and a solid receiver with some speed. If you don’t want to allocate all of these points, though (and there are a lot), you can choose from a preset build based on an NFL legend like Rob Gronkowski. From there, it was off to my high school career, and you know what? Playing a tight end is fun! Blocking a run and pancaking some poor DB is fun! Catching a game-winning pass is fun! But the old problems still raise their ugly head.

I started John Block as a three-star recruit – not bad, but not amazing, either – and worked him up to a five-star prospect who could have gone to basically any school he wanted. Alabama, LSU, and Michigan were my top picks, but I ended up going to Nebraska because they made a great offer and I’d be higher on the depth chart. High school is still my favorite part of Road to Glory, because each week gives you new challenges to complete and new things to do.

Then you get to college, and it’s mostly a spreadsheet. At a higher end school, I didn’t see the field much early, and my weeks quickly became about managing my limited energy on things like studying, conditioning, going to practice, and dealing with events, like getting invited to a party by a girl I went to high school with and blowing things so badly that she walked home alone… when we were in the same dorm. (Apparently, John Block’s high school highlights aren’t a big hit with the ladies. Some people just don’t appreciate greatness when they see it.) It’s a cool moment, but one that’s undercut by being delivered entirely through text and still images.

Admittedly, some of this is fun. I like the new practice drills, like the position-specific ones about blocking, and the team ones that put the offense down a score and task you with taking the lead within one minute while also leaving as little time on the clock as possible so the other team can’t score themselves. They’re a good time, and there’s a certain satisfaction in improving your player and moving up the depth chart. I really like that you can watch games on the sideline while you wait to play, too. It’s just a shame that everything else is a menu or a text conversation between JPEGs of characters you never share a physical space with.

It’s jarring to go from College Football’s incredible on-field presentation to Road to Glory’s barebones campaign. Yes, it’s great that you can track your player’s legacy and see where you’re likely to be drafted in real-time, but Road to Glory is supposed to be an RPG, and you spend most of it filling meters. Coach Happiness, Coach trust, where you stand on the depth chart, and so on. Off the field, it feels like you barely exist. Your player doesn’t really have a personality or friends or a life. He doesn’t inhabit a real world that isn’t a football field or football adjacent, and there’s more to being a college athlete (and college student) than text conversations and meter management. Until EA gives me something more, Road to Glory is something I typically play for these reviews and then move on from. I wish the rest of it was as fun as the high school experience is. John Block and Joe Throw remain almighty, but man living their lives is boring.

The core appeal of these games is and will always be Dynasty. There’s a lot of new stuff to manage this year, and at first it’s overwhelming. It’s not just about doing your recruiting, playing your games, and moving onto the next week anymore. The big changes here are Athletic Director Expectations, Dynasty Points, and how much you're offering that player for NIL (name, image, likeness) rights. AD Expectations are what you’re expected to do, and how patient (or not) your school will be while you do those things. Each school is different: some want national championships, while another may just want to cream their rival. You get Dynasty Points based on things like your conference prestige, stadium atmosphere, and so on, and then you have to spend them to hire staff, upgrade your facilities, offer the players you’re trying to recruit NIL deals, keep the ones on your team happy, and so on.

It’s… a lot, and I’m not sure I spent all my Dynasty Points wisely. Sometimes I’d try to buy some facility upgrades and College Football 27 would be like, “Are you sure? This is expensive and you only get so many points. Are you super duper sure?” On one hand, props to the dev team for realizing This Is A Lot. On the other… I had no idea if I wanted to spend my points here, man. I just kinda went off vibes and watched what happened. Thankfully, I was LSU and I was winning, so I had room to make mistakes. My complaint about Dynasty for the last couple years is that it’s mostly recruiting (which is just a bunch of menus that I find really boring) and playing games. This changes that by offering more stuff to manage (and a better coaching carousel at the end of each season, if you want to move on), and there is a strange joy to following your Dynasty blueprint, offering players scholarships, and landing the right recruits. I also love that I can manage my players’ individual practice status now.

One particular change I am fond of here is that offering a scholarship doesn’t just take a chunk of your limited recruitment hours per week. Now, you gotta spend Dynasty Points to offer them an NIL deal, too. Offering more than they expect may get their attention, but if you renege on it later, they’ll be unhappy. It’s an interesting system.

The problem is that it’s all just more menus to sit through while I look at some JPEGs. I’m sure being a college football coach is a lot of spreadsheet management, but College Football 27’s major off-field adds are all spreadsheets, and my reward for sifting through them is to actually play the fun football part. And… I get it. The Venn Diagram between highly invested sports fans and nerds is a circle, and a lot of them can spend hours just Listing Guys and Comparing Their Numbers and have a great time. But there’s more to this than filling meters and min-maxxing, which is essentially what most of Dynasty is. The Evil God of Numbers has laid claim to basically all of College Football’s off-the-field stuff, and it kinda makes me sad.

Now, I suppose, we have to talk about Ultimate Team. And… it’s Ultimate Team, man. You still do challenges and earn card packs and build your team and all that jazz. There’s a lot of new stuff around player upgrades this year that allow you more freedom when shaping your guys. An even bigger change called EVOs is supposed to be coming down the line, but it isn’t available quite yet. That said, none of this changes how I feel about Ultimate Team as a mode, so I’m going to let Past Will take this away with a direct quote from my College Football 26 review:

“I functionally believe, deep in my soul, that these modes are predatory, more than a little evil, and designed to trigger the dopamine-producing parts of our brain that gambling stimulates in the hopes that you will continue to spend money for a chance at a good outcome, which is what gambling is, and I cannot endorse anything about them. Yes, you can build a team without spending money, but it is designed to take much longer than just opening your wallet, and given that doing so can literally make your team better, it is pay to win. These are unremarkable and verifiable truths. Do with them what you will.”

Speaking of which, we should also talk about a little bugaboo that has hit Road to Glory and Dynasty: the removal of XP Sliders. It used to be that you could juice your coach and player progression to get levels faster. That has been removed, but you can buy coach and player levels for real money now. The nicest thing I can say is that this is a scumbag move that degrades what is otherwise a pretty good game, but hey, the Evil God of Numbers says the line’s gotta go up. Whether or not the sliders will be re-added at some point after release is anyone’s guess, but my money is on “lolno.”

[Update, July 9: EA has already responded to the negative feedback about the removal of XP Sliders and says it plans to at least add three XP Speed Settings in an upcoming update.]

On paper, Echoes of Aincrad is the Sword Art Online game you've been waiting for if you loved the anime. It takes place during the Aincrad arc, the very first one in the series, which is easily the most memorable and iconic. As your own created character, you get to experience Aincrad without having to retread the path of series protagonist Kirito. He also doesn’t have a huge role in the story, allowing Echoes of Aincrad to carve out its own identity with a brand new cast of characters in a single-player action-RPG.

But even when being mostly free from the confines of Kirito’s presence, it still feels constrained by the anime’s established lore. And unfortunately, the semi-open world structure is too bare and slows down the story’s pacing to an unbearable crawl, although its saving grace is the frenetic combat that's a great mix of fun and methodical. In the Aincrad arc, players are unable to log out, and if they die in Sword Art Online, they die in real life – at certain points, I wanted to log out, and luckily for me, I could still put it down without sending myself to an early grave.

Echoes of Aincrad’s story starts off with a warming welcome. As a new player, you meet up with a few other newbies including the friendly and dependable Iori, as well as the bubbly Saayu and quickly party up. The prologue is cleverly disguised as Sword Art Online’s beta, providing you tutorials on how to play, like a real video game would. It makes for imaginative immersion, and by the end of the prologue, you and your friends make a promise to meet up again once Sword Art Online officially launches.

From that point on, the story runs parallel to the first arc of the anime where game master Kayaba has forced all of Sword Art Online’s 10,000 participants into a death game. In order to escape, they must fight their way through all 100 floors of the floating castle, Aincrad. However, Echoes of Aincrad mostly sidelines this to tell its own story. Your MC and a few of the other key characters find themselves equipped with mysterious brooches that periodically show them visions of an apocalyptic future, subsequently giving them a special quest in their log to prevent it, all whilst trying to reach floor 100 and escaping. It’s like a subplot to the anime, but it’s well implemented. The permadeath threat is still ever present, but it’s given new context because if this doomsday event occurs, then everyone is dead anyway. It doesn’t take away anything from the anime and actually supplements it.

The story, however, is stalled by the barebones open regions. It’s not exactly an open world as you instead load into large zones that are only accessible via story or side missions, and even then you’re only allowed to explore portions of it at any given time. Each mission has a designated in-bounds area, and you can’t just go off and see what you like. If you go out of bounds, you’re simply turned around. This railroaded approach kills any sense of wonder and encourages you to just go straight for the critical path objective.

You activate Safe Zones along the way, uncovering more of the map, and there’s usually only one or two correct ways to reach new safe zones. You simply run along the path laid out, no climbing or gliding, and there's not much in the way of secrets or spectacle outside of treasure chests and landmarks to liven up the limited exploration. I’m not asking for every game to be completely open-ended like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, but with so few options, it highlights how one-dimensional and limited Aincrad feels. Granted, you can find magical arks around the area and fight a miniboss to break nearby seals to unlock shortcuts, but that’s hardly a remedy given how drawn out everything is. Minibosses are also mostly bigger and reskinned versions of normal enemies too, and on top of that, many are recycled in different areas.

Since you only really explore two floors of Aincrad, there’s not much environmental variety. The first floor is entirely woodlands and forest, with some swamplands scattered in between, while all of the second floor is a barren desert, but there's also a complete lack of liveliness outside of towns. This would make sense lore wise – if players die in real life when they die in Sword Art Online, why would they take the unnecessary risk of potentially getting mauled by a monster outside? I’d stay home too. The issue is that it doesn’t translate well into an actual playable game world, resulting in empty open zones with indistinguishable vistas as far as the eye can see. There are some dungeons that mix things up visually, like the one between the two floors of Aincrad where stars and crystallized stalagmite fill the foreground. The story-related dungeons that are covered in glyphs are mainly there for story exposition and help break the repetitiveness, but those are few and far between.

Now, I don’t mind long stretches of open segments if done well, as you may see in a Xenoblade Chronicles, as an excellent example. Unfortunately, Echoes of Aincrad doesn’t have the sense of discovery or rich diversity of monsters to support an expansive world. Bosses and monsters are often palette swaps of the same wolves, bears, and trolls, and I grew tired of literally fighting the same kind of boar over and over again. Monsters can also somehow see you from light years away, forcing you to engage in battle when all I wanted to do was find the next Safe Zone.

Thankfully, Echoes of Aincrad’s combat is one of its better parts. It’s an action-RPG with your typical light and heavy attacks, but there’s an extra layer of depth with its specific approach to parrying and dodging. By timing your evasive maneuvers perfectly, you can launch stylized counterattacks with your battle partner to deal huge damage. Enemies can sometimes be resistant to stagger, so these counterattacks ensure that you can break their stances and gain the upper hand. It also encourages you to avoid mashing the attack button all the time and pay closer attention to incoming attacks.

Similar to Bandai Namco’s action-RPG from earlier this year, Code Vein 2, you can pick one character to accompany you on missions (some main story ones allow for multiple). It’s a bit all over the place, and a bit of a let down considering past Sword Art Online games were more consistent with allowing three or four to fight alongside you. It’s kind of odd considering Echoes of Aincrad gives the impression of a party-based RPG in-lore due to its emphasis on an original cast banding together to save the world. Depending on who you choose, the proper partner can make some fights easier depending on your own personal approach to combat. A more defensive player, for example, could pick Iori’s healing field over Zash’s more offensive capabilities like granting an attack buffing barrier which gets stronger the lower the target’s HP.

Each of the six weapon types (including swords, daggers, and axes) have different speed and damage properties, and heavy weapons like maces and two-handed axes can perform crushing attacks normally without needing to charge up like swords, which can be helpful in downing enemies, leaving them vulnerable to a further onslaught. It’s hardly revolutionary, but I like how you’re able to experiment to find your preferred playstyle, and switch it up without penalty.

