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.
All of these issues are fixable (some quite easily, I’d hope), and just a little extra content could do so much to hide the edges of the game. I hope it comes. Because the compulsion reactor at the heart of Space Crew is putting out more power than is currently being used.
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.
Not the most innovative game in the world by any means, but one of the best adventures you can go on inside a telly, and one of the most beautiful, too – especially now that telly is a PC.
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.