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It's been obvious for a very long time that Lego games iterate more than innovate. If you pick up a Lego title, you are guaranteed a wholesome romp in whichever licensed universe is at hand. Everything is breakable and spits out glittery, golden collectibles when destroyed. Beloved characters are Lego-fied and reenact their famous antics with an extra dollop of cartoon absurdity. Those qualities remain appealing, but every so often, developer Traveller's Tales stumbles onto an idea that requires an extra bit of creativity to really make it sing. Sometimes TT steps up to the plate, like it did for Lego City Undercover and Lego Dimensions. Other times, well, it doesn't. It's a little sad to see Lego DC Super-Villains fall into the latter category.

The issue here really comes down to the premise. The idea of subverting the Lego Batman playbook and making a game that's all about DC Comics villains is a great one in theory. However, opening up the game to the entire roster of DC villains has the unfortunate side effect of highlighting just how weak DC's broad slate of evil is. Sure, you're doing fine when you've got The Joker using Lex Luthor as a straight man, or when big, unique baddies like Sinestro and Gorilla Grodd start showing up, but much of the game's story mode has you saddled with third-string riff-raff like Heat Wave and Malcolm Merlyn for extended stretches. Somehow, both Captain Cold and Killer Frost figure heavily into the main story, but the far more compelling Mr. Freeze doesn't.

There's a fertile concept in the idea of the loser villains hatching a plan to head up to the big leagues, but the actual plot takes a far less interesting course: The Justice League gets captured and replaced by the Justice Syndicate, who comic fans probably know as the Crime Syndicate of America, a super-powered group from alternate dimension Earth-3. On the surface, it looks like the Syndicate is doing a great job cleaning up crime, but the Syndicate's going a lot harder on the bad guys than the League ever would, leading the Legion of Doom to gather up a slew of recruits and take the fight to the Syndicate.

The wild card would appear, at first glance, to be you. At the outset, you get to create your own custom villain who ends up joining the Legion. It's an impressive slew of options you get at the start of the game, and an even more extensive selection is available as you play, earn more powers, and unlock more parts. Everything from your villain’s haircut, to their weapon of choice, which arm they use to shoot energy at their enemies, to even what that energy looks like can be customized. It’s an extensive collection of options from the moment you start the game, and almost intimidatingly vast by the end. My first villain took maybe an hour to create and be happy with, after which I watched as my lovingly crafted superhero was sidelined for most of the story.

Unfortunately, your custom villain is not the star of the game--they don't even have a voice--and no matter how badass you make yourself, all the other villains simply refer to you as Rookie (except for Harley Quinn, who calls you Dr. Doesn't-Talk-Much). You're occasionally called upon to use your technical skills to open a specific door, and you are able to absorb new powers along the way, but for the most part your budding baddie has almost no impact or meaningful presence in the story. Instead, most of the game's levels boil down to a formula: A group of one or two big-ticket villains and one or two small-timers go to a familiar locale--Gotham, Metropolis, Smallville, Belle Reve prison--to free some more of their criminal friends, and run into some of the remaining small-time heroes in the process, e.g. the Teen Titans or Nightwing.

The moment-to-moment gameplay remains as simple and accessible as ever; combat boils down to spamming a single attack button, with the safety net of infinite lives, and there's some very rudimentary platforming. Finding secrets usually just means running around breaking everything until a shiny new toy pops out. There's nothing really wrong with that by itself, given the Lego games’ appeal to a younger audience, and watching Lego structures explode into a million pieces really hasn’t lost much of its innate joy, even after all this time. The problem is, only a few esoteric sliding tile puzzles differentiate the game mechanically from things the Lego Batman games were doing 10 years ago.

The level design in particular is a major strike against the game. It attempts to evoke a sense of chaos and disorder for the villains to feel at home in, but everything is so cluttered and elaborate, it's hard to know what's breakable and what's not, which character you're controlling, and what you can actually interact with. The wanton destruction that’s kind of Lego’s bread-and-butter loses something when the area being destroyed looks like a mess to begin with.

The villains themselves are well-animated, and great care has gone into differentiating the hundreds of playable baddies from each other, be it all of the Joker's attacks ending with theatrical flourishes, Killer Frost's ballerina moves, or Gorilla Grodd being able to literally leap over tall buildings in a single bound. There's a ton of overlap from the small-timers, though, and the alternative choices don't provide you with a reason to want to use them. Even the relatively easy attention grab that comes from having much of the voice cast from both the Superman and Batman Animated Series from the '90s show up--including Mark Hamill's iconic Joker, and a delightfully up-for-anything Michael Ironside reprising his role as Darkseid--doesn't quite land due to the more interesting villains taking a backseat.

Playing as all villains, you'd think there'd be more opportunity to wreak havoc on Metropolis or Gotham City, even if it's in an E-for-Everyone kind of way, but there isn't. The best part of the game is once the main story is over and you can just roam around the rather expansive open areas at will. Any and all villains unlocked during the game are accessible, and there's tons of little sidequests and races to take on. This is always the best part about the Lego games, though.

Ultimately, Lego DC Super-Villains goes down as another cookie-cutter Lego game, and while there's still plenty of merry mayhem to unleash, it's the same kind of mayhem we've seen before. What should be as wild and riotous as the Clown Prince of Crime comes off as just another mild-mannered reporter.

When it comes to delivering a memorable and tense experience, not many games can match up to the original Dark Souls. Many fans swear by the approach From Software takes with its stoic and uncompromisingly bleak action-RPG series where one wrong move can cost you dearly, and it's become one of the most challenging and anxiety-inducing franchises in recent memory. Coming off the recent release of Dark Souls Remastered on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, the Souls series now brings its particular style of high-pressure gameplay to the Switch--marking its first appearance on a Nintendo console.

While this new release isn't as visually and technically impressive as the other current-gen versions, it is an admirable port that reinforces what makes Dark Souls memorable. It effectively makes use of the Switch's capabilities as a portable console, which in turn offers a slightly different feel to the Souls experience that's surprisingly refreshing.

As a recap, Dark Souls Remastered is an enhanced port of the original 2011 game. On PC, PS4, and Xbox One, the remaster runs at 4K and at 60 FPS and features a much sharper visual look, along with a suite of quality-of-life improvements--such as improved matchmaking with dedicated servers and a variety of gameplay tweaks. The Switch version is very much in line with what came before. However, due to the limitations of the system's hardware, it's seen some clear downgrades compared to the previous Remastered releases.

While playing through the Switch version, it felt closer to the original PS3 and Xbox 360 releases, albeit far more stable. Running at a consistent 30 FPS, the docked version of Dark Souls on Switch displays at 1080p, with the handheld mode set to 720p (the same resolution as the original game). Aside from the drop in resolution, general frame-rate between docked and handheld is largely consistent, which is great when swapping between the two modes during a session.

If you're used to Dark Souls Remastered running at 60 FPS on the other platforms, the Switch version will take some time adjusting to. In addition to some fairly short draw-distances on environmental details, the audio quality sounds far more subdued and quiet compared to other releases. While this doesn't happen often--and most times isn't that noticeable--it can create odd moments where some sound effects get drowned out by others, or when there's a slight delay in hearing a sound effect. Moreover, playing in docked mode with the Joy-Cons can often induce some lag with the camera controls, which can be a dire issue during careful platforming or an intense combat encounter. Fortunately, the Day One patch does work to address these issues to success, but some of the technical hiccups still linger.

Despite these rough edges, Dark Souls on Switch is an impressive port that manages to keep the Souls experience intact for its new platform. In a surprisingly neat feature, it's possible to pause the game when playing in the offline mode by backing out to the Home menu or setting the system to sleep. If you're planning to take Dark Souls mobile, then you'll more than likely make use of the offline mode often, and the Switch feels much more suited to.

To properly put this version through its paces, we journeyed to one of Dark Souls' most notorious levels, which frustrated and unnerved many players upon its original release. Blighttown, the derelict shanty town full of diseased creatures, was a nerve-wracking descent into a grotesque atmosphere filled with narrow walkways and an infamously unstable frame-rate. Many years later, it's still among one of the most game's most memorable and feared areas. The Switch version is fortunately able to keep a stable 30 FPS throughout, which includes the depths of Blighttown.

While there are noticeable dips during some encounters, particularly during bosses and set-pieces that have lots of action, the Switch handles the true Dark Souls experience quite well. The most notable success that Dark Souls Remastered has on the Switch--aside from the sheer fact that it runs properly on the hardware--is how it can feel like more of an involved journey. This is mostly due to how it works in handheld mode, allowing you to play Dark Souls on the go. As a returning player, it often felt like I was bundling up with an engrossing book, voraciously exploring and unearthing the game's many locations.

In an interesting way, playing in handheld mode can make for a more personal experience with Dark Souls, which is something that's entirely exclusive to the Switch release. While the portability feature of the console can often feel overstated for other games, it truly does amplify the core of what Dark Souls is all about. Over the course of your personal story in-game--which is on a road paved by defeat, small victories, and occasional humiliation--you'll eventually come to a major win, making the challenging journey feel worthwhile.

While Dark Souls Remastered on Switch possesses some odd quirks and isn't as technically impressive as its current-gen counterparts, it still retains the heart of what the original game is all about. To this day, Dark Souls remains a watershed moment for the action-RPG genre. Getting to re-experience many of the game's most nerve-wracking and iconic moments can be satisfying in its own right, but coupled with the Switch's flexible playstyle, this equally haunting and triumphant game becomes an even more involved journey.

With the Witcher trilogy, developer CD Projekt Red established that it's capable of making compelling role-playing games with tough decisions, hearty combat, and engrossing lore. In Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, all but one of these aspects has persisted. This prequel is as captivating narratively as some of the Witcher series' best tales, filled with gut-wrenching decisions that have far-reaching consequences. The only difference is that instead of fighting with a sword, you battle with cards. Thronebreaker is an intelligent spin on the collectible card game Gwent and manages to transform its simple premise into an enthralling tale of family, loyalty, and hardship.

You play as Queen Meve, ruler of the lands known as Lyria and Rivia, on the eve of the great Nilfgaardian invasion. These ruthless imperials sweep across the land like a plague, decimating villages and their citizens and using underhanded tactics to wrestle control of kingdoms away from their rulers. Meve and her forces, returning home after another lengthy war, get caught in the middle of the invasion. With traitors around every corner and spies lurking in the shadows, you'll have to make difficult decisions about who to let into your party and who to cut ties with permanently as you rally together a guerrilla army to snuff out the Nilfgaardian invasion and rally support for a full-blown counterattack.

Thronebreaker's tale involves an entirely new cast of characters (with some notable cameos here and there) which is fully voiced throughout the 25-hour campaign. The interplay between Queen Meve and her trusted subjects is notably strong, with exceptional writing bringing each character's motivations and principles to life. Meve isn't as blank a slate for you to project upon as Geralt is, but Thronebreaker gives you room to work in her decision-making. The choices you make are painted with the same grey brush that The Witcher is known for, with no one choice promising a better outcome than the rest. Leading a dwindling army into battles with impossible odds puts an incredible amount of responsibly on your shoulders, and choosing when to be empathetic and when to be ruthless has some fascinating repercussions--both immediately and far further into the story.

You command Meve through multiple large open areas, each bearing a distinctive visual aesthetic and characters to interact with. These areas look like pages ripped from a concept art book, with stunning watercolors and brush strokes bringing sun-kissed pastures and bubbling swamps to life with impressive detail. The cel-shading on Meve and supporting characters helps define them against the background while giving them all distinctive appearances, but it can be slightly jarring when brought into focus during serious conversations. Thronebreaker is a tour around some of The Witcher's most engrossing landscapes, and it's a treat to see them from a different view.

Each area plays host to the many story battles you'll need to undertake to progress, but also numerous side missions and collectible content. Side quests can be as simple as making decisions to solve petty quarrels or as involved as hunting down dragons in dark caverns at the request of terrified villagers. Each quest has a story to tell, which can either affect the mood of your troops, bestow you with important rewards such as gold and wood, or introduce new special characters into your ranks. Skipping them can have consequences too, with characters reacting to the people you help and the bounties you choose to take. It makes Thronebreaker's world feel incredibly reactive to your choices, compelling you to take care with how you handle each of them.

You'll also need to gather resources in the vein of gold, wood, and requisitioned troops to better establish your fighting force. Constructing new attachments for your base camp can help you grow your deck of Gwent cards with new characters and abilities, ranging from simple Lyrian forces to noble dwarves and stealthy elves. Thronebreaker doesn't make you feel the need to scour each corner of the map for resources, instead giving you more than enough on the critical path alone. But seeing your small army grow with each passing area is rewarding, as are the effects it has on your abilities to fight with your chosen cards.

Thronebreaker interweaves Gwent into its story in smart ways that keep it from feeling like an intrusive method for resolving combat situations, helping you learn its intricate systems while engaging in unique quests and rulesets.

Units have a variety of abilities that can be triggered in a number of ways, many of which can be chained up with other units to create devastating combos during a single turn. Since Gwent isn't just about dolling out damage and more about field control, striking a balance between cards that damage your opponent and ones more adept at raising your personal score is paramount. Thronebreaker's shifting priorities in combat prevent the flurry of battles from wearing thin, with only a few resting on the basic rules of Gwent alone. Some standout fights had me chipping away at individual cards that made up the body of a dragon, with each piece having its own attributes that either damaged my cards or healed others. Thronebreaker contextualizes the rules of each of its encounters to fit the purpose of the story in clever ways. This makes playing Gwent consistently rewarding and helps avoid the potentially deflating transition from a rousing ride into battle to a simple game of cards on a table.

Playing Gwent in Thronebreaker can often feel like a reintroduction to the game with its new rules and stipulations, and that comes with the cost of some quests that feel too easy. On the default difficulty, most core quests won't trouble you enough to make meaningful decisions about the composition of your deck, which saps some life out of the overarching metagame of having to use resources to acquire better cards. Optional puzzle encounters make up for this though, giving you a specific deck to work with in uniquely tailored challenges. These encounters are the best learning tools Thronebreaker has to offer, exposing you to complex card combinations as a requirement to win. Often these challenges lead to card unlocks for Gwent's online component, so you're encouraged to take them up as often as they present themselves.

Don't be tricked into thinking Thronebreaker is simply a lengthy tutorial for what is to come when Gwent opens its multiplayer. Its tale is mandatory if you're looking for more Witcher lore to chew on and manages to engage you with a strong cast of well-written characters and a suitably dark plot that challenges your morals every chance it can. Thronebreaker interweaves Gwent into its story in smart ways that keep it from feeling like an intrusive method for resolving combat situations, helping you learn its intricate systems while engaging in unique quests and rulesets. Gwent was a side attraction in The Witcher 3, but through Thronebreaker, it's blossomed into something new that stands on its own as a proud member of the Witcher family.

After nearly a decade, the end of the Game of Thrones TV show is in sight. Fortunately, fans of the series have new things to look forward to, but even for those with faith in George RR Martin, the prospect of a new Song of Ice and Fire novel looks increasingly unlikely. Similarly, what the future holds for video game adaptations of the franchise is unclear. Telltale is all but dead, and for a series that has proven to be such a phenomenal success in other mediums, it's surprising that there haven't been more game adaptations. Reigns: Game of Thrones may not be the Elder Scrolls-style RPG you're hoping for, but it does nonetheless offer a welcome use of the license--even if it does occasionally stumble with repetition.

