And for a fiver on Steam, the spots you end up with genuinely do look lovely. There’s a real knack to the way it’s all put together, the kind of thing that makes you want to sit back and just look at your own campsite for a bit once you’re done, rather than immediately packing it in for the next one. It’s a proper little dollhouse-em-up (it’ll catch on), and when it’s working, it’s a nice place to switch your brain off for twenty minutes.

The trouble is I Know a Spot doesn’t always get out of its own way. The interface is the first snag, and it’s a fairly serious one. It’s easy, too easy, to back out to the main menu without quite realising that’s what you’ve done, and doing so wipes out everything you’ve just spent half an hour building. There’s no warning, no “are you sure”, just a quiet little reset of your afternoon. For a game built entirely around unhurried, low-stakes creativity, that’s a genuinely bruising thing to run into, and it happened to me more than once before I learned to tread carefully around every exit prompt like it was live wiring.

Then there’s the lighting, which stings a bit more because it’s tangled up in the whole appeal of the thing. You get lanterns, torches, all sorts of lovely little light sources to dot around your spot, exactly the kind of stuff that should turn a decent-looking campsite into a really atmospheric one once the sun goes down. Except you can’t actually switch any of them on. I went looking to make sure I hadn’t just missed a button somewhere, and found other players asking the exact same question on the game’s own Steam forum, unanswered, with nothing to suggest it’s been addressed since. Your car headlights do work, so there is light in the world, it’s just coming from your car rather than the lantern you carefully placed by the tent. So instead of the gently glowing night scenes the concept practically begs for, you get a car park situation, lovely wide dark, and one narrow beam pointed at whatever happens to be in front of the bonnet. Considering the nicest photos are taken at night, the lighting shortfall is what burns the most. It could’ve had battery-pack-powered string of LED lights, working lanterns and so much more, but… no. Just the headlights and the campfire, which is pretty in itself but doesn’t quite cut enough mustard.

Since launch there’s also been an open world mode added, letting you just drive off and find your own spot rather than picking from the preset locations, which is exactly the sort of thing this game should be building towards. Have a proper poke around the edges of it, though, and you can break straight out of the intended map and end up stranded in a bare desert with the game’s entire asset library hovering above you like some sort of anti-gravity jumble sale, tents and lanterns and folding chairs just drifting in mid-air with nowhere to land. It’s the kind of thing you stumble into by accident rather than go looking for, but it rather undercuts the sense that this is a finished, polished little world you’re pottering about in. And no, before you ask, the post-update lamps still don’t switch on out there either. Just the car.

It’s a shame, because take those things away and this is a genuinely relaxing way to spend a bit of time. The building itself feels good, there’s a decent spread of gear to decorate with, and hopping between locations, preset or self-found, keeps it from going stale too quickly, at least across a session or two. It’s the sort of game that’s very much at its best in short, unhurried bursts, ten or fifteen minutes here and there rather than a big sit-down session, and taken like that, it mostly delivers on what it says on the box.

Whether that’s worth six out of ten depends on how forgiving you’re willing to be about a cosy game tripping over its own furniture, both figuratively and, in the case of that floating desert, quite literally. I’ve landed on it being worth that mark because what’s actually here, the building, the atmosphere, the general vibe of the thing, does work when it’s allowed to, and the price is very friendly. But I’d go in knowing you’re getting a demo of a really nice idea rather than the finished, cosy dream it’s selling on the store page, and be careful with the menu buttons, because the game certainly won’t remind you to.

Not for everyone, especially if losing an evening’s work to a stray menu click is going to properly wind you up, but if you can treat it as a chill little sandbox rather than something you’re building toward, there’s a nice spot in here somewhere.

Reviewed on PC

The first thing you notice pulling it out of the box is how light it is. There’s a real feather-light-nearly-forgot-it’s-there quality to it, and that lightness isn’t just a spec sheet boast, it actually changes how the headset behaves on your head over a long session. No creeping ache across the top of your skull, no need to keep readjusting every twenty minutes, no slow realisation halfway through a race that your ears have gone numb. It’s the kind of thing you only really appreciate by comparison, and once you’ve worn something this light for a few hours, going back to a heavier headset feels like strapping a brick to your head.

