At its best, the game leaves you by your lonesome to get to know the “deep blue” sky as intimately as possible.

Bowser Jr.’s Journey is engaging as a real-time army-versus-army game. Because your party automatically runs toward enemies in the style of the opening scene from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, you only have control over small but crucial elements of the skirmishes. Through punctual button presses, you can help your troops score critical hits, interrupt your foes’ techniques, and provide temporary buffs. Managing your forces here provides an interesting change of pace from the more unorthodox madness of Bowser’s Inside Story, cementing this release as the ultimate version of a pop masterpiece.

It takes more than a little bit of programming genius to allow a game as simple and accessible as this to still keep the door open for in-depth competitive play.

It doesn't matter how cool an individual set piece looks if all the smaller scenes leading up to it are marred by unresponsive vehicles, dumb AI, and shoddy physics.

It's tough not to imagine how a sequel could improve the writing and the exploration to realize what is, at this point anyway, mostly just a lot of potential.

There's little to love about Darksiders III, even for longtime fans.

It’s a visually rich release that’s bound to appeal to new and veteran players, but it’s also one of the shallowest remasters this console generation has seen thus far.

Battlefield V‘s failure to communicate, whether the emotional disconnect of each War Story or the difficulty of organizing your fellow soldiers in a Grand Operation, is the crippling problem that holds the game back from greatness.

Imagine reaching the final minutes of an hour-long mission only for your connection to drop and, in turn, your progress to be lost. Overkill’s The Walking Dead certainly stokes the player’s despair, but not the sort that its developers intended.

All the flair that’s been added to the base game lays bare what’s been deliberately and inexplicably left out, like online multiplayer.

Even if the lavish detail, excellent writing, and world of possibility within vivid levels mostly just refine what came before, that’s because IO Interactive have all but perfected what they set out to achieve in Hitman: Codename 47 nearly 20 years ago.

It's a spin-off of a spin-off that improbably couples the lighthearted but surprisingly complex mechanics of the free-to-play multiplayer Gwent: The Witcher Card Game with the dark, moral storytelling of Wild Hunt.

This compilation of Diablo III and its expansions underscores how far the gothic hack n' slash series has fallen.

The game tends to dole out the narratively driven elements of Edward’s sleuthing in frustrating half measures, before suddenly blooming into a straight-up survival-horror experience in its second half.

After a while, the experience of playing the game can feel akin to being dropped into a TV show's previously-on segment.

Red Dead Redemption 2's evocative, often beautiful sense of place exists insofar as it is still convenient to the player, which harms some of the desperation and hardship the game means to convey.

Where SoulCalibur VI goes for broke are the areas that make its vibrant world and its motley crew of characters endearing to the capable but casual player.

The Missing's self-harm mechanic is deliberately uncomfortable and inscrutable, as the disturbing process clashes with its bizarre, often humorous results.

Before you know it, Starlink turns playing with toys into something that feels an awful lot like work.

There’s no doubt that Super Mario Party is at its best with a couchful of friends, but even 2v2 matches in which you have to play with the computer AI are passably done.

This is a vast swords-and-sandals epic that’s rendered in the finest of details, and there’s little else like it. Seeing it through to conclusion, however, has a major cost: your money or your patience.

Despite occasional success in its stripped-down, straightforward approach, it suggests that maybe simplicity and escapism has limitations of its own.

Japan-based developer Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea 1 Complete, an HD re-release of 2003’s Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, presents grinding as a spectacle of artful, sometimes comical, excess.

But the game’s most egregious wrong is its stiff controls, which are reminiscent of those in Mega Man 7, the worst title in the series.

It's a shame that Dragon Quest XI, despite being the most visually sumptuous Dragon Quest title to date, doesn't do more to strike a bolder, more mature path within a tired series.

The greatest thing in Forsaken is its Gambit mode, a hybrid competitive/cooperative mode where teams of four kill enemies for motes of light, and deposit as many as possible into a portal, which sends bigger enemies to the enemy team's arena. It's a refuge of pure brilliance, a reminder that Bungie can please everyone, and do it rather elegantly, but perhaps maybe not on the scale of an entire, living universe.

In regard to Shadow of the Tomb Raider's gameplay, there's no doubt that Crystal Dynamics has perfected the kind of game that Tomb Raider should be in the 21st century.

Punches fly faster this time around, and Yakuza Kiwami 2 re-introduces features from earlier games, like a wider moveset and the ability to store weapons.