Also available on Xbox Series X, Switch 2, and Windows

I never got into Warhammer or Warhammer 40k.  I always thought it looked super cool, but I was never really into tabletop gaming until the past couple of years, and I knew I'd bankrupt myself on minis if I let myself get into it.  I do, however, love wanton violence against invading aliens, so I played through the remaster of the first Space Marine game not too long ago.  Long story short, it was awesome, so I picked up a copy of the sequel.  After giving myself a little bit of time to play other games to cleanse my palate, I dove in and found that this sequel is every bit as glorious and addicting as the previous game.

Like the first game, you play as the ultramarine Titus and are sent to the planet of Kodaku in response to a distress call.  When you arrive, you find that the planet has been overrun by Tyranids and fight a desperate last stand battle for survival.  Titus holds out valiantly, but in the end, his is overwhelmed and slain...or is he?  By nothing less than the will and mercy of the Emperor, Titus clings to life just long enough for the techno priests to perform some insane operation to save his life and put him back in the fight.  As his entire squad was wiped out, he is given command of a new squad with a new mission to fight the Tyranid invasion of Cadia.  The story perfectly nails the grimdark tone I obsess over with a seemingly unwinnable fight, religious fanaticism, and a glimpse at the inner political workings of the Imperium.

The gameplay is basically the same as in the first game but refined.  The balance between and seamless integration of swordplay and gunplay really make this game stand out from the crowd of shooters.  I'm not sure I'm going to say that it feels smoother than Gears of War, but it does do a better job of putting melee in an equally important position to ranged combat than Gears does.  The most metal part of the game is when you have literally hundreds upon hundreds of Tyranid enemies swarming you and trying to climb whatever wall you happen to be on top of.  Whether it's a melee weapon or a grenade, it's immensely satisfying to watch dozens and dozens of bodies just fall.

Multiplayer has a few different game modes to choose from with most being cooperative but a few being your more traditional player vs player matches.  More worth noting than the multiplayer, however, is the presentation and the visuals.  Cut scenes and music are well crafted to deliver a sense of gravity to the narrative situation, and the game is absolutely beautiful.  You've got the typical two modes to swap between - Performance at 1080p60 and Quality at 2160p30 - and as usual, I went for performance.  Always prioritize frame rate over resolution.  There are some noticeable drops in performance mode with the frame rate targeting 60 fps but often staying in 40s or 50s whereas quality does a much better job at keeping a stable target 30 fps, but with the frame rate only very rarely dropping below 40 fps and only briefly at that, I still thing performance is the mode to go for.  I am absolutely not one of those guys who say "30 fps is unplayable, it has to be 60," but when the option is there, I will usually go for the higher frame rate even if it doesn't quite manage to hold 60.

For fans of Warhammer 40k, Space Marine II is an absolutely non-negotiable must-play.  For fans of third person shooters like Gears of War or Helldivers, I would consider this game a must-play unless you're one of those losers who refuses to play single player games.  If you're just a fan of military sci-fi settings, it's still worth playing.  Basically, unless you're a gaming pacifist who won't play games with any realistic violence at all, you should play this game.  It's not perfect - there are some frame rate issues, objectives do get pretty repetitive now and then, and the game's level design is completely linear with no real side paths to take - but the game's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses.

Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, Android, iOS, and PC

Final Fantasy VII, along with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is one of those games that defined gaming in the late 1990s and is still looked upon with abject reverence today.  With the remake trilogy close to wrapping up, I figured I should revisit the original game before diving into Remake and Rebirth so that I can better appreciate, for good or ill, the changes and additions the remake games offer as well as just revisit this classic with the benefit of age as I last played this in 2011 when I was in college.  My findings - it's a great game, but a lot of the reverence is due to nostalgia glasses.

Final Fantasy VII, in addition to being the first game to appear on a competitor's system instead of a Nintendo console, also marked the series's shift to 3D.  The story, put overly simplified, is about ecoterrorists waging a campaign against an oppressive and environmentally destructive corporatocracy.  As events unfold and the plot progresses, you discover a planetary threat much greater than the Shin-ra company and shift your quest from fighting the capitalist pigs to fighting a psychotic demi-god intent on destroying the planet.  It was a darker tone than previous Final Fantasy games, and a lot of that is down to presentation.  Midgar is depicted as a dark, dirty urban sprawl of a city, and that dark and foreboding aesthetic helps reinforce this idea that the Shin-ra corporation is, if not inherently evil, at least maliciously apathetic and negligent.