The design itself won’t turn any heads, and that’s clearly deliberate. No RGB, no chunky premium materials, just a clean plastic shell in either Carbon or White. There’s a small yellow accent around the earcup hinges that stops it looking totally utilitarian, but otherwise this is a headset that knows exactly what it is and isn’t trying to convince you otherwise. Build quality is solid enough too; it survived being tossed in a bag, sat on by a 12 year old (my clumsy son, not a random kid I borrowed for the experiment), and shoved off my desk at least three times by my cats, without so much as a creak.

Comfort holds up throughout a session, not just for the first twenty minutes. The earcups form a proper seal, insulating you nicely from the outside world, which is a genuinely nice surprise at this price point; a lot of budget headsets let outside noise leak in around the edges, but this one shuts the door properly. Good news if you share a house with someone who likes their TV loud, or a cat that’s decided 2am is conversation time. The fabric-covered padding stays breathable too, so you don’t end up with that sweaty, overheated feeling that some pleather earcups are guilty of after an hour or two.

Sound-wise it punches well above its price bracket. Positional audio is sharp, footsteps and distant gunfire land exactly where they should, and dialogue comes through clean rather than muddy. It’s tuned more for clarity than any real bass rumble, so it’s not going to replace a proper set of top-end cans for kicking back with an album, but for actually playing games it’s doing more than a headset at this price has any right to. The removable microphone matches that energy too, handling squad chat and Discord calls without the thin, tinny problems you sometimes get further down the budget ladder. Nobody’s going to mistake it for a proper streaming setup, but for actually being heard clearly by your mates, it does the job without complaint.

Battery life is a genuine strength as well, easily lasting through long sessions without needing a top-up, and the tri-mode connectivity (2.4GHz, Bluetooth, wired) means it’ll happily hop between your PC, console, and phone without much thought. There’s also no fiddly software to wrestle with. Plug in the dongle, or pair over Bluetooth, and you’re off. No firmware updates to chase, no companion app demanding your email address before it’ll let you adjust an EQ slider. It just works, which sounds like faint praise until you remember how rarely that’s actually true.

Now, the caveat, and it’s a proper one if this applies to you. The headband is adjustable, technically, but only via the elastic inner band, and mine arrived already sitting at its longest setting. It still fit, just about, but there was no room left to give if I’d needed it. If you’ve got an average or smaller head, you’ll likely never notice this. If you’ve got a bigger head, though, this is a genuine ceiling rather than a gentle limit; there’s no secondary adjustment point to fall back on, and once you’re maxed out, that’s it. This isn’t a minor nitpick I’m tossing in for balance, it’s the one thing that could make this headset a non-starter for some people regardless of how good everything else is. Try it on, or at least check sizing carefully, before you buy if you’ve had fit issues with headsets before, because there’s no fixing it after the fact.

So where does that leave it? A lightweight, comfortable, well-sealed headset with sound and mic quality that consistently overdelivers for the price, dragged down only by a headband that doesn’t leave much wiggle room for bigger heads. If you fall inside the sizing sweet spot, and most people will, this is an easy one to recommend, genuinely one of the better budget wireless options going right now. If you don’t, that one issue is significant enough to actually change the calculation, so weigh it up before you buy rather than after.

Reviewed on PC

I adored Disco Elysium. Properly, obsessively adored it, to the point where I’ll admit I sat down with Esoteric Ebb half braced to be disappointed by the comparison everyone’s already made. I wasn’t.

Esoteric Ebb is a single-player CRPG from solo developer Christoffer Bodegard, and it wears its Disco Elysium inspiration proudly: dialogue-first, skill-check-heavy, with your own stats chiming in on conversations like a chorus of increasingly unhinged advisors. The setup has you investigating a tea shop bombing days before Norvik’s first ever election, a city on the Esoteric Coast still finding its feet after a magical war, with your goblin companion Snell along for moral support and the occasional withering aside. It’s not chasing Disco’s exact register, all post-Soviet melancholy and washed-up detective ennui, it’s playing in a much sillier fantasy sandbox, but the bones underneath, that sense of your own skills bickering with each other in your head, are unmistakably from the same family.