Reigns: GoT has you take on the role of king or queen of Westeros. You're faced with a series of situations, and you respond to each card that pops up with a binary choice by swiping left or right. Your decisions impact four different meters you must constantly balance: military, religion, citizens, and money. It sounds simple, but you have to prevent all of these meters not just from emptying, but also from filling all the way up. Becoming overwhelmingly popular with the people sounds great, but it's a one-way ticket to losing your throne thanks to jealous lords who launch a coup. You're able to preview the impact of any decision, but you're only told which meters will be affected and whether it'll be a minor and major effect, not whether it will increase or decrease.

This results in a certain amount of guesswork when you're initially presented with any scenario, which can lead to a swift death--I've had runs end with my very first swipe. In time you'll develop an understanding for how to approach situations, and the challenge comes in being prepared for anything. You're never sure what opportunity or obstacle lies around the next corner, and deftly handling whatever is thrown at you is the key to success.

As is appropriate for Game of Thrones, no character is untouchable, and that's true for each of the rulers you can play as. Like in the previous Reigns games, your death is the very likely outcome of any run, but it comes in many forms, and discovering them all (whether it's contracting greyscale, getting lost in the tunnels of the Red Keep, or being burned to death by wildfire) is one of the most entertaining aspects of the game. It's a rarity that death is a legitimately enjoyable moment in a game, but that's undoubtedly the case here.

That's thanks in large part to the excellent writing. Despite each card consisting of a few sentences at most, characters are colorful, distinct, and full of personality. And although the subject matter is often serious, and the world brutal, the game manages to maintain an air of lightheartedness throughout. Some part of that is due to the apparent decision to leave out the sexual assault and rape that is a common element of Martin's novels and the TV show. The game is better off by not trivializing these things by having you respond to them with a Tinder-style swipe, and their absence makes you feel no less like you're inhabiting the world of the books and show.

The use of well-established characters is thankfully not heavily reliant on quotes or wink-wink references to the show, like you might expect. While it makes sense that your own ruler's personality is dictated by your choices, there are the occasional moments where characters feel less like themselves and more like generic individuals who share the name and look of their book/show counterparts, but these instances are few and far between.

Reigns: GoT embraces its non-canonical status, building loosely on the state of the world from Seasons 6 and 7 and allowing it to expand in many different directions. You're able to make decisions that run contradictory to what we know about these characters; there's nothing stopping you from making Cersei into a benevolent leader or Jon Snow into a materialistic jerk. You will face resistance where you'd expect; Winterfell is not inclined to take kindly to Cersei's attempts at diplomacy. This helps to deepen the sense that you are occupying this world, and not one that just happens to have characters whose names you recognize.

The game is well suited to mobile, where you can quickly knock out a brief run. It's designed to be replayed over and over as you take different paths and try different rulers and approaches. In time, you recognize patterns and scenarios that emerge repeatedly, and playing begins to feel like exploring an elaborate maze. You can't save your progress during any run, so you're unable to do the old choose-your-adventure book trick of peeking ahead to see if you're making the "wrong" choice. While there were times that I wished I could place a bookmark I could return to in order to see how differently things could have played out, the absence of such a feature provides a weight to each of your decisions. You'll just have to live (or, well, die) with your decisions, whether or not you like the outcome.

As with discovering the many deaths that await you, much of the fun comes from finding every corner of the maze, rather than successfully navigating your way out of it. The threat of the White Walkers is constantly looming in the background, and some runs do prove to be repetitive and dull, offering nothing new to see or do. But more often, you'll be faced with some well-written scenario to see through, be it a war with Dorne, the threat of the Greyjoys, or experiments with wildfire. While this could have felt directionless, vaguely described optional objectives--win a tavern brawl, make Dothraki pie, and so on--provide you with a loose path to pursue as you seek to check everything off your list.

While the Game of Thrones license is the headlining feature, there are some advancements here that provide welcome variety and iterate on the formula established in Reigns and Reigns: Her Majesty. You'll periodically have the opportunity to pick from a handful of branches of a decision tree (though these still lead to swipe left or right choices). Slightly more elaborate sequences have you making a series of decisions that, rather than directly affect your four reputation meters, determine whether you successfully complete a long trip or win a battle. In the latter case, you'll have to make tactical decisions about which of your forces to use against specific opponents. StarCraft this is not, but these sequences help to break up the action and make these moments feel like the significant events that they should.

Reigns: GoT is by no means perfect. It doesn't lend itself to long play sessions thanks to the potential for repetition, which can make the action feel tedious. But that's ultimately a minor quibble for what's a genuinely fun experience: a choose-your-own adventure where you're faced with non-stop decisions and a seemingly endless combination of ways for things to play out.

As a continuation of the Black Ops subseries, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 both benefits from and is limited by its past. All three of its major modes--multiplayer, Zombies, and the new battle royale mode Blackout--pull from and build upon previous games. Multiplayer is largely successful in its mix of old and new, while Zombies struggles more with dated elements. Blackout, though, strikes an excellent balance, putting a clever Call of Duty spin on a genre entirely new to the series.

While Black Ops 4 doesn't have a traditional single-player campaign, it does have a helpful set of character-focused tutorial missions. Called Specialist HQ, it introduces you to each of the 10 multiplayer Specialists one by one, taking you through their unique abilities and a practice multiplayer match. It does have a bit of a story and some gorgeous (and gory) cutscenes threading each mission together, but it's all in service of getting you acquainted with the new Specialist mechanics--which is well worth the three or so hours it takes, since some of those mechanics appear in Blackout as well. One mission even weaves in a bit of general Zombies training, an unexpected but welcome touch that helps make the largely separate modes feel a little more cohesive.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is the most straightforward of the modes, and Black Ops 4 attempts to be more tactical than previous entries. The wall-running and thrust-jumping of Black Ops 3 is gone, replaced with weighty, grounded movement, and healing is now manual and on a cooldown timer. The combination forces you to be more thoughtful about your positioning, since you can't just jet and dodge enemy fire until your health regenerates--you need to make sure you have adequate cover and time to heal yourself in your immediate vicinity. This encourages a slightly slower, more cautious pace on an individual level, and it's refreshing to play it smart instead of just fast. But time-to-kill is still low and respawning still near-instant, ensuring that matches don't stagnate.

The more tactical feel extends to the Specialists, which build upon those introduced in Black Ops 3. Each has a unique weapon and equipment with a specific combat focus, like area control or high damage output. Each Specialist's weapon is tied to a longer cooldown and functions as a superpowered attack (or defensive ability, in some cases), while their equipment varies from a special grenade to trip mines and other gear with a clear strategic purpose. This includes roles other than offensive ones--there's even a pseudo-healer Specialist, Crash--and it's a change that gives multiplayer more variety.

Certain Specialists and strategies are more useful in some game types than others, though. Area control is best for objective-based modes like Domination, for example, and far less effective in the more scattered Team Deathmatch. Generally, your choice of Specialist and your team's composition won't matter in any mode if you aren't skilled in basic shooting and positioning, even if you're in a more defensive or supporting role. This means you can play selfishly and still emerge victorious, which works well for those of us who often solo queue and would rather not risk trying to communicate with randoms. But it can also make playing support-focused Specialists less rewarding if you aren't working as a team, since your efforts are useless if your teammates don't take advantage of them. It's a surprisingly good balance overall, though, giving you the flexibility to be only as tactical as you want or are able to be and enjoy the match regardless.

The map design, too, facilitates that flexibility. Each map has areas perfect for different Specialists to take advantage of, like blind corners where Nomad's trip mines can take enemies by surprise or high ceilings where Recon can shoot and hide his Sensor Dart that reveals enemies on your radar. But the long and narrow three-lane structure each map is built on is a strong foundation for more traditional shooting as well, with both long sightlines good for sniper and tactical rifles and tight spaces for close-range automatic weapons.

The Specialist strategies are best showcased in the new Control, an objective-based mode in which each team, one attacking and one defending, shares 25 lives. You win by either exhausting all of the enemy team's lives or gaining or maintaining control of the two objectives. A defensive Specialist like Torque, who has Razor Wire perfect for placement under windows and a Barricade "weapon" for extra cover, is a great option if you're trying to hold an objective, for example. An offensive Specialist, on the other hand, can aim to wipe out the enemy team.

Zombies

Black Ops 4's Zombies is as broad as it is deep, with two separate storylines across three maps (or four if you have the Black Ops pass included in the game's special editions). The first two, IX and Voyage of Despair, are part of the brand-new Chaos story, while Blood of the Dead and Classified round out the selection of maps to make up the returning Aether story. All of them follow the familiar Zombies formula--fighting waves of the undead, saving money to access better weapons and new areas, and uncovering wacky secrets and puzzles along the way--but each has its own quirks that take time and effort to discover.

The Chaos maps are strong aesthetically, with rich level design and clever puzzles to match--draining water that has seeped into the Titanic's depths so you don't drown while searching for other secrets, for example. Like previous Zombies maps, a lot of the fun comes from figuring out how the map ticks while also trying not to die, and both IX and Voyage of Despair have the complex layouts that lend themselves to thorough yet hectic exploration. Voyage is a personal favorite, with narrow, creepy hallways and presumably drowned zombies that have water gushing from their heads.

On the Aether side, Blood of the Dead is based on Black Ops 2's Mob of the Dead, while Classified is a reimagination of Black Ops' Five. Although they're definitely familiar, there are still surprises to entertain returning players--some puzzles don't unlock what you expect them to unlock, for example. However, the Ultimus crew hasn't aged particularly well, even considering that each of them is stereotyped to the extreme. The jokes just don't land anymore, especially Takeo's overdone Japanese accent where Ls are replaced with Rs at every opportunity. In Blood of the Dead it's distracting, but in Classified, lines about the Emperor and eating sushi are just plain offensive. You'll also hear these same lines every time you start a new run, which doesn't help.

On top of the already hefty amount of Zombies content, Black Ops 4 introduces a new mode of fighting the undead, Rush. It's a much faster-paced version of Zombies where you don't have to do any thinking or puzzle-solving; you're just there to kill them horde-style. There's no money, so you don't need to save up to buy a weapon or unlock a door. You're instead told which area will have the next Rush wave, and you're directed from room to room as you go. It's too intense to be a tutorial, per se, but it's a great way to familiarize yourself with the map, test weapons, and plan where to go next if you get stuck in Classic mode.

Blackout

The third and most exciting of Black Ops 4's three main sections is, of course, Blackout. Like other battle royale games, Call of Duty's take puts 100 players on one map with the goal of being the last person or squad standing, and a collapsing circle of death forces you in closer and closer proximity. It's unlike anything Call of Duty has done before, and slight alterations to its mechanics, like the addition of bullet drop on some weapons, help it adapt to the very different gameplay style.

Brilliantly, experience in both multiplayer and Zombies benefits you in Blackout. Perks and Specialist equipment can be looted during a match, and knowing how to both use and counter them can give you an advantage. There are also zombie-infested areas that offer powerful loot at the risk of attracting human players to your position, and that PvE twist in particular helps distinguish Blackout from the likes of PUBG. A successful Blackout round can last over 20 minutes, so if you're impatient or more used to Call of Duty's shorter multiplayer formats, seeking out zombies and causing a ruckus mid-match is a great way to see more action.

The map itself is also distinctly Call of Duty, filled with references to previous games, including the fan favorite Nuketown. Vibrant and varied design makes each region stand out from the next, and the map as a whole is easy to navigate as a result. That in turn facilitates the strategic movement and positioning necessary to succeed; it's easy to pivot if a lot of other people are nearby, for example, if you know where you are in relation to the next-best loot area.

The combination of Call of Duty-specific mechanics with PUBG-style health, loot, and shooting systems is executed well, with quality-of-life improvements to UI--notably, you can quick-equip weapon attachments without going into your menu. The twists are balanced, too, and the Specialist equipment in particular doesn't make things feel unfair. Like in multiplayer, you can ignore anything you don't want to bother with, and survival ultimately comes down to your situational awareness, your skill with various weapons, and a bit of luck with looting and the circle. That makes victory feel earned and, as a result, immensely gratifying--Blackout definitely captures the tense, shaky excitement that makes battle royale such a popular genre.

Black Ops 4 isn't short on content, and its three main modes are substantial. Multiplayer introduces more tactical mechanics without forcing you into them, and it largely strikes a good balance. Zombies has multiple deep, secret-filled maps to explore, though its returning characters don't hold up and prove distracting. Finally, Blackout pushes Call of Duty in an entirely new direction, making use of aspects from both multiplayer and Zombies for a take on the battle royale genre that stands on its own. Sure, there isn't a traditional single-player campaign, but with the depth and breadth of what is there, Black Ops 4 doesn't need it.

What truly distinguishes SoulCalibur from its genre contemporaries is a pervading sense of adventure. It tells a grand tale of knights and ninjas, axe-wielding goliaths and pirate warriors, all struggling over mythical weapons of good and evil. It accents this with a rousing orchestral score and grandiose narrations about entwined destinies and inescapable fates. Sure, deep and rewarding mechanics are at the heart of every good fighting game--and SoulCalibur VI certainly has that--but for this series, adventure has always been the soul.

That spirit of adventure is most evident in SoulCalibur VI's two story modes. Libra of Souls is the meatier of the two and takes inspiration from SoulCalibur II's beloved Weapon Master Mode. It's part fighting game, part role-playing game, part Dungeons & Dragons campaign; you create your own unique fighter using a creator that, while serviceable, isn't nearly as robust as the one in Bandai Namco's other fighter, Tekken 7. From there you embark on a journey that will take you across the world, and along the way you'll cross paths--and swords--with both named characters and generically named bit-parters.

Libra of Souls tells its story primarily through text, but it's all surprisingly engaging, with dialogue and descriptions setting the stage for the inevitable fight and giving even its throwaway opponents a bit of flavour. The story's conceit for making you travel around the world is that you're "malfested" with an evil energy and must absorb Astral Fissures to stay alive. Although you're ushered between main quest missions, various side-quests pop up around you, with NPCs asking for a hand solving their problems. Naturally, the solution each time is a sword-swinging contest, but the game does a valiant job of world building along the way to give texture to its fantasy universe. You'll learn that Ceylon is a major producer of cinnamon, which is favoured by royalty and thus very precious, and that hamlets are being decimated by a rampaging Azure Knight with a thirst for souls. You'll meet a would-be entrepreneur who, while affable, is mostly after handouts; a weaponsmith who is looking to impress the royal family to win a contract; and a priestess who doubts her abilities, among others.

Completing these missions rewards you with experience that levels you up, and this is where the RPG hooks are strongest. As you grow, you'll be able to use stronger weapons that have different visual styles and properties. Enemies also become hardier and, on top of that, special battle conditions spice up fights. These may make one type of attack more effective while decreasing the strength of others, thus forcing you to diversify your skillset within the battle system. Another wrinkle to the RPG mechanics is the ability to select a food item to take into battle. These bestow bonuses such as increased counter damage, a boost to health at the start of a new round, or extra experience for a win, to name a few. If you’d rather let someone else do the dirty work, you can visit the Mercenaries Guild and hire a fighter, outfit them with a weapon and food, then send them into battle. At best the AI will secure a victory; at worst they’ll knock off some health from the enemy before you step in.

