Dominic Tarason
Bigger, better, more refined than its predecessor. Perhaps standing out a little less now, but with vast potential.
Despite a capricious early game, Astrea is a very pretty, refreshing & tense spin on the tried-and-true deckbuilder.
On par with its (excellent) predecessors, Shadow Gambit trades some focused design for deeply compelling piratical freedom.
There's a few bolts that could be tightened up here and there, but Jagged Alliance is back in business.
For all its many flaws, LOTR: Gollum is an oft-beautiful and oddly endearing adventure.
A graphically gorgeous descendant of Myst, paradoxically limited by its own ambitions.
Beautiful, polished and painfully hollow. Ravenlok's bones are immaculate, but lack meat or connective tissue.
A small but satisfying strategy puzzler that comes, does its job and leaves without fuss.
An exciting concept begging for structural refinements and more meat on its robot bones.
Old-school Yakuza for better or worse, but still a good point of entry for newcomers.
Cozy, meandering fun for One Piece fans, but swabbies should set sail from other ports.
Tense, haunting and beautiful. Inventory shenanigans aside, one of the best survival horror games yet.
A game that pushes VR's boundaries. Strange, playful and committed to creativity, but intense if you're new to VR.
What it lacks in charm, Temtem makes up for with mechanical depth and involved multiplayer.
This heartfelt, engaging reprise of a classic falls just shy of greatness due to a lack of fresh ideas and endurance.
As it stands now, Mothergunship has a lot of likeable elements that sometimes mesh into an excellent whole, but just as often bump awkwardly against each other.
There's maybe a third of a good game in here, weighed down by a mountain of big and ambitious ideas, none of them given the time and attention they needed to really function.
Wizard of Legend is a good, if lopsided game. The moment-to-moment combat is highly flexible and seldom anything less than satisfying, especially in co-op. It's just a pity that while your arsenal of spells and artifacts is massive enough to be remixed a thousand ways, the maps, bosses and enemy types only fit together in a handful of configurations.
Household Games clearly have vision and creativity on their side, as well as some very skilled artists and musicians. All they need is to exercise a little restraint on whatever they work on next.
In the end Iconoclasts wasn't quite what I expected, but I greatly enjoyed my time with it, and would recommend it to any platformer fan.