The Fertile Crescent somehow manages to riff nostalgically on Age Of Empires, while completely rewriting its ground rules to become something new and exciting.
Total War: Warhammer 3, though best considered as the final part of an excessive strategy megagame, is a heavyweight in its own right.
Despite a subdued opening hour, Expeditions: Rome is a gripping, ambitious historical CRPG, which shines in its writing, art direction, and combat.
Jurassic World Evolution 2 makes changes to the DNA of its predecessor, but remains a great adaptation stretched over an inconsistent management game.
Humankind is, by and large, exactly what I hoped it would be: a heavyweight alternative to Civilization in the world of historical strategy.
While I may not identify with any of my guerrillas and their grab-bag backstories, nor feel any sense of real investment in the fate of DedSec as a whole, I’m still attached to this strange band of possessed berserkers. We’ve had a good time together, in this nonsense dystopian playground.
Partisans 1941 is a Soviet take on Commandos, and it's great. It's very savescummy, but makes up for it with a base management metagame and a strong setting.
The central experience – of being a pilot in a Star Wars – is masterfully crafted, and I can’t find much to fault with it. Squadrons is probably the most fun I’ve had with any piece of Star Wars media since my teens, in fact, and it frequently invokes a joy I haven’t felt since playing TIE Fighter in 1995.
The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk is a goofy, D&D-themed turn-based tactics game with a lot of polish - but if the word 'zany' sets your teeth on edge, be warned.
I think I’ll need another year of playing it to work out exactly what I think of it. But that’s another way of saying I want to play it for a year, so it must be pretty good.
This is a good Total War game.
Much like crabs themselves, I am tremendously glad this game exists, but it’s something I’d rather appreciate at a distance.
Worst of all, so much of the effort that’s gone into making the very deepest locales seem melancholy and strange is wasted, as there’s no sense of scale. Thanks to handwaved technology, Morai is capable of diving in her regular suit even at abyssal depths, and there’s no real sense in having to travel to get there. The madness-inviting vertical isolation of the deeps, the monstrous cold and the pressure, are all absent. These lonely pits feel like any of the other levels: roughly oval patches of water, about so high and so wide, with a certain number of fish spawned within them. It’s not that I’m unimpressed, or ungrateful, you understand. I just think the developers set themselves a near-impossible task.
It’s a robust piece of design that you could well consider a triumph, given just how many ways in which the concept of an ARPG based on a construction game phenomenon could have ended in disaster. And I’m confident in recommending it as worth its price to even the most jaded click-stabber, especially one with even a passing familiarity with Minecraft. But the fact it’s been executed so competently leaves me wishing the developers had been a bit more reckless, frankly.
The overwhelming impression is that the game doesn’t really know what it’s trying to say, and can’t convincingly pass the mess off as satire. So it would probably be best off saying nothing.