The game's graphics have not aged well, especially the pre-rendered backgrounds and heavily compressed video clips, but the music remains, in my opinion, the best of the series and, after Persona 4, the best video game soundtrack of all time.  The battle theme, the title theme, and One-Winged Angel are genuine OST classics, and even almost thirty years after the game's release and fifteen years after my first playthrough, One-Winged Angel still gives me goosebumps every single time.  Final Fantasy has always had superb music, but Final Fantasy VII is in a league of its own.  In terms of aging as a game from 1997 played in 2026, it hasn't aged well overall, but that's largely down to the visuals and performance which I'll get to in a moment.  I think the character models are just fine - I've never had an issue with the blocky polygonal 3D models of the PS1, N64, and Saturn, and character models do highly benefit from the increase in resolution - but the heavily compressed video and the pre-rendered backgrounds that sometimes make it hard to see where you need to where you're supposed to go and what's a wall vs what's a ladder hinder the overall smoothness of the experience a lot more than I remembered.

Revisiting Final Fantasy VII was a strange experience for me.  In my head, it sits on this pedestal of JRPG divinity, but when I replayed it 29 years after its release, it just did not hold up to how I remembered it.  That's probably partly because my previous playthrough was back when the Wii was my primary console, so I was more used to the somewhat blurry backgrounds and low frame rate.  Part of it, I think, though, is that it just wasn't aged well.  Don't get me wrong, it's still a fantastic game that I thoroughly enjoyed replaying.  I just didn't enjoy it as much as I expected to.  Since the story is one of my favorite parts of it, knowing what happens already probably dampened some of that, but I really can't stress enough how jarring that frame rate drop when you enter battle is and how frustrating to navigate some of the pre-rendered backgrounds can be.  Thankfully, this game is cheap and playable on every piece of modern gaming hardware there is, and I do recommend giving it a play.  It's okay if you don't finish it - it's a solid 35 to 50 hour RPG depending on how much you grind and how many of the game's side quests you make a point to finish - but I firmly believe that any JRPG fan ought to experience at least the Disc 1 of the game.

Also available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Switch, Switch 2, macOS, and PC

I first bought Divinity Original Sin II several years ago to play with a few friends who had played it before but never finished it.  Well, as is often the case when you have a group of adults trying to play the same co-op game while living in different cities, we never finished, either.  We never got past Act 1.  I never touched it after that because I couldn't really get into it.  I didn't "get" CRPGs, so I hadn't been enjoying it that much.  Years down the line, however, and I've now played a lot of DnD which got me into Baldur's Gate III which, as a CRPG, was when the genre finally clicked with me, so I decided to revisit Original Sin II after I finished Baldur's Gate.

I haven't played the few games in the series that released prior to this, so going in with zero franchise context, the premise is basically that anyone who can use Source (magic) is rounded up and sent off to a concentration camp island called Fort Joy by the Magisters - basically a cross between the Knights Templar and the Gestapo.  This is because they're blamed for the appearance of "Voidwoken," big monster bugs from another dimension.  It's believed that using Source attracts the Voidwoken, so we have to contain you for the good of world, they claim.  You and up to three of six main characters set off on an attempt to break the collars that prevent you from using your powers, hijack a Magister ship, and escape the island.  As with most CRPGs, you have a number of ways of getting yourself to that end goal, and as with most games of any genre that I play, I chose to go full chaotic good and kill every single Magister I saw because they're basically just fantasy Nazis.  That's Act 1.  The three subsequent acts have you investigate the powers calling the shots and eventually, because this is the endgame of every RPG, opposing the Big Bad Evil Guy and saving the world.

My game disc obviously says Xbox One, but I only ever actually played the Series X version, so that's all I can personally attest to, but it looks fantastic and runs beautifully on Series X.  I've seen footage of the Switch and Switch 2 versions, and while the Switch version definitely looks like one to avoid with how blurry the graphical cutbacks made it, it looks like a pretty solid port on Switch 2, so Nintendo gamers aren't left out in the cold here.  Switch 2 actually seems like a pretty ideal platform for this kind of game, I think, because it's a BEEFY RPG that took me around 80 hours to beat, and being able to play anywhere I have a little time would be a big boon.  It is, sadly, only available digitally on Switch and Switch 2 (unless you want to cough up $175 for a copy of Limited Run's Switch printing), but that's increasingly unavoidable these days.