You can also learn Sword Skills, which are flashy attacks that consume SP. These skills add the kind of visual flair you’d expect from an action-RPG, and have special properties that tack on unique status effects. For example, the rapier’s Oblique Lunge sends you downward and emits a shockwave for extra damage, while the two-handed sword’s Cascade skill inflicts severing damage that can potentially dismember enemies and change their attack behavior, giving the combat a Monster Hunter-lite edge. Since you can only equip three Sword Skills per weapon, you’ll have to be wise about which ones you pick, adding another layer of strategy to the combat.

I also like how straightforward other systems are in Echoes of Aincrad. Every time you level up, you’re given a certain number of growth points to allocate to your attributes and the menu makes it clear how each attribute impacts your capabilities. There are certain buffs like faster attack speed and bonus EXP gains earned by reaching certain attribute levels, providing more incentives to invest in some stats over others depending on what you want to emphasize.

The customization and weapon modification systems are highlights as well. You’ll get a ton of weapons and items through enemy drops, which gets overwhelming, but a town's blacksmith can turn any unwanted weapons into materials to level up your favorite ones and declutter your inventory. You can also transfer weapons’ passive abilities by sacrificing the weapon that has the ability you want to extract, making it so easy to create your ideal weapon. For example, I added the +24% sprint speed modifier to any new weapon I wanted to use, becoming noticeably faster running out in the open field to make it a bit more tolerable.

What’s an RPG without a bit of post-game grind? After you’re done with the main story, you get access to Warped Dungeons; randomly generated roguelite-style dungeons where you earn Key Stones. These give you buffs that can increase your base stats that should prepare you for the most challenging content that Echoes of Aincrad has to offer. Warped Dungeons are no joke either, as I quickly discovered. Come underleveled or unprepared without the proper equipment, and you’ll soon find yourself getting decimated against bosses from even the first level. Clearing harder levels (which goes up to 10) will subsequently power up your Key Stones too, making Warped Dungeons worth doing since you’ll also earn EXP for killing the monsters anyway, and becoming strong enough to face the true final threat.

Each Sword Art Online game feels grindier than the last, and you'd wish they were more substantive or just drew lessons from other RPGs. Having more interesting ways of earning XP instead of side missions mostly consisting of fetch quests and “kill this monster here” objectives for little XP, that’d be a start. The bulk of the EXP is earned from the monsters you’re expected to slay along the way, and at the very least, monster levels scale with you, so you’re earning enough to stay afloat. But it gets repetitive when that’s its main crux, and I guess that’s what we’ve come to expect from an RPG that’s modeled after an anime about being in an MMO.

Whenever a new Assassin’s Creed comes around, the conversation inevitably loops back to the same question: “Hey, remember the one with the pirates? That one was great.” Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is the last game my friends who lapsed on the series have played. It's the one whose hero, Edward Kenway, always sits high up on “Best of” lists. It’s the one that spawned two remarkable spin-offs and inspired a whole game that is just ship combat. Black Flag was a cultural moment, and Resynced isn't just a full remake of that juggernaut, but Ubisoft Singapore’s celebration of the original’s well earned reputation. With new graphics, revamped combat both in melee and on the high seas, and retooled exploration and stealth systems, its bigger and better in all the ways that matter.

The most obvious upgrade is in how Resynced looks. The 2013 original actually holds up surprisingly well thanks to its tropical color palette and great lighting, but Resynced is still a flex in comparison. Ubisoft’s Anvil engine is a clear step up thanks to new options like ray tracing, with 2026 textures and physics also adding depth to hair, skin, and clothes that just couldn’t be done back then – and all at a smooth 60 fps on PC. The bigger cities you’ll visit, like Havana, are bustling with people and the wilderness is dense with lush foliage. Like with last year’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Resynced also has some pretty remarkable wind, water, and weather effects.

Bringing Black Flag in line with modern Assassin’s Creed design also adds some much needed modesty to the world map. Previously, your map was littered with icons marking things to find and do in distracting abundance. The more discovery-focused approach introduced in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – where non-quest-related points of interest don’t show up until you observe them from synch points or are in direct proximity to them – helps keep the map from being overwhelming, but also encourages you to actually explore this refreshed and remixed world.

Travelling through that world is enhanced by Resynced’s updated freerunning mechanics. It may not seem too different from what you remember at a glance, but I revisited the original Black Flag just before this review, and there are a handful of modern tweaks here that make it a notably better experience. Parkour runs transition from one move to the next much more smoothly, and you can change direction far faster in case you find something in front of you that you don't like and need a new route quickly.

The routes themselves are now more boldy highlighted by white chalky paint and cloth on buildings in a way that has become more noticeable in games from the last decade, so there's less trial and error when it comes to jumping from step to step. It has the breezy slickness of 2023’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage (without the same level of urban density to trick through), but it does also retain a little too much of the stickiness that came from AC games of the original’s era. Too often did a good running sequence come to a complete stop because the angle I hit a jump from was off by some microscopic amount, or because Edward would fling himself down one path even though I definitely needed him to leap through another.

Edward Kenway’s story is one of the most beloved in the series for good reason. It’s filled with memorable characters, consequential twists and turns, and some great writing and acting. It was unconventional for its time: a selfish pirate in pursuit of glory who has to be dragged into the conflict between Assassins and Templar kicking and screaming, and at great personal loss. 13 years later, there still aren't many stories that break the mold in quite the same way in this series. It’s still easily a top three Assassin’s Creed adventure, and I wouldn’t put it at number three.

The story has even gotten some additional love, mostly in some extra cutscenes that expand on certain moments with characters like Blackbeard – as well as a brand new end-game chapter that lets you tie up a loose end related to a character that never saw any justice for his crimes in the original. Some quests get reworked to make them a bit more open-ended, as well. For example, it used to be that the only way to get the diving bell to search a wreck for medicine was to save up enough money to buy it from your ship vendor. Now, there’s an alternative way: steal it from a group of soldiers. Some of these adjustments won’t even stand out as new if you haven't played the original recently, but as someone who has, changes like this really help speed up some of the chokepoints in the story's pacing that felt more like busy work than swashbuckling.

Gone completely are the present day interludes where you would tiptoe around the Abstergo offices to try and sabotage the evil Templar corporation from within. Instead those glyphs scattered around the map from the original now contribute to various meta progression systems in the new Animus Hub project, which Ubisoft first introduced in Assassin’s Creed Shadows Finding floating glyphs in the wild to earn points and level up mostly amounts to a glorified battle pass, which isn't my idea of fun, but Resynched does at least take an admirable step in the right direction. You can now enter special Rifts that serve up some unique platforming puzzles and act as the backdrop for a story between a voice locked in the Animus that wants to show us the “truth” and the Animus itself attempting to trap us inside forever. It doesn’t really go anywhere definitive, and it is kind of a bummer to see the present day story sort of be abandoned whole sale, but I am interested to see how this Rift idea develops in future games.

After a long hiatus from Civilization 7 following my original review – after which I wasn't exactly in love with it – I decided to give it another go with the big 1.4 Test of Time update, and more specifically the 1.4.1 patch that came out in late June 2026. Firaxis has made pretty big changes across the board, including some much-needed quality-of-life improvements here. But I don't know if I agree with the overall philosophy of making it more like older, existing Civ games.

In May, Take-Two' Strauss Zelnick told Game File that Civilization 7 had been a "bridge too far" for existing fans of the series. That's definitely the guiding star the Test of Time update was based on. And man, from my perspective, that was completely the wrong message to take from the negative feedback to Civ 7's launch. There's a quote I keep coming back to from No Man's Sky developer Sean Murray that goes, "Players are normally almost always right about problems … [but] they're almost never right about the solutions." I think Firaxis has put too much faith in the solutions certain vocal portions of the player base were calling for.

I'm a fan of civ switching. It's very contentious, and I get that. And it hasn't gone away or anything. You can still switch civilizations every age if you want to. You can set the AI to change civilizations every age. I don't even hate the way "timeless" civs have been implemented, necessarily – which let you play the same civ through all three ages like in previous games. There are unique policy cards for each one even when they're not in their native "apex" age. And I especially love the Syncretism feature that lets you borrow unique units or improvements from a civ you're aware of that’s in its apex age.

I played one campaign as Iceland through all three ages, and in the modern age I picked up American Marines as a unique unit through Syncretism, which felt very appropriate. You know, we used to be vikings, so of course we'd be good at amphibious warfare. I don't hate that it's an option. It's more the principle of the thing. I don't feel like Civ 7 puts its best foot forward when it backs off of some of its most interesting ideas.

Bittersweet Victory

Where this really turns out to be a bummer is in the victory conditions, with each one having been converted into a really simplistic race for points that may or may not include some vestigial nods to the age-specific objectives from 1.0. A lot of those objectives were a total mess. I'm not denying that at all. But rather than getting refined, they've been replaced with something far less interesting.

Tourism is back, but it doesn't work anything like it did in Civ 6. It's just the name for cultural victory points, and it hasn't done anything to break up the wonder spam meta. There's also Domination for military, GDP for economic, and Innovation for science, and they're functionally almost identical. The science victory has a small, interesting wrinkle that you need to build and defend a launch pad.

But all of the victories now work by requiring you to get your score in one of the four categories to a certain threshold above the civ in second place, which starts a five turn countdown before ending the game. 1.0 mechanics like factories and treasure fleets now simply give you GDP points, which also looks at things like how much gold your cities are producing and how many trade routes you have. Domination mostly comes from owning conquered cities. Innovation comes from special projects and the tech tree.

The victory threshold shrinks over time from 5x in Antiquity to, at the lowest I've seen, 1.5x about 60% of the way through the Modern Age. This means you can end the campaign quite early if no one else is really competing with you for the same victory objective. And while that can be a welcome way to wrap things up instead of playing out 50 more turns of a foregone conclusion, it also feels like an admission that they just couldn't make the late game fun, so they might as well give you a way to skip it.

The 1.4 patch notes talk about the fact that you can now focus on one victory condition from the very beginning like it's a huge improvement, but I actually liked the ability to change up my strategy between ages, too. And there's no longer any reward for doing that. My Icelandic Empire was the terror of the seas during the Exploration Age, as they should be, and I just ended up continuing my momentum into a Domination victory in the Modern Age even though it might have been more interesting to settle down and go for Tourism with all my bonuses to natural wonders. It was too late to change my mind, really.

Sneaky-pedia

The quality-of-life changes are significant, at least. The interface and tooltips have been greatly expanded with ways to quickly access more information. You can pin tooltips using… the K key? Okay. Weird choice, but you can rebind it at least. The Civlopedia is still missing plenty of features I'd want, like clickable hyperlinks that take you to a relevant article. But it's a lot easier to locate relevant details or dig deeper for more information on how a specific figure is calculated.

Game setup options have been expanded as well, and are a bit better explained. They're still not quite as robust as older Civ games. But certain map types come with additional variables you can tweak like sea level. Archipelago actually looks like an archipelago, though I still think it's a bit too land dense on the high sea level setting. There's a bunch of custom difficulty modifiers as well, if you don't mind the AI getting free money but don't want their units to get arbitrary combat bonuses, which is nice. You can even set whether they stick with their starting civilization or pick a new one every age.

So where am I at with Civ 7 after all these updates? Does it finally have the juice? Well, I started a new campaign while I was writing this that I plan to keep playing just for fun, so like I said in my initial review, it's not lacking in that “just one more turn” quality the series is known for. It's a huge relief to have an interface that doesn't hide important details from me. But here's the thing: I would still rather be playing Civ 5 or Civ 6. Civ 7 still isn’t able to compete with their years of patches and expansions, especially since it has backtracked on some of its more daring ideas, which makes it feel even more like a stripped-down Civ 6.

The Test of Time update didn't suddenly make this my go-to Civ. I think it's going to take at least a big expansion or two to find out if it ever crosses that line. And while I disagree with the design philosophy that has guided a lot of its changes since launch – victory conditions in particular feel like a step back – there are at least meaningful improvements I can point to as well.