Character creation is proper tabletop stuff. Every stat you neglect will find a way to humiliate you later, whether that’s a Strength check on a stuck door or a Dexterity roll on something as basic as climbing down a ladder. I built mine leaning hard into Charisma and Intelligence and paid for it constantly, in a good way; there’s real pleasure in a game that lets you build a character who’s brilliant at talking their way into trouble and hopeless at getting back out of it. The dice are visible and honest about it too, so when a roll goes badly you’re never left wondering whether the game stitched you up or you just built your cleric wrong from the outset.

Norvik itself is doing a lot of the work here. It’s a city trying to hold itself together in the aftermath of a war fought with magic rather than muskets, now lurching towards its first ever democratic election, and every side conversation seems to have an opinion on how that’s going. Snell, your goblin companion, ping-pongs between genuine warmth and biting sarcasm depending on how your investigation’s going, and never feels like a tagalong there purely to explain the plot to you.

Where it splits from its obvious influence is combat, which actually exists here and is handled through proper encounters rather than being talked around entirely. It’s not the main event, and it doesn’t need to be, but it’s a smart addition that gives the dice rolls a bit more bite when things go sideways, and it means a badly failed check can escalate into something you actually have to fight your way out of rather than just a worse line of dialogue.

The writing is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting, and it holds up: funny, political without being preachy, and generous with the kind of throwaway detail that turns out to matter three conversations later. It’s a bureaucratic-fantasy-conspiracy-em-up (it’ll catch on), and genuinely one of the sharpest scripts I’ve sat through this year. Side characters get proper arcs rather than existing purely to hand out quests, and the tea shop bombing itself unravels in directions I didn’t see coming, which is rarer than it should be in a genre this stuffed with red herrings.

There are some rough technical edges and the odd graphical hiccup, but genuinely there’s so much here that just works perfectly there’s very little room for complaint. It’s the first game since Disco Elysium I’ve finished and immediately wanted to talk someone’s ear off about, which for me is about as high a compliment as I’ve got.

Reviewed on PC

#DRIVE Rally, from Polish developer Pixel Perfect Dude and published on console by PM Studios, cashes a decent chunk of that goodwill in, even if it never quite spends the lot. This is the follow up to Pixel Perfect Dude’s mobile hit #DRIVE, and after a long stint in Early Access on PC it’s finally made the jump to PS5 (Xbox and Switch owners get it too). It knows exactly what it’s trying to be: a bright, breezy, 90s-throwback rally game where the point-to-point stages matter more than the story, because there isn’t one.

That’s not a criticism in itself. Plenty of great arcade racers have got by on vibes alone, and #DRIVE Rally has vibes to spare. You pick a team, each with its own chattering co-driver, and set off across a string of fictional but clearly rally-inspired locations, everything from sun-baked desert roads to icy forest stages, in cars that look suspiciously like an Audi Sport quattro or a Renault 5 Maxi Turbo wearing a fake moustache. It’s cheerfully unlicensed and better for it. The colours pop, the dirt kicks up nicely, and there’s a genuine sense of speed even when you’re pootling along at what a real rally driver would consider a Sunday drive.

Where it lands, tonally, is somewhere between Assetto Corsa Rally (which is genuinely brilliant, go and play that too) and the Dirt series, but nowhere near as polished as either. It’s lighter than AC Rally by design and rougher round the edges than Dirt by circumstance. The handling model is where this is most obvious. It’s accessible almost to a fault, closer to Sega Rally all those years ago than anything with actual weight transfer to worry about. Give it half an hour and pretty much anyone can be sliding round hairpins and feeling like they know what they’re doing, which is a real skill on the developers’ part, but it does mean the driving never gets much deeper than that first impression. There’s a floaty-arcadey-pretending-to-be-Group-B-em-up going on here (it’ll catch on), and once you’ve clocked how forgiving it is, the challenge mostly evaporates.

The visual style is cool but basic. It leans into a flat-shaded, slightly toy-like look that suits the retro pitch well enough, and the lighting does some heavy lifting when the sun’s coming through the trees. But there’s not a huge amount going on underneath it, and a few hours in you start noticing the same rocks, the same fences, the same bit of scenery recycled down every other stage. The co-drivers, who should be doing a lot of the personality work here, end up being part of the problem rather than the solution. The pace notes are fine when they’re needed, but the actual character chatter repeats itself far too readily, and after enough events you’ll be reaching for the mute button rather than enjoying the company.

