A simple yet brilliantly executed love letter to the iconic music of Final Fantasy.: If you have even a passing interest in music from Final Fantasy and other Square Enix titles like Nier, NEO: The World Ends With You and the Chrono series, then you will LOVE this game.

The rhythm gameplay is addictively simple to pick up, yet infuriatingly difficult to master at the higher end. Combine that with some basic RPG mechanics allowing you to construct and level up your own party using heroes (and villains!) from any Final Fantasy game and you can see why it's a winning formula. You also get to choose which game's airship you'd like to use and even get MOOGLE COSTUMES! What more do I need to say?

The only thing stopping me from giving it a full 5 stars is some songs are cut down into smaller segments and in some cases, cut off before they get to the best part. Obviously, this needs to happen to support the game's pick-up-and-play style but an option to play the full version of songs like FF6's Dancing Mad and FF7 Advent Children's One Winged Angel would be welcome.

There's also some strange choices and omissions in some of the soundtracks: Out of FF14's 32 tracks, 24 of them are from the base game and Heavensward - with only 4 tracks from Stormblood, 4 from Shadowbringers and none at all from the latest expansion Endwalker (granted, the latter had only been released for 13 months when this game launched).

A huge improvement over the base game, though some questionable decisions still hold it back from reaching the high heights of XC1 or even Future Connected.

Let's dive into the good: Nearly all of the overly convoluted systems from the base game are GONE, hallelujah! No Blade RNG gacha, far less weapon/blade/pouch management etc. Combat is also greatly refined, a little jarring versus the base game at first, but the faster pace and smaller pool of abilities made for a more satisfying and fluid combat experience. The devs also learned their lesson on the base game's horrendous tutorial management, Torna's tutorials are much more clear and can be read again at any time. The campfire system introduced here is also excellent and actually makes collecting items fun.

Not everything is so positive though: The story's pacing starts well but comes to a grinding halt right at its most climatic moment when, in a baffling move, you cannot progress any further without completing most of the expansion's side quests. The game does a decent job of explaining this away within the story, but it felt ridiculous to have the antagonist obtain a literal world-ending power but then let you take as much time as you want to complete lifeless MMO fetch quests for the last quarter of the game. Even as someone who went out of their way to complete every side quest up to that point, this still felt like a chore.

Torna The Golden Country feels like a bite-sized Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with the polish that the base game was seemingly lacking. Despite troubles of its own, it seems to lay down some excellent foundations that I'm hopeful will be taken on into Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

I was pleasantly surprised by Pokémon Violet, in a very similar way to how Sun, Moon, Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon surprised me. The story and characters are surprisingly strong for a Pokémon game, the gameplay changes taken from Legends: Arceus make battles more fluid and fun and the open world feels busy and alive (looking at you Legends: Arceus!). The soundtrack also takes a page from Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon's playbook by introducing a bunch of new genres to the series like the excellent Jazz Gym Leader theme and the EDM Team Star music.

My only gameplay complaint is the game tries to push this narrative that you can tackle the three story paths and explore the world in any way you'd like but without level scaling, you're really set to tackling objectives in a specific order which defeats some of the open world and objectives' purpose. This also makes the pacing of the story a little odd, though no more odd than your average open world RPG.

That aside though, I really enjoyed how Violet shakes up the main series Pokemon formula...which makes it a real shame that the, frankly, horrendous performance issues ruin everything going for it: This is, by FAR, the worst-performing Nintendo Switch title I've ever played.

Constant stutter and slowdown makes exploring and battling in the open world a sluggish and unpleasant experience, NPCs and Pokemon pop in right in front of you and when they do appear in the distance, they appear at a much lower framerate which makes them even more jarringly noticeable. Playing in handheld seems to provide a slightly smoother experience than Docked surprisingly but the issues are very much noticeable through both methods of play.

I also encountered a ton of minor bugs throughout my playthrough, from Pokemon appearing inside buildings and trees to the camera falling through the floor during battles. I even had a wild Pokemon's model just suddenly disappear in the middle of a battle. It's baffling that it remains in this state four months after release and with the DLC coming later this year.

It's a real shame because purely based on the content, this is a HUGE step up from Sword/Shield and is up there with Black/White, HeartGold/SoulSilver and Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon as one of Game Freak's best Pokemon experiences. But judging by the lack of fixes this far on from release, it looks like the game will be forever tarnished by these issues.

Despite the GTA Definite Edition Trilogy's poor reputation after its disastrous launch, I was pleasantly surprised with how smooth my playthrough of GTA San Andreas Definitive Edition was.

Let's get the big negatives out of the way first: The game's performance is still SHOCKINGLY bad on PC for a nearly 2-decade old game with slight visual upgrades. With an RTX 3060, I had to stick to medium settings to get a solid 60 FPS though oddly, some clothing stores would cause the framerate to drop to the mid-40s for no apparent reason. Also if you weren't a fan of the 'remastered' visuals and questionable model design, then these are also practically identical to how they were at launch - though personally, I didn't mind these.

Considering all the above, I was quite surprised to encounter almost zero bugs during my entire playthrough across both PC and Steam Deck apart from the radio occasionally cutting out (fixed by switching to another channel then back again) and two Fatal Error crashes near the end of the game. Gameplay-wise, the Definitive Edition is the same as the original apart from a few minor additions pulled from GTA V. The additions didn't really have a big effect on San Andreas vs the original although I imagine they'll be much more apparent in Vice City & III.

Overall, I'd still recommend the original edition over the Definitive edition but if the latter's your only way to play, I wouldn't rule it out entirely. It's a stable, if slightly butchered, way to revisit San Andreas.