I’ve always liked Dead or Alive – unfortunately, that sentence usually has to be followed by a “but,” lest people think you’re some kind of weird pervert. “Not like that!” you might yell. “I think the Triangle System is rad!” It’s tiresome, and Dead or Alive 6 is a mechanically rich fighting game that deserves better than that stuff dominating the conversation around it. That said, while everything that made it special in 2019 still holds up today, Last Round specifically just doesn't feel worth the cash if you already own the original – and there are several things missing from it that really should have been included in a re-release of a seven-year-old game.

Before we jump into the ring and throw some punches, let's set some ground rules and establish what Last Round is (and unfortunately is not). Last Round is Dead or Alive 6 bundled with five of the seven DLC fighters previously released for the original game (Nyotengu, Phase 4, Momiji, Rachel, and Tamaki), five new costumes each for Kasumi, Ayane, Marie Rose, Honoka, and NiCO, a new Photo Mode, and some small but solid visual updates. That’s it.

What is not included are several hundred DLC costumes (this is not a joke; the Steam page currently lists 440 pieces of DLC, though some are bundles and character unlocks), although you can import most of what you already own if you've previously bought an outfit in the original release of DOA6. What you do not seem to be able to transfer are unlocks for the guest characters Mai Shiranui and Kula Diamond from The King of Fighters series – you'll have to buy them for $11 each, even if you already owned them. Yikes.

And that's Last Round. There are no new characters or returning stages from older games, as there were in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round. There is no cross-platform play, no rollback netcode, and no Tag Battle, despite fans begging for these additions for years. Team Ninja has promised additional characters and costumes down the line, but this threadbare re-release is absolutely baffling. Dead or Alive 6 is seven years old. If all the existing DLC were included for free or some impactful new feature were added then maybe you could justify it. But as it is, Last Round just feels like an excuse to sell more costumes. Those costumes are nice, sure, but there’s really no excuse for why they weren’t just new DLC.

I’m a Fighter

That's a bummer, because Dead or Alive 6 is still a great fighter. The Dead or Alive series has always been extremely simple: one button for punches, one for kicks, one for throws, one for holds, and a “new” (as of the 2019 original) special attack button that performs a Fatal Rush autocombo and unlocks special meter moves. But more than a lot of fighters, Dead or Alive is, at its best, a chess match. Using what’s known as the Triangle System, every move invites a countermove – strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, holds beat strikes – and every attack is also an opening, if you’re good enough.

What makes this fighting system great has always been the holds. See, you can counter essentially any strike by pressing hold and the direction you expect the attack to hit (high, low, or mid, though mid punches and mid kicks require different directional inputs), potentially stopping any offensive in its tracks. Holds are inherently risky, though. They won’t stop throws and still lose to strikes if mistimed or if you don’t use the right one – but land a hold right and you can swing an entire round. It’s absurdly satisfying to pull off, even against the computer.

The mind game that creates rules, and it’s still here in Last Round, but it doesn’t change that Dead or Alive is also incredibly easy to pick up. It’s not quite as deep as, say, Virtua Fighter, but anyone can play Dead or Alive 6. Getting good at it involves really digging into moves and countermoves, knowing how both the character you’re playing and the one you’re playing against work, and using that knowledge to pick the right option at the right time. It feels great when you land a hit, and hurts to take one.

When you’re getting smacked around and watching your health bar go the way of the dodo, it stings. But it should. That means you made a mistake. Shouldn’t have mistimed that hold, ya know? But when you max out your Break Gauge in order to hit a Break Blow – think Critical Blows from Dead or Alive 5 – or get just enough Break Gauge to pull off a Break Hold and turn the tables with a nifty counter, the Triangle System sings. Adding a meter to a 3D fighter is always risky (just ask Tekken fans how they feel about Heat in Tekken 8), but I think Dead or Alive 6’s implementation has managed to stand the test of time.

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round also feels absurdly good to play on PC. Hits carry weight and impact, characters feel agile, and matches are quick and engaging. You can pull off some truly sick combos if you know how, but matches still revolve around risk-reward decision making and execution. I'm also still a big fan of the Danger Zones, which range from overtly silly things like “you got blasted into a pterodactyl egg and now the pterodactyls are Big Mad at you” to “it's funny when someone falls down a really big hill and hits everything along the way.” Positioning, poise, and proper timing are elements of any fighting game, but it’s hard to overstate how simple and clean and good Dead or Alive's moment-to-moment game feel is. Everything just flows.

As someone who played a lot around the original’s release in 2019 but didn’t keep up with every update since, one of the benefits of Last Round is getting to use the five included DLC characters I hadn’t tried out. I enjoyed them all, but really clicked with Momiji, Rachel, and Phase 4. Momiji trades power for speed and aggression, while Rachel is all brute strength through short strings that turn into lots of damage, which tracks if you’ve played as either of them in Ninja Gaiden. Phase 4, well… she can do a little bit of everything – one of those “feels immediately good to play” kind of characters, at least for me. I definitely want to spend more time with her.

What’s Old is New Again

Dead or Alive 6 is otherwise the same game I remember – and though that’s disappointing for a $40 re-release, it’s mostly a good thing when it comes to the actual game stuff. It still has excellent teaching tools, including an incredibly detailed tutorial, command training, your standard training mode (complete with frame data), and combo trials for each character. If this is your first Dead or Alive, it's easy to find your footing, and if you’re knocking off some rust, these things still help a lot.

I'm also a big fan of DOA Quest, a challenge mode that puts you into a fight and gives you up to three tasks to complete, like doing X amount of damage in a combo or hitting an enemy while they're sidestepping. The best part is that if you don’t know how to do something, you can press a button and be immediately taken to the appropriate lesson in the tutorial, practice to your heart's content, and then go back to DOA Quest when you're done. Incredible. Fighting games are hard to learn and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, so good teaching tools are essential to getting people in and keeping them around. DOA6 may be seven years old, but it got this stuff right, and that’s a big deal.

The other single-player modes are good, too. Say what you will, but I like the enjoyably silly if disjointed story mode. Sure, it's about tournaments and evil corporations and global conspiracies and ninjas and cyborgs and all sorts of crazy stuff, but it’s also very endearing. Where else can you see a guy yell “Hey, ninja man!” at an actual ninja before throwing a steel drum at him and immediately thereafter watch two women bond over their love of fighting, and then watch a couple of kids cheer on a New York street fighter after a sparring match? Not many places, and I would much rather play through this than something like Street Fighter 6's World Tour, or just watch a movie like in Guilty Gear Strive.

It’s also nice to see a fighting game campaign that puts women in its lead roles instead of relegating them to supporting parts like most others do. The boys play their parts and get their moments, but this show mostly belongs to Kasumi, Helena, Ayane, Honoka, Laifeng, and Hitomi. They make choices, have agency, and solve their own problems in a way people who have only ever seen them playing beach volleyball might not expect. And sure, the story is a little Looney Tunes, but every fighting game’s is. Ever paid attention to Street Fighter lore? There’s a guy who thinks he’s a car, and that might not even be the weirdest part of it. Dead or Alive even makes a hell of a lot more sense than something like Mortal Kombat (and I say this as someone who likes MK's nonsense), and while the overarching plot can be messy, the individual scenes and character interactions work well and are a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s not the reputation Dead or Alive is typically known for, and because one of the selling points of Last Round is new costumes and a Photo Mode, I suppose I now have to talk about the thing that consumes every piece of criticism ever written about this series: how everyone looks and moves. Yes, the women look Like That™. Yes, many of them are very bouncy. Yes, you can change their hairstyles, give them glasses, and even dress them in revealing outfits if you’re into that (though you’ll still need to pay extra for the truly egregious stuff). Personally, I’m here for the punching.

If we’re being honest, there is no shortage of sexy characters in fighting games; Soul Calibur’s Ivy is quite literally a dominatrix and Capcom’s sexy outfits for Chun-Li sell so well that the last couple Street Fighters made the GDP of a small country. If anything, fighting games have only gotten hornier as time has gone on. I mean, have you seen the Guilty Gear cast? Or Street Fighter’s Juri, who is now Foot Fetish: The Character? Compared to some of that stuff, Dead or Alive 6’s brand of horny feels kind of… quaint? Some of the outfits here are tacky or tasteless, yeah, but I also don’t have to purchase or use them, or let them define my entire perception of Last Round. And if someone does use one of the ones I dislike online? All the more reason to kick their ass.

In fact, many of the visual improvements that were dismissed in 2019 as Team Ninja “being weird” actually hold up quite well. It rules that characters sweat during combat and you can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies when they’re doing their win poses. You should be a little sweaty and beat up after a fight, and it doesn’t feel like those details have been added with purely exploitative, leering intentions. Fighting is a brutal, bloody business. I like that Dead or Alive 6’s characters look like they’ve been in a brawl after a knock down, drag out fight. Don't get me wrong: you'd never mistake Dead or Alive 6 for a fighter made today. It looks like a very pretty PS4 game, which it functionally is, but it at least holds up really well.

So yeah, Dead or Alive is still Dead or Alive, but you have to take the good with the bad, and there is certainly good here. Even with the DLC issues, I’d kill to have this many costume options in most modern fighters, and it’s nice that you can unlock so many of them just by playing as characters and spending in-game cash. Some of them are tacky, but I’d rather put Helena into one of her many fabulous dresses than a swimsuit anyway. There’s also an impressive visual variety across everyone’s designs, especially in an age when we’re seeing a lot of the same face shapes and body types be recycled. I want to be clear: I’m not saying Dead or Alive 6 is immune to criticism. Some of it is absolutely deserved; but spending time with it after a few years away also makes me think there’s stuff here that deserves more praise than we previously gave it credit for. I hope we can be normal about that.

Rollback Netcode, My Beloved

As for other single-player modes, well, there's no shortage. The lack of Tag Battle in this release is lousy, but there’s still plenty to do, like standard versus, arcade, and survival modes, a replay theater, a library with lore entries and trivia, and a music room (in addition to the aforementioned story mode and DOA Quest). Even if you never want to play online, there’s lots here to occupy you.

I even like the new Photo Mode (despite the fact that it will inevitably be used for evil). It’s easy to pick your characters and stage and go through their move list frame by frame in order to get the shots you want. I wish there was more freedom when it came to moving the camera; it's largely locked in place, though you can zoom in and out and rotate the characters to compensate. Photo Mode also doesn't work quite as well on a fightstick as I'd like because some options are mapped to the right analog stick, but it’s solid enough.

Finally, let's talk about online play. The lack of cross-platform play in 2026 is completely inexcusable, but the lack of rollback, while equally maddening, is easier to understand because it's famously difficult to implement in 3D games. That said, Last Round's netcode worked surprisingly well when I tested it. I live in New York and played someone in Texas and our matches were, aside from one minor instance of stuttering, incredibly smooth. However, we were both on wired connections. Now, I'm of the opinion that people who play fighting games on wireless connections are ninja dogs who will never see heaven, but the fact remains that a lot of people play that way and it's going to impact matches. It's wild that Team Ninja had the opportunity to implement a rollback solution here (which they could have then refined in future games) and simply chose not to. Is it gamebreaking? No. But it's an incredibly disappointing choice.

The Steam Machine is finally here after looming on the horizon for the last eight months or so. And while Valve has been adamant that the Steam Machine is an entry-level gaming PC, rather than a new, fourth player in the console space, this little box has captured the attention of console and PC gamers alike.

At $1,049, the Steam Machine is unlikely to win over the hearts and minds of PlayStation and Xbox faithfuls, but it is easily the best living room PC I’ve ever used, despite being a bit weaker than either of the base consoles. But what’s truly impressive is that it’s able to do that while also being one of the best ways to just get into PC gaming in the first place. PC gaming has always been expensive, and the Steam Machine is certainly no different, but Valve was able to cut away most of the tinkering and just get new players into the game.