There are also little touches in Libra of Souls that reinforce the idea that you're a wandering warrior on an epic journey. One of them is an indicator at the top of the world map that ticks down the years as you progress, establishing a passage of time as you bounce between locations and fights in rapid succession. Another is the decision-making moments, some of which will simply dictate how you act towards a character, while others will weigh your soul towards good or evil, impact the story, and decide how the ending battle plays out. The eventual consequence of your actions is small, but it's a neat way to give you a tiny bit of authorship in the story.

The main issue with Libra of Souls is the ratio of storytelling to actual gameplay. The mode is very text-heavy, which would be less of a problem if its battles weren't so quick. In the hands of a capable fighting game player, many enemies can be dispatched within as little as 10 seconds, which means time spent in Libra of Souls is heavily skewed toward reading over fighting. And although the loading screens before and after battles are quite short, they can become increasingly tedious. The mode is also lacking in variety, so beyond the occasional battle condition, it does very little to keep you on your toes. For the most part, applying an aggressive strategy will see you emerge victorious.

The second mode, Soul Chronicles, is a more typical take on a fighting game story but is still expansive and has an interesting approach to laying out its narrative. It features a main story that chronicles what happens with the legendary Soul Edge but supplements this with 19 character-specific campaigns, drilling down on what they're doing while the broader story takes place. Although they're heavily reliant on static artwork, they're fully voiced and the artwork itself has an eye-catching, sketch-like style. There's a microcosm of Libra of Souls' issues here too, though, as battles can be over in the blink of an eye, and that means more hitting buttons to advance text.

Nevertheless, Libra of Souls and Soul Chronicle make for a satisfying single-player offering, with the former lasting upwards of eight hours and the latter taking around four. Idiosyncrasies aside, both give you plenty to do and provide a comprehensive, engrossing story throughout. By the time it's over, you'll have travelled the world, met a variety of colorful characters, and fought all manner of strange creatures. Quite the adventure.

SoulCalibur VI doesn't demand hours of study and experimentation ... you can pick up a controller and feel like you're competent in no time

The beauty of SoulCalibur's gameplay is its simplicity, and in that respect SoulCalibur VI is a bit like rock-paper-scissors. At its most superficial, the rules of engagement are simple and the pace of battles means decision-making is based on instinct as much as considered tactics and being reactive. Admittedly, the same can be said of most fighting games, but unlike them SoulCalibur VI doesn't demand hours of study and experimentation to do this; you can pick up a controller and feel like you're competent in no time. Although there are complicated systems and techniques to consider, an inability to interact with them doesn't loom over you. Before long vertical attacks will reveal themselves as powerful but slow, you'll quickly realise that horizontal attacks interrupt sidesteps and are a safe way to apply pressure, and kicks are a nice balance of the two but with limited range. It takes little time to internalize those fundamentals, and so their intricacies become apparent quicker than in most fighting games. Throw in blocking and movement, both of which are intuitive, and the pick-up-and-play factor becomes a key strength of SoulCalibur VI.

The surface simplicity belies more complex systems beneath, and SoulCalibur VI is mechanically dense. It layers systems from throughout the series on top of each other so even veterans will need to examine the individual pieces and figure out how they fit together. Although each character has a relatively limited range of attacks, the eight-way run movement lets you modify them. Attacks also land at different heights--high, mid, and low--and in turn blocking becomes a three-tiered system. More confident players can react to an attack by executing a last-second Guard Impact to repel and leave their opponent open, but a staggered player can retaliate with a Reversal Impact--a reversal reversal.

From there it only gets more complicated. Reversal Edge is a special stance that will counter incoming attacks at any height. It's executed with a single button and the longer it's held the more attacks it can absorb. This makes defending against an onslaught of attacks really easy, but the ease of execution means it also steps on the toes of the more skill-based Guard Impact. Reversal Edge seems to be aimed at casual players as, while a successful Guard Impact places the initiator in a more advantageous position, Reversal Edge establishes a neutral playfield by initiating a clash. Here the action slows, the camera swoops in close, and the two fighters effectively bet on what the other player will do and counter it. This is a useful way to create some breathing room when being smothered, but the guessing game leads to a feeling of randomness that can be frustrating. The workaround here is to land an unblockable break attack to stop a Reversal Edge.

Beyond that there are Critical Edges, which are the game's equivalent of super moves. These are governed by the Soul Gauge, which is built up by attacking, defending, and taking damage. Once one level is attained, it can be spent on executing an incredibly powerful and outlandish cinematic attack. A Soul Gauge can also be spent on a Soul Charge, a comeback state of sorts that opens a separate set of moves up for a character to use, powers up normal attacks, and makes them cause damage to blocking opponents for a brief period.

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Those are just a few of the systems in SoulCalibur VI, so for those that want to become students of the game, it offers plenty to learn. However, at times it can also feel needlessly complex. This is likely a symptom of creating a collection of systems that give the hardcore fighting game players the depth they crave while also enabling casual players to stand their ground against them. On paper that might seem like a good approach, but the end result is a construction that is at odds with itself, as if built out of both K-Nex and Lego--the simpler parts undermine the complex ones, and although it works, it's inelegant. A good player with an understanding of all the systems will almost always triumph over someone only making use of the basic ones, so the biggest issue this superfluousness presents is that it makes the path from casual to expert a little less appealing to walk. That complexity is overwhelming when it doesn't need to be, and if there are simpler and easier options there's less incentive to dig beneath the surface.

SoulCalibur VI is a fighting game that's easy to recommend. Like all the best titles in the genre, it has a low barrier to entry and high skill ceiling. For those looking to get in a few games with friends it's welcoming and immediately enjoyable. For those committed to ploughing the depths of its systems to get tournament ready, it has plenty to unpack and understand. Better still, those that want to play alone will find SoulCalibur VI has some of the most substantial single-player content in any fighting game today.

At the time of writing, SoulCalibur VI's online servers aren't live. GameSpot will test the game post-release and update this review with an assessment of its online performance.

[Editor's Note: We have updated this review to reflect our experiences with Armello's Nintendo Switch version]

Armello's hybrid of tactics, dice-rolling, and political intrigue has aged better than expected in the three years since its release, and on Nintendo Switch, the game is almost as formidable as it is on PC. Its charming blend of animal kingdom hijinks and turn-based strategy gameplay has yet to be replicated by a newer, flashier title; Armello has definitely held up well, and its uniqueness is undeniable. However, there are a few major differences between PC version and Switch releases, and not all of them are positive.

The most important distinction is the fact that the Switch version includes all of Armello's DLC content. The Complete Edition of the game includes a bunch of morally-grey heroes, seasonal effects, and a whole new clan to contend with. While the base game has a fair amount of material to keep you occupied, a criticism of the launch content was that particular victory styles were incentivized over others. At their core, the DLC packs attempt to address that by expanding your potential champion pool with heroes that operate very differently from the original ones in the base game.

Luckily, the champion pool increase is more than just a numbers game. The Usurpers DLC in particular has heroes which are brimming with devilish personality, along with playstyles that revolve around more than the just original victory avenues of skirmishing and keeping a death grip on the King's coffers. The Bandit Clan DLC adds around 50 new quests specific to this charismatic new faction, along with a thematically-appropriate follower that gives risk-taking players a second chance when taking up arms against their competition. The other DLC packs focus on mostly aesthetic and minor upgrades to dice variety, but they're still notable improvements on the range of material that was initially available.

The unfortunate change to the Switch version is the performance. Unlike the DLC additions that are, on the balance of things, a net positive, Armello doesn't run as nicely on Nintendo's console as it does on other platforms. It's not the sort of frame rate drop that makes the game unplayable by any means, but there's a clear disruption in the smoothness and timeliness of actions and animations that play out on the screen when you're in-game. This isn't something that you can attribute to online connection troubles either; some graphical degradation was experienced in playing against the AI in the Prologue segments, which in itself contained condensed elements of the game's mechanics. If you can put that to one side, then Armello's unique blend of strategy makes it a worthy pick-up on Switch. -- Ginny Woo, 10/16/2018

[Original review text follows below]

When you don't have three friends and some reasonably good beer to keep you engaged, a board game--especially a virtual recreation of one--has to work a lot harder to hold your attention. Armello accomplishes this and then some, and while it could use some fine tuning, it remains one of the best virtual board game experiences available.

At first glance, Armello can feel like a tangle of things--dice and cards and boards and coins and stats--but the quick four-part prologue does a good job of making sense of these pieces. Your primary actions include moving a character around the board to complete quests and avoid hazards. There are eight playable characters, and each character has different strengths, weaknesses, and abilities in addition to items they can equip to skew their stats in a slightly different direction. They also each have great-looking combat animations. Ever wish Disney's Robin Hood had 40% more bears punching each other senseless? Well, this game is for you!

As if you can't tell Brun means business, in a world full of anthropomorphized animals, he's wearingsomeone's head as a belt buckle.

To win in Armello, you have to either kill the king or have the highest prestige when the monarch dies due to a disease called the rot. Every full day--one turn for day and one turn for night--the King's health dwindles lower while his rot creeps higher, so no matter how things shake out, there are a finite number of turns that can be taken before the King will keel over on his own. It's also possible to defeat the King in combat, either by gathering four spirit stones from quests or tiles, or gaining a higher rot level than him. If a would-be assassin fails, the victory will automatically be handed to the prestige leader. Unless you're playing against clever friends, a prestige victory is almost always the easiest way to win. This can make the game feel unbalanced, especially when playing against AI opponents that frequently make ill-advised assassination attempts. That said, if you can resist the siren song of an easy victory or have other players wanting to spoil your plans, the varied win conditions provide enough variety to accommodate different play styles and keep things spicy through multiple sessions of playing with friends.

You also have a hand of cards--which are as well-animated as the characters themselves--that can be anything from equippable items and followers to spells and tricks that can be applied to yourself, other actors on the board, or specific tiles. Imagine if you could slam your Hearthstone deck down on a Clue board and swarm Professor Plum with Murlocs, and you have an accurate idea of just how neat this is in practice. Cards all have different costs to play, and crucially, they can be played regardless of whose turn it is. This allows for some tense moments and sharp twists in matches with other human players. On the other hand, when it comes to the A.I. opponents, the game tends to jump around a bit too fast to take full advantage of that ability unless you're particularly quick on the draw.

Long live the king!

What Armello suffers from most is a lack of customization options, something it could have stood to learn from more-traditional strategy games. There's no way to define whether you want a quick or a long game, A.I. skill levels are static, and when you're playing with friends, you're bound to a move timer whether you like it or not. Graphics controls are also somewhat limited, which means that you won't be able to turn off the haze of clouds in the sky, which would be dlightful if you didn't have to look down through them when you zoom out to see the full board.

Armello picks and chooses a variety of elements from board, card, 4X, and role-playing games without demanding either a familiarity with or a fondness for any genre. It also leaves a lot of room to engage as deeply as you want with the game's guts without feeling like you're floundering if you don't. Whether you're bumbling your way to the top or playing all your cards right, Armello makes regicide ridiculously entertaining.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas is a game about flying through space, exploring new planets, and shooting a lot of aliens. Set in a seamless open-world galaxy, it sees you pushing back occupying forces by battling enemies, setting up outposts, and completing simple tasks set by your allies. For better and worse, it's a distinctly Ubisoft game, from the huge spaces (seven separate planets and the vast depths of space that separate them) to the maps overloaded with activities. But thankfully, Starlink is not quite so full that it feels bloated--just full enough so that there's always something for you to be working towards.

Starlink is also Ubisoft's entry into the toys-to-life market--you're able to buy physical packs of pilots, weapons, and ships, all of which are interchangeable and have their own unique attributes and abilities. Constructing and attaching these models to your controller using a specialized mounting device will give you access to those characters and tools in-game, and while swapping between all these components isn't necessary, doing so brings distinct advantages.

Starlink's combat is fun thanks to simple controls and the two weapon system--different enemies are weak against or impervious to different weapon types, and swapping the two weapons mounted on your ship will change your methods of attack and the kinds of elemental combos you can perform. Using a stasis missile on an enemy so that they float helplessly in mid-air, then setting them alight with a flaming minigun, never gets old. Every weapon can be leveled up individually and augmented with mods that you collect, so by the end of the game, your most-used guns will likely be able to absolutely rip through certain enemies, provided you have the foresight to equip them.

When you're grounded on a planet, you'll be doing a lot of strafing and aiming for big glowing weak points, whereas fights in space are more freewheeling, with dogfights often pitting you against swarms of enemy fighters. These feel like all-range mode battles from Star Fox, and swinging around to land a precision assault on an enemy (often thanks to the game's rather generous auto-aim) is satisfying every time. The controls for each ship are the same, but there are minor differences between them; a light ship is better for maneuvering through a delicate situation on the ground, for instance, while a heavier ship can take more hits during battles.

Like weapons, each pilot has their own upgrade tree and unique special ability, and they even get their own unique script during missions, which is a great touch. There are only a few big story-driven missions, and in the back half of the game, you're given some freedom as to how you go about weakening the enemy forces. There's an order of operations in each sector of space--clear out mining sites guarded by enemies to weaken 'Primes,' which are big robot monsters on each planet. Killing Primes on planets that are near each other will weaken a related Dreadnaught, a giant spaceship that will, in turn, produce more Primes if you don't take it out too.

The one drawback to this structure, though, is that you're essentially taking on the same kinds of fights with occasional difficulty spikes. Taking out the game's three Dreadnaughts will make the final boss easier, and you can theoretically take on a Dreadnaught at its maximum strength regardless of how under-leveled you are. It's repetitive, but you also get a good sense of your progression, and the feedback loop of loot and rewards hits a good balance where you rarely feel like you're stuck grinding. The battles might repeat a lot, but they're consistently entertaining, and figuring out the best way to take down a huge enemy with the tools you have on hand is a satisfying challenge. The Dreadnaughts are particularly fun to take down--every time you take out one of their mounted guns a swarm of enemy ships will attack, leading to the game’s most intense dogfighting, and each encounter ends with a Star Wars-inspired "fly into the center and destroy the core" sequence.

If you're playing on Nintendo Switch, you'll have access to Fox McCloud and his Arwing. He can call in one of the other members of Star Fox, complete with the Corneria theme from the original game, and if you're a fan it's very tempting to play as him the entire time. The Switch version consistently runs smoothly, although there's a visual trade-off. The planets are not particularly detailed, everything's a little fuzzier in handheld mode, and there's a lot of pop-in--it's weird to have an asteroid belt suddenly appear in front of you when you're flying towards a planet.

But the Star Fox fan service throughout the game is a great bonus, especially in the mini five-mission campaign in which the team hunts down long-time antagonist Wolf O'Donnell. Wolf is a much more interesting enemy than Andross, as it turns out, and while this campaign is short it feels true to the spirit of the series. Fox and his team get integrated into the rest of the game, too, popping up in cutscenes with the rest of the Starlink crew.

Unfortunately, the game's primary plot--which concerns a crew of adventurers trying to save their captured captain and take down the "Forgotten Legion" forces led by an alien named Grax--is much less exciting. Strangely, despite Battle For Atlas being the first and only existing game in the Starlink series, the script feels as though it's written for players who have a pre-existing relationship with these characters and their situation, meaning that there's not much in the way of pathos or catharsis to be found. Some of the characters are interesting, but even though the game is keen to throw lore at you there's little sense of who these characters are, what sort of universe they exist in, or even what their fundamental role is beyond needing to take down this enemy force.