When you start the game, you can either choose one of the pre-existing main characters to play as, or you can make your own custom character.  Most people on Reddit seem to suggest picking a pre-made character because that way you get to go through four character-specific quest lines instead of only three, but I always go with a custom character when it's an option.  Since I'd just finished Baldur's Gate III, I just remade that character; the dragonkin Vorkath Ironscale became the lizard Vorkath the Virtuous.  I definitely get the point the folks on Reddit were making when they suggested playing a pre-made character, but for me, part of what immerses me in an RPG is playing a character is my own creation, so that's always going to be the preferable option for me personally.

If you don't have any experience with CRPGs like Baldur's Gate, the old school Fallouts, or Tides of Numenera, Divinity Original Sin II might take some acclimation to get a feel for.  It definitely did for me.  After having Torment: Tides of Numenera and Baldur's Gate III under my belt, though, I started to appreciate the genre and was able to get fully immersed in Original Sin II.  It's not a masterpiece - I ran into a few bugs I had to quickload to fix, and the quests are a bit too easy to miss and lock yourself out of for my taste - but it is excellent.  It's definitely got me eyeing eBay for a copy of the previous Original Sin game, that's for sure.

Star Fox for Switch 2 (I hate that there's no subtitle) is essentially a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake.  Nintendo has basically made the original Star Fox game five times now.  The first game on Super Nintendo was super advanced for the hardware, but it hasn't aged well with is jagged polygonal graphics and low frame rate.  Star Fox 64 was a remake of that game which brough the power of the Nintendo 64's 64-bit computing to deliver in true 3D what the SNES's 16-bit hardware needed the Super FX chip in a cartridge to try to do.  In 2011, they said "Hey, what if we remake a classic game but changed very little and put it on a handheld?"  Thus, in 2011, Star Fox 64 3D was released for the 3DS.  About 20 years after the Nintendo 64 title, Nintendo said "Man, the Wii U isn't selling all that well.  Maybe we should do Star Fox again.  But not a sequel.  Just do another remake of the original but expand it with new ideas."  There's a lot of the debate over whether or not Star Fox Zero is a remake or, as Miyamoto says, simply a "reimagining," but what it's definitely not a truly new Star Fox.  Then ten years after that, Nintendo said "Man, the Switch 2 is selling really well.  Maybe we can use that success to make people care about Star Fox again?"

The premise of Star Fox is that an evil super genius monkey scientist named Andross, who was previously banished to the uninhabitable planet of Venom for treason, has somehow survived inhabiting an uninhabitable planet and built an army of robots plus a four-man mercenary group called Star Wolf whose parents didn't love them.  Andross declares himself to be emperor of the Lylat system and begins conquering planet after planet in the star system as he moves towards its capital world, Corneria.  General Pepper, commander of the Corneria Defense Force, contacts the mercenary group Star Fox - these guys did have parents who loved them - and hires them to help bolster the war effort.  I'm not sure why he thought four mercenaries could do what the entire Cornerian fleet couldn't, but whatever.

For the most part, Star Fox is a rail shooter.  You fly through the levels with your path handled for you and shoot enemies while trying not to get shot, although you occasionally pilot a tank instead of a fighter and several levels do have an "all-range mode" segment where you can fly in full 3D like Star Wars Squadrons or Crimson Sky.  Some levels have additional objectives that can affect the route you take through the game, but you always play seven levels.  The first level is always defending Corneria itself, but from there, your actions affect the route the game takes, and some routes are MUCH more difficult than others.  That gives the game a good bit of replay value which is definitely a positive as the game is pretty short to roll credits; a single playthrough took me about an hour and a half, I think, and that was with numerous deaths on the last two levels (I unintentionally picked the hard route).  This replay value is further bolstered by medals to unlock for performance in each level, challenges, and multiplayer.  There are two multiplayer modes, one competitive where you compete across three maps with different objectives, and one co-operative where you play through the campaign with one player acting as the pilot and one player acting as the gunner.