The RAM crisis may have caused Valve to raise the price, but $1049 for a gaming PC is certainly not unheard of, especially for a rig as small as this. So, yeah, the Steam Machine isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you have the budget, it’s an incredible device to hook up to your TV.

Expensive, Or Is It?

The Steam Machine’s price has been a constant topic of conversation ever since it was announced back in November 2025. Back then, Valve made it very clear that the Machine would be priced competitively with a comparable gaming PC, and at that point, I assumed it’d land at around $800. But gaming PCs, and the components they’re made of, have become much more expensive since then.

Thanks to the ongoing RAM crisis, fueled by seemingly every company needing to build a hyperscale datacenter, the 16GB of RAM in the Steam Machine alone would cost nearly $250 by itself. And, with that in mind, it makes it a little easier to understand how Valve landed on a $1049 price point for the 512GB version and $1349 for the 2TB model, even if it makes it a bit harder to recommend.

That makes the Steam Machine around $400-450 more expensive than the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5 to start. That price probably disqualifies Valve’s new mini gaming PC in the eyes of many console faithfuls, but it makes a lot more sense for its intended purpose as an entry-level gaming PC.

Because as much as that $1049 price tag is shocking at first glance, Valve is still keeping its word about keeping the price competitive. I took a moment to price out a similarly-specced gaming PC on PCPartPicker, and it ended up being around $1050, and that’s with a full-sized ATX PC case, rather than the Steam Machine’s tiny little cube.

Whether you’re just getting into PC gaming and need a low-effort starting point, or if you already have a huge Steam library and you need a mini gaming PC for your living room, the Steam Machine is arguably a pretty good deal. Especially because unlike most gaming PCs, the Steam Machine is ready to play games as soon as it boots up for the first time. And, well, time is money.

Design and Features

Right out of the box, the Steam Machine doesn’t look like much. It’s a little cube, about 6-inches on each side, with an RGB light bar across the bottom. And that’s one of the main appeals about this little PC.

At the beginning of this console generation, the PS5 and the Xbox Series X both had out-of-this-world designs. The PS5 looked like some fancy space-age building in a gentrified neighborhood, while the Xbox Series X looked like a mini-fridge with green accents in the vents. Depending on your sensibilities, the Steam Machine is so small and unassuming that it might be the first console-that’s-not-a-console that actually blends in with the rest of your entertainment center.

Everything about the Steam Machine’s design seems purpose-built to blend into your living room, down to the cooling. There’s only a single fan on this thing, located in the rear of the device. That doesn’t sound like enough, but most of this cube is a giant heatsink that takes cold air from the front of the device and passes it directly out of the back. Just take off the magnetic faceplate and peek inside, and you’ll see just a block of aluminum fins to that effect.

This is such a simple cooling solution in theory, but it immediately solves the overheating problems of anyone that just wants to shove their console on a shelf and forget about it. You don’t have to worry about keeping the sides of the Steam Machine free to ‘let it breathe’ because the only air intake is in the front of the console, which then spits hot air out of the back. And, you’re going to want both the front and the back of the device clear anyway to access the ports.

There are three ports on the front of the Steam Machine, two USB-A ports to connect controllers or other peripherals and a MicroSD card reader. I love that the card reader is in the front here, because if you already have a Steam Deck, you can easily swap the SD card carrying your game library between the two, and have immediate access to whatever you’re playing.

Just like any desktop PC, there are way more ports ‘round the back. There’s an HDMI and a DisplayPort for displays, along with a power connector, an ethernet port, two USB-A ports and a USB-C port. That’s admittedly less than a lot of full-sized PCs, but with the size of the Steam Machine, it’s hard to expect anything more.

It’s important to note, though, that the power connector is the same as what’s found on other game consoles like the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. That certainly helped a lot in my testing, because it kind of just slotted right into my setup, but it also just means that the power connector will be super easy to replace, as there are a ton of cheap power connectors you can buy online for this thing.

If you don’t necessarily want the Steam Machine to blend into the background, the faceplate is swappable. It’s attached by magnets on each of the four corners, and the Machine comes with a plain black one preinstalled. If you have the cash for the 2TB model, it’ll come with two extra faceplates, but because the attachment is so simple, I expect there will be a little cottage industry that springs up selling 3D-printed faceplates with all kinds of wild designs.

There’s also the RGB light strip at the bottom of the device. By default, this acts as a sort of status indicator, glowing blue when the PC is on and blinking white when it’s trying to go to sleep. But you can go into the ‘Customization’ menu and either turn the light off entirely, or change it to any color or effect you want.

More Than Just a Console

It would be easy to dismiss the Steam Machine as an overpriced console, but it is so much more than that. There’s a reason that Valve repeatedly hammered home the idea that this is intended to be a gaming PC – it can do so much more than just play games.

While it’s true that the PS5 and Xbox have a slew of different apps that extend their utility, a lot of those boil down to watching Netflix or something similar. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is just a Linux PC that launches in Steam Big Picture mode, so the possibilities are basically endless.

You’re not going to find much in the way of ready-to-install entertainment apps, but even without swapping the operating system over to Windows – which you can do – you can install a bevy of different programs. Yeah, you can just use it to watch Netflix through the Chrome browser if you want, but you can also plug in a keyboard and mouse and code on this thing. Try doing that on a PS5 without jailbreaking it.

Admittedly, that narrows down the appeal of the Steam Machine a bit. People who just want a little entertainment box might be better served with a traditional console, but I don’t think that necessarily matters. One of the beautiful things about PC gaming, and one of the reasons PC gamers are so attached to their machines, is because a great gaming PC becomes a sort of appliance in their home.

I already mentioned how well the Steam Machine fits into an entertainment center, but the small size and unassuming aesthetics also makes it a great fit on any desk. Simply plug in a keyboard and mouse, and the Steam Machine is powerful enough to be a little mini workstation, especially for lighter tasks like coding or writing.

That’s probably a big reason why Valve wasn’t able to use sales from the Steam Store to subsidize the cost of the Steam Machine. Even without playing games, the Steam Machine is just a great little mini gaming PC, and in that world the $1049 price that is so high compared to a game console actually starts looking like a bit of a bargain.

The Big Picture

Being more of a gaming PC than a game console doesn’t mean that the Steam Machine carries the same kind of baggage as Windows 11 devices. Just like the Steam Deck before it, Valve’s mini PC is basically plug-and-play. As soon as you boot it up, it’ll pull up a log-in screen that you can get past simply by scanning a QR code with the Steam Mobile app. And, then you’re just in Steam Big Picture mode, where you can just start downloading and playing games.

For a lot of people, that’s as deep as you’re going to need to go. And, even if you do need to tweak some settings, it’s super easy to just hit the Steam Button on the Steam Controller, or the equivalent menu button on whichever controller you’re using to bring up the Steam menu. From there, you can go into settings and tweak everything from default game resolution to the RGB lighting.

You can also use the Quick Access menu – brought up by the 3-dots-button – to tweak system settings like refresh rate and even how much power is being pumped into the GPU. It is surprisingly easier to tweak settings on the Steam Machine than it is to tweak things on an Xbox or PS5.

Of course, you can go into the Linux desktop and really get into the weeds. But unless you really want to add your Epic Games or other games libraries, you probably never have to even look at the desktop if you don’t want to. Although, being able to go to the desktop and just use the Steam Machine as an actual computer is what makes this thing one of my favorite PCs in years. There’s just something incredible about a gaming PC that’s connected to my TV that I can push a button and turn into an actual workspace, when typically it’s the other way around on Windows machines.

Performance and Gaming

The Steam Machine is packing a 6-core, 12-thread Zen 4 processor, paired with a RDNA 3 GPU with 28 CUs, the equivalent of a Ryzen 5 7600 and a Radeon RX 7600, respectively. That’s not exactly a recipe for a high-end gaming PC, but it is more than enough to run most modern games, although you will have to tweak settings to play at 4K.

Unfortunately, Valve came out the gate claiming the Steam Machine would be able to play games at 4K60 with FSR. The Steam Machine absolutely can do that, but not with all the eye candy enabled. And, it just so happens that when I’m testing a gaming PC, I benchmark with all of that eye candy enabled.

If my testing process was limited just to my regular benchmarks, the Steam Machine wouldn’t look too great. In Cyberpunk 2077 with the Ray Tracing Ultra preset at 4K, and with FSR set to ‘Performance’, the Steam Machine only managed to get 14 fps. That’s pretty dismal, but once I turned down ray tracing, that number skyrocketed up to 42 fps at the same resolution.

Then, in Forza Horizon 6, with the Extreme preset without ray tracing, the Steam Machine got 30 fps with FSR set to ‘Performance’. And in Total War, Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset at 4K, the Steam Machine gets 23 fps. These numbers don’t exactly bode well for Valve’s ‘4K60’ frames, at least until you remember that, at its core, the Steam Machine is a gaming PC.

All it really takes to hit those 4K60 numbers is to tweak with the settings. Once I turned those games down to their respective medium presets, Forza Horizon 6 was able to get 57 fps, and Cyberpunk 2077 was able to get up to 64 fps. And that’s exactly where I’d want the Steam Machine to be, if I’m just connected to a TV in the living room.

The same was true across all the games I played in my time with the Steam Machine: I had no problem hitting averages between 50-60 fps in pretty much every game I tried. There are some games, like Death Stranding 2, which averaged around 45 fps with its medium preset, but even that is still very playable. It’s important to keep in mind too, that the image quality that comes with ‘Medium’ presets on PC, is typically about the same as what you’d get from the base PS5 and Xbox Series X.

For instance, in 007 First Light, I set most of the settings at around medium or high, and managed to get around 55-60 fps. That’s not quite the same locked 60 fps that the PS5 or Xbox Series X gets, but those consoles typically use dynamic resolution in games, which means the resolution will scale up or down in order to maintain a locked frame rate.

That option will certainly be available in some games on PC, but for the most part, you’re going to have to tweak games until they run at the frame rate you’re comfortable with.

It’s also worth noting that a driver update came out after this review went into edits, which may improve performance. We’ll be testing that soon and will have those results in a performance deep dive in the coming days.

I love pixel art. I find that, even decades later, the best-looking games of the ‘90s – Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – can still be breathtaking in a way older 3D games usually aren’t. That’s why I take notice whenever Square Enix uses its signature HD-2D art style, and why it’s so exciting to see that aesthetic expand past its turn-based roots with The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, the first action-adventure game to get this modern-retro treatment. Even though its titular hero may be wearing red instead of green, it essentially asks the question, “What if Square made A Link to the Past?” The answer is an adventure I never knew I wanted – one with a compelling story, impressive build customization, and a world I hope we see more of.

Elliot is an adventurer – a fact he makes sure everyone is aware of – who helps anyone that may be in trouble or has a problem to solve. After a summons by the king, your seemingly routine quest turns into a mission to save both the princess and the kingdom itself, traveling through time to do so. Elliot is is easy to root for, charismatic without ever crossing over into cheesy. Traveling alongside our hero-in-red is Faie, a small and slightly amnesiatic fairy who helps Elliot navigate and faces down foes with her magical abilities. She is a bit chatty (how chatty can be adjusted but never turned off completely) and occasionally falls into the “partner who gives you the puzzle answer too soon” trope, which is unfortunate, but is still a pleasant companion to have. Over the span of the 20-ish hours I spent with Elliot, Faie, and the rest of the supporting cast, I grew to love this world and was invested in the lives of these characters – even if the most emotionally impactful moments don’t arrive until quite late, sometimes not until the post-game portions.

One of the core components of The Adventures of Elliot is its time travel, which can be a tough thing to get right in a game, and it never quite lives up to its promise here. You’ll jump from age to age, and while that’s reflected in some ways as certain locations or routes change depending on the time period, these differences are rather underwhelming. It’s neat to find the ruins of a once great building from the Age of Magic during the Age of Reconstruction, but venture a short distance outside the city walls, and you will see the same trees and shrubs regardless of when you find yourself. Stranger still is the lack of any sort of evolution or development in the settlements of the beastmen tribes you frequently visit. You’re telling me that the wolfish Ulfur, even in a thousand years, never figured out how to set up a few more tents?

