Includes PushSquare
Last reviewed: Mina the Hollower · 5 days ago
A referential and joyful deep dive into the world of Batman, the latest LEGO effort from TT Games is elite brick gaming. Legacy of the Dark Knight just wants to be an enjoyable time, and it refuses to falter from that commitment. This new LEGO Batman will be some of the best fun you have all year.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is an excellent action RPG that offers an even more hardcore take on the increasingly popular Soulslike formula. It's fast, frenetic, and hits like a truck, with one of the most mesmeric combat systems we've ever had the pleasure to master. It might scare off more casual players, but those looking for a challenge, well - you can stop looking.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is one of the most memorable RPGs we've played in years. In pursuing a new property, complete with a fantasy setting, Atlus has allowed its creativity to blossom, resulting in a brilliantly rich experience - both in terms of narrative and audiovisual design. While Metaphor takes obvious gameplay and structural cues from the developer's previous projects, it combines and refines those elements to make an epic, kingdom-hopping adventure that feels unique and deeply fulfilling.
By daring to downscale some of the fluff, NBA 2K25 brings its focus back to basketball in a positive way. Improvements to the series' dribbling system and ProPLAY make this the best feeling hoops sim Visual Concepts has made, while the sheer density of different modes and features means you could play nothing else all year – and still never get bored. But the borderline insulting emphasis on microtransactions remain a thorn in this series' side, and something you simply have to accept if you want to enjoy everything else on offer here.
Bloober Team has faithfully and respectfully recreated one of the survival horror genre's all-time greats, modernising Silent Hill 2 in all the right ways.
Across the board, the emulation is excellent, and the package has been enhanced by beautiful 3D renders of the original Famicom cartridges, as well as artwork and high-resolution scans of each game’s manual. This is a well-done and loving bundle, then, but the games themselves are ancient and demand a very specific mindset if you plan to extract any actual entertainment value from them.
Worms Armageddon: Anniversary Edition is a warts-and-all revival of a game that, 25 years later, still has it where it counts, and there aren't too many titles that can make that claim.
All in all, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Plus delivers a fun mystery-filled visual novel experience, perfect for anyone who is a fan of Danganronpa or similar titles. There are a few frustrating elements here and there, but the whole package is a mostly solid narrative-focused adventure.
The story and world-building are definitely the most interesting things about Reynatis but it’s a shame everything else feels so half-baked and repetitive. It’s hard to get invested in the characters when the dull combat makes you want to get through the adventure as quickly as possible.
But it’s this type of boundless creativity that many feel PlayStation is missing these days. Sony may have lifted the overall quality of its output, but it’s come at the expense of unbridled oddities like this; a game that, when considered critically, is barely above average – but ends up more memorable than the latest AAA fancy purely because of the sheer insanity of it all.
The Plucky Squire is a delightful adventure that surprises with fun ideas in every chapter. The world within the book offers unique puzzles and challenges, which is compounded by Jot's ability to leap from its pages into the third dimension. Though the combat's kinda flat, and some elements deserve to be used more often than they are, there's an undeniable joy to the game's constant imaginative ideas. It's a short but sweet game that'll win over players of all ages.
A substantial visual overhaul of Dead Rising is what will immediately stand out most, but where the Deluxe Remaster truly thrives is in all its gameplay touch-ups to make the classic play and feel like any other modern game. They all build to the definitive Dead Rising experience, where its time management feature can be properly appreciated.
Train Sim World 5 shunts the series forward with a number of smaller improvements. While the base package feels a bit unnecessary, it's effectively a free client upgrade for existing expansion owners, and therefore worth your time. Of the new routes included with the Deluxe Edition, we really love the West Coast Main Line, and the other two additions bring their own character and challenges. We just hope, moving forwards, the franchise starts to live up to its moniker – it's Train Sim World, not Train Sim UK USA Germany.
The combat feels awkward; the game is buggy, and filled with abrupt cutscene transitions. At the end of the day, we’re left asking, ‘Who is this for?’ Children don’t care about Battlestar Galactica and The Thing, and adults won’t love the boring, simplistic gameplay loop.
Caravan SandWitch is just a really pleasant video game. It can be a bit rough around the edges in terms of animations and technical performance, but its story intrigues, and its atmospheric brand of exploration is largely a delight.
Wild Bastards is good, but it didn’t quite hit as hard as we’d hoped. That said, the studio's fantastic art direction and writing continue to shine through, enough to make this a title worth looking at.
Cumulatively, you end up with a title brimming with nostalgia and good ideas, but controls that hold the affair back.