First and foremost, the game is GORGEOUS.  I was already impressed with Metroid Prime 4, but seeing a first party game made from the ground up for Switch 2 was breathtaking.  Corneria, once pretty empty for hardware limitation reasons on N64, is a beautifully rendered albeit burning and ruined city, and the fur texture on the anthropomorphic characters looks great.  The explosion effects look fantastic, lasers look as unrealistically visible and colorful as one would want, and the environmental details like water or nebulae really drive home that while it's a short arcade-style game, it's a premium experience that had a lot of effort and artistic talent put into its creation.  The music is likewise virtually perfect, managing to hit an ideal balance between nostalgia with the new arrangements and performances of the Nintendo 64 soundtrack and new tracks and new musical flourishes.  Just like they did with Super Mario RPG and Link's Awakening, Nintendo has proven that they know how a remake ought to be done.

Star Fox may not be a game that you marathon for an entire weekend, but it's definitely a game that you'll repeatedly revisit.  Trying a new route, trying a different difficulty, or just trying to improve your performance on a route and difficulty you previously played all give solid reason to keep booting up this title, and that's before you even consider the multiplayer elements.  This is a game you could easily sink an entire evening or two into; just make sure you don't go in expecting a long campaign with a deep narrative.  True to its arcade styling, Star Fox is intended to be all about short and action-packed playthroughs that you run repeatedly.  It's perfectly designed as a comfort food game, and for those of us who grew up playing Star Fox on the Super Nintendo or Nintendo 64, there's probably a lot of comfort to be had here.

Since Yoshi's Woolly World on the Wii U, I've been a huge fan of Yoshi platformers.  Crafted World on Switch, while not as good as Woolly World, reinforced my love.  When I saw that Switch 2 was getting an exclusive Yoshi game, I was stoked.  Day one purchase for sure.  Unfortunately, this game took a different direction than the last two and one I don't necessarily think was a net gain.

What sets this game apart from its predecessors the most, I think, is the book.  The titular "mysterious book," Mr. E., is actually a living talking book, but it can't read itself.  Each of its chapters have a variety of creatures, and Mr. E. asks you to go and research each of these creatures.  Each creature you choose to focus on has its own level, but creatures can appear outside of their specific level.  The way you progress here is not by completing levels, although each level does have a "clear" objective.  What you have to do is find different interactions with the creatures; each interaction is worth between one and three stars.  Some are as simple as how it reacts to being ground pounded or what it tastes like when Yoshi eats it.  Some of them are as obscure as taking a creature on your back to a specific hidden area that only appears in one level.  At first, I didn't mind this at all.  The discovery was fun.  After the second chapter, though, it lost pretty much all of its charm for me.  The challenge here wasn't clearing a level; it was finding increasingly frustratingly obscure creature interactions because you need a certain number of stars (total cumulative) to unlock the next chapter.  I easily had enough to unlock all six of the main game chapters by the time I finished chapter one, and by the time I finished the sixth and final main chapter and rolled credits, I have enough stars to unlock the first two of the six post-game chapters and almost had the third one unlocked.  No, the problem isn't difficulty; it's holding my attention.  I got bored after a while.  The levels were decently varied even if a bit drab feeling, but because it was always about interacting the creatures, it started to feel monotonous.  I was wanting a solid platformer, not a taxonomic research game in the format of a platformer.  Maybe that's on me for expecting it to play like the previous two games did, but it feels to me the way Resident Evil 5 felt to me; it's less that this is a bad game and more that I expected Genre A, but the game feels more like Genre B.

Graphically, the game is cute.  It's visuals aren't going to wow anyone - I don't see any reason this couldn't have run just fine on Switch - but the artstyle is cute.  It has sort of a watercolor look, and I absolutely loved that they took the whole art design in that direction.  The music was good but not especially memorable.  That's really the game's overall problem - it's forgettable.  The story is cute and simple, and it's clearly made to be accessible to young gamers as you can't really die; if you fall off a ledge or into a pit, you just immediately respawn where you were, and while enemies can "hurt" you, you don't actually have any hit points to lose.  I'm all for accessibility, and I have long played games on low difficulty settings because I'm here for a power trip and a story, not something to conquer, but this takes it too far.  New Super Luigi U got it perfect with Nabbit; most gamers who want some degree of challenge can play as Luigi like normal, but young players still getting a feel for video games can play as Nabbit and have invincibility.  Invincibility is not the only option like it is here.  I could overlook that, though, if the levels were good, but as I've mentioned, they feel monotonous.  There is a decent variety of level designs, but it doesn't feel like it.  The levels feel empty and same-y even when they're not.  I never felt that way about Woolly World or Crafted World, and it made the last two-thirds of the game feel like a slog.  I didn't even start the post-game levels because I just had zero desire to keep playing.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a bad game.  The problem is that it's painfully okay.  It's the kind of game that you wouldn't hate to play if it were all you had, but it's also not a game that most would ever want to replay or feel compelled to 100%.  Artistically, they knocked it out of the park with the watercolor aesthetic; in terms of actual gameplay and level design, it's a disappointment.  I can't stress enough that the game isn't bad, but it's not especially good, either.  It's just...fine.  If you see it on sale for $40 or less, it's not a bad buy for the occasional level or two, but there's no reason to pay the full $70 for it like I did.  The game just isn't good enough to justify that price point.