On the topic of those pesky beastmen, the enemies of the various ages don’t change, either. Whether I was exploring dark caves in the present day or the ancient sands of the Age of Budding, I was swinging my sword at the same slugs, rat people, and weird flying things. You can at least skirt around them pretty easily if you just want to get somewhere in a hurry (with the exception of the occasional room that requires you to clear out all the enemies before moving on), but the lack of variety does mean that after the first few hours, you will have seen a majority of the foes you will face on your adventures. The best Elliot offers in terms of age-exclusive enemies is a palette swap for the robotic automata units, with their once-shining chassis becoming caked with an aged patina in the years that follow their invention during the Age of Magic.

But while the time travel might not alter them much, the world itself and the designs of the characters and enemies within it still make this another beautiful example of Square Enix’s HD-2D aesthetic in action. There were occasional encounters where a monster would be hidden behind a wall or other piece of scenery, but that was only a minor inconvenience and was brushed aside whenever I stumbled across the next stunning landmark. The drooping indigo leaves of Grandree, the crown of the Mount Phoenix volcano, and the glistening structures of the grand city of Weyzn are just a few such places. Not to mention the creative boss sprites, such as the laser-shooting lava lizard Salathmadra, or my personal favorite, a frog don that rides a turtle around. All of this and more shines on Nintendo Switch 2 where I did my full playthrough, nearly as well it did during my tests on the PC build, with only slight slowdown and longer load times being the main noticeable differences with the former.

Crystal Combat

Much of what The Adventures of Elliot does feels very familiar, but equipable Magicite buffs and the “crafting” system you can use to make more of them is one of the most interesting twists it introduces. You would be forgiven if you assumed Elliot to be an RPG upon hearing it was developed by Square Enix and Team Asano, but it actually has very little in common with the genre those teams are best known for. Instead of gaining levels to become stronger, your growth is tied more to Magicite that you slot into your weapons, granting different modifiers and enhancements.

These crystals can be found in chests or crafted at a special shop using shards that are dropped by enemies. Coming in progressively rarer and stronger tiers, each of the seven possible weapons has a whopping 15 unique Magicite options that can be swapped in or out at any time, even during combat. Perhaps enemies are moving around a bit too much, so you want a stun effect that will let you land hits more easily – just hop into the pause menu, equip the Magicite that does that, and get right back into the fight. That flexibility is empowering.

There are also some awesome combinations of crystals that turn Elliot from an adventurer into a weapon of mass destruction. For example, the bow’s Fire Shot Magicite will give its arrows a chance to light a target on fire, while the Explosion Magicite causes, well… an explosion when you hit a burning target. It’s exciting to experiment and find a powerful combo like this, which can melt a boss’ health bar in no time flat. Between being able to have two weapons equipped at a time (each assigned to a specific button) and the ability to swap their Magicite quickly, as well as a variety of helpful magical spells from Faie, I always felt ready for whatever encounter awaited me next.

Team Asano really knocked it out of the park when it comes to just how seamless and easy all this swapping can be, too. A convenient radial menu can be popped up at any time to swap weapons, and similar screens are used for your potion vials and Faie’s magic as well. All three are accessible from the others with a simple button press, and opening these menus freezes the action around you. During tricky fights where I needed to plan and prepare, or just stop and analyze the situation, it all worked splendidly. At the same time, though, hot-swapping weapons and guzzling potions basically became muscle memory by the end of the campaign, so I never felt like those menus slowed things down or took me out of the action unless I specifically wanted them to.

Combat itself is a nostalgic trip to simpler days when all that was involved was looking at an enemy and pressing a button to swing. It feels good to just walk up and spam my sword attacks to take out enemies, but there are still ways to quote “get good” for those who want to really excel. Elliot can parry with his shield, leaving a foe dazed and open for critical hits; you can cause some enemies to explode and, in the process, damage their allies; or you can just hurl some pots at their heads for old times' sake.

If you do find yourself having trouble on a boss or another annoying mob, The Adventures of Elliot is rather gracious with its revives, allowing you to pay to have Faie heal you back to full. The price doubles each time, but resets when you visit certain checkpoints (unless you are playing on the Very Hard difficulty). The best part is that this is completely optional, instead giving you the option to simply respawn at the last save point. This revive proved to be a welcome option against some of the bosses where I needed just a bit more life to come out victorious. As long as you have the money, you can just brute-force your way through anything, but it never feels like you need to do that.

However, Elliot rewards you for playing well and avoiding damage, too. Every enemy you strike down will add to a chain count, and enemies drop more goodies when they’re defeated if you reach a high enough number, making this a great way to grind for resources – but the moment you take the slightest bit of damage, the combo breaks, and you have to start all over. I had high combos break more times than I care to admit due to becoming overconfident and overlooking the dangers around me.

For those battle masters that want to really test their mettle, Elliot offers a special Temple of Trials. This pits you against not only previous bosses but also increasingly difficult mobs of enemies. The rewards are worth it, and it's a great place to test out those weapon combo ideas, but they are not for the faint of heart!

Watch Out for Pit Falls

Outside of combat, Elliot has a surprising amount of platforming. Leaping across gaps, diving underwater, and figuring out how to get up to some nearby plateau all play a far bigger role in this adventure than I had anticipated. Dungeons tend to feature at least a few sections that will test your dexterity, requiring you to maneuver around pits or over lava. Thanks to how tight Elliot’s controls are, I generally had a good time with these sections. There are some handy accessories that can help you out too, such as one that lets you briefly hover or another that prevents you from taking damage if you drop into those pesky holes. Since many areas of the map can be explored in whatever order you want, you may even encounter places with abilities like Faie’s Warp spell that let you bypass parts altogether.

The varying terrain height also allows for some fun experimentation during combat. When enemies were nearby, ledges stopped being simple hills and instead became high grounds, ripe for the taking. My go-to strategy usually involved chucking bombs down on the enemies below or sending Faie out to beat on them for a bit. Though setting them on fire or exploding nearby bomb slugs with her magic also proved devilishly effective.

Traveling through time is just as convenient as traveling across the map itself. Special guideposts are placed around the world that, once activated manually the first time, can be fast-traveled to from your map screen at any point. It doesn’t matter what age you or your desired location are in, you can get there in a flash. The maps are also covered with various markers pointing towards treasure chests, shrines to upgrade both Faie and Elliot, collectible cats, and lots more. That’s quite helpful for secret hunting, but it’s actually so much information that I wish I could filter the icons or even turn them off completely for the times I simply want to discover things on my own.

The maps inside dungeons have all of the same helpful features, with icons pointing out all the chests or cats and guideposts positioned at both the front entrance and right before the boss. You won’t be able to teleport into a dungeon from the world map, or to the outside from within one, but most of the beefier dungeons have a convenient guidepost nearby. It was always just a short detour to heal up or restock at a village if I found my resources lacking before a boss fight, which I appreciated a lot.

Link? No, I’m Elliot

Okay, it’s time to address the moblin in the room: The Adventures of Elliot shares a lot of DNA with A Link to the Past, and the Zelda series in general. It would frankly take longer to list out all the things it has in common with that SNES classic than those it doesn’t. Calling this “The Legend of Elliot: A Link to the Pasts” really wouldn’t be too off base. A lone swordsman on a top-down quest to save a blonde-haired princess, wielding the likes of bows, bombs, boomerangs, and even a dash you can use to bonk into things. You have your fire dungeon, water dungeon, and forest dungeon all checked off the list, and you get a neat glowing magic sword, too. Being so reminiscent of one of the greatest video games of all time is hardly a bad thing, and finding all the little nods and callbacks almost became a game of its own for a big Zelda fan like myself. Elliot even manages to pull off a convincing “hyah!” when he swings his sword that would make Link proud.

I am all for more Zelda-style games like this, and Elliot does a great job of recreating that formula while also introducing a few twists that help it stand out. But when you follow the overall blueprint so closely like this, it unavoidably puts you into direct comparison with what came before, and Elliot’s quality doesn’t quite reach the same lofty heights as its inspirations. The dungeons tend to lean on the simpler, more straightforward side, and I never found the “puzzles” to be much of a brain buster. (Though, also in typical Zelda fashion, Elliot’s equivalent to the Water Temple did feature water level shenanigans that made me grumble a bit.) I can only recall a handful of times where trying to figure out how to reach a specific area on the map left me scratching my head, and people who grew up with or frequently played 2D Zeldas may not find much of a challenge here in general, but I can see how The Adventures of Elliot could be an on-ramp to the genre.

Of course, Elliot differentiates itself significantly by having multiple endings to uncover, the best of which require a deeper dive into the various ages. There is a good amount of stuff to do and discover here; playing through on Hard, which felt similar to a standard 2D Zelda level of difficulty for me, it took just under 14 hours to get my first ending, and I found the rest of the endings within another 10. That was the perfect size I wanted from a game like this, and some of those endings were so good they may have had me holding back tears.

As the years go by and current hardware becomes increasingly incompatible with the past, the first Gothic gets harder and harder to play, making it the perfect target for a remake. The 2001 RPG is a cult classic for a reason, ahead of its time in worldbuilding and nuanced NPC interactions. While Gothic 1 Remake pulls the original into the near-modern era in terms of presentation and controls, it doesn’t touch much else. This is a mixed blessing. It’s great because Gothic already forces a higher level of engagement and immersion out of those who play it, refusing to hold your hand in a way that still resonates in 2026 – but it’s own sparks of brilliance are regularly challenged by the poor quality of its story, the inconsistent pacing of quests, and shallow combat, and none of that has changed either.

I first played Gothic soon after The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which came out around the same time. I immediately identified them as similar games in many ways, but different in at least one stark one: while they are both dense worlds designed to get lost in with lots of mysteries to find and foes to fight, Morrowind invited and encouraged me to fulfill my destiny as the hero of its clandestine peninsula, while Gothic couldn’t care less about my survival, my progress, or my fun.

Ironically named the Hero, you’ll spend much of the first half of Gothic feeling like anything but. From the moment you are dumped into The Colony, a work camp and open air prison surrounded by a magical one-way barrier, you are met with tribulations as grand as the complicated political climate that the survivors here live in and as small as the tiny critters that can one-shot you in combat if you’re not careful.

This remake’s best upgrade is easily how it looks and sounds. Gothic had a unique style even back in 2001. It was the definition of “doing a lot with a little,” thanks to low-poly models with muddy details arranged and colored in ways that really evoked a sense of place many bigger budget games didn’t. The forests have big trees that block out the light from the sun, which is a huge contrast to the brick and mortar ruins where people are making new lives. All of this has been enhanced, with modern lighting and models that make the old castles and caves of the Valley seem more like real places. The grassy and rocky lands that make up the uncivilized spaces between The Colony’s settlements look verdant and appropriately wild now.

The audio design was always strong, too, especially in the sound effects and ambient nature noises. All of those are more robust than ever, even if the droning background music selection isn’t all that special. But the best enhancement is the completely revoiced script. The original Gothic had some abysmal voice acting and this remake does a great job upping the bar to at least “good.”

Training Days

Despite the visual upgrades, Gothic is still fairly buggy. It was rare that I ever straight up crashed, but more common were weird AI behaviors. Sometimes I took a bunch of monsters just watching me run past them without any reaction whatsoever as a win, counterbalanced by all the times I had to load a past save because an NPC that I was supposed to follow got stuck, the quest I needed to finish trapped with him. For a solid chunk of Act 3, an NPC I had to recruit for a quest just followed me around aimlessly. That poor ore digger has seen things no man should…

Gothic’s difficulty is baked into its design in ways that aren't simply enemies that hit you hard. It starts with how little you are even told about how to play. The remake does you a favor the original didn't, including a small glossary of important controls for how to do basic things like pick up items and attack with bows. Otherwise, most of what you learn comes from trial and error. For instance, the lockpicking minigame, though not overly difficult to understand, is something you just have to throw yourself against until you get it, even if it means wasting a ton of picks. Thankfully, the modernized control scheme and the inclusion of controller support help sand down some of the early game edges that came from a basic inability to interact with the world around you correctly, which does get you off the blocks and into the ore mining rat race more quickly.