Despite this, it's always clear what your overarching objectives are and how you need to work towards them. There's a lot that you can be doing at any given point--even in the vastness of outer space, there are wrecks to salvage gear from and enemy outposts to take down. Wrecks can be identified from their flashing beacons and usually contain loot, while outposts are added to your map as you chase outlaws from planets. Exploring the depths of space reveals plenty of neat loot and fun encounters and the thrill of taking off from one planet, seamlessly flying into space, and landing on another never gets old.

But Starlink's proposition as a toys-to-life product is hampered somewhat by the comparative financial value of the digital alternative. The physical starter pack varies in content between consoles, but they each give you far less than both the starter and deluxe digital versions, which unlock multiple ships, pilots, and weapons from the get-go. If you get the physical starter pack and don't want to buy additional toys you can still finish the game, but you'll be at an enormous disadvantage.

Having multiple ships in Starlink essentially operates as having extra lives--if you get wrecked during a battle you can choose to either quit or replace the ship immediately. If you don't have a replacement, certain battles are going to be a real struggle, and progress doesn't carry over when you come back to them. It's easy to lose a ship, too, especially since your defensive options during fights are often limited--you can summon a shield or barrel roll, but both eat into your limited energy supply, which takes a while to recharge. The digital starter pack gives you four ships (five on Switch), which feels fairer and lets you worry less during big battles. Between ships and weapons (pilots are less vital), you'd have to buy quite a few toys if you wanted a varied and balanced experience.

The ship models themselves look great, though, and while switching loadouts via the menus is always going to be the more convenient option, physically swapping out the components will pause the game the until your ship is completely decked out again. Changing pilots will require you to remove the entire ship first, but that's only a minor pain--the only real impediment is being able to remember which weapon does what by sight, but their designs are distinctive enough that this isn't an issue once you get accustomed to it to them.

Starlink is an interesting and enjoyable open-world game, one that fully understands the appeal of exploring new planets and dogfighting in the cold depths of space. With a small fleet of ships at your disposal, it can be a lot of fun to progressively assault and weaken the Forgotten Legion's hold on the galaxy. It's just a shame that if you're interested in the physical models, you'll have to spend more to get the same experience as the digital version.

There are times I want to be sad, when I'd rather be all alone, quietly thinking about my life, or hugging a loved one to forget about the day's trouble. Child of Light embraces that melancholy beautifully and its various elements cultivate a doleful mood. From the overgrown foliage threatening to overtake the neglected environments to the tired inhabitants wasting away their days, there's a somber tone that permeates this storybook adventure. I was struck by that desperation in the whimsical poetry of the dialogue; conversations are constructed with overtly meticulous rhymes that betray the bewilderment building below the surface. And the docile piano melody made my heart all the heavier. Child of Light is a lovely adventure, a journey as remarkable as it is uncommon, that left me grappling with my own sadness.

I wasn't so accepting of Child of Light at first. The delicate artistic style is so immediately inviting that I had imagined a world opening before me that I would want to exist in. That's because I had mistaken color for happiness. Child of Light is not about fleeting joy, and so, when the sorrowful tone endured as I ventured on, I struggled to find my bearings. I waited for a lightheartedness that never arrived, so I fought against the energy that Child of Light was putting forth. But as I pushed deeper inside of this dreamlike world, I stopped resisting and opened up to the game. Child of Light is difficult in ways that I hadn't expected, and is incredibly effective if you allow it to work its magic.

It's in the earliest moments that the game reveals its true nature. A story told through stained-glass imagery shows the protagonist Aurora's inseparable relationship with her father, and tells of how their bond was torn asunder. One night, she rested her head upon a pillow, and never awakened when a new day dawned. Her father, the once proud king, was beside himself with grief, choosing to spend his days awash in tears rather than care for his kingdom and the wants of his populace. He was a lost man. Lost, too, was Aurora, who awakened not in her own bed, but in a place she did not recognize. It's a story about fear and betrayal, hopelessness and fortitude, in which every citizen you meet seeks shelter in Aurora's loving arms. Her plight to fight for both her own freedom and her companions' is one we've seen before, though that doesn't detract from the feelings it conjures.

Child of Light is a lovely adventure, a journey as remarkable as it is uncommon, that left me grappling with my own sadness.

Aurora joins up with a jester who has lost touch with her brother, a rodent who craves monetary wealth, and a gnome whose people have been cursed with an avian disease. But it's a firefly who proves to be the steadiest friend. Igniculus floats alongside you as you explore the creaking trees and abandoned homes you drift past on your way to free this land from the misery that it's drowning in. Always with advice on his lips, he can also light the passageway through dark caves and collect treasure that your human hands can't wrest open.

Spiders are cast as villains, as they should be.

When Aurora sets out into this foreign world--barefoot, weaponless, and utterly alone--she clambers upon rocky outcrops as she winds her way through labyrinthine caverns. Slowly but determinedly, Aurora uses ingenuity to scavenge for scraps of treasure, and I felt at one with the environment as I charted a course onward. After reaching her first destination, Aurora was imbued with flight, and the tactile pleasure of forging unknown paths vanished. Once airborne, you can no longer run and jump as you once could, instead floating dreamily through air thick with fog and rain. The kinetic freedom of flight rises and quickly falls away as you continually find your path barred. Thorns rein you in, waterfalls and gales push you away, and those restrictions echo the themes of imprisonment. You're not free; you're trapped and scared and desperate to return home, and those aerial barriers further those feelings.

Enjoy flight when you can. There are treasure chests and hidden passages for those with an inquisitive disposition, and when you're able to break free from the chains corralling you in place, the landscape is too beautiful to not admire. But such appreciation is fleeting. There are enemies lurking--creatures that should have no qualms about your presence cut you down if you drift too close to them. They patrol in the open, marching from side to side along high plateaus or hovering menacingly in dark caverns. You can avoid them if you wish--fly down another path or wait until they turn their backs on you--but Aurora is not one to walk away from a confrontation. She wields a sword almost too heavy for her to carry, and has her heart set only on her freedom, so she doesn't run away from the monsters that stand before her. She longs to fight, relishes in it, and her friends readily join her, eager to damage the foul beasts who roam about their home.

It's a story about fear and betrayal, hopelessness and fortitude, in which every citizen you meet seeks shelter in Aurora's loving arms.

It's in the combat that the sadness that permeates the rest of Child of Light is momentarily halted. The music loses its solemnity as it suddenly becomes fierce, and the characters forget their aching problems for a moment while they focus on the threats that stand before them. Wolves and boars growl their displeasure, flaming birds and ethereal horses bar your path, and you stare them down like only a true warrior can. Although your party balloons as you trudge deeper into this desperate land, only two can fight at one time, while the others swap in when their fists are needed and back out once their energy is spent. It's a frenetic system in which you're continually juggling your party, tapping a healer when you need a boost, matching elemental attacks against your shifty opponents, and finding ways for everyone to contribute.

The energy of these encounters carries a fast-paced excitement that's lacking from the rest of the adventure. That's not to downplay how affecting the quiet moments are, but rather to show how sharp the contrast is. When you're fighting, you're so invested in an immediate threat that you're no longer saddened by the dire world around you. And it's a freeing feeling that exists only because of how different it is from the rest of the adventure. Part of that rush comes from how smartly time is used. Though fights play out in a turn-based manner, you and your opponents race to perform attacks as quickly as you can. Cast haste to get a boost, or hover Igniculus over an enemy to slow it down. Interrupt an attack, and you can infuriate an enemy, cause it to retaliate with anger or cower from frustration. If you're inattentive, your hard work can blow up in your face, so you have to act with exactitude and think on your toes.

The night is dark and full of terrors.

The challenge of these encounters is expertly balanced. Against tougher foes, I always felt out of my element. Would this be the fight where I finally met my end? I would scrape and claw, desperately casting spells while fending off the unceasing threat. My attacks would be interrupted, my characters infected by curses, and yet I pressed on. I would drown enemies in water, blind them with sunlight, and never relent for even a second. I never did lose a battle. Child of Light did a wonderful job of pushing me hard, forcing me to fight with speed and precision, without ever becoming overwhelming. When I won, I would pause for a few moments to take in what I had accomplished. It's a great feeling to come out on top. And though I would invariably level up from such victories, I wasn't drawn to better stats or new powers. It was winning that was infectious. It was embracing the moments of respite amid a sea of sorrow and despair.

Child of Light is a remarkable adventure. I wouldn't have thought that was true during the first couple of hours given that my expectations of what kind of game this was shattered when reality showed its face. But once I accepted the sadness that is so intertwined with every element, I grew so much closer to Child of Light. It's easy to heap praise on the combat because it's so interesting and engaging, and it's certainly a high point in this adventure. That's not what makes Child of Light stand out, though. Rather, it's how confident it is in its own feelings of woe. There are so few games willing to explore that dull ache that I became mesmerized by Aurora's journey, even when I needed to step away from her plight while I regained my composure. Child of Light is a wonderfully realized, somber adventure, and I couldn't be happier that such a game exists.

Editor's note: It has been more than four years since Child of Light first hit consoles. The somber tone that permeates the adventure still resonates deeply, using its delicate visuals and wistful music to capture a feeling of melancholy that still feels incredibly rare. The passage of time hasn’t undermined the sadness that makes this game so welcoming because there is still nothing quite like Child of Light. The transition to the Switch hasn’t hurt the experience in the slightest. Whether docked or in handheld mode, the beautiful artistic design shines through and the controls are smooth regardless of which controller you use.

Because this is the Ultimate Edition, there are bonus features that weren’t included in the original release. A couple of alternate skins for the protagonist are available from the onset along with a few items, one additional skill, and a new mission. It’s still the quiet adventure that is the main draw, though, and whether you’ve never before experienced Princess Aurora’s adventure or simply want to revisit this dreamlike world, Child of Light is just as great as it was years ago. -- October 11, 2018, 10:30 AM PT

The games of Hidetaka Suehiro (better known as Swery) impart a distinctly identifiable creative vision. He revels in grounding you in the mundane before throwing you off balance with a moment of absurd humor or plunging you into a sequence of fantastical horror. Before you know it, that ground has opened up and swallowed you whole. The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories feels smaller and less ambitious than his most recent works, Deadly Premonition or D4, but it could not be mistaken for anything other than a Swery game. At heart, it is a 2D platformer akin to Limbo or Inside that alternates between ambiguous narrative beats with frequently macabre puzzles, wrapped in a creeping sense of dread. As a puzzle-platformer, it succeeds in testing your timing and your wits despite a couple of overly finicky sections. As a story, it deftly explores themes of teen sexuality and identity with a rare tenderness, though it would ultimately be better served by a guiding hand that wasn't quite so determined to have a big late-game reveal.

You play as J.J. Macfield, a first-year college student living away from both home and the prying eyes of a loving yet conservative mother. On a holiday break, J.J. goes on a camping trip with best friend Emily, who goes missing during the night, spurring J.J. to set off and find her. J.J.'s search takes place on the small Memoria Island off the coast of Maine, whose indigenous name translates, appropriately enough, as "the place to find the lost." Even though it is set on the opposite side of the continent to Deadly Premonition, The Missing sees Swery return to quaint, semi-rural American landscapes where J.J. will travel through fields dotted with windmills, a sawmill, a lonely diner in the middle of nowhere, a bowling alley on a small-town strip mall, a dilapidated church, a highly exaggerated clock tower, and so on.

Early on, J.J. inherits the ability to survive incidents that would otherwise kill you. Fall too far, for example, and you'll land with a sickening crunch. But you won't die--you'll get back up and continue on as a dark, shadow version of J.J., only with, say, a broken neck leaving you dazed and staggering. Lose a leg and J.J. resorts to hopping around and inevitably falling over, severely restricting your movement. Lose your arms and J.J. can no longer pick up objects or climb.

This grotesque mechanic informs a number of the game's puzzles--fail to crouch under a spinning buzzsaw and J.J. might be decapitated. You'll control J.J.'s head, rolling along the ground, and now able to squeeze into otherwise inaccessible crevices. Certain high impact "deaths" result not only in such injuries but flip the entire world upside down, sending J.J. tumbling to the ceiling along with any other objects affected by gravity. At any time, though, you can return this shadow version of J.J. back to original human form--limbs fully re-attached, neck un-snapped, world no longer upside down--thus ending the thematic body horror show and, more prosaically, allowing you to quickly retry that jump you missed or puzzle you mishandled. It is possible to actually die--hurling your decapitated head onto yet another spike trap will do it. But this simply resets you back to the last checkpoint, typically only a few minutes away at the start of the current puzzle section.

The Missing extracts a lot of mileage from this not-really-death mechanic. Together with the physicality of the platforming and the introduction of fire-, electricity- and water-based environmental interactions, puzzles are rarely too obvious and mostly satisfying to piece together. There were only two occasions when progress was halted by what felt like unfair means, where seemingly feasible puzzle solutions were overlooked by pedantic design, but these only make up a small number of the game's challenges overall.

As J.J.'s search continues, key milestones are greeted by the buzz of a mobile phone. Over the course of the game, J.J. exchanges a series of text messages with F.K. (no, not the chap from Deadly Premonition), a childhood plushie toy apparently come to life, and is also able to unlock past conversations with Emily and with her mother. These messages, along with additional conversations with friends unlocked via collectibles, serve to sketch out J.J.'s backstory and gradually, but elusively, relate the events leading up to the beginning of the game.

The buzz of the mobile phone right on the tail of a stressful bit of platforming can feel jarring, puncturing the moment in what feels like a typically Swery way. Tonally, the conversations are all over the place, too, veering from stonewalling a concerned parent to arranging a study session with a classmate, or shrugging at career advice from a professor to telling your plushie to shut up. But they do a terrific job of painting a portrait of J.J.'s life before it was upended by a camping trip. Reminiscent of the audio diaries in Gone Home, these text messages are a heartfelt window into the insecurities and vulnerabilities of a teenager struggling to process the ways in which they don't conform to the expectations of so-called normal society.

The Missing opens with the message: "This game was made with the belief that nobody is wrong for being what they are." It's a sentiment supported throughout, and particularly in its portrayal of the relationship between J.J. and Emily, except for one thing. The way the story structure withholds information--drip-feeding details to maintain suspense, in order to construct a surprise reveal at the end--ultimately feels like it undermines some, but crucially, not all of the good work it does along the way. The game wants to embrace diversity while at the same time treating a part of someone's identity as something of a 'gotcha' moment. It doesn't feel cynical--there are no bad intentions detected here--but its execution comes off as clumsy and its impact is diminished.

The faltering plot twist doesn't detract from the overall experience. The Missing is smaller and more mechanically conventional than Deadly Premonition or D4, but its components remain focused on distinctly a Swery game: a dark, idiosyncratic experience that tells a deeply personal story that's as confronting as it is sincere. It is absolutely not for everyone, but as the game reminds us, there is nothing wrong with that.

Luigi's Mansion was a curious launch title for the GameCube back in 2001, and it's even more curious as an end-of-life title for the 3DS. It's got the feel of an eccentric mid-generation release, a July stopgap to keep you going while you wait for the next major title. But Nintendo's faith in Luigi's Mansion, which has taken on a cult status over the years and has a second sequel due to release on Switch next year, isn't misplaced--the game still has a lot of charm.