Also available on Xbox Series X and PC

Baldur's Gate III is a game I now know that I definitely should have played years ago when it first came out.  I'd played Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the Gamecube when I was in middle school, but that's as far as my experience with the series went.  I'd never even played Dungeons and Dragons until about a year and a half ago.  Once I did get heavily into DnD, however, I knew that I had to play this game.  I actually got the collector's edition back in December as a birthday gift from my oldest childhood friend, but it took me six months to actually play it; I knew this would be an epic adventure that would consume my attention, so I decided to wait until summer when I could lose myself in the game during my annual two months of unemployment.  As such, over the past two weeks, I have put 110 hours into this game, and those were 110 hours extremely well spent in my opinion.

The premise of Baldur's Gate III, without giving big spoilers, is that you have been captured by an illithid - more commonly known as a mind flayer - and had a "tadpole" put into your brain via your eye socket.  These parasitic tadpoles are how mind flayers reproduce; the tadpole matures in the host's brain, and once it's mature, the host undergoes "ceremorphosis" - the transformation into a mind flayer.  This, obviously, is a cause for concern; most people would not want to become soulless brain eating cosmic horrors, and your player character is no different.  You escape from the mind flayer ship that captured you, picking up an ally or two along the way, and eventually find yourself alone on a beach where said ship crashed.  Thus begins your journey to find a cure for the tadpole in your brain and, maybe, defeat a Big Bad Evil Guy or two along the way.

As Baldur's Gate III came out in 2023, it's based on the 5e (5th Edition) rules from 2014; I, on the other hand, have only played DnD using the 5.5e rules from 2024 (just an updated and slightly rebalanced version of the 5th edition rules), so while everything was very familiar to me as it would be to anyone who's played Dungeons and Dragons, there were a few small things that took me some getting used to.  No video game can truly capture Dungeons and Dragons - no game, for example, gives me an option to seduce a random goblin to avoid combat or sneak up and pull a half-orc's pants down to gain an advantage on the first turn of combat - but Baldur's Gate III captures it as well as any video game possibly can.  If you exclude the truly ridiculous possibilities that playing with multiple real human people create, this definitely does feel like an authentic DnD adventure.  You can play with up to three friends for an even more authentic feeling DnD adventure, or you can do what I did and play solo and have your three companions just follow you as best as the computer can make then and then control everyone when combat begins.  One of the things that I most appreciated that some games of this style that I've played (that aren't officially connected to Dungeons and Dragons) don't do is show the die rolls for things.  It doesn't show you die rolls to hit with attacks or to roll for damage, but for a skill check - persuading someone to do something or picking a lock, for example - it shows you a d20 rolling and adds your bonuses to it to either succeed or fail based on that roll's DC (difficulty class; how hard it is to pass a check).  I do wish that attack rolls, saving throws, etc. had been animated as well, but I loved that any d20 check was animated and done so well at that.

The best thing, in my opinion, about Baldur's Gate III is also the best thing about Dungeons and Dragons in general; you have a ton of options at your disposal to solve problems and impact the world, and often those impacts won't be seen for dozens of hours.  I found an owlbear nest in a cave when I was maybe 10 hours into the game.  They're horrifying monsters, so I killed the adult owlbear and its cub.  100 hours later, I find out that if I'd let the cub live, I could have had an armored war owlbear help me in the final battle.  That's the kind of far-reaching choice impact that really immerses me in a game.  A very close second-best thing is the combat.  I absolutely love turn-based combat - hence why Fire Emblem is my favorite Nintendo IP - but I don't think anyone does turn-based combat better than Dungeons and Dragons because it's half how strong are your characters and half how lucky are you.  You can have your crappiest character roll a 20 on a d20 to hit and do massive damage with a critical hit; you can also have your best character roll a 1 and do nothing with a critical miss which allowed that foe to live and kill one of your other characters.  At the end of the day, you are the mercy of the dice (whether your see every digital roll or not).

