But that doesn't mean that Bearded Ladies' latest doesn't deserve a look, if this kind of game is usually to your taste. Especially if - for you - percentages are simply part of the turn-based tactics experience, if you like to plan your turns meticulously, and you love to save and load your games a lot, while exploring every nook and cranny of a game world, Miasma Chronicles might be your Eldorado.

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum unfortunately didn't turn out to be "my precious" and only rarely manages to captivate. Dramatic bugs and performance problems abound.

Competent and pretty-looking retro shooter with great splatter effects and decent length. Not all weapons are equally useful, though, and the pathing and encounter design is sometimes confusing. This is still an easy recommendation, though, if a 40K Boomer-Shooter sounds like something you would like.

Of course, this isn't really that sophisticated in terms of gameplay, but Resurgence's story and characters really shine, by skillfully continuing on from an early TNG episode. If you're like me and you're a fan of the TNG era, you'll probably really suck this one right up.

Is Lego 2K Drive something you can make your kids happy with? Yes, absolutely. And what about the adults? Well, if you look beneath the surface, you'll notice that not everything is perfect. In some situations, the controls could be a bit more sensitive, the power-ups could have more impact, and the rubberbanding is a bit too noticeable.

There's a lot to like about this pretty, wordless puzzle platformer, but you'll complete many of its repetition-prone puzzles on autopilot. It's heartfelt, but nowhere near as impactful as Limbo or Inside.

It doesn't quite deliver the punch of its predecessor, and right now I'm having a hard time imagining that there's anything more to come out of *this* Hyrule than we got with Tears of the Kingdom. With any luck, we'll find out later this decade. Until then - see those mountains over there? It's never been easier or more fun to try to reach them.

Mato Anomalies is a JRPG with a good battle system and interesting ideas. Unfortunately, their implementation remains mediocre due to the monotonous gameplay.

Showgunners is a fast-paced, often surprising mix of turn-based tactics and real-time exploration in a scenario reminiscent of The Running Man and other 90’s movies aesthetics. Smooth controls and well-crafted characters are cornerstones of the generally familiar XCOM-like.

Arkane’s expertise in crafting an immersive sim does shine through, but a lot of Redfall’s mechanics, including the four-player co-op experience, feel undercooked and even faulty, resulting in a surprisingly mediocre first-person shooter in a bland open world playing field.

Just leave me here, on these lush, gigantic worlds, and I'll be too well entertained to over-analyze Survivor's certain lack of precision or it not exactly inventing all these mechanics anew. I am docking a point for the technical state it is launching in, though.

Although Age of Wonders 4 may seem at first overwhelming, it's actually not. Many automatisms help beginners, and gradually you'll be able to abandon them if you want to. In the end, its great flexibility offers an enormous replay value and encourages you to try out all possible combinations.

All in all Stray Blade is a passable game that plays well. Unfortunately, it doesn't make it easy for you to master its battle system, asi t never quite strikes a perfect balance. Furthermore, more variance wouldn't have hurt the fights, the story is okay at best and the fact that I can only create new equipment myself isn't really satisfying either.

Its lacklustre looks notwithstanding, this is a wonderful turn-based tactics game that's just as much fun as back then on the Game Boy Advance.

Basically, a lot of it feels like a game from 10 years ago, when all of the many, many other games in the genre didn't yet exist in their modern form (...) Dead Island 2 exists, it looks nice and the zombies pop in a satisfying way. Maybe that's all the boxes this game ever needed to tick.

Not only have these JRPG-bedrock games never looked or sounded better, they also give you all the comforts you could ever want, to experience them again.

Constantly jumping between a number of simultaneously running programs feels shallow at times. The quick problem solving though cleverly translates the glorified idea of what live hacking might be like into a unique and engaging breed of puzzle game and resource management.

Rockfish put Everspace 2 together with insanely good intuition. They blended components that, in lesser hands, could have either seemed conveniently stolen together or difficult to reconcile and made them into a wonderfully coherent whole. The result is a game that repeatedly makes you forget about time, while you fly from one pulp sci-fi poster into the next, with your mouth wide open.

A good DLC tidbit for a small price, but with only one new campus and no gameplay effects in other levels it also doesn't offer too much content.

A nice re-release of the PS2 original with slightly improved graphics and PSVR2 support, but without new content it doesn't quite live up to its potential.

The rally aspect suffers from the openness of the tracks, the game world is not very exciting, but it includes a lot of new content and comes with the usual good gameplay.

Paranormasight features a multi-layered story with interesting insights into Japanese myths, even though it promises more than it delivers in terms of content and gameplay.

There aren't many games like this on consoles. It's all the nicer that the conversion of Transport Fever 2's PC version is largely successful, apart from a few performance problems. Once you get the hang of it, you can easily create transport lines and build your own logistics empire from the 19th century to the present day.

Dressed up for the present, old strengths preserved, a perfectly executed balance of trash and elegant horror shooter. Resident Evil 4 is still the most straight-up fun outing in the series.

So yes, ultimately you're left with a game that, despite all the considerable possibilities of the likeable main character, overall plays out the same way too often. However, that doesn't mean I didn't have fun with this. The scenario is fresh and the breadth of Tchia's abilities interesting enough to get you far enough in that'll want to see it through to the end.

A good conversion of the PC city builder for consoles, which also unfolds its addictive potential there. The controls work well, but unfortunately the season passes will not be released for consoles.

An entertaining, humorous and demanding first person shooter. Fashion Police Squad captures the classic Doom style shooting quite well and adds a good dose of colorful madness on top of it.

I’m glad to have finally played Mask of the Lunar Eclipse as it’s a fine sample of classic survival horror following the style and motifs made popular by the Ring movies. Game mechanics are clearly outdated though, both regarding exploration as well as combat, and fighting the apparitions is more of a matter of landing satisfying combo hits than it has to do with overcoming spine-chilling terror.