Luigi's Mansion sees Mario's put-upon younger brother exploring a mansion after receiving a letter telling him that he won it in a contest. He arrives to find that not only is the mansion haunted and full of ghosts, but that Mario received a similar letter and has not been seen since he entered.

When it released, the game represented a major shift away from the usual Mario format--there's no jump button here. Instead, Luigi has a flashlight and a ghost-sucking vacuum (the Poltergust 3000), which he needs to use to rid the mansion of ghosts and save a captured Mario in the process. You move through the mansion methodically, unlocking new rooms by vacuuming up the ghosts in the ones you've already opened.

The ghosts are divided between your standard ghoulies, 'portrait' ghosts (mini-bosses and bosses, essentially, which have escaped out of paintings), and Nintendo's familiar Boos. Standard ghosts come in a few different varieties--some will grab you, others will punch, throw bombs, or hurl banana peels for you to slip on--and can be vacuumed up once you shine your flashlight at the heart visible in their ethereal chests. When you start up your vacuum, Luigi will be dragged around the room as they try to escape, and you lower their hit-points by pulling the stick away from them, as though Luigi was pulling back, while keeping the vacuum trained on them. It's a fun system, especially when you manage to nab multiple ghosts at once and have to put in the effort to reel them all in.

Luigi's 'Strobulb' flashlight from Luigi's Mansion 2 has also been added. The Strobulb, which can be charged for an extra big flash of light, is useful in a few scenarios--I found that it was helpful for nabbing multiple invisible enemies at once--but the game was designed with a standard flashlight in mind, and I mostly stuck with it.

Portrait ghosts are the main meat of the game and capturing them generally involves solving a small puzzle or figuring out the pattern of their movements. None of them are too complicated--you can examine each portrait ghost for a clue, and simply interacting with the objects in the room will usually trigger the ghost's 'stun' state so that you can begin to vacuum them. These are fun encounters, even if their patterns are usually easy to predict. Hunting the 50 Boos that scatter around the mansion at a certain point in the story is enjoyable for the first 40-or-so--a blinking light on the screen lets you know when you're close to one, and during a chase they can slip through walls and into other rooms--but the novelty of these pursuits wears out towards the end of the game.

Once most of the mansion's doors are open and its rooms cleared are towards the end you'll have to do a lot of backtracking, which can get tedious. But it's worth tracking down every ghost--this is a short game, and you'll get more out of it if you hunt down everything. The brevity of Luigi's Mansion was a major complaint during the initial launch, and while our expectations regarding game length have shifted somewhat (six-hour games are less unusual than they were at the time) Luigi's Mansion still feels like it ends too early. While you can replay for a high score, dictated by how much treasure you find and earn, or play the more difficult 'Hidden Mansion' mode that unlocks after finishing the game, the core experience is still a tad thin. 2013's Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon was a big improvement in this regard, although there's still an allure to the original game's focus on a single location that you slowly master.

The 3DS' second screen is put to great use too, now displaying a 2D map of the mansion at all times. This makes navigation much easier than it was on the GameCube, as there's no need to bring up a separate map screen, which cuts down on some late-game frustration. You now tilt the 3DS to dictate where Luigi is pointing his light or vacuum, which mostly works but can be finicky when the camera plays up in some of the game's tighter spaces. Although the game supports the C-stick on the New Nintendo 3DS, it's not viable since Luigi barely moves his torch or vacuum when using it--motion controls are essential.

Despite these few tweaks and additions, Luigi's Mansion still feels like the same game it was in 2001. That means the little touches that made the game so memorable have remained. Luigi still charmingly hums the theme tune--confidently or fearfully, depending on whether the room you're in has been cleared or not--and his shaky animations are as much of a delight as ever. Luigi still carries a translucent purple 'Game Boy Horror', which can be used to scan rooms for clues. Even the hilarious interact animation that makes it look like Luigi is humping everything in the room, often paired with an enthusiastic 'oh, yeah!', is unchanged. The stranger puzzles and curious aesthetic elements that you might remember remain, and it serves as an interesting, fun look into how Nintendo managed the transition into their fourth console generation.

Luigi's Mansion is the only GameCube port Nintendo has put onto the 3DS, and while some details have been noticeably toned down for the 3DS' smaller screens (the ghosts are less translucent, for example) there's nothing that feels like an unreasonable compromise. The game adapts to a lower resolution much better than many of the Wii and Wii U ports we've seen to the 3DS, giving the game the curious feel of an excellent tech demo for a system that is now on its way out.

The main new feature is an offline co-op mode, which lets you play the entire game through with another player if they also have a copy of the game (or replay boss fights with anyone who owns a 3DS). The second player gets to control the charmingly named 'Gooigi', a version of Luigi made entirely from green goo, and can assist throughout the game by sucking up ghosts and helping to solve puzzles. This is likely to be a very niche feature--Luigi's Mansion is not an especially difficult game and playing together on your 3DS just doesn't appeal the same way a traditional console does--but it's a neat bonus. The whole game also supports 3D, and looks great with the slider turned up.

The game also supports four amiibo--Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Boo--and each one will make your game permanently easier. Mario will change the poisonous mushrooms ghosts sometimes spit out into super mushrooms that restore health, Luigi gives you a chance of surviving death, and Boo will mark the location of five undiscovered Boos on the map. By far the most useful, though, is Toad--the Toads scattered around the mansion act as save points, and if you scan this amiibo they'll also restore your health. This is the one enhancement that should have been made universal--not having to shake every item in every room for hearts takes some potential tedium out of the game.

Seventeen years after its first release, with one sequel out and another on its way, there's still nothing quite like Luigi's Mansion. Nintendo's strange foray into the paranormal has aged well--I was surprised at how much of it had stuck in my memory, and how good it felt being back in its haunted halls. It's a basic port with a few issues, but Luigi's Mansion still remains a charming and enjoyable game.

My Memory of Us, a game by Polish developer Juggler Games that focuses on the plight of two Polish children during a robot uprising, serves as a thin allegory for World War II, and obviously means well. This is important, as a version of My Memory of Us that didn't have its heart in the right place would be a disaster. This puzzle platformer aims to pay tribute to the Polish citizens who lost their lives during the Nazi occupation, especially those that provided shelter and help to the people around them, and the game feels like it intends to be respectful, especially in the collectible "memories" that tell you more about the real-world people who inspired the game. Unfortunately, the good intentions of My Memory Of Us are obscured by dull gameplay and poor metaphors.

You play as a young boy and girl simultaneously, neither of whom are given names. Early in the game a "robot occupation" occurs, standing in for the Nazi occupation of Poland, and you find yourself guiding these two kids through an increasingly perilous situation. The game is a puzzle-platformer with an intentionally limited monochromatic color palette, with a sparing use of red. You can swap between the two characters or move them both at once by having them hold hands, and solving most puzzles comes down to running around interacting with everything and using the unique abilities of each kid. The boy can sneak and shine light into people's eyes to temporarily blind them if he happens to be standing in a patch of light, while the girl can run and use a slingshot, abilities which make her more enjoyable to control.

Occasionally the children will be separated or will need to work together while having access to different parts of the map and different resources. Some sections have a stealth focus, where you'll need to creep between cover and avoid enemy patrol patterns, and there are even a few vehicle sections (think Excitebike but much slower) scattered throughout. Any sequence like this with a potential fail state can get tedious thanks to some control issues--climbing objects requires more inputs than it should, the hand-holding mechanic can be unresponsive, vehicle sections feel stiff, and checkpoints that could stand to be more generous.

The puzzles you solve often resemble those you might find in a very simple point-and-click adventure and are rarely well implemented into the game world or plot. For example, figuring out a padlock combination during one sequence set within an orphanage involves observing an equation left on a blackboard, which encourages you to multiply birds by strawberries, then subtract the number of ships. The solution is to use a telescope upstairs to count the birds outside, multiply that number by the strawberries that appear in a thought bubble above an NPC's head after finding and giving them a jar of strawberry jam, and then subtracting the number of ships dotted around the house the padlocked door is in. This isn't a difficult puzzle to solve, but there's a sense of disconnect between your actions and the outcome, and completing it feels like busywork.

This is an issue throughout the game, where the impact and logic of your actions is often unclear. You're regularly stumbling ahead just looking for the next thing you're able to interact with, unsure of what outcome you're trying to achieve. The best puzzles are the more traditional ones--there are sliding tile puzzles, a few numeric brain-teasers, and even a clever maze later in the game. They largely feel divorced from the levels they're in, but some of them are at least entertaining.

A bigger problem is the concept of dressing up a Nazi invasion as a robot invasion. The plot's framing device--that the boy, now an old man voiced by the great Patrick Stewart, is telling a story to a young girl who visits his bookshop--can only justify the game's euphemisms so far. The conceit is that the story is being changed to make it child-appropriate and more exciting; in practice, though, obscuring the truth of the story just makes things weird. Stewart delivers his lines, set against static cutscenes between missions, with his trademark timbre, but it's hard to get past the fact that the game has taken something horrific and made it cute.

Worst still is when the metaphor the game is operating under starts to fall apart. Partway through the game, the girl gets marked as "red" by the robot army. The game's "red" people wear red clothing, painted on by the robots' machines, and suddenly find themselves treated like lesser beings by everyone. It's an obvious tribute to the girl in the red coat from Schindler's List, but as a metaphor for how the Polish Jews were treated, it feels too ham-fisted as a metaphor and far from the horror of what it is meant to fill in for, especially when it seems like the citizens being painted are being chosen, essentially, at random. It's possible to tell a Holocaust story like this through metaphor and abstraction--Art Spiegelman's comic Maus stands as perhaps the best example--but it never feels like My Memory of Us has anything new or interesting to say about the period it is depicting, and framing it as a story being told to a child does not excuse this.

The disconnect between the game's cuter aesthetic elements and the story, where characters get sent to live in ghettos and whisked off to concentration camps, is jarring. In one scene, a robot commander demands that the girl dance for him (which plays out as a button-matching minigame), throwing her a literal bone (which you need to subdue a dog) when she succeeds. The cruelty of this act is obscured by the game's layers of metaphor. There are a few moments when the game's aesthetic works well--one section where the two characters dress up in a crude robot costume is a standout--but the tonal confusion dampens most of the experience. The game's art style and soundtrack are both great, despite a few mild performance hiccups where the music would blip out for a moment, but even the way both children are smiling in their idle animations feels wrong.

Things improve later in the game when it leans in harder to the underlying horror of the situation. The weird fantastical elements still don't quite sit right, but when you're, say, releasing other "red" people from the robot's flying train while it's on its way to a camp, there's a tangible sense of gravity to proceedings, and there are a few plot beats that land well. When a weird, out-of-place final boss fight (complete with stuttering performance issues) breaks out in the penultimate level it's hard to know what the game stands for. But the emotional finale that immediately follows, while simple, manages to pay off well on the relationship at the game's core, providing the closure a story like this needs.

My Memory of Us feels misguided; a concept that doesn’t sit well, marred by puzzle gameplay that fails to challenge or excite. It means well, and divorced from the game's context, the game's aesthetic is charming. But it doesn’t really work as either a puzzle game or as an educational experience.

While there have been many, many attempts to translate the tabletop roleplaying experience to the PC and console, more often than not it hasn't quite worked out. One of the biggest struggles in transitioning a traditional tabletop RPG into the quicker, imminently more binge-able video game form is incorporating a complex ruleset faithfully. Hypothetically speaking, with the right combo of spells and skills, a tabletop campaign can get utterly bizarre, with players collaborating to do things like using effectively unlimited ammunition to shoot through a mountain. These kinds of solutions are impossible in video games, where destructible environments and the difficulty of coding different possibilities necessarily limits the ways you can interact with the game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a partial exception to that rule, but it often fumbles with the execution.

Just about everything has been wholesale imported from the Pathfinder tabletop games; nearly all the mechanics, spells, skills, etc. make their way in, and so does a massive chunk of the lore and mythology. That's all well and good, particularly because Kingmaker offers plenty of options to help customize the difficulty and effectively put you in the role of Game Master. There are more than a dozen options for adjusting everything from damage scaling for foes--a handicap that makes you more resistant to harm in tougher fights--to how the AI will manage your (eventual) kingdom.

Given that this is a hefty choose-your-own-everything adventure, your character is a blank slate. You can pick from many of the basic races--as well as the godlike aasimar--and a fair few of the basic classes, skills and abilities from the tabletop edition. Your companions are initially pulled from a crowd of heroes you meet in the game's opening, but it expands soon after with any number of additional friends and allies to bring along the way. For the most part, these serve as means to an end. Your allies are as much a part of the experience as your own character is, both in terms of party composition and roleplaying in the narrative.

This is reinforced by one of the few concessions the tabletop game doesn't make, but the game does: party-wide skill checks. Passing obstacles in the tabletop Pathfinder, for instance, can often separate the party, as those that don't have a skill like acrobatics won't be able to maneuver through a thicket. Instead, in Kingmaker, the party completes these tasks as a team. It behooves you, then, to really spread out your abilities and party to maximize coverage of options over making sure everyone has the same basic setup with slightly different modifications down the line.

Such concessions transition well into group cohesion in combat, as well. With such a diverse set of specializations, party management is exceptionally important--especially because of the intense base difficulty. By default, Kingmaker follows the rules of tabletop perhaps too closely; it's a system where simple combat with a few foes can take 30 minutes to an hour (or more), all compressed into a few seconds on-screen. That can be taxing as it requires tremendous familiarity with each classes' traits as well as the acuity to know how to pull them together.

Were everyone sitting around the table, each would have a couple minutes to look over their spells, consider all manner of responses, and then execute the plan on their next turn. In Kingmaker, though, combat largely happens in real time. Sure, you have a pause button and can quickly look over your characters to devise tactics mid-battle, but this absolutely grinds combat down and really hits the pacing of the game in the worst way.

Perhaps a bit more troubling is the fact that within Pathfinder's ruleset, many monsters and creatures require very specific tools to kill. Swarms of small creatures like rats, for instance, can't be effectively fought with a sword and shield. Sometimes Kingmaker warns you, but other times it simply expects you to know how to handle the problem. Rust monsters, skeletons, ghosts, and so on all have specific tools that you need to understand and be able to use with relative ease. That's made easier by having a diverse party, but then you have to take far more time aside to learn the ins and outs of your band of characters than a traditional tabletop player.

This tension--between what Kingmaker is trying to be and what that looks like in practice--is at the heart of many of its missteps. With more than a dozen references and resources to draw upon, quite a few things have slipped through the cracks, causing issues of balance throughout. There’s the distinct impression that Pathfinder’s convoluted rulesets have led to oversights in how damage gets calculated by the game in this or that room, or whether you’ll face a much higher spell failure chance when squaring against a boss.

There have patches since release, and many of the adjustments definitely work. A slightly modified Story Mode (the name of one of the difficulty presets) is a solid entry point for many. Still, the rules and procedures can be labyrinthine--and that's even with tooltips that explain proper nouns and the requisite in-game encyclopedia to explain everything else.

For those willing to take on the challenge, however, what lies beneath the brusque exterior is a welcome return to involved roleplaying. The voice acting is spotty, and writing can be a bit cliché at times, but the game doesn't shy away from its subtitle. In relatively short order, you earn your barony and have the ability to build it out however you choose--hiring advisers and upgrading facilities to help you along the adventure. Kingmaker’s campaign cuts much closer to long-term tabletop campaigns and gives you a stable home base from which to plan your next outing. And, not to belabor the point, but most of your mini-adventures will definitely require prep.