The game's visuals, are unsurprisingly, gorgeous.  The textures on armor and skin are wonderfully done; you can see the stubble on cheeks, you can see that dragonborn and kobalds have tough scaly skin, and you can see how smooth and slimy a mind flayer's tentacles are.  As one should be able to expect from any decent fantasy game, the music is top tier especially in the optional boss fight against a certain infernal character.  The effects, both visual and auditory, for the spells gives them a real feeling of power.  When I cast Disintegrate, I can feel the impact of the force damage, and when I cast Fireball, I can see the smoldering and burning of the ground and objects nearby where the spell attack hit.  Those details and a million small details I'm forgetting all work in tandem to create a fantasy game even more immersive to me than Skyrim or Breath of the Wild, and I never thought I'd play a fantasy game that gripping.

Baldur's Gate III is an absolute masterpiece.  There's no better way to describe it.  I had some minor incidents of slowdown and a bit of screen tearing at the bottom of the screen on my base PS5 even with VRR enabled, but that may well have just been my particular console; I have an extremely finnicky and temperamental PS5.  Even with that, though, this might be my new all-time favorite game.  It's definitely in my top five at the worst.  If you're already into DnD, this game is a perfect way to scratch that itch when your party can't seem to get on the same page with scheduling the next session.  If you've never played DnD or used to but don't have a group where you live now, Baldur's Gate III can definitely introduce you to the game or scratch that existing itch for you.  The Xbox and Playstation releases have official mod support, so while you'll obviously not get access to the full absurdity of PC modding, there are still hundreds and hundreds of mods to browse with everything from serious mods that attempt to bring the game up to the 5.5e ruleset all the way to stupid funny mods that let your druid Wild Shape into a car or give your character an unnecessarily large Ball Park frank.  Unfortunately Switch and Switch 2 players are left out here (although the remasters of the first two Baldur's Gate games are on Switch), but if you have a Series X, a PS5, or a gaming PC, you need to experience Baldur's Gate III.  It can be a little overwhelming at first with how much control you have over your character and your actions, but once you get a feel for it, it will probably end up being the most addictive game since Civilization.

I'm a big fan of the Mario Tennis games.  Mario Power Tennis was honest to God one of my favorite Gamecube games growing up.  The series has had a rough go it lately - Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash on Wii U was...kinda garbage...but Mario Tennis Aces on Switch was excellent.  How does Mario Tennis Fever hold up on Switch 2?  It's not as good as Aces, but it's a lot better than Ultra Smash.

The thing I go for immediately in any game is a story/adventure mode, even in sports games which Golf Story proved can absolutely have good single player adventures.  In most sports games, it's either a "career mode" or just a series of back-to-back matches with some unimportant story dialogue thrown in between matches.  I'm fine with that; if there's some kind of tangible progression, and I can play it solo and offline, I'm content.  Mario Tennis Fever tries to go beyond that and do more.  Unfortunately, it does a piss poor job of it.  Mario Tennis Fever has an "Adventure" mode where you play as Mario after he, Luigi, and Peach have been turned into babies by monsters.  You have to go through some tennis coaching that's over half of the adventure mode and really nothing but an excessively drawn out (albeit extremely effective) tutorial so that you can get good enough to defeat the monsters and undo their magic babification.  Because apparently jumping on them or throwing them or hurling fire balls at them is too old school; we have to humiliate them to death by beating them at tennis.  Outside of some "rank up" regular tennis matches, this tutorial is painfully boring.  It's about five times longer than it had any business being, and it's not even fun like tutorial sections in most SRPGs.  After you graduate from tennis training, you hop on an airship, immediately get shot down, and then proceed through a handful of environments playing tennis against random monsters and collecting magic tennis rackets.  Eventually you find the monsters, beat them, and everyone's an adult again.  Wahoo or whatever.  It was not at any point exciting and only mildly interesting.  Some of the boss fights were kind of fun, but that's basically the only part of the game that I found legitimately "fun."