Combat also benefits from the revamped controls, making it easier to swing at and hit enemies. This does not make combat easier overall, however, which is still just as dangerous as it was 25 years ago. Your hero starts off weak, and even lowly molerats can send you to the game over screen in a hit or two. Leveling up gets you Learning points you can spend at trainers to raise your stats, which goes a small but gradual way towards making you dangerous in your own right. Once you get stronger gear, you stand a better chance, but weapons of any real note can be a big investment early and armor even moreso, the latter being the biggest factor in surviving more than a few blows.

You'll be pretty bad at handling any weapon you pick up without training. It's cool to see the difference between wielding a one-handed weapon untrained vs trained (or eventually mastered). Untrained, you clutch a short sword with both hands for dear life, flailing awkwardly with every swing, while trained attacks can flow into combos with the proper timing, and can critically hit enemies. This is a fun example of a game’s storytelling goals being met with both interactive and non-interactive elements at the same time, but it still means that melee combat feels bad for a large chunk of the early game, only getting better if you can scrounge together enough money and save up a couple of levels worth of Learning points to get trained. And even after that investment, while the act of swinging a sword feels better, the actual action never evolves beyond standing in front of bad guys and bashing them until you or they are dead.

Leaning on ranged attacks from a bow or crossbow is the safest (and most costly) early game option, and though training makes your shots more accurate over long distances, it's an approach that evolves even less than melee. Magic does help both of these strategies, with offensive spells that are just better ranged attacks like fireballs, or support options that can change the size of enemies or summon monsters to help you out. Some of these spells can even have out-of-combat utility, like transforming yourself into a bloodfly so that you can fly from place to place and cut down travel time. But magic doesn't become a real factor until the mid-game, and by then you’re probably pretty well invested in other skills and stats, making the pivot to a “magic-based” build a hard task unless you plan well in advance.

You can learn all sorts of other skills that affect how you play, like investing in acrobatics so that you take less fall damage but also get a dodge roll. Every time I made a big investment in a skill or equipment, these changes were noticeably impactful. I got stuck on a boss for a while, and when I finally decided to try out Remake’s new branching armor paths (which allow you to improve armor in stages) it made the difference. But it often felt like I had to grind either to make Gothic 1 Remake feel good to play at all, or just to raise my stats so that I could endure cheesy enemy attacks for long enough to hit back. I never had to gain any actual skill, I just had to be more annoyingly determined than my enemies. I guess there's some sort of message in there somewhere?

Listen and Learn

Information about this world has to be teased out of it, either by talking to its denizens or picking up context clues from the environment. When agreeing to quests, don’t expect objective markers to appear on your map to guide you. Hell, don’t even expect a map at all unless you plan to buy or steal one first. Especially in the early hours, Gothic trains you to pay close attention to what you see and hear. It can feel daunting at first, trying to remember where specific NPCs are at certain times of day or establish who the most important people in town are based on their jobs or how other people talk about them. Your screens are free from the tooltip detritus of modern games of this ilk, but the reward for engaging with the Gothic at this level is how great it felt every time I could navigate to a point of interest on the map based on memory and context clues alone.

Unfortunately, the overall story of Gothic doesn’t fulfill the promise of its great setting and world. The denizens of the mining colony have basically revolted and set up several microgovernments, each with their own hierarchy, economies, and organizational goals. You’ll need to join in with one of the three camps early in order to get a stable foothold in the region and start working towards your own personal agenda. Each of these camps are unique from one another and present different social and moral quandaries that are really cool to exist among. The Old Camp is the largest and most established and does the most direct interaction with the outside world, but it's also the most obviously corrupt. The Swamp Camp is a cult-led theocracy out in the wetlands filled with people who pray to a new forbidden god now that they are out of the reach of the mainland church. The New Camp is a hodgepodge of people who don’t want to live in the former camps, and is largely a pretty ruthless meritocracy where the strong and capable can have anything they want.

I spent my playthrough getting into the good graces of the Old Camp, which meant impressing its leader, Gomez, enough for him to elevate me into his troop of personal guards. To do that, I had to spend a lot of time in the camp schmoozing his people enough to vouch for me, which meant doing favors for them or catching their attention in other ways. It also meant navigating the social structure of the place, sometimes the hard way. Elite guards patrol different sections of the camp and run protection rackets for the people in their districts. They would constantly try to shake me down for money in a “it would be a shame if something happened to you” kind of way, and more than once co-conspirators would try to set you up to have that thing happen to you if you don't. They all have allegiances to their own paying customers, of course, so if you get into a fight in a place where you didn’t pay a guard but your opponent did, they will act accordingly.

This attempt at immersion doesn’t always land consistently, though. While most citizens in these settlements are pretty vigilant against weird and potentially criminal behavior by you, it's easy to avoid any real consequences if you're caught. People will stop and make a fuss if you walk into a house uninvited, but so long as you leave before someone starts swinging, everyone goes back to normal. I was caught more than once failing to pick the lock on someone's personal treasure chest, but I simply walked out of the room before they questioned me and they never brought it up again. It's the kind of videogamey stuff that happens all the time, but it stands out as odd in a game that has such an emphasis on character behavior and relationships.

Not every camp approaches social dynamics the way the Old Camp does, but in the early parts of Gothic at least, you’ll find a surprising wealth of these social lattices. Lots of early quests put your dedication to joining a camp in direct conflict with your relationship with a different camp, meaning choices can have pretty definitive outcomes depending on how you navigate them. One quest had me chasing a guy out of town at the direction of a guard captain, only for a different guard to get mad at me about it because that person was his main source of smuggled goods. This sort of dynamic-feeling social structure was always Gothic’s biggest strength and it goes untouched in the remake. That unfortunately also means that when the main story finally gets into full swing and the rote “save the world” tale spins up, the complete shift away from all this nuance makes the back half of this game comparatively boring. This is exacerbated by just how jarringly paced the quests in the final acts can be. So many of them require meeting the only guy who can help you do a thing, but proving your worth to that guy then means hunting X of a certain monster first. It feels like homework, not heroism.

That isn’t to say that the parts that work are perfect, anyway. You’ll fight boredom throughout thanks to the uneven story pacing in every act, even with this remake’s occasional attempts to smooth the transition between major plot points by changing a quest in key ways. Back to the Old Camp example, you can impress everyone you need to impress to get a meeting with Gomez, but you still can’t actually do that until you hit level five, which means you may have to go out and grind or spend some time in other camps you don’t intend to join just to find some way to get enough experience points to meet this arbitrary goal. These gaps spent wandering around doing busy work were at least sometimes rewarded by small but neat discoveries in the wild early on, though those were mostly a new plot point that let you feel your way through the dense tapestry of the world some more.

The Remake does bring a wealth of new sidequests that gives you many more opportunities to submerge into and affect the world in small ways. One that lets you get a measure of revenge on a jerk you meet very early on is among the best, but my favorite is easily when you learn the tricks to train your very own rideable scavenger bird (think dinosaur chocobo). As a returning player, the process of discovering genuinely new things to do was just as pleasant as it was to see all the regular stuff the first time. Which is to say, it was often just as interesting and valuable as it was tedious.

Some years back, a few buddies and I started going to the park every Wednesday afternoon to shoot hoops. Five-on-five, first-to-11, 1s-and-2s; that way, we could take a break after each game, swap a couple of guys around to keep things fresh, play another, and repeat until it was either too dark to see the rim or people were all balled out. This is what NBA The Run feels like. There’s the burst of excitement I get the second I hit my first shot. There’s the novelty of having enough players to switch it up so things don’t become stale. And, unfortunately, there’s also the unavoidable exhaustion at the end; of having played too many games, shot too many threes, and alley’d too many oops until I need to take a complete break from it. Sure, I can go again next Wednesday, but until then, I’d rather be doing something else.

Thankfully, something NBA The Run lacks compared to my local court is that one guy who always throws elbows. Instead, it hosts a roster of 30+ NBA all-stars and five street legends full of hardwood pros who are all masters of their craft. Trying out different characters in these fast, 3v3 matches never got old because, much like in reality, each guy has certain things they’re better at than others: Victor Wembanyama is, as you’d expect, an alien who can shoot, dunk, and block with his Go Go Gadget arms. On the less-freakishly-tall side, there’s Stephen Curry and Damian Lillard, who can both throw it up from pretty much anywhere. And we can’t forget Ja Morant, who is a highlight dunker and daring shooter like no one else. That deep player roster keeps things exciting, and the championship I won with Devin Booker felt very different than the one I got as Nikola Jokic. (And no, I’m not just saying that as a desperate Suns fan.)

To top it off, NBA The Run doesn’t just capture each player’s likeness; it also accurately mimics their signature jump shot forms, which was a very pleasant surprise. I’ll be honest, having played a lot of the NBA Street series on the PSP and GameCube back in the day, I was half-expecting generic character movements and animations to be copied and pasted across all the different players. Instead, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Book’s silky smooth shot and even LaMelo Ball’s unorthodox release throughout each match.

All of these hardwood icons and their jumpers are playable within NBA The Run’s two main game modes: Knockout Squads and Knockout Solos. The former is a lot like The Park in NBA 2K, where each pro in your squad of three is controlled by a different player, and you have to work as a team. The latter, on the other hand, lets you control all three of them by yourself against another person doing the same. There’s also a third mode called Knockout Friends (tragically named, in my opinion, because you shouldn’t knock your friends out unless you want enemies), which is a promising private tournament format where you can invite up to 48 people to play for a championship, but I wasn’t able to test that out ahead of release.

Across all my runs, I gravitated more towards Knockout Squads because you just can’t replicate the wild highlights, the frequent taunting from both sides, and the pure joy of winning a championship with two random teammates. Sadly, there’s always a chance you get paired with someone who apparently doesn’t know how to pass the ball. But if that happens, and it does often, the short match times make it easy enough to just chalk it up as a loss and run it back without much frustration.

Side note: I am begging you to pass the ball, people. It’s one button on your controller. One key on your keyboard. It’s not that hard. Basketball is a team sport. There is no ‘I’ in team, “We, not me,” and all that jazz. Now, back to our regular programming.

Home (Court) Is Where the Heart Is

Look, I get that I can’t just ask Kevin Durant to replace that flying elbow guy in the real world, so how about we find a new court to play on instead? You know, one that doesn’t have multiple dead spots? NBA The Run has options for me here, too.

Take The Tenement, for example, a small piece of my home from the heart of Manila, Philippines, brought to the global stage. I’m a bit biased here, but it's my favorite of the seven in-game courts, not just as a nostalgic hit, but also because it so perfectly captures what basketball is: a spectacle that draws crowds, from the oldheads who can barely walk to the youngins who stand on their tiptoes just to watch. From that towering behemoth to the concrete jungle’s iconic Rucker Park, I appreciate the care and attention developer Play by Play Studios has put into building these courts, treating each one like the gathering and celebration of hoops that they are. And with every arena being a grand, near-accurate recreation of a real place, it turned the first few runs I went on into an exciting global tour where I may or may not have lost some matches because I was busy taking in the sights.

But, hold on. What do you mean we can’t just drive down to the Venice Beach court to play a few actual pick-up games? Fine, how about we switch things up with the scoring instead? Like, three points for dunks and one point for threes?

Although this would be a terrible idea that I would never suggest in real life because I can’t dunk, it’s the kind of unexpected option that makes NBA The Run tick. Different match types are selected pre-game through a roulette, and that keeps things interesting and unpredictable – be it Triple Threat, where threes are threes, and everything else is only worth a single point, or another option that turns the match into a first-to-7 contest where every basket, whether that’s a half-court shot or a flashy alley-oop, only counts as one. It’s like a box of tweets from Kevin Durant’s burner accounts; you never know what you’re going to get.