These outings also constitute the bulk of your questing play and a good chunk of the ongoing narrative--an interconnected web of relationships and allegiances that lends itself to plenty of political intrigue and exciting adventures. Unearthing the mysteries of not only your “employers” but also the shifting factions of the Stolen Lands and how that plays into the world at large is definitely an extraordinary and rewarding endeavor.

For those willing to take on the challenge, what lies beneath the brusque exterior is a welcome return to involved roleplaying.

The interaction between the ruling bit of play and the rest of it is great. Having each of these systems--roleplaying, combat, adventuring, and what's essentially SimCity-lite--feed into and influence one another yields an experience that is as broad as it is deep. Your level of investment and engagement with each is largely up to you, but each of them matters and will require attentiveness to get the best results. But the opportunities it yields are exceptional. Having your roleplaying choices and character story and alignment all play into how you rule and who accompanies you on your trek is amazing. Working towards getting a well-crafted set of gear for your party after carefully maneuvering through hours of quests and adventures, all for the glory of besting a big bad using all the skills and abilities you've given your team, are high points of the adventure.

All-told, Kingmaker isn't a stellar outing, hampered by a litany of small issues, balancing, and the gargantuan knowledge base you'll need to play most effectively. But, for those with the patience, the rewards are well worth the investment.

If FIFA 19 on PS4 and Xbox One is a 40-piece orchestra with all the bells and whistles you can think of, then FIFA 19 on Nintendo Switch is the tribute band. The Switch version of EA's footballing behemoth purports to have all the same qualities--the Champions League! Ultimate Team! Career Mode!--but under the surface, each of its many facets lacks the depth and longevity from other versions. On the pitch the Switch port feels relatively smooth, if a little dated, but it's hard to shake off the feeling you're playing an inferior and incomplete version of this year's biggest soccer sim.

Some improvements from the PS4 and Xbox One editions carry over to the Switch port, such as timed finishing and the new Kick Off house rules options like No Rules and Survival Mode. Others, such as game plans--or any kind of tactical tweaks or player instructions--do not make the cut.

Once you get on the pitch, things feel satisfying--sometimes. Passing still feels imprecise, even with the world's best players, but shooting and dribbling feel almost as good as what's available on other platforms. But this port also seems to pull from older versions of FIFA--many cutscenes and environmental cues like those read out by stadium announcers are from as far back as FIFA 10.

Additional problems crop up when you want to play a friend with one Joy-Con each. It works, but not particularly well. As with FIFA 18 on Switch, fewer buttons and sticks means there's no way to use finesse shots, threaded through balls, knuckle shots, manual defending, skill moves, or driven passes. Double-tapping the right bumper allows you to knock the ball ahead of you in a similar fashion to the right stick when playing with traditional controls, but similar workarounds don't exist for the other missing functions. Playing with one Joy-Con is possible but often ends up feeling like more hassle than it's worth. You are, at least, able to matchmake with friends when playing online, which was missing from last year's Switch port.

The Champions League license and standalone mode do form a part of the Switch version, complete with Derek Rae's Aberdeen-Atlantic commentary and UEFA's operatic anthem. Night games look impressive on Switch, even if the atmospheres don't quite live up to the sights and sounds of the PS4 and Xbox One editions, in part due to lower resolution. The standalone mode is essentially a stripped-down version of Career Mode, which itself is even more bare-bones on Switch than it is on home consoles this year. On Switch, neither mode contains the dynamic cutscenes or interactive transfer negotiations found on other platforms. Here, FIFA 19 really does feel very similar to 18, just with updated licenses.

Ultimate Team has a similar story in this version. FUT is easily FIFA's biggest and most popular mode, thanks in large part to EA's Squad Building Challenges, in-form cards, and more live services that keep things fresh. All those are present and correct on Switch, but the mode is lacking in ways to actually use your squad. Division Rivals, FUT's new sub-mode for this year on PS4 and Xbox One, is nowhere to be found, meaning you have to make do with standard old Online Seasons matches. Squad Battles, the primary method of play for offline players in FUT, is also absent--the more miserly Single Player Seasons are your best bet here. To make matters worse, you still need a constant internet connection to access even Ultimate Team's single-player sections, so playing FUT on the go isn't an option unless you tether your Switch to your phone signal. Oh, and the FIFA 19 companion app is not compatible with Switch versions of the game, so you're out of luck there, too.

All that's left is to lament the ongoing absence of The Journey, which of all FIFA's modes appears the best fit for Switch--a deep, offline story playable in small chunks--and yet it's omitted entirely from the port. And that sums up the Switch version of FIFA 19: a playable, competent game of football encased in a package of outdated modes and lacking the controls and features you really want.

Editor's note: We have updated this review to reflect our experience with the Nintendo Switch version of Cities: Skylines. See the end of the review for our thoughts.

Now this is more like it. Even though my real-world occupation as the mayor of a Canadian town means that I try to escape such things as budget meetings and zoning hearings when I play games, Cities: Skylines still managed to hook me due to its authenticity. Unlike the latest SimCity, which was far too fantastical to let me build cities that resembled those in the real world (size limitations and not being able to establish proper zoning districts drove me crazy), this Colossal Order production nails just enough of what is fun about running a municipality in the real world. Proper zoning, room to grow, and the addition of policies and districts that let you plan out sensible city development make for a (mostly) bona fide experience in the virtual mayor's chair.

Is it too geeky to be excited about the use of zoning rules and policies in a city-building game?

Making comparisons between games is not always helpful, but in this case, it's difficult to ignore the tight relationship between Cities: Skylines and its SimCity inspiration. Colossal Order delves deep into what Maxis and EA once made so popular with a traditional city-building approach. Few surprises or even significant innovations can be found here: There is just a standard single-player mode of play in which you choose from a handful of maps representing territory types ranging from flat plains to tropical beaches. You may also play the game with standard conditions, dial up the difficulty, and/or turn on sandbox and unlimited-money mods. No tutorial is included, either, which makes for a learning curve at the beginning. At least tips are provided on a continual basis during regular play.

Multiplayer is totally absent, as are frilly options like disasters and giant monster attacks. There are no multiple-city games, either. You have one city to deal with, along with a mostly invisible outside world that allows you to buy and sell goods on a common market. The game has been developed with modding in mind, however, and it ships with a full editor. Therefore, you can expect a lot of user-made add-ons to hit the net shortly. Nonetheless, at the present time, this "just the facts" focus makes for an initially bland experience. The plainness is exacerbated by stark menu screens and dated visuals that are attractive enough to get by, while at the same time cutting corners by cloning buildings and signs, as well as lacking amenities like a day-night cycle and weather patterns.

If you have been jonesing to be a virtual mayor, though, Cities: Skylines gets nearly everything else just right. First off is zoning. You have full control over zoning neighborhoods as low or high (medium is absent, although I didn't miss it) residential, commercial, and industrial. These basic mechanics provide thorough control over laying out cities, which gives you a real sense of being in charge. Second up is map size, which allows for a lot of stretching out. The initial size is restrictive at 2km by 2km, but you can access more plots of land to eventually expand to a metropolis spanning a whopping 36 square km. That allows for expansive burgs, and an incredible sense of freedom. You always have room to correct mistakes and grow out of early problems, making you feel more like the super-mayor that you should feel like, and not the goofball constantly demolishing whole neighborhoods to fix problems you couldn't have foreseen three hours ago.

Two other great features involve establishing districts and policies. This allows for the creation of boroughs with separate identities (policies can be set to take in entire cities, as well) by drawing them out with the Paint District tool. If you want your very own Brooklyn hipsters or a hardhat neighborhood for factory Joes, you can paint out city blocks and then tweak localized settings. This allows you to offer free public transit, boost education, give away smoke detectors, get into high-tech homes, ban high rises, and even alter tax rates for different zones. You can also set up specific industrial areas to focus efforts there. So if you want a green city, allow only farming use in industrial zones. If you want to go in the other direction with the sort of hardcore factories that killed grandpa, you can set up oil or ore districts and watch the smokestacks pump out poison.

Smart use of districts and policies allows for the creation of cities that closely resemble their real-life counterparts.

Policies are on the fanciful side, and establishing wildly different rules on social activities and even tax rates between neighborhoods in the same city will not go over well on election day. But I still love the ability to fine-tune cities without delving too deeply into micromanagement. The district and policy features combine to let me sketch out what I want in each part of my city--yes, this will be my gentrified borough for snotty white-collar professionals, complete with a smoking ban, no pets, no high rises, recycling, allowance for the use of certain controlled recreational substances, high-tech homes, and, of course, stupid high taxes--and then sit back and watch neighborhoods evolve.

The challenge is not pronounced, especially if you have city-building experience. You needn't worry about random sparks somehow taking down whole blocks, or other acts of God obliterating all of your hard work. This gives Cities: Skylines a relaxed character, instead of coming across like a rigorous game loaded with set objectives and problems to be solved. It's an old approach, but a great one, as it allows you to concentrate on the abstractions of building, instead of mindlessly racing around meeting random goals related to citizen happiness or residency numbers.

I wish I had shares in Go Nuts Doughnuts.

The only aspect of the game that becomes annoying to handle is transit. Given the same developer's Cities in Motion series, you might expect roads, buses, and the like to take on a vital role. Ultimately, however, transportation systems are overly Byzantine and convoluted, particularly when it comes to bus routes. It's difficult to tell if transportation woes are your own wrongdoing, or if there are problems with vehicle pathfinding in the game itself. You can muddle through, although you never exert the same level of control with transit as with everything else.

Moving Cities: Skylines to the Nintendo Switch is mostly what you would expect. This is a pretty thorough port of the PC release, including the original game as well as the After Dark and Snowfall expansions that added evening activities and ho-ho-ho weather. But while the game experience itself is virtually the same as it is on PC, you have to make a few sacrifices on the Switch. While the interface itself functions (perhaps surprisingly) well ported from mouse-and-keyboard to the more limited d-pads and buttons of the Switch, the controls are less than precise. I often overshot or undershot my mark. Laying out roads, for example, requires patience here, especially when compared to the ease of putting down long stretches of asphalt on the PC. I eventually became accustomed to the controls, although I still prefer mouse and keyboard.

While the game experience itself is virtually the same as it is on PC, you have to make a few sacrifices on the Switch.

Portability presents some big pluses in that it makes Cities: Skylines more of a pick-up-and-play game where you can bite tasks off in chunks. I played the game more casually and more frequently on the Switch, knocking off sessions throughout the day just because I had the system close at hand. Still, taking the game on the road or even around your house comes with some drawbacks. The intricate nature of city layouts and the small size of the screen makes it tough to track everything easily. This problem grows as cities get bigger. I spent almost as much time zooming in and out as I did zoning neighborhoods. In some ways this made me pay even more attention than usual to what was happening on the mean streets of my cities, but it also led to some frustration.

Camera manipulation reveals performance problems as well. Even though the graphics have clearly been dialed back a touch on the Switch, the game chugs when it has to handle larger cities. This can be a problem when you need to take a close look at things. These stutters seem more pronounced when you have the Switch docked and you’re playing on a TV, so they don’t present as many annoyances when using the console’s own screen, when--as noted above--you have to zoom in more often. Still, this slowdown is not a show-stopper, although optimizing the game through a patch would be welcome.

Even with a few PC issues and a less-than-perfect Switch port, Cities: Skylines remains the best city-builder on the market right now. The game's presentation is stodgy, but it is all but guaranteed to provide you many hours of carefully crafting cities, laying out zoning, and establishing districts for specifics residential and industrial uses…all free from real-world mayoral headaches like 6 a.m. phone calls griping about snowplowing. Right now, there is no better way to take a peek at life as a mayor without filing your papers to run for office in the real world.

Anyone who's played a Mario Party game in the past 20 years has a good idea of what to expect from Switch's Super Mario Party, but Nintendo's latest offers a few new modes that each add their own creative spin on the tried-and-true formula. In many ways, Super Mario Party feels smaller than previous games in the series, but added layers of strategy and clever, fun minigames help keep it lively and fresh.

The fierce competitive nature of the series' earliest titles is back, as Super Mario Party ditches Mario Party 9 and 10's cooperative car mechanic and once again pits players against each other in a race for Stars. The overall goal in Super Mario Party is to earn five Gems, which you get after completing each of the game's five major offline modes: Mario Party, Partner Party, Challenge Road, River Survival, and Sound Stage.

Mario Party mode features the series' classic formula of bite-sized games interspersed between rounds of board game hijinks. Your character is still placed on a board with three others where you'll all race after Toadette and her collection of Stars. The biggest change is the introduction of character dice blocks; while previous Mario Party games utilized virtual 10-sided dice, now every character has two dice blocks, one six-sided and the other unique to them, and you have to decide which one to use each turn. The six-sided die rolls a one through six, while each character die comes with its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

For example, Mario's has a number three on three of its sides, while the remaining three sides are one, five, and six. In comparison, the devilish gambler Wario has a special die where two of the sides cause him to lose two coins, but the other four sides are sixes. For the first time in a Mario Party game, your choice of character is more than just aesthetic, and figuring out the best time to use a specific dice block adds a level of strategy to what's typically been an act of randomness.

Each of the game's four boards requires slight tweaks to your strategy for reaching the Star, but they're all small, and most don't take advantage of their unique makeups. Whomp's Domino Ruins, for example, features Whomps who will block your path down certain shortcuts. The board only has two Whomps, though, so you don't encounter them very often, and even when you do, the board is small enough that taking the long way around won't put you at much of a disadvantage. Super Mario Party's four boards don't feel distinct, so your strategy for each one won't be all that different. And since there are only four boards in total to pick from, Mario Party mode grows stale fairly quickly.

There are a total of 80 minigames in Super Mario Party, putting it just behind Mario Party 6, 7, and 9 in terms of quantity. Of the 80 minigames, nearly half rely on the motion control or rumble features in the Switch's Joy-Cons. Don't fret; both the motion and rumble features work surprisingly well, and it makes for some of the most cleverly designed games in the Mario Party series. For example, in Fiddler on the Hoof, you and three others race horses, and making a pulling back motion with the Joy-Con to simulate whipping the reins increases your score if you move with the beat of the song that's playing. In Nut Cases, you and a partner need to outwit the other team by claiming the five boxes that have the most walnuts inside them. You get an idea as to a box's contents by picking it up and measuring the severity of your Joy-Con's vibration. As Super Mario Party only supports motion control with a single Joy-Con, you won't be able to play the game in handheld mode or with a Pro Controller.

Partner Party mode is Super Mario Party's reimagining of Mario Party 6's Team Battle mode. The rules are similar to Mario Party mode, but there are more paths around the board, and you need to actually land on Toadette's spot to get a Star instead of just collecting it while passing by. The minor obstacles from Mario Party mode become trickier to get past in Partner Party because you need to remain mindful of both you and your partner. Paying to move Whomp out of the way might get you to the Star more quickly, but doing so could trap other players, including your teammate. There's the possibility of winning the next minigame and earning enough coin to buy an item to free them, but that's no guarantee. This type of consideration and amount of forethought simply doesn't exist in Mario Party mode.