What this game does get right - which honestly is more important than the boring adventure mode - is the actual tennis gameplay.  If you're doing random matches against AIs or playing online, this game is great.  It feels wonderful to control, the character variety is fantastic, and fewer than half of the characters are unlocked by default, so you have something to work towards as you play through the game's various offline modes.  That's something I wish more games still did - meaningful unlocks.  The tennis courts themselves are okay - nothing to write home about, but not bad or overly lacking.  If you don't care about the adventure mode, then this is a solid tennis game that fits in well with the rest of the Mario Tennis games.  There are some non-traditional match single player challenges that add some variety (and are necessary to unlock all characters), but for the most part, Nintendo played it relatively safe with this one.  No big new gimmick - the "Fever" shots are really just a twist on the unique power shots that have been around since the Gamecube title - but sometimes that's a good thing; Pokemon Legends ZA tried a new battle gimmick with real-time battles, and all of my friends and I hate it.  So sometimes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a good adage to follow.

Mario Tennis Fever is fine.  It won't change how you see the series or revolutionize how Mario Tennis is played like Mario Power Tennis did, but it also won't leave you feeling ripped off and disappointed like Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash did.  Sometimes it's best to play it safe, and that's what Nintendo did here.  The only thing new they tried was a more drawn-out adventure mode, and that completely sucked in my opinion.  Fortunately, the tennis itself is rock solid with loads of characters to unlock and play as, so all things considered, I don't think it's as good as Mario Power Tennis or Mario Tennis Aces, but it's a solid game and definitely worth picking up if you're into sports games.

Fallout fans have been waiting for over a decade for a new Fallout game.  If you count Fallout 76, we've still been waiting for eight years (six years at the time of this mod's initial release).  Unfortunately, Bethesda decided that they'd rather keep making content expansions for the Fallout game nobody likes instead of making a new blockbuster adventure.  Fortunately for fans, a team of mostly (but not exclusively) British modders said, "Fine, we'll do it ourselves.  Chip chip cheerio."  Probably.  Or something to that effect.

Fallout: London isn't "technically" a new Fallout game but rather a total conversion mod for Fallout 4.  And when I say total conversion, I mean this feels as much like the vanilla Fallout 4 as New Vegas feels like Fallout 3; yeah, the gameplay is basically the same, but literally everything else is completely different.  This is, hands down, the most impressive mod I've ever seen for any game.  The sheer scale of Fallout: London is astounding especially when you consider that it was made by a twelve-person-team, and one of those twelve handled the website and PR, so eleven people actually made the mode.  There are branching mission paths and multiple ending depending on which faction you side with, just like an official Fallout.  There are dozens of side quests that you may or may not ever stumble upon, just like an official Fallout.  There are hilarious Easter eggs, just like in an official Fallout.  Most impressively to me, the game is FULLY voice acted, just like an official Fallout, and unlike most of the few voice acted mods I've played, the acting in Fallout: London is done by probably 85% genuinely talented voice actors.  No late 90s/early 2000s craptastic voice acting here.  Honest to God, the quality is so good, if I put this down in front of someone and said "This is the unannounced Fallout game that just leaked," and hid the Team FOLON logo and name, most people would believe it was a genuine Bethesda product.  Bethesda ought to throw a boat load of pounds at them and release this as a standalone game for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch 2.  It's that impressive.  I spent nearly 120 hours with Fallout: London, and I've never spent that much time with any mod for any game ever.

The game starts off with a scenario that feels right at home with how other Fallout games by Bethesda have started; you wake up with no memory in a mysterious lab, and all you can find are mysterious masked guards and a voice over a loudspeaker that identifies itself only as "Mr. Smythe."  From there, you break out of the lab and eventually find yourself in the streets of London.  The first people you encounter are a few gangsters with a group called the Vagabonds.  This is your first major faction of the game.  They're embroiled in a bitter turf war with a rival gang, the Isle of Dogs Syndicate.  The Vagabonds are typical plucky underdog heroes (well, as much as violent gangsters can be heroes), and the Isle of Dogs Syndicate is basically the literal mafia.  You can choose to side with the mob, but I personally found it much more satisfying to stroll into their HQ with a .50 caliber revolver and start bursting heads like they're watermelons while my Vagabond sidekicks trail behind wading through an ankle-deep lake of blood.  Those two factions, however, are not among the factions from whom you'll choose for your ending; their entire questlines are entirely self-contained and unrelated to the game's finale.  The other five factions that don't have endings - and actually aren't even options to side with formally in any sense - are the Tommies, the closest thing there is to a successor the British army, and the Gentry, a bunch of rich douchebags who have barricaded themselves in Westminster to keep away from the commoner rabble and use their wealth to exploit the rest of the London wasteland.  There are also the Pistols in Camden; they're basically a group of quasi-communist punks who keep to themselves and govern Camden via a democratically elected council with a limited-time term and only one term allowed.  So basically, what I wish Congress was.  You've got the Roundels in Hackney.  They're weird; they're like a cross between a gang and a neighborhood watch.  They'll engage in open street fights with Miller's Men, but they also kind of just want to be left alone to live in peace.  They also devoutly follow a "prince" with a severe drug addiction.  Lastly, you have Miller's Men in Islington.  These are straight up raiders whose only rule is "Miller's' word is law."  