Repetition is the word that kept popping into my head, if I’m honest. The championship structure asks you to do broadly the same thing across every team, just with a different coat of paint and a marginally faster car, and #DRIVE Rally doesn’t do enough to disguise that. It’s the sort of game that’s a genuine joy for a weekend, less so as a long-term project. On PS5 specifically it runs smoothly enough day to day, though I did notice some scenery popping in a beat later than I’d like.

None of that stops it being good fun in short bursts. There’s real charm here, and if you’re the kind of person who just wants to chuck a colourful little car sideways for twenty minutes without thinking too hard about it, #DRIVE Rally will happily oblige. It’s not going to replace your Dirt or your Assetto Corsa Rally, but it’s not trying to. It’s trying to be the game equivalent of watching old rally footage and grinning, and on that measure, it mostly succeeds.

Reviewed on PS5

Developed by Neurona Games, this is the Football Manager pitch applied wholesale to esports: you’re taking over an existing organisation or building one from scratch, scouting real players, negotiating contracts, hiring coaches and analysts, and steering live matches yourself through a semi-3D Simulation Mode rather than just watching numbers tick over. There’s no story mode and no game over screen, just the long grind of trying to build something that doesn’t collapse under its own budget. So far, so reasonable.

The scope is genuinely impressive. Real organisations, real pros, a transfer market that actually feels alive, and a backroom staff system where hiring a sports psychologist isn’t a luxury, it’s damage control after a bad losing streak. When it clicks, it clicks hard, the kind of one-more-contract-em-up (it’ll catch on) that eats an evening before you notice.

The problem is getting to that point. The tutorial covers the absolute basics and then leaves you to work out the rest yourself, and the rest is a lot: training plans, morale systems, sponsorship deals, tactical prep, all stacked on top of each other with very little signposting for which of them actually matters most to a fledgling team. I spent my first few hours making decisions with no real sense of whether they were smart or just plausible-sounding, which isn’t the same thing as difficulty done well, it’s just a confidence trick the game hasn’t earned yet.

The map veto screen is an obvious offender. The game clearly wants you to know your squad’s strengths and weaknesses cold, picking and banning based on which map each player actually performs on or which ones you maxed out on in your training half an hour ago, but there’s no percentage breakdown or form indicator anywhere on that screen to tell you. You’re expected to have that knowledge in your head already, built up from matches you’ve watched or training you’ve set up, which is a big ask when the whole appeal of a manager sim is that it should be doing some of that number-crunching for you. A simple win-rate-per-map readout next to each player’s name would have sorted this out in an afternoon’s patch.

The live match commentary is a similar story of good idea, patchy execution. It’s a genuinely nice touch having a duo call the action while you tinker with tactics in Simulation Mode, and it does a decent job of making a screen full of stats feel like an actual match. The trouble is the pool of lines is small enough that you’ll hear the same reactions to the same situations within a handful of games, which undercuts the atmosphere it’s clearly going for. Great idea, needs a much bigger script.

If you already live and breathe the Counter-Strike scene, you’ll likely fill in the gaps the tutorial and the map screen leave behind through sheer familiarity. If you’re coming in cold, be ready for a rough opening stretch before any of it starts making sense, but also be ready for a weird draw that means that despite the flaws and confusions, there’s a very strong “one more match, maybe I’ll win this one” about things that made me keep going back.

Reviewed on PC

Built by Velan Studios, it’s a rail shooter through and through, and a confident one. You pilot the Arwing through short, tightly designed levels full of enemy waves, asteroid fields and boss encounters, swapping in the Landmaster tank for ground based stretches and the Blue Marine for a couple of surprisingly atmospheric underwater levels. The vehicle switching does a lot of work keeping things fresh across a fairly short runtime, and every level has a clear shape to it, a proper build from opening skirmish to a boss that actually tests what you’ve learned along the way.

The core toolkit is simple but well judged. You’re flying at rings mid-flight to keep your charge shot topped up, weaving through debris fields while managing when to unload a fully charged blast versus just spraying standard fire, and there’s a real rhythm to reading incoming waves and picking your moment. It’s not a complicated system on paper, but the pacing within each level makes sure you’re never just holding the fire button and coasting through.