Two of the other major modes, River Survival and Sound Stage, are new to the Mario Party franchise. The former has you working together with three others to survive a trip down a dangerous river while playing Co-op minigames, while the latter is an energetic dance competition where you solely play Rhythm minigames. Both River Survival and Sound Stage offer fun, albeit brief, alternatives to the staple Mario Party formula. The Co-op and Rhythm minigames are also some of the best in the Mario Party series, especially the Rhythm ones like Fiddler on the Hoof, that have you actually standing up and moving around to match the groove of the game's characters. Both Co-op and Rhythm minigames lack the heated competition of other head-to-head minigames, but they do pump up a room.

Super Mario Party's final major mode, Challenge Road, is the closest the game has to a single-player campaign, but it only opens up once you've unlocked all 80 minigames. The mode has you play through every single minigame with specific handicaps placed on you to make each one harder. For example, a racing minigame might challenge you to get first place without running into any of the track's hazards. This mode comes very close to giving Super Mario Party just the amount of challenge the game would need to increase its longevity, but unfortunately it buckles. If you fail at a challenge three times, the game asks you if you'd like to just skip it. You can always come back and beat the challenge later if you want, but the mode never punishes you for skipping any of the minigames. As long as you get to the end of the road, regardless if you skipped a dozen challenges to get there, you'll still earn one of the five Gems you need.

Super Mario Party also has several smaller modes and features that aren't tied to earning the Super Star title. In Mariothon, you compete in five minigames where outlasting your opponents in time-based games earns you extra points on the tournament ladder. There's an online version of Mariothon too, but the servers aren't live until the game's launch. Square Off is also a minigame-based tournament, but after each win, you're allowed to claim a territory space. Owning the pieces of territory on either side of another player's territory nets you their space too, and the game continues until every space is filled. The winner is whoever owns the most spaces at the end of the match. Both modes give you a goal to strive for while playing minigames, which creates extra levels of friendly competition amongst a group of friends.

The new Partner Party, River Survival, and Sound Stage modes add enjoyable alternatives to Mario Party mode--which at least returns to its competitive roots.

There's also Toad's Rec Room, where you can play unique games that change based on how you position your Switch, and a Stickers room, where you can cover a wall in a mural of stickers you've collected. Both seem tacked on to Super Mario Party; the former to justify putting the game on a console that can be played on a horizontal plane, in kickstand mode, or in a dock, and the latter to give you a reason to go out and buy some Amiibos to scan and get special stickers that aren't earnable within the game. Although the option of changing perspectives in Toad's Rec Room--such as looking at a baseball field from a bird's eye, laid-back, or pitcher's view--is an interesting gimmick, none of the games are really made better by adjusting how you look at them. The Stickers room is not worth getting invested in at all.

Everything about Super Mario Party feels smaller in comparison to previous titles in the series. Both Mario Party and Partner Party mode play on small boards, and certain modes, like Challenge Road, have clear tier points to make it easy to play through in small chunks. So it's all the more puzzling that you can't actually play Super Mario Party on the go in handheld mode. Given you need a seperate Joy-Con to perform the motion-based actions in the game, it makes sense, but it's still odd to see a game on Switch that actively prevents you from making use of the console's portability.

Most of Super Mario Party's varied assortment of 80 minigames are fun, especially if you've got a full group of four players, as the NPCs aren't smart or skilled enough to pose much of a challenge until you unlock Master difficulty. The new Partner Party, River Survival, and Sound Stage modes add enjoyable alternatives to Mario Party mode--which at least returns to its competitive roots. And even if the unique character dice blocks don't shake up Super Mario Party's four boards enough to give Mario Party mode some longevity, they implement small moments of strategy into a series that has for too long solely relied on randomness to determine a winner.

Editor's note: As we have not been able to test Super Mario Party's online features on live servers prior to its release, this is a review in progress. We will update and finalize this review when we're able to test its online functionality at launch.

Things haven't been easy for Mega Man fans in the 2010s. Between the cancellations of Mega Man Universe and Mega Man Legends 3 and the disappointing spiritual revival Mighty No. 9, it felt like every hope of seeing the series' beloved, classic action gameplay return was dashed in some way. So it was to great anticipation and expectations that Capcom announced Mega Man 11, the first all-new Mega Man game in over eight years. And while the game does deliver on its promises of being a charming, challenging action game with a rogue's gallery of robots to scrap, it makes a few puzzling choices that keep it from true greatness.

Those who have been enjoying our blue buddy's adventures within the last three decades are probably familiar with the gameplay formula here: You go through eight themed levels in the order of your choosing, claiming the weapons of the end-stage Robot Masters you defeat--and which can be used to exploit weaknesses in subsequent boss encounters. Once the eight robots are beaten, you advance to a tiered fortress with a final Dr. Wily showdown waiting at the end.

The big new feature this time around, however, is that our hero has been fitted with the Double Gear System, which allows him to increase his weapon power or slow down the environment for a limited time. The Power Gear can increase the output of the standard Mega Buster or enhance special weapons with more potent effects, while the Speed Gear can help you in tricky spots where timing or moving quickly is crucial. However, these effects only last a few seconds, and once time runs out you have to wait for a cooldown period to end or collect a special item before you can use them again, preventing you from relying too heavily on them. You're also not the only one using this new power, as you'll find Wily's machines are also putting it to use.

One thing you'll notice right off the bat is how well the game manages to nail the overall feel and charm of the series in its visual presentation. The 3D character models of Mega Man, his friends, and his Robot Master foes are on point, with subtle visual flourishes like Auto's exasperated expressions and robot bird Beat struggling to lift Mega's weight adding a little bit of humor. The stages themselves are packed with the sort of strangely cute, googly-eyed robot enemies that have come to define the franchise, and background elements like Blast Man's self-advertisements or Block Man's strange hieroglyphs add a spark of personality to each of the stages. With visuals this nice, it's easy to overlook the soundtrack, which is pleasant but wholly unmemorable.

Unfortunately, the early-game experience in Mega Man 11 is a trying one. Veterans will certainly notice how unusually long each of the stages are. While you might assume that more Mega Man action is good, the stage length serves to make the game far more frustrating than it should be, as checkpoints are sparsely placed and extra lives are few and far between. Making things worse, you often hit the most challenging parts of a stage in rapid succession, affording you little time to catch your breath. The stage design also tends to put trial-and-error areas like a labyrinth of instant-kill spike walls or a series of rapid-fire jumps at the end of these lengthy levels, making game overs especially demoralizing.

In other Mega Man games, failure feels more like a learning experience than a setback; here, however, the prospect of redoing a 10-minute level laden with strict checkpoints, instant-kill elements, and a mid-boss brawl often feels painful. The Double Gears help somewhat in navigating the more difficult sections, but they always seems to run out of power too quickly to be reliable. Progress gets better once you manage to build up a repertoire of boss weapons and purchase upgrades with collectible bolts found in the stages, but there's still a small degree of frustration at certain stage design elements, like Torch Man's three stretches of instant-kill flame wall pursuit, that never quite goes away. And while you can play the game on a lower difficulty, giving you more lives and checkpoints to make the stage hazards more manageable, it overcompensates by severely lowering damage to the point where boss battles become a dull pushover.

Of course, the levels--overly long as they are--aren't entirely bad, and there are a lot of enjoyable and interesting ideas. Blast Man's stage has you blowing exploding robots into crates and other mechs to create chain blasts, while Impact Man has some reflex-testing areas where you need to dodge a series of drilling robots that fly out in quick succession. The mid-stage bosses are all pretty great, as well; my personal favorite is the robotic, icicle-summoning mammoth skeleton in Tundra Man's stage. The Robot Masters themselves are also a lot of fun to fight, and they'll actually change up their patterns by using their own Double Gears as their health depletes, keeping you on your toes. The collected boss weapons are also tons of fun to use, and the Power Gear variations are a neat touch that calls to mind the Mega Man X series.

Still, it's easy to forget how much fun you had in other stages when you're stuck getting nailed by yet another spike trap in the tail end of Acid Man's stage or struggling with the springy walls and obnoxious slappy-hand platforms present in Bounce Man's miserable abode. It culminates in a final set of levels that are both awesome and underwhelming: awesome in that they have some really fun gimmicks and bosses, underwhelming in that it doesn't feel like it's as significant of a skill test because you already dealt with some of the game's biggest obstacles in the stages prior.

Mega Man 11 is a good action game that you can easily identify with, but it's far too uneven and bumpy to hold up against some of the best installments in the venerable franchise. At its best, it's a terrific retro romp with exciting boss encounters and unique gimmicks. At its worst, it's a frustrating experience whose too-long levels toss out infuriating obstacles to progress at the worst times. But even with these issues, it just feels good to see Mega Man back in action, and Mega Man 11 will hopefully be the start of many new robotic adventures to come.

"You are already dead" is a familiar refrain from Fist of the North Star's protagonist, Kenshiro--often said after he effortlessly pokes the death-triggering pressure point of a hulking bandit. It's a hokey yet empowering catchphrase delivered with infectious confidence. Even more satisfying is what follows, as Kenshiro's foe implodes into a bloody mess--a gruesome punishment dealt upon those who harm the innocent. This classic power fantasy has captured the imaginations of anime and manga fans for decades, pulling in countless people with its over-the-top martial arts justice. It's a quality that the Yakuza developer, RGG Studios, captures so well in Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise--and there's plenty for newcomers to FotNS to enjoy, too.

From the start, Lost Paradise gives you a wealth of tools to make short work of desert bandits and criminals in a fight, performing devastating executions upon enemies who all clearly underestimate you. All the while, an expert handling of melodrama and absurdist humor ensures the series' epic dramatics are conveyed, while also pushing them in exciting new directions. There's great ambition in Lost Paradise's take on FotNS, and while it may not always realize its full potential, the game is exceptional at placing you in the shoes of its messianic martial artist.

Lost Paradise decidedly crafts its own take on the series’ characters and events, telling a story set in an alternate timeline. While its plot is nowhere near as dense or complex as the Yakuza games, there’s more than enough action and intrigue to hook you into the tense drama on display. The supporting cast is endearing, each possessing struggles and aspirations that are easy to empathize with. You're often thrown into moments where you are fighting alongside them and even up against them. As new foes enter the fray, it's difficult not to get caught up in the peril that befalls Kenshiro and his allies--despite some characters and themes not being as deeply explored as they could be.

The game doesn’t completely change everything, however, occasionally lifting elements from the series and inserting them into the framework of its narrative. The game feels like a collection of new and old, which sparks excitement when witnessing iconic moments set against the backdrop of a new setting. There’s something special about how Lost Paradise seamlessly incorporates classic characters into its narrative, though it’s difficult not to be disappointed by how little it sometimes develops them. They often exist for the sake of giving Kenshiro a tough opponent to fight rather than fully implementing their arcs into the narrative. Other times, some characters appear to fight and never show up again. This may disappoint fans who desire the context that the series gives these characters and more than likely will leave some newcomers confused.

Despite this, there’s still plenty of memorable moments that preserve the series’ signature storytelling for both fans and newcomers. However, where Lost Paradise truly excels (and surprises) is in its use of levity; RGG Studios adds its own style to the mix, including a suite of absurdly comedic substories that regularly poke fun at the source material. This level of self-awareness should come as no surprise to Yakuza fans, but it makes for an amazing fit that helps balance out FotNS’s traditionally dire tone. You might save innocent citizens from local bandits or even join up with Kenshiro's closest allies on a quest to help a nearby village. But it's the less traditional side-activities that delight the most, putting you into light-hearted scenarios that redefine what's possible in the FotNS universe. For example, one substory addresses the morality of Kenshiro's frontier justice in humorous and heartfelt ways, while another jokes about the prevalence of shoulder pads in the series' character designs. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Kenshiro worked as a bartender? Better yet: how about Kenshiro as the manager of a hostess nightclub? Lost Paradise works in these side-activities for laughs, and it's presented in a way that brings to light just how ridiculous yet endearing Kenshiro can be.

To accommodate this shift, Kenshiro is much more expressive than usual. Historically a protagonist of few words, the increase in his dialogue and internal thought process is a welcome change that reshapes him into a more charming and noteworthy presence. While you won't come out of Lost Paradise understanding Kenshiro from a new and meaningful perspective, his more exaggerated personality at least highlights what makes him so captivating and likable.

The writing properly sets the stage for the power fantasy of being Kenshiro, but it's Lost Paradise's delivery of his over-the-top fighting style that brings it all home. The Yakuza series' uncomplicated beat 'em up-style approach to combat works well with FotNS, offering you easy access to a flashy and deadly arsenal of attacks and techniques. You'll constantly gain new abilities as you progress that demonstrate Kenshiro's God-like fighting prowess against enemies. The impact of his punching flurries, swift kicks, and graceful acrobatics are all faithfully brought to life. There's a destructive and mesmerizing force to each blow that somehow never manages to grow old no matter how much you exhaust each possible combo.

Combat isn't especially difficult, but that's precisely what makes it so gratifying. Enemies are always a combo or QTE away from turning into a crimson fountain. With such power at your fingertips, you’re always encouraged to play with your foes--whether it be launching them into an air juggle or sending them flying across the stage with a well-placed kick. Before long you'll find yourself emulating Kenshiro as you fight, effortlessly dispatching groups of enemies with speed and grace.

It helps that every activity feeds into your sense of progression too. The world may be smaller than those from the Yakuza games, but every corner is rich with opportunities that reward you with items and experience points that'll increase your strength. Whether it’s a fun mini-game to play for a while, a shop system you pour resources into stocking, or a bounty-hunting system with its own overarching story arc, there’s usually something worthwhile to tackle. And more often than not, you're pulled into unexpected directions thanks to how random substories seem to trigger.

It’s worth noting that Lost Paradise is a little rough around the edges. Despite its cel-shaded art style, low-resolution textures give the game’s visuals a dated look that’s plain ugly at times, while stiff character animations accompany most cutscenes. Not only that, but there are some pacing issues scattered throughout that have you going from point A to B and back again that can be outright laborious. However, these are only minor complaints in the grand scheme of what Lost Paradise ultimately succeeds in, and that’s understanding and capturing what makes FotNS so special.

Lost Paradise may replicate the Yakuza series' format, but it's filled with a passion for FotNS that makes it fantastic all on its own. While previous games based on the property have adapted its story and characters with some success, few have managed to not only nail the style and tone but redefine what's possible with its world and characters. RGG Studios has done a splendid job at evoking the justice-fueled power fantasy Kenshiro represents, succeeding in revealing more about the historic and beloved character in amusing and unexpected ways.

The soft reboot that was Assassin's Creed Origins introduced a new approach to the series' brand of stealth-action gameplay, along with an expansive and vibrant open world with many dynamic systems at work. In this year's follow-up, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, developer Ubisoft Quebec builds upon its predecessor's pillars, and in the process shows greater confidence in the series' new direction.

Set in Ancient Greece, Odyssey predates the previous game by several centuries. During the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE, you take on the role of either Alexios or Kassandra, siblings and former Spartans-turned-mercenaries. In keeping with series tradition, Odyssey features parallel storylines, with the main narrative taking place in the distant past and the overarching plot set in the present day. After pivotal moments dealing with political intrigue and wartime conflict in Greece, you'll jump back to the modern day to continue the story of Layla Hassan, introduced in Origins, who's working to uncover the secrets of the first civilization. Throughout your travels in Ancient Greece you'll uncover lost tombs, engage in naval warfare on the high seas, and assassinate the key members of a shadowy conspiracy seeking control of the known world.