Take the dunks-count-as-threes mode as an example: if that gets chosen out of everything else, then a team that had picked Stephen Curry, Damian Lillard, and Devin Booker to spam threes all game long would be out of luck against a more well-rounded one. Overall, the current match type rotation is a smart way of encouraging you to explore the roster instead of going all-in on a single strategy every time. Can you imagine how stale it would get if you played as Anthony Edwards your whole playthrough? Or if all the games you played were a first-to-21, 1s-and-2s contest? It’d be like voluntarily watching the Washington Wizards for a whole season.

Time to Hang it Up

Sadly, there are only so many Zion Williamson 360-windmills, Trae Young half-court heaves, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander flops I can stomach by my 22nd match at the Dongdan Sports Complex before things get old. (Well, that’s not all true; flopping isn’t actually a part of NBA The Run, but my overall point still stands.) After winning multiple championships through a lot of highly-contested matches and playing as all of the available characters across its two main game modes, that feeling I savored so much in my first, second, and even third championship run is long gone.

This must have been what Michael Jordan felt during his second retirement with the Chicago Bulls. I’m not comparing my accomplishments to his or anything (I got more than six championships, after all), but when you’ve won everything there is to win, what’s left? Playing for the love of the game only works when it loves you back, and now that both sides are spent, there’s little reason to stick around any longer. NBA The Run could pull me back in eventually if new content arrives in the coming weeks and months, just like MJ coming back to play for the Wizards – but at the moment, my legs are spent, my wrist is aching, and I cannot shoot, dunk, or ineffectively put my hand up any more than I already have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re a fan of life simulators, you’ve no doubt heard critics, developers, influencers, and all manner of social media-savvy people wax lyrical about the complexity of creating a compelling social simulation. As I said in my own inZoi review last year, curating a world that’s both representative of the murky mess that is being human and enjoyable to play is a seemingly impossible undertaking that few have managed. And yet, after spending 35 hours in Paralives crafting families, building homes, and sowing discord among residents, I have a renewed hope. This ambitious challenger to The Sims’ throne has captured not only the practical elements of humanity but, importantly, the weird ones we sweep under the rug, too. While its Early Access start has a lot of room to grow before it slays the reigning king of the genre, it’s certainly on its way.

Your time in Paralives begins on a train, with a quick tutorial for how to handpick the actions of the Parafolk (the name Paralives gives to its digital citizens) as God of this world. You’ll initially do so with predesigned families, including the father-son duo of the ​​Marquez household, who hide secrets beneath their chirpy veneer, and the party-loving trio from the Wolf household, who need to get it together if they want to pay the bills. These families all feel thoughtfully written and have their own issues to connect with, which is a boon for people who prefer a rich backstory to bounce off. But if you’d rather get straight into the nitty-gritty of people pottery like me, you can also create your own household via the Paramaker mode right away.

Comparable in layout to The Sims 4’s Create-a-Sim, the Paramaker mode splits avatar creation into three main sections: Appearance, Clothing, and Personality. From here, you can curate the look of your digital person through a selection of pre-fab facial and body features, dress them in stylish garb, and finally choose what kind of digi-person they will be with various traits. There is also the option to fine-tune your creation by using your mouse to tug and drag at anchor points to twist up their features like putty. It’s a reactive and rewarding process, particularly if you’re working from a reference photo.

There aren’t a great deal of options for customisation just yet, though it’s clear there’s been a particular effort made to replicate the diversity of the real world with what’s available. Hair presets span a variety of textures, including straight, wavy, curly, and coily, plus there’s an option to select hearing aids and prosthetic legs. What’s more, you can layer items like piercings, jewellery, and tattoos to really amp up your character’s personality. This blend of options safeguards your households from the cursed same-face syndrome, and ensures that every person you meet out in the world doesn't look like they're all related either. Clothing, too, has a decent variety and caters to a range of styles from goth to coquette, even including a full-body morph suit – to each their own.

No matter what you pick, Paralives' standout art style evokes the nostalgia of classic Telltale games like The Wolf Among Us. This dynamic comic book approach is not only easy on the eyes, it also helps details like wrinkles, facial hair, and eyelashes really pop. That’s particularly true as your Parafolk emote and perform actions like cooking or scrolling on their phone while ignoring their chores – they’re just like me, for real! By leaning away from the hyperreal and toward the more cartoonish aspects of humanity, Parafolks feel slightly goofier and a lot more likeable than the people of their competitors, conjuring favourable comparisons to The Sims 2. In this way, I found myself connected to their plights more so than the undeniably trendy but slightly soulless inhabitants of Krafton’s InZOI.

Unfortunately, the wheels start to fall off in the Personality section of character creation, which feels quite limited at the moment. You’ll give every Parafolk a Vibe, a Social Perk, and a Talent area, each of which is intended to influence how they move through the world. For example, if you choose the “Good at taking care of other people” Social Perk, that character can make chicken soup for sick friends. Alternatively, if you pick the Gloomy option for their Vibe, they will be happiest when in a bad mood. As you play out their life, you’ll unlock more slots to fill, though these choices don't translate clearly into practical gameplay. And, frustratingly, even with drastically different personalities, most of my households reacted more or less the same to major incidents.

Rounding out the start of each new family, you’ll also need to choose a specific Storyteller, which is a unique mechanic that will dictate the difficulty of your day-to-day life. Storytellers dole out cards every dawn that cause random events to happen in the lives of your Parafolk. One day, you might get a free computer from work. Another day, one of your household members may be encouraged to cheat on their spouse. This system adds much-needed entropy to your household's otherwise routine shenanigans. While many of the prompts seemed repetitive in concept, I found them to be effective in practice — they do well to keep things fresh in the long term, which is one of the biggest bugbears of the genre.

Once you have your household, the next step is to find a home, which once again gives you the choice between a pre-designed estate or an empty block with a budget to spend on all the essential amenities, like beds, baths, and beyond. Similar to the Paramaker, Paralives' build mode currently has a fairly limited pool of items and options, but there's at least enough customisability here to keep you busy building for hours on end.

In construction mode, you erect walls, add windows and doors, and then decorate the space with a selection of modern interior options. It’s an approachable process, thanks in part to a togglable snap tool that ensures your architecture is balanced and beautiful. Still, cowboy builders need not worry as there’s plenty of room to get weird with it, too, and Paralives isn’t keen to hold you to any building code. When renovating your space, you can place items almost anywhere you’d like. As a huge fan of cosy, cluttered spaces, I squeaked with joy when I realised I could stack ramen cups on top of kitchen fridges and select random throw pillows to jazz up plain couches. Yuckier touches like mould, damp, and body hair can also be dotted around for the sickos out there, with Paralives allowing you to make a truly bespoke, if totally gross, living space.

This customisation is a double-edged sword, though – while beautiful, much of the world isn’t actually interactable. Those ramen noodles might create a cool vibe, but they can never be eaten, and the cosy throw pillows will never crumple under the weight of a sleepy character, which feels like a missed opportunity. Such aesthetically pleasing but useless items also crop up in the open world and inevitably lead to deflating moments as you realise you can walk through a moving train completely unscathed. There has been an effort to provide the background city with a sense of liveliness through a daily newspaper and rotation of activities like run clubs and BBQs. Even so, these events can feel rather flat, with locals milling around as if on a timer. As such, Paralives' setting doesn’t feel like an entirely cohesive society just yet.

Moment-to-moment survival comes down to meeting a few basic needs: Hygiene, Hunger, Sleep, and the Toilet. Achieving these needs is a constant uphill battle, though failing them so badly that you die isn’t so easy either. As with real life, Parafolks' days are split between working a job that pays the bills, toying around with home appliances, and chatting with the locals to try and make friends. The way you progress is fairly rudimentary; you’ll often be stuck reading a book to level up skills or waiting out the in-game clock for a work shift to end. Thankfully, there is some reprieve in the socialising portion, with Paralives opting for a refreshingly alternate approach.

Instead of selecting another character and choosing a conversation topic, you’ll need the Parafolk to interact long enough to fill a conversation meter. From there, you’ll have a small pool of subjects to choose from, which includes asking other Parafolk if they’re single in a flirtatious way, telling jokes, and chatting about general life events. At first, I didn’t love this radical style, but it grew on me over my play sessions, and I eventually realised how handy this hands-off approach was. Instead of sitting with one of my household members, clicking topics on repeat, I could move on to another task or person while they were schmoozing, and periodically jump in to keep the conversation flowing. Like spinning personality plates, I could lock in as one started to wobble, before jumping over to another conversation to keep that one in play, too.

Alas, not even expert helicopter parents like me can keep everything in check, and across my time with Paralives, I fell prey to the inevitable chaos of an Early Access life simulator. One day, during some routine cupcake-baking, my house burned down because the firefighters kept spawning just outside my front door without being able to step through it, as if they were mocking me. Soon after, another of my households got stuck in some kind of viral loop, circulating a sickness through the entire family, like a never-ending, festering plague. During this time, they all had to take turns running back and forth between their beds and the home’s single toilet – no prizes for guessing how that shook out.

Such unfortunate occurrences might seem like frustrating, gameplay-halting events that make you want to ragequit. But its spirited art direction and goofy charms manage to make these scenarios feel funny and endearing to experience, as if they were intentional. Where the day-to-day activities lacked the depth to keep me entertained, these scrappy edges showcased more of the rich, chaotic personality that bleeds through all aspects of Paralives, and makes it stand out as a worthwhile contender amongst its more substantial and established peers in the genre.

After the opening hour of Mina the Hollower, I found myself dropped into a hostile world with no obviously “correct” path to follow and roaming enemies that could kill me in just a few hits no matter what direction I chose. That’s about when I realized this retro RPG was hiding far more than I expected beneath the surface – and once I burrowed on in, I never wanted to come back up. Mina is a tough-as-nails adventure gorgeously done up in the style of the Game Boy Color’s best, and it isn’t shy about those influences. It borrows The Legend of Zelda’s open-world structure, adds a healthy amount of Castlevania’s horror setting and haunting chiptunes, and peps things up with a surprising dose of FromSoft’s Souls games in its combat and progression. But somewhere in that mix, Mina becomes more than the sum of those parts, cleverly riffing and remixing them them with consistent brilliance. Its blocky exterior disguises rich combat systems, some of the best puzzle solving ever put to screen, and a funny, deeply weird world I loved to explore.

Developer Yacht Club Games is no stranger to retro tributes, with its standout Shovel Knight series drawing heavily from NES classics like Mega Man. While Shovel Knight stuck to its source material pretty closely, Mina uses Zelda games like Link’s Awakening and the Oracle duo as a foundation for a much deeper, more modern take on a top-down action-RPG: You have a jump that will get you over small gaps but never up to a higher ledge, an overworld that partially scrolls but has distinct edges between regions, and of course start out with a stubby little weapon (actually, several to choose from). These are not the Zelda games you usually see developers aim their sights at, but I love how the seemingly-limiting constraints of imitating the early handheld Zeldas conceals Mina’s inner complexity.

However, very much unlike the Game Boy games it draws from aesthetically, and more like The Legend of Zelda for NES (or Breath of the Wild decades later), Mina has a completely open world. There are no paths blocked until you get some special item, and nothing but your own skill level keeping you from going to any one of its four initial dungeons first. You just need to fight your way there. And if you can’t cut it, there’s probably another area to try instead, a clever place to grind for money and levels, or some side quests that lead to optional upgrades.

Mina’s world is often surreal, dreamy, and uncanny. Built around the central village of Ossex, the Tenebrous Isles are an entrancing mix of gothic fantasy and magically-infused steampunk tech. There are plenty of adorable animal denizens, like Mina, but also building-busting giants, perfectly friendly abominations, and a whole lotta possums – which are a type of monster. Cutesy overworld sprites are sometimes subverted by ghoulish character portraits when you stop to chat. It all smacks of the David Lynch-inspired characters that make up the otherworldly island of Link’s Awakening in just the right way (and that’s not some snooty art school connection I’m making, Twin Peaks has been widely cited by the devs as a major influence on that 1993 Zelda game). Additionally, these characters all have lives that are affected by your actions, and many end up holding a greater purpose in the larger story, which has some fun (if predictable) twists and turns, but really saves the good stuff for the end.