Visually it’s really nice. The Lylat System is rendered with real personality, Corneria’s cityscapes and Zoness’s grim, polluted oceans both look like someone genuinely cared about making a rail shooter’s backdrops worth looking at rather than just something to fly past. The orchestral score backs it up nicely, and the fully voiced cutscenes and mission briefings give Fox, Falco and the rest of the crew a bit more bite than I expected from what’s essentially connective tissue between shootouts. Their bickering actually landed some jokes.

Mechanically, it’s tight. The Arwing feels responsive in exactly the way a good on-rails shooter needs to, barrel rolls deflecting fire with satisfying precision, boost and brake giving you just enough control over pacing within levels that are otherwise dictating your path for you. Branching routes reward exploring or shooting the right things mid-level, and I found myself replaying stages just to see where the other paths led, which is the sign of a rail shooter doing its job properly.

I did try the new mouse-style aiming on offer with the Joy-Con 2, mostly out of curiosity, and bounced off it within a couple of stages. It’s a neat idea on paper, more precision for the charge shot, but it fights against the flow of a genre that’s normally about reading the whole screen rather than fine aiming at one spot. Standard controls did everything I needed.

Where it lost me a bit was the checkpointing. Die partway through a level or during a boss battle, which happens plenty given how unforgiving a single hit can be, and you’re often sent back further than feels fair, redoing a stretch you’d already cleared cleanly. It’s an old-school-punishment-em-up (it’ll catch on), and while I don’t mind a game that expects precision, there’s a difference between demanding skill and just eating your time. A few more generous checkpoints would have made the tougher stages feel challenging rather than repetitive.

New content beyond the main campaign is mostly parked in the online multiplayer, a competitive battle mode with a handful of maps that’s a decent bit of extra value without being the main event. It’s the kind of thing you’ll dip into for an hour after finishing the campaign rather than something that’ll hold you for weeks, but as an add-on to a game this short, it’s welcome padding rather than filler.

At its asking price, this sits a smidge below other first-party Nintendo efforts, and given how tight and replayable the campaign itself is, that feels fair rather than steep.

If you’re after a short, sharp, gorgeous rail shooter with real personality and a soundtrack worth turning the volume up for, this delivers. Just brace yourself for the odd stage you’ll be replaying more than once.

Reviewed on Switch 2

Megapop’s underwater reef-builder swaps concrete and traffic lights for coral polyps and sea sprites, and the pitch is simple: instead of building a city that exploits its surroundings, you’re restoring an ecosystem that’s already been trashed. You seed coral, attract species, balance food chains, and watch a barren patch of seabed slowly turn into something worth protecting. It sounds like it could be worthy in a bad way, the sort of thing that lectures you between menus, but it never does. The message sits quietly in the background, the same as everything else here.

And what a background it is. This might be the best-sounding management game I’ve played in years. Julie Buchanan’s soundtrack does that rare thing where it’s clearly been composed with real care rather than looped out of a stock library, swelling gently as a new species arrives, dropping to something barely-there while you’re just pottering about placing rocks. I’d have a vinyl pressing of this on the shelf  alongside my gaming soundtrack collection the second it existed, it’s that good. Pair that with genuinely gorgeous art, all dappled light and drifting particles, and you’ve got a game that’s less “build the optimal reef” and more “sit in this really nice aquarium for a few hours.” I had it running in the background more than once just to enjoy the vibe while I did something else, which probably isn’t the intended use case but says a lot about how well it’s put together. Megapop have also quietly gone in and tightened up the audio systems since launch, and if anything it sounds even better for it.

The mighty upgrade and research tree gives some freedom to develop your reef in your own way, although initially this is locked behind a preset sequence of unlocks to teach you the ropes, something that stops the potential for overwhelming confusion early on. But it opens up quickly and hints at what’s to come, more and more plants, corals and upgrades to bring in a wider variety of fish, plants and useful improvements. It takes a while to learn what all the different symbols mean, and a few hours in you’ll find your screen swimming in them, but pay close attention to the on-screen prompts and you’ll be figuring it out quickly enough.