(Reviewing the trilogy as a whole as I played the entire story for the first time in Hitman 3)

The moment I fell in love with this game was during the very first level of Hitman 1 (you can play all the levels of Hitman 1 & 2 in 3 through DLC access packs) in Paris. As you take control of 47, a news crew starts filming a piece and so, of course, I had to walk right in front of their shot to see if they reacted. They did. Aggressively. So I kept doing it and after the third interruption, they both cussed 47 out and walked away. It's so simple and yet, it perfectly encapsulates what makes this game so great: Anything and everything you can think of, the game has accounted for and its world will react accordingly.

Hitman 3 awards creativity unlike any other game I've played: You can follow the Mission Stories to setup a somewhat contrived but fun scenario to kill your target quietly or you can devise your own plan. The more ways you kill, the more challenges you complete - which unlock new tools, starting areas in each map, outfits and other unlockables, making the game nearly infinitely replayable.

Now, it isn't a perfect game: The always-online requirement forced me to reboot the game on several occasions after it lost connection to the servers, it can be somewhat janky with characters dying and the pricing for the entire trilogy + DLC is The Sims-levels of insane but none of those detracted from the utter blast I had playing through it.

I've only beaten the main campaign of the trilogy but there's still so much I've got left to do: The side missions, player-made contracts, sniper missions, Elusive target missions and I cannot wait. Unless a very late contender appears at the last minute, I believe I've found my game of the year for 2022.

A short but fun little nostalgia trip back to a game I played a TON of as a kid - and when I say short, I mean SHORT. I managed to blitz the story in one 6-hour sitting but of course, the story isn't really the main focus of this game. From the genuinely surprising variance of minigames (there's even a Doom-style FPS!), coaster & race builders and park management aspects, there's a ton of replayability here. The soundtrack is pure mid-2000s nostalgia, ESPECIALLY if you were a Disney Channel kid, with tracks from the likes of Blur, Lily Allen, Miley Cyrus and The Veronicas.

Don't go in expecting a game as in-depth or robust as the rest of Frontier's back catalogue, but it's definitely a fun little trip down memory lane for a day or two.

Okay, let's get Wind Waker's issues out of the way early: There are noticeable pacing issues towards the endgame, it's notoriously easy and the final dungeon & boss are pretty underwhelming. The HD edition does make some steps to resolve these but ultimately, they are still there and noticeable.

However, these are very minor problems when you look at this Nintendo classic as a whole. The combat is simple but incredibly satisfying, its toon-ish comedy is used sparing yet precisely when it needs to be and the charming artstyle is one of the most timeless in all of gaming. Wind Waker is one of those games you HAVE to play just once in your life and I'm so glad I finally did.

A fun if fairly average Ace Attorney game. The music, Edgeworth himself and the original Ace Attorney cast carry a story that gets dragged out way too long for its own good. The first three cases were good but nothing groundbreaking, the fourth was the best by far and the fifth was excellent up until the battle with the final villain which goes on FOREVER and sours the end of the game somewhat. There were also quite a few mistranslations and grammatical errors, way more than the original trilogy and Apollo Justice had.

I still prefer Ace Attorney's original formula of Ace Attorney but there's definitely potential in how Investigations handles things and intrigued to see how things are shaken up in AAI2!

Before anyone murders me for rating this higher than Origins, hear me out. Yes, Dragon Age II has its well-documented issues: It reuses assets all over the place, the setting isn't as diverse, the third act was clearly rushed in development...

HOWEVER, it is a fantastic Bioware Action RPG that holds up really well in 2022 if you can look past those issues. The writing and characters are great, the combat is super satisfying & weighty and I loved seeing the progression of Kirkwall over the 10-year story arc. DLCs were fun too, though I preferred Mark Of The Assassin to Legacy. Super invested in the Dragon Age world and intrigued to see how Inquisition's move to Open World tackles it.

I really wish I liked this game more but the first third of the game suffers majorly due to the vague and misleading tutorials on top of the convoluted systems which feels, at times, like Monolith Soft were throwing potential systems at the wall to see what stuck for the DLC & XC3.

The game also leans HEAVILY into full-on anime tropes compared to XC1 which is at its worst during the first few hours when one of the party members is outted as having a maid fetish as part of a comedy bit. Might be okay for some, but I felt a bit uncomfortable with the shift.

Once you get past the slog of the first third though, it becomes a really good continuation of the Xenoblade series (although not overall better than the first) but it is a BIG hill to climb over.

+ Combat is arguably BETTER than XC1! The elemental orbs chain attack system is super satisfying and makes you feel incredibly powerful once you master it.
+ The cast outside of the main party feel much stronger and more memorable than XC1. Alrest feels like an alive world with characters constantly developing vs the Bionos & Mechonis where, at times, everyone outside the main cast felt somewhat flat outside their side quests.
- Its vague, misleading and outright bad tutorials make learning the game's systems a very frustrating experience.
- I am not a fan of Rex (sorry!). I felt more of a connection with Nia as a main character honestly.
- Tsundere characters, maid fetish jokes and other heavy anime tropes are front and centre vs the more 'Look for it and you'll find it' attitude of XC1.

I mean, who hasn't played Peggle... Me apparently! A fun and challenging little timewaster that never outstayed its welcome and still holds up in 2022!

+ Gameplay is SUPER satisfying, especially when you hit an Extreme Slide or some other crazy combo.
+ The difficulty curve is perfect, introducing you to each of the power-ups in their own set of levels before making you tackle the fairly challenging final one with whichever power-up you prefer!
- It's Peggle, you're not gonna get any groundbreaking innovations here.
- Fairly short, I managed to beat it in just a few hours.