In your trek through the Greek mainland and the islands of the Mediterranean sea, you come across diverse locales that showcase lush environments that pay tribute to the old gods, while rubbing shoulders with the many historical figures of the era looking to make their impression in Greek society. The amount of detail packed into each location is impressive, tied together by an active and dynamic ecosystem where local wildlife and civilians keep their territory. But as you dive further, you'll see the many hardships and realities of life in Ancient Greece firsthand, including the horrors of slavery and the ever-present war between the military-driven Spartans and the bureaucratic Athenian army.

Featuring a map that's more than double the size of the previous game, Odyssey is built to be explored and has incidental content to reward your wanderlust. You get the sense that your actions will have a lasting impact wherever you go, and Odyssey offers up a wealth of content that fuels your growth at a steady pace. Though the issue of level-gating comes up occasionally, preventing you from actively exploring any region as you wish, you can take a break from the main story and dive into the breadth of side content at your leisure. Several side quests offer a surprising amount of depth and heart and feature some of Odyssey's more standout moments.

Throughout the main story and in side-quests, you'll make several key decisions that affect the game's narrative and your character's journey. While many of the choices you make are largely inconsequential and result only in slightly different endings for quests, the fateful decisions that do matter can lead to drastic turns of events, with some storylines and characters meeting their end prematurely. In moments you'd least expect, you'll see the payoff for decisions made early on in the story, for better or worse. With nine different possible outcomes at the main story's conclusion, there's a surprisingly large amount of cause and effect that can make the narrative feel all your own.

The different protagonists also offer up some of Odyssey's most endearing and entertaining moments. Despite the grim nature of the game, jokes and fun gags often break the tension, even during serious events. Though both Kassandra and Alexios share the same dialogue and story beats, their differing personalities, gender, and points of view offer unique flavor, making them stand apart--with some scenes and questlines feeling more appropriate with a particular character.

The Photo Mode in Assassin's Creed Odyssey allows you to capture some of the game's most breathtaking views.

Romancing side characters is also possible in Odyssey. While some of these scenes can be amusing, they're mostly just bizarre shows of affection that have no real purpose. These scenes almost always result in a shallow aside during the conversation, with the characters slinking off-screen before returning to the conversation without skipping a beat. Most often, these awkward romance opportunities appear immediately after (or during) otherwise harrowing events. Aside from seeing some additional scenes with certain characters, there's really no benefit to engaging in romance at all. The inclusion of these scenes feels cheap and can sully otherwise interesting conversations.

As you unravel more of the world and advance in the main story, new gameplay mechanics and side opportunities will reveal themselves, adding even greater incentive to explore. When the conspiracy that threatens Greece makes itself known, you'll be able to keep track of the major players through a large interconnected web in the game's menu, showing their connections to other targets and how to find the intel to track them down. But in one of Odyssey's more involved quests, you'll encounter several mythological beasts hidden within the world, offering up some of the game's most inventive and memorable encounters, where brute force isn't always the answer.

The world in Ancient Greece feels much more reactive compared to previous Assassin's Creed games, and you get the sense that your actions will have a lasting impact wherever you go. When you start causing too much trouble, you'll attract the attention of rival mercenaries looking to collect a bounty. Similar to Shadow of War's Nemesis system, though not as sophisticated, Odyssey presents a seemingly endless set of antagonists with their own backstories, strengths, and potential loot. If you find yourself with a bounty on your head, mercenaries are often quick to appear--leading to some annoying encounters where they arrive at the worst possible time, even during some story missions. If the heat from the encroaching mercenaries feels too much, you can lay low long enough for the bounty to clear, assassinate another wanted criminal, or pay off your own bounty in the game menu.

With nine different possible outcomes at the main story's conclusion, there's a surprisingly large amount of cause and effect that can make the narrative feel all your own.

One of Odyssey's more clever features is the new Exploration Mode. With this optional mode enabled, you're challenged to use your observation and deduction skills to find your next target, without the support of icons or waypoints. By engaging with quest-givers and friendly NPCs, you'll learn details about your surroundings and slowly piece together your next steps. Exploration Mode heightens the pride that comes from solving puzzles, and this makes each step of your investigations feel all the more rewarding.

When it comes to combat, Odyssey keeps up with the recent trend to incorporate stat-based mechanics into its core gameplay. Compared to previous games, there's now a greater focus on allowing you to customize your character to approach the challenges ahead. You can also build your character to specialize in stealth, long-range, or melee combat, and you're able to respec at any time. If you want to build your character as a powerful Spartan warrior wielding a legendary spear and use your Spartan Kick to boot enemies off cliffs, you can, but you are also free to stick with the traditional Assassin archetype.

This opens a lot of opportunities to experiment with special moves and gear, the latter of which can also be customized with special perks that offer unique bonuses. Odyssey no longer features the shields introduced in Origins, and as a result, combat flows at a brisker pace. By placing the emphasis more on dodging and parrying incoming blows from enemies, fighting feels more involved and dynamic. While there are times where Odyssey can run right into the awkwardness of its RPG mechanics clashing with the action gameplay--such as being unable to assassinate enemies outright due to being under-leveled--it makes up for it by giving players the options to avoid such clumsy engagements.

Your ship, The Adrestia, can be upgraded to deal greater damage and move faster while out on the open waters.

Naval combat and sailing make a return in Odyssey, opening up exploration on the high seas. As you build up resources and find new members to join your crew, you can customize and upgrade your ship, The Adrestia, to take on more daring challenges. Much like in Black Flag and Rogue, seafaring offers up some of the more exciting and visually pleasing moments of the game, finding lost sunken ruins in the oceans depths or facing off against increasingly aggressive rival ships. Over the course of your travels, you'll be able to recruit new lieutenants to add buffs to your ship, giving you more of a fighting chance against the sea's greater threats.

The scope of Odyssey is enormous, and for the most part, it's presented well. But some of the new innovations that seek to fit within the scale of the world, however, feel somewhat lost in the grand scheme of the game. With the ongoing war between the Spartan and Athenian army, you can choose to take part in the conflict and dismantle a faction's influence in a region. In these Conquest battles, you'll pick a side and cripple an army's hold by assassinating their leaders and taking their resources--culminating in a large-scale battle against their forces.

While this is a solid way of gaining resources and improving your standing with a faction, the mechanics and implementation into Odyssey's general systems make it feel half-baked at best and pointless at worst. In some of the more bizarre cases, the game and its narrative don't seem to take Conquest seriously, especially when the main story has you helping a particular faction, despite the side content in the area actively hurting them. This in turn can create a jarring and noticeable feeling of dissonance throughout your adventures. The game often struggles to make sense of the actual war gameplay within the context of its core narrative, which is disappointing.

When looking at Odyssey in the bigger picture, it can often feel like too much game for its own good. There are numerous moments where the loop of exploring, completing missions, and traveling can slow the pace significantly. This is exacerbated by the expansive map, which can sometimes feel excessively big and a chore to travel through. There are also some notable bugs and hitches that crop up throughout, including those that prevent progress in missions to outright crash the game. Several times throughout my journey, progression was somewhat exhausting, which made some of the more impactful and exciting moments in the story feel like a drag.

Despite this, Assassin's Creed Odyssey's ambition is admirable, which is reflected in its rich attention to detail for the era and its approach to handling the multi-faceted narrative with strong protagonists at the lead. While its large-scale campaign--clocking in at over 50 hours--can occasionally be tiresome, and some features don't quite make the impact they should, Odyssey makes great strides in its massive and dynamic world, and it's a joy to venture out and leave your mark on its ever-changing setting.

InXile Entertainment's resurrection of this long-lost series from the age of Ronald Reagan and Max Headroom takes the role-playing genre back in time for better and worse. The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep's visuals are a charmingly nostalgic reminder of the origins of 3D role-playing games, but most of the game's features are too outdated to hold up to today's standards.

Actually, the first challenge here is remembering what the Bard's Tale franchise is all about. The plot is supposed to follow 1988's The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate, although most of us will have to take their word for it given the 30 years between major franchise installments. Skara Brae and a rogues' gallery of familiar villains from the original Bard's Tale trilogy are the main hallmarks here, along with new live-action cutscenes that brings to life the iconic cover art from those '80s RPG classics. They are beyond cheesy, but these clips provide plenty of old-school atmosphere.

Other shout-outs to RPG history are evident in the core design, which is minimalistic by comparison to modern role-players. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the straightforward character development and combat systems are easy to learn. Your group is depicted via portraits in the "party bar" along the bottom eight slots (for the six party-member maximum plus two for summoned allies) on the screen. Movement is handled fluidly with the party being directed as one in real time while exploring. Encountering enemies switches the game over to turn-based combat where you give orders to attack, cast spells, and so forth based on objective and spell points. Overall, it's a tried-and-true system for a retro RPG experience, especially if you want something basic.

But with that said, Bard's Tale IV is too simplistic. Characters come with just four core stats (strength, constitution, armor class, and intelligence) that can basically only be adjusted with equipment and skills earned when leveling up. If you want to raise your constitution (which functions here as hit points, unlike a more traditional D&D system), for example, you need to put on armor, wield a bonus-granting weapon, or take a skill that gives a corresponding buff.

Serious customization is hard to come by. There aren't a lot of character choices provided beyond standard fantasy races like humans, elves, dwarves, and the goblin-like trow, and classes like fighters, practitioners (mages), rogues, and bards. Bards do feel somewhat unique due to their ability to power skills and magic in battle by chugging booze. Leveling up provides some ability to tweak your heroes, but choice is limited because you're allocated just a single point with each advancement to distribute among the four skill trees

Combat has a narrow focus. A handful of objective and spell points are given to the party to use collectively each turn, and you have to spend them on just four selected skill masteries from your overall pool of abilities. Attacks always hit, so strategizing involves looking through each hero's masteries, choosing what does the most damage, and deciding on the best enemy target. You can deal physical damage via melee and ranged attacks or mental damage via spells.

Masteries deal with one type of damage or the other, which causes problems as there is no way to switch them up once a battle has begun. As a result, readied masteries regularly don't match up with what enemies bring to the table. For example, heavily armored foes are vulnerable to mental damage, but if your ready-to-go masteries don't have enough mental attacks, you're out of luck. You can try to build a balanced party, but many masteries aren't shared across classes, so there's not a great range of options if you want a group that's prepared for everything. Because of that, combat feels gimmicky, with you failing at times through no fault other than not guessing what the game is about to throw your way.

The one positive aspect of combat--and it's a positive with definite drawbacks--is that every region is populated with the same four or fives types of enemy. So once you take on the first mob of goblin fire archers, cultist sorcerers, skeletons, assassins, or whatever in a particular location, you know what to expect in that entire area and can go on autopilot when it comes to battle strategizing. Enemies help out by not being very bright, either. They waste their own objective points on moving around unnecessarily, do nothing in the back row, ignore wounded heroes and threats like spellcasters, and so on.

Surprises still happen, though. Difficulty jumps around. You can be steamrolling all comers for ages and walk into a brutal fight against an all-new creature with a never-before-seen ability like regeneration, or undead that revive unless you send them all back to the afterlife in one turn. You learn how to fight different creatures as they appear, but because there's no save-on-demand feature--you instead save at totems strewn around the landscape--this can lead to frustrating trial and error.

Making matters worse is the inaccuracy of the enemy warning system. Look at a mob of foes and they highlight green, yellow, or red. To try to make matters even clearer, party members chime in by assessing the potential bout as a cakewalk, a challenge, or suicide. None of this is very accurate, though. While green scraps always seem easy, some yellow are murderous, and some red are a lot more painless than expected. As a result, you can get a nasty shocker and get killed in a fight that looks like no problem--which is a major pain if you haven't been able to save in a while.

Stability is a also problem. Crashes are a frequent occurrence, especially at the end of battles. Usually the game went down with an error message, but a few times it froze up at the end of a fight while looking at the loot that dead foes left behind. Because of these crashes, it's wise to save constantly--even when you have to run back significant distances to find a save totem after a tough battle.

More serious issues arise due to problems with the level design and structure of the game's locales. The maps are huge and labyrinthine and that's befitting the history of dungeon crawlers, of course, but the game is too loaded with narrow corridors with minimal incentives. Despite the maze-like appearance, you are led in a linear fashion from Point A to Point B in the dungeon ruins of Skara Brae, the forest of Inshriach, or the tundra of Stronsea. There is little room for creativity, as both plot and maps run on rails from start to finish. Inaccessible areas are crudely blocked off with rubble or piles of crates, as well, reinforcing the feeling that you're playing a game of connect-the-dots with extra steps.

While there is a good variety of brainteasers in the game, ranging from switching gears to moving blocks to shoving faeries around an obstacle course to routing blood into connected streams, there are far, far too many of them. Puzzles are used to pad out levels too often. Instead of having to face one or two of these innovative enigmas at a time, you get five or more in a row, almost always of the same type, which gets very monotonous, very fast.

Aspects of the map design appear unfinished. While loads of NPCs are ready to chat, these encounters generally lead to dead ends. Some wayward monk or lovelorn peasant will tell you a story of woe that seems to be leading somewhere, as their conversations tend to revolve around boilerplate RPG quests like hunting for an artifact or finding a lost girlfriend. But then these talks either come to an abrupt halt or the guy or gal turns into a merchant. Your only response to somebody pouring their heart a lot of the time is to ask if they've got any stuff to sell.

Most areas offer little beyond solving puzzles and fighting. Loot drops are limited. You collect the same swords, helmets, and armor constantly from defeated enemies and the crates and barrels scattered across the landscape, along with various types of food and drink that both recover hit points and can be used in crafting. There is little sense of reward. For every cool sword you discover, you smash open 50 barrels and chests filled with vegetables and bottles of water. There's nothing like taking 10 minutes to solve a puzzle leading to a chest…and then finding nothing in it but three carrots and a potato.

The visuals aren't technically impressive and cause even the best systems to chug and stutter when moving the camera on all graphics settings. Character faces have an oddly disturbing appearance in the middle ground between a mannequin and a melted candle, and animations are stiff and jerky, both in real-time dungeon delving and in turn-based battles. Still, the look of the game remains charming. Everything is given a Celtic/Scottish look that could have been taken from Braveheart, and a bright color palette evokes an '80s RPG mood recalling the vivid hues of classic D&D art.

Audio is hit and miss. Well-acted dialogue perfectly handles the Scottish brogue of most characters. Enemies repeat cheesy taunts in combat, though, and party chatter consists of juvenile insults. Some audio effects don't fit with what's taking place on-screen. Gulping down water triggers the same crunching and lip-smacking that accompanies eating a cabbage or apple. At least the music has a beautiful Celtic flavor with plucked strings, fiddles, and choral odes that make the game sound like Enya outtakes.

Other quirks add aggravation. Load times are long and frequent; it takes over a minute to transition between areas, even when leaving a tavern to hit the streets. Level maps can be misleading. Key items like save totems aren't included, and you can't make notes. There is no way to sort character inventories, leading to tedious item management.

Common wisdom and clichés aside, The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep proves you can go home again. But why would anyone want to? While the game re-creates what we played in the 1990s, misty water-colored memories of hours spent with Eye of the Beholder are not enough to fix numerous design miscues, performance problems, and bugs. This is a tough sell to all but the most dedicated and patient retro fan.