Where it wobbles is the hazard system. Oil slicks, temperature swings, lionfish infestations, and the dreaded garbage patch roll in periodically to test your reef, and in principle that’s fine, a bit of jeopardy stops the whole thing turning into a screensaver. In practice, some of these events hit like they’ve wandered in from a much harder game, and it’s a well-worn complaint among players that an early garbage patch can wipe out a reef before you’ve unlocked anything that can actually deal with it. It’s a proper drifting-along-em-up that occasionally turns into a getting-flattened-by-a-truck-em-up (it’ll catch on). The early hours don’t do a brilliant job of signposting what’s coming either, so you can end up scrambling to counter a threat the game hasn’t really explained yet, which sits awkwardly against how gentle everything else feels. It’s worth saying though that Megapop have been actively patching this since launch, tying hazards to how developed a zone actually is so they shouldn’t blindside you quite as early, and there’s now a proper “easy” Calmer Waters mode that stretches the gaps between events and keeps them at their gentlest. It’s the right instinct for offering the kind of game any would want from this, and it’s the kind of post-launch care that’s easy to take for granted.

None of that sinks it, though. Once you’ve got a few zones established and a rough handle on what each hazard wants from you, Life Below settles into a lovely rhythm, more about nurturing than min-maxing, more about watching things grow than chasing a perfect layout. It’s not going to satisfy anyone after the deep systemic crunch of a proper strategy game, but it doesn’t pretend to. What it does instead, better than almost anything else out there, is make you care about a coral reef.

The slow pace and quietly judgy context won’t be for everyone, but if you want a management game that’s actually about looking after something rather than squeezing it dry and rinsing the population for everything its got, this is a lovely one to sink into.

Reviewed on PC

You play as a private investigator who receives a letter from one Brás Cubas, a wealthy, arrogant and deeply unpopular Rio tycoon, informing you that he’s been murdered and would very much like you to find out who did it. Fourteen suspects, one day, and a time loop that resets at midnight each time you run out of road. It’s a brilliant setup, and for the first several hours, The Posthumous Investigation absolutely earns it.

Mother Gaia Studio, the Brazilian indie team behind it, have done something remarkable with the world. The hand-drawn black and white art is immediately striking, the noir atmosphere of 1930s high-society Rio is beautifully realised, and the writing weaves in characters and details drawn from Machado’s other works, like Dom Casmurro and The Alienist, in a way that makes you want to actually go and read them afterwards. You’re piecing together a proper web of grudges, secrets and motives, and for a while it feels like a genuinely brilliant clue-chasing-and-gradually-crumbling-em-up (it’ll catch on).

There are a couple of grumbles. The game markets itself as light on hand-holding, which isn’t entirely honest. Every time you reset your loop, Brás Cubas pulls you into a debrief and walks you through your evidence, more or less telling you what to do next. Your clue tooltips chip in too, as do your suspect profiles. I ended up deliberately ignoring Cubas and skipping my own notes just to preserve a bit of detective agency, which is a mildly odd thing to have to do in a mystery game.

The back half also leans into repetition more than it needs to. What starts as an atmospheric whodunnit gradually becomes a run-across-town-and-show-someone-a-piece-of-paper-em-up (it’ll catch on, probably). There’s one particular alley you’ll visit so many times you’ll start mentally furnishing it. The time loop is a genuinely clever mechanic, and the game mostly uses it well, but by the final few hours it starts to feel a little more like a commute than a puzzle.

Neither of those things undoes what The Posthumous Investigation gets right, and it gets a lot right. The setting is wonderful, the premise is one of the most original in the genre in years, and the literary angle gives it a flavour you won’t find anywhere else. There’s real craft here, and a genuine passion for the source material that comes through in every scene.

If the idea of a noir mystery set in 1930s Brazil, built on books you’ve probably never read, sounds like exactly your kind of evening, it almost certainly is.

Reviewed on PC

EA Sports UFC 6 is a significant step forward for the franchise, delivering the most polished and immersive mixed martial arts experience that EA has created to date. While previous entries laid a solid foundation, UFC 6 builds on those mechanics with smoother gameplay, improved visuals, more realistic fighter movement, and a deeper career mode. Although there are still areas that could be improved, the game succeeds in capturing the excitement, strategy, and unpredictability of the UFC better than any previous instalment.