Mina herself is a bit of an enigma. She’s a monster slayer, but also something of a mad scientist who has outfitted Tenebrous Isles with tech that is being mysteriously sabotaged. The plot follows whether her machines are actually good or bad, and while brave little Mina seems to act heroically in this kill-or-be-killed overworld, often solving problems for the Islefolk, she also causes a few: Without spoiling anything, those can come back to haunt you. This little white mouse explores a lot of grey areas, and I love that!

Dungeon Hollower

There are six main dungeons spread across the Tenebrous Isles, each with a matching area that leads up to it – a swamp, a beach, a crypt… you’ve played a video game before. There’s even a small but very cool nod to Castlevania here, with short establishing shots showing the boss towers silhouetted in the distance for every area – and then those creepy spires showing up in backgrounds as you climb, just like Dracula’s perched lair. While most of Mina’s art choices are limited to blocky tiles, these sweeping scenes and backdrops show off some stunning pixel art that helps set the mood.

(And then there’s the soundtrack: Pure Castlevania! Baroque jams performed on a glorious, beepy boopy NES/Game Boy soundalike instrument set. I’ve been associating this sort of gothic Casio sound with tense horror action games since 1987 and it still feels totally rad when executed this well in 2026.)

All six areas are filled with charm and challenge, but one called Septemberg especially stood out as a piece of storytelling I’d never experienced before. It’s a region frozen in autumn, with gusty winds that blow you around, piles of fallen leaves, pumpkins, and a general Halloween vibe. All of it is out to kill you. You quickly learn of a lurking terror in your midst there, and the escalating nightmare of trying to manage that threat through a hedge maze, a lightning storm, and more is an absolutely bonkers, adrenaline-inducing sequence I couldn’t stop talking about with others who had seen it; just an incredible amalgam of schlocky, spooky-season fun.

While you could go to Septemberg as your first area or not find it until much later, there are areas you can’t access immediately, but the way to reach them is never a dungeon-based upgrade. It’s a secret passage, a side quest, or, in some cases, by using a specific Sidearm (secondary weapon) or Trinket (ability-modifying equipment) that you find while exploring the overworld. This is the best and most pure kind of open world, and it’s executed excellently here. Mina dangles a prize just out of reach to challenge you: Can you get to that treasure chest from another screen? Can you survive long enough in the water to reach that gap under a bridge? Should you go in that creepy hole in the ground right now with no save point in sight?

Mina’s move set as you meet these challenges is all her own, and it is a ton of fun to learn and master as you explore. Her ability to burrow beneath the ground and then pop up for an aerial leap is multipurpose: It’s a dash, a dodge, a long jump, and eventually a graceful way to dance around an enemy like a furry lil’ ninja. There’s a learning curve for sure, and effectively working this move into my hacking and slashing took time. There are no counters or dodge rolls here, just sliding under an enemy to get the better of them. But once I got the hang of burrowing, it became a versatile combat tool that made Mina feel extra nimble compared to, say, a certain squat, little Hylian.

Morsel Combat

There are two other aspects of Mina’s arsenal that will surely catch Castlevania fans’ eyes – and ears – right away. First off, the whip: Mina’s Nightstar (actually described as a mace on a chain) is one of five possible weapons to pick from, and it’s a fantastic go-to option (and, of course, any aspiring Belmont’s choice of weapon). I stuck with the Nightstar for most of the roughly two-dozen hours it took me to reach the credits, but I ended up also falling in love with the daggers, Whisper and Vesper – more of an Alucard thing. The Nightstar is good for delivering fast, heavy damage at a safe distance (and you can upgrade it to do the useless, dangling chain thing, ala Castlevania IV!). But the daggers, when boosted by a Trinket that adds an attack multiplier for landing hits without missing, became an awesome boss killer.

The other system ripped straight out of Castlevania are the Sidearms, which give you a variety of secondary attacks depending on which Sidearm pickup you grabbed last (all of which are in predictable locations you can remember to return to). Options like the sword and axe function almost exactly like sub weapons in Castlevania, and are even replenished the same way, with a resource called Joules that is spent each time you use one (just like so many Hearts in classic Castlevanias). There are some weird Sidearms, though, like the Iron Steed – a bicycle with a sort of jousting rod attached that serves both as a quick option to dash around and a way to jump over huge gaps to reach secret areas. Other Sidearms I liked were a little ghost that attacked enemies and drained Joules over time, and a demon pet on a leash that acts as your own personal Chain Chomp.

You can augment most of Mina’s moves through swappable Trinkets, which provide buffs that boost your movement, attack, or defense in helpful and sometimes wacky ways. I was able to expand my Trinket slots to activate five at once, and my preferred combos for exploration (long jumps, increased burrowing time, wall grabs) were very different than those for combat (DPS multipliers, a revive, health extenders). For instance, one Trinket allowed me to float slowly down after a jump, and that became essential to how I moved through this world – but it was useless in most boss battles, so I’d replace it with an attack buff that shocked enemies at the save room right before a big fight. There are dozens of trinkets to find – some extremely useful on their own, and others that only add up to huge results when used together. Unlike many games where I tend to stick to a formula I find that works, I was always excited to experiment in Mina.

The Bones Are Their Money

The other way to upgrade yourself brings us to Mina’s third major influence: FromSoft heavy-hitters like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The “Souls” currency equivalent here are Bones, and they serve the exact same purpose: Experience points gained from both combat and exploration that you must either spend or risk losing upon death. Mina isn’t nearly as punishing, however, as you can quickly gain multiple Sparks that will prevent you from losing your Bones on death, getting stuck inside the enemy that killed you or in the room where you died until you can recover them. This leads to a loop familiar to Souls players that’s just as hard to resist here: Do you delve deeper on this outing, getting more Bones and items, or do you run back to the nearest save point and “Bone Up” first?

Boning Up allows you to spend an escalating amount of Bones to level up either your main weapon attack, defense, or Sidearm attack, with a fourth option to store the Bones for safekeeping in a “savings account” of sorts, which is impervious to death. I found that going all in on attack was the best bet early, and did a fair amount of grinding to do so.

Finding grinding spots proved a major component of Mina, which I had a lot of fun with in the late game especially. It was cool to feel slightly OP at times if I found a really good spot, though that does mean pushing through the already tough intro first. Dumped into the open world after the on-rails opening area, you are nudged in the direction of the Crypt to the east of Ossex as your first dungeon, but the path there is really, really hard at starting levels. Once I hit an area with a particularly invincible-feeling set of knight enemies, I was caught a bit off guard by Mina’s difficulty curve. But fear not: This first hurdle is also the biggest, and it can be solved simply by spending some time to level up your attack, maybe some defense, and look for secrets.

This is because Mina starts to throw a lot more Trinkets at you, as well as opportunities to score Bones naturally as you explore. In this way, Mina, which is a very hard game, sets itself apart from another recent 2D action game notorious for toughness: Hollow Knight: Silksong. In Silksong, your primary options are usually to “get good” or just go somewhere else. There are items and upgrades to find, but grinding just to level up your stats doesn’t exist, and that limitation made that particular Metroidvania-with-bugs feel less open than something like a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

In contrast, Mina let me solve difficulty checks like bosses in multiple ways, which I appreciated a lot. You can certainly learn a tricky boss’s patterns, or you can grind for Bones to up your attack and then absolutely roll it. Alternatively, you could play with your Trinket build until you find some combo that makes that particular boss a breeze. All of these upgrades really matter: Enemies that take 10 hits could take half that after a Bone Up, and then half that again, so just finding a clever grinding spot can make things much easier. Crucially, that grinding feels perfectly tuned to allow for multiple playstyles, not like a slog you are forced into.

Souls-Tyke

Your healing and life bar also owe a debt to Dark Souls, but there’s a really fun and twisted… twist to it. You have a stock of health potions called Plasma Vials, but you can only replenish your health bar if you attack enemies. Each hit you land fills in the missing section of your bar with a yellow part called Plasma, and that Plasma can then be converted into good old fashioned red health when you use a Vial. So that means if you are getting low on health, you have to go on offense. There are a few environmental items that can help you heal, and Trinkets can once again play with Vials and Plasma in cool ways, but the core healing system presents an amusing gamble that I ended up loving – and making plenty of wrong bets on.

Of course, every Souls-inspired game also has its version of a save point that both heals you and restores all the enemies to the world. Mina’s is cute and clever: A tiny “Underlab” specific spots let you burrow down to where you can use stored Bones to level up, swap Trinkets, and change weapons. The main loop of Mina becomes centered largely on whether or not you can make it to (or find) the next Underlab, or whether you should retreat to the last one you visited. This sets up that ultra-tense, risk-vs.-reward version of exploration that makes so many games so appealing and hard to put down, from Resident Evil to Metroid. After each successful outing, you’ll think, “Just one more try – at least I know where the enemies are now!” A neat twist to Mina’s Underlab is that you can outfit it with things like a way to store Sidearms, replenish your Joules, and even look at a rudimentary map that tracks collectibles by region.

Speaking of maps, Mina does not have a detailed, room-by-room one to pore over for secrets. While this makes it a lot more like Dark Souls and Bloodborne in terms of the sheer, terrifying unknown of what’s ahead, it cuts out Zelda, Metroid, or Castlevania’s ability to constantly probe the edges of a pause-screen map to sniff out some collectible hidden past a breakable wall. There are plenty of secrets out there; you just have to probe every element of a room in order to find them. This helped me focus on the combat, platforming, and survival, which I did appreciate, but filling out a map is one of my favorite activities in any game. However, I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would since it significantly ups the challenge of finding secrets in a fun way. (And over at IGN Guides, you know we are hard at work on a map, so you will have an option I didn’t!)

Small Wonder

A game with so many disparate influences like this always runs the risk of becoming a mishmashed hodgepodge, but Mina’s inspirations are all awesome choices that mix well together. The result is a sort of Breath of the Wild moment for top-down adventure games: Mina takes a bunch of ideas found in the most popular open-world games of the modern era and squishes them into the ‘90s Zelda mold. What comes out is a game Nintendo would be too scared to make, FromSoft has already tried, and Konami gave up on for two decades.

And despite being so referential, Mina is actually quite unpredictable, and frequently plays up the element of surprise. These surprises can be small: A giant hand pulls you into a shop; some creep just shows up in your Underlab; a freaky clown jump scares you only to tell a dad joke. Or they can be really big. While I obviously won’t spoil anything here, Mina’s triumphant ending is its biggest surprise of all. It may set up more questions than answers, but this conclusion and the run up to it is undoubtedly one for the books, full of excellent twists I didn’t see coming. And darkness – “Tenebrous Isles” is accurate. Look it up.

To get to that ending takes a while, too. After 23 hours, I rolled credits with 72% completion and immediately started into New Game+ to find all the stuff I didn’t the first time around. Those 23 hours were more than enough for me to fall head over heels for Mina, but there’s a lot more, too. You can go for 100% completion within your original save thanks to a clearly labeled point of no return – but what’s interesting is that, since your completion rate and all the treasure you’ve found will carry over into New Game+, you can continue to chip away at that 100% goal in your new save as well. Returning to boss fights with all your gear or noticing that crack in a wall you forgot to delve into the first time around is a blast. I’ve never played a game that allows you to do a second playthrough with a bunch of chests sitting there open, while others remain undiscovered. It’s extremely cool.

On top of that, each New Game+ through the seventh run has unique permutations: The initial version I’m on now has far fewer save spots, making runbacks an absolute killer (which, blissfully, is not a concern at all in the base playthrough). And for you oldschool cheat code fans, there’s a massive menu of modifications to turn on and off, which range from goofy to helpful. You can even toggle on a sort of "God mode" for when you get stuck – just remember that this disables the “Feats” (achievements) system. I left it alone for that reason, but started a new save up just to mess around with it, and it’s fantastic for making Mina more accessible.