Kena feels like a spiritual sequel to the original Jak & Daxter on the Playstation 2. Its an old school 3D platformer with Dark Souls inspired combat and phenomenal visuals. While its battle system is simple, its dependance on strict timing gives it challenge. The visuals are amazing and make exploring a treat even if the world feels static for the lack interactivity from its environments. It also has a touching story that maked me reflect on an individuals hardships and their journey to the afterlife. Kena: Bridge of spirits is a great homage to its playstation 2 roots, containing fun exploration and combat while being limited in its level design.

A massive surge in quality compared to Metroid Fusion and Samus Returns. Dread finds a great middle ground between exploration, cinematics and objectives. The first hours feel restrictive but the well designed, secret filled map opens up and feels like a joy to explore. This is in part to the sublime controls. Samus feels amazing to control with the right response, weight and momentum. The game provides good, challenging difficulty with plenty of checkpoints to keep the frustration in check. Fortunately, the games progression to turn you into a unstoppable badass at the end is paced amazingly. Dread also has the best boss battles in the series history.

Its not perfect though, the EMMI robots, while providing a horror experience, can be frustrating with their one hit kills. Mini bosses repeat too often at the end. The grappling hook straight up sucks, but fortunately you barely use it in game.

Metroid Dread is the best game in the series since 2007's Corruption. A straight up classic and a must have on a Switch library.

Exceptional worldbuilding and graphics are brought down with slow, repetitive gameplay.

The Ascent has a stunning graphical style. The cyberpunk world is dense, populated and oozes atmosphere. This makes up for the gameplay mechanics a lot. The game is a Diablo style twin stick shooter. The action is plentiful with exploding wet chunks mixed with slabs of concrete everywhere. The mission structure is the basic go there, shoot that or defend this spot.

What makes this game a difficult recommendation is the slow movement speed. Takes ages to get anywhere even with fast travel. Though I can see the argument that this makes you soak in the world's atmosphere, I can't help it and get bored a lot of the time. You will also blindly shoot enemies away from the screen because of the camera and the cover system feels tacked on.

Your love for explosive, Diablo style twin stick shooter action, beautiful graphics and expertly crafted cyberpunk world will determine your tolerance for finishing this game.

Back 4 Blood's saving grace is its great shooting mechanics and interesting card system. Shooting feels satisfying, even though the gore effect is not reflected well on the zombies. The card system lets you create many different classes and gives the game a needed boost in the replay department.

But this game has the shadow of the vastly superior Left 4 Dead 2 over it for good reason. The level design is mediocre at best and it recycles its setting a lot, making you slog through the same areas at a different time of day. The AI director just spams zombies instead of providing a good challenge with the special infected working with each other. The best part of the game was done better in the Concert scenario in Left 4 Dead 2.

Back 4 Blood hits the right price as a Gamepass title. It can be fun with friends but it never even comes close to matching its contemporary.

The Gurdian's debt should be payed to Mass Effect and Telltale. Also add in modern videogame corridor linearity as exploration and you get a surprisingly great game.

Guardian's story, characters and amazing graphics go a long way to mask its serviceable combat full of sponge enemies that by the end of the game fall too easy to your team's abilities.

Still, its an amazing journey full of surprises but you need to tolerate the incessant ramblings of a well acted cast that just wont shut the hell up for a second. It made the impression that the game was too insecure in maintaining its audiences attention.

A shame, cause Guardians could let itself breathe in its amazingly crafted locales. Its a memorable space opera well worth playing through.

An incredible premise bogged down by hand holding and weak enemy AI.

Deathloop's premise sounds more complicated than it really is. All the talk of being stock in a loop and figuring out how to kill 8 people in one day is relegated to mission objectives that spoil the solution instead letting the player solve the puzzle.

Fortunately, the shooting, using magic and sneaking around feels great. It is fun to play around messing with the enemies and thinking of different ways to mess with them. It also feels satisfying to get more powerful by killing the bosses in every loop. Though, in my playthrough I just found 2 out of the 7 powers to be truly useful to finish the game.

Good gameplay, an enjoyable story and superb voice acting form a game that almost reaches greatness. It just fails because Deathloop's developer, Arcane had to over simplify their vision in favor of a mass market approach.

The most "just ok" game ive played in a while. The game centers on clean up gameplay a la Super Mario Sunshine but with a vacuum. Its fun restoring an areas nature when you suck up the dirty gunk with your arm vacuum but it gets old half way the 5 hour runtime. The last half of the game has a nice pace and ups the challenge a bit from its almost walking simulator like beginnings. At least the Unreal Engine 4 graphics are not terrible because of the decent art style.

Level design is subpar, the scan mechanic is half baked, puzzles feel more like inconveniences than fun, story is deus-ex machina filled generic save the world plot and the voice acting is terrible.

Seriously, whomever decided to have a mom like character say be careful every 5 minutes needs to get over their fetish and get help for your childhood abandonment issues.

Play Kena: Bridge of Spirits instead.

A massively addictive mix of Starcraft, Diablo, No Man's Sky and Tower Defense.

This is a top down game that strikes a great balance of calm, zen like resource gathering, exploration and base building with the insane defense of the relentless alien monsters that want to eradicate every trace of your invasion of their planet.

The game eases you into everything bringing you a good tutorial that teaches you the basics but leaves you hungry to discover combinations of different defenses and offenses. The great UI helps a ton making it clear about what you need,

Sure, it can be tense and frustrating when your creations could be destroyed in less than a minute. But with every defense, comes great growth in the form of a skill tree that upgrades for your mech, guns and your buildings.

This is a hidden gem. It can be grindy and repetitive but the dozens of hours this game gave me were some of the most fun ive had this year.

Just play Nioh 2.

A decent battle system completely wasted on awful level design, dialog, story and loot. Prepare to crank that brightness setting all the way up for the overly dark, overly tiny and uninteresting areas. Make your PC suffer at 10fps by zooming in to an NPC with a fur coat.

The overly edgy main characters are best left at a hot topic. This story is will be best enjoyed by youtube essays that will make fun of it in the future. The fans it will generate will love it for the "Irony". No irony is worth full price or even your time.