One of the biggest improvements is the striking system. Punches, kicks, elbows, and knees feel far more responsive than before, allowing players to chain together combinations naturally. Every strike has weight behind it, making fights feel intense from the opening bell. Timing and precision are rewarded, meaning players cannot simply button mash if they want to succeed against tougher opponents. Counter-striking is especially satisfying, with well-timed punches capable of changing the momentum of a fight in an instant. And momentum is key here – punching while moving is costly, well, if you’re on the receiving end of it. A player moving forward hitting you will do a lot more damage, and my way of playing UFC 5 has seen me lose more than my fair share of games on UFC6.

The fighter animations are significantly improved, and UFC 6 really captures all the movement and atmosphere of a fight. This is helped by the visuals as a whole – they are outstanding. Fighter models are incredibly detailed, with realistic facial expressions, tattoos, and body movements. Damage accumulates naturally throughout each fight, with cuts, bruises, and swelling becoming increasingly visible as the contest progresses. The arenas are faithfully recreated, and the crowd atmosphere helps make every fight feel like a genuine UFC pay-per-view event. The improved lighting and presentation also enhance the realism, making each walkout and fight introduction feel authentic. Even the most recent UFC White House venue is in the game. Very cool.

One of the most controversial mechanics is the grappling system. It has seen improvements, although it remains one of the more challenging aspects for new players. Transitions are smoother, submissions feel more tense, and ground control requires genuine strategy rather than repetitive inputs. Experienced players will appreciate the extra depth and feel at home immediately, whilst newcomers may need time to understand the mechanics. Fortunately, the game’s tutorials do a reasonable job of explaining the fundamentals, making the learning curve less intimidating than previous titles and this is certainly evident online where most players I’ve encountered seem to have a decent idea of how to defend the most simple ground attacks.

Sound is brilliant as well. Like a lot of EA sports games these days, the commentary is excellent and adds excitement without becoming overly repetitive, while the crowd reacts dynamically to big knockdowns, submission attempts, and dramatic finishes. The impact of strikes is accompanied by convincing sound effects that make every punch and kick feel powerful. Together, the visuals and audio create an immersive presentation that closely resembles a televised UFC broadcast. But whilst the fighters and sounds make it feel ‘real’, some visual elements do not.

For a start, every limb health, overall health, stamina and block health are always on screen, so it looks a bit like a 2D fighter with multiple coloured bars. It’s useful, for sure, but takes away some immersion. Then there is Flow Mode. Flow mode is activated by your fighter building up a bar akin to their fighting style. A striker for example might build for clean hits, whereas another fighter may build their bar by defending and dodging. Once full, you can activate for a number of different benefits – extra stamina, less damage etc – and the entire screen except your fighter goes black and white, with exaggerated sound coming from your fighter and enhanced visuals. This is to try and capture the feeling of fighters being ‘in their flow’ – multiple examples of which have been seen in real-life UFC. And it sort of does work

– it highlights the moment, but it feels extremely ‘fighting game’ and not ‘MMA simulation’. The community seems extremely displeased and the developers have promised drastic changes in this place, which could change the game.

Career Mode is one of the strongest parts of the game. Instead of simply progressing through fights, players are given greater control over their fighter’s development. Training camps, skill progression, recovery, and fight preparation all contribute to long-term success. Decisions made outside the octagon have meaningful consequences, encouraging players to think strategically rather than rushing from one fight to the next. The mode offers a satisfying sense of progression as your created fighter develops from an unknown prospect into a championship contender.

There is a story mode too, seeing you take on the role of an up and coming MMA fighter. Cutscenes play out quite a fun story, but once you get to the UFC it becomes essentially the same as the Career Mode.

Customization options are extensive but sadly they are broadly the same as the last few games – even including the same suite of tattoos and hairstyles. It does allow for a personalised experience however, and you can compete online in the Online Career. This mode sees you taking your created fighter and upgrading their stats and abilities through frequently performing moves. I love this mode and it has been my main go-to in previous games, so I’m glad that it remains in UFC 6 and thankfully, the online gameplay is superb. Matchmaking is generally reliable, and victories feel rewarding. Having access to all of the health bars seems to be making strategic gameplay a bit easier to plan and adjust to mid-match, and I’ve had some incredibly competitive matches. Thankfully, fight stoppages due to damage seem a bit less frequent too.

A nice addition is the UFC museum mode. This has you walking round one of three museums each dedicated to a UFC star, with video walls playing which talk about their past, and classic matches, as well as giving you an option to replay certain ones. This is an amazing addition, and the care taken to showcase the likes of Max Holloway is fantastic – I can see EA adding this feature into other sports games to celebrate stars in the future.

It’s not all glowing though. Minor niggles exist – for some reason, the game has a sort of metagame where you can ‘coach’ players when you’re away from playing, which upgrade them. I don’t know what the point of this is, but the menu system for it is so excruciatingly slow, I’ve avoided it aside from the first few hours of gameplay.  The grapple system will also come under fire I suspect from returning players – personally, I quite enjoy it, but can see that a return to the system from UFC 4 and earlier is favoured by many, so folks may be disappointed that the system is largely unchanged for UFC 6.

Overall, EA Sports UFC 6 is an excellent sports game that successfully captures the intensity, technical skill, and drama of professional mixed martial arts. The improved striking, refined grappling, impressive graphics, engaging Career Mode, and competitive online play combine to create the strongest UFC game released so far. I’m really excited to see what changes come down the line – in past additions there have been many gameplay tweaks, with new fighters and arenas added, as well as the expected changes to flow mode.

Whether you are a long-time fan of the UFC franchise, an avid MMA enthusiast, or someone looking for a challenging and rewarding fighting game, EA Sports UFC 6 is well worth playing.

Reviewed on PS5

Schrödinger’s Call comes from Japanese studio Acrobatic Chirimenjako, and it sets out its stall almost immediately: the moon is about to crash into Earth, and in the 21 nanoseconds before everything ends, Mary becomes humanity’s last confidant. Guided by a cat called Hamlet (let’s face it, more cats should be guiding lost souls through the apocalypse), she answers calls from spirits stuck between life and death, each carrying some unresolved grievance they can’t quite let go of. Your job is to listen. Properly listen.

That opening hour is rough in the best possible way. You’re thrown in with no real idea what you’re doing, fumbling through your first calls and watching people slip away because you didn’t say the right thing, didn’t ask the right question, didn’t notice the detail that mattered. It feels less like a tutorial and more like genuine failure, and that’s exactly the point. By the time you start understanding the rhythm of it, you’ve already felt the cost of getting it wrong, and that makes you want to get it right for everyone who calls after. It’s a clever bit of design dressed up as despair.

The notebook becomes your best friend here, scribbling down names, dates, throwaway comments that turn out to matter three calls later. Conversations overlap and double back on themselves, and there were several points where I genuinely couldn’t tell if I was talking to a spirit or just Mary’s own fractured memory talking back to her. That ambiguity is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it works. If there’s a phrase for what this is, it’s probably a grief-counselling-em-up (it’ll catch on), and I mean that with total sincerity. Every call is somebody’s unfinished business, and the writing trusts you to sit with that rather than rushing you towards a tidy resolution.

The music deserves its own paragraph, frankly. It shifts from unsettling, almost glitchy tones during the more uncomfortable conversations to something genuinely soothing once a soul finds peace, and it does more emotional work than half the dialogue. I’ve had bits of it stuck in my head for days. Do yourself a favour and play this one with headphones on. Through speakers it’s good, through headphones it’s a completely different experience, every glitch and soft piano note suddenly sat right inside my head where it belonged.

It’s not flawless. Quit out at any point and you get a “you will lose unsaved progress” warning with zero indication of how much progress that actually is. Five minutes? Forty? No idea, and that uncertainty sat awkwardly against a game that’s otherwise so careful about how it treats your time and attention. A simple “your game was last saved 3 minutes ago” would’ve sorted it.

But that’s about the only real complaint I’ve got. The pacing dips occasionally when flashbacks repeat themselves, and this is absolutely not a game for anyone wanting mechanics, action or a quick fix. But if you’re willing to slow down and actually listen to what these lost souls have to say, Schrödinger’s Call rewards you with something that’s stuck with me more than most games manage in twenty times the runtime.

It’s not for everyone. It might be exactly what you need.

Reviewed on PC