The three factions between whom you'll have to choose for the game's finale are Angel, the 5th Column, and Camelot.  Angel is Mr. Smythe's faction, so you could end up siding with the folks who had you imprisoned at the start of the game and were experimenting on you.  The 5th Column are interesting because they're basically how a lot of people saw Donald Trump (not me; I always knew he was a fascist); they look like a beacon of hope and liberty aiming to restore freedom to London, and then you're shocked and horrified to discover that they're actual a fascist paramilitary militia with cult-like devotion to their leader.  Did Team FOLON base them on MAGA?  Probably not, but the parallels are hard to miss.  Lastly, you have the faction I chose, Camelot.  These guys are like if LARPers staged an armed coup.  They live in a huge pre-war building they call Camelot, their leader calls himself Arthur, their chief tactician calls himself Merlin, and the lieutenants are referred to as "knights" and each adopt the name of one of the mythical King Arthur's knights.  And yes, their strategy meetings are held sitting at a round table.  Their goal, like the 5th Column, is to invade Westminster and overthrow the tyrannical rule of the Gentry, but unlike the fascist 5th Column and its desire for a dictatorship with their leader on top, Camelot aims to replace with Gentry with a representative democracy with universal suffrage.  Put Jimmy Carter in plate mail and give him a longsword, and you've got Arthur.  Oh, and Merlin builds a gigantic trebuchet that flings a car at the Westminster gate and blows a gigantic hole in their huge stone walls.  The Rule of Cool dictates that they are the best faction.

What made Fallout: London so much fun for me wasn't just getting to explore London or having a new story in the Fallout universe to explore but all of the little silly fun things.  There's a cult of "Cutethulhu," a stuffed knitted Cthulhu, and you find Cutethulhu dolls all over the place.  Then you find out that the cult is actually a legit cult, and there's an entire side quest around it.  There are new perks you can get upon level up, numerous companions that have their own companion quests and unique perks that you unlock when you get them to max affection.  There are new monsters with a distinctly British feel like the radager, and the game has its own regional take on mirelurks and ghouls with mittenlurks (based on mitten crabs instead of blue crabs) and "commuters," respectively; I don't think the game ever makes clear how commuters are distinct from ghouls, but regular ghouls are in the game as well.  Then you've got the weapons and armor.  Most are your typical types of weapons, some from Fallout 4 and some unique to Fallout: London, but there are a lot of cool unique weapons, some of which are nods to elements of British history, like Joan of Arc's sword or the Crown Jewels.  And yes, you can steal the Crown Jewels and walk around London looking like a hobo became the king or queen.  So much love and attention and detail when into the creation of this mod that it really does boggle the mind.  They teamed up with GOG, too, to make it super easy to install; as long as you own Fallout 4 through GOG, they have an installer that you can add to your library and launch like any other GOG game.  It's not a problem if you have Fallout 4 through another launcher like Steam or Xbox, it's just a longer and more complicated manual installation.

Fallout: London is, in the context of fan-made mods, a masterpiece.  That said, it's not perfect.  Like I said, Team FOLON is only a dozen people, and they don't have the resources that Bethesda has.  I ran into a lot of bugs.  Most were minor - when I switched weapons, sometimes the gun would, for lack of a better phrase, lock up, and I'd have to switch weapons and then switch back in order to shoot or reload - but there were some that I could only get around with console commands.  Quest-critical NCPs not spawning, a key to a door in a quest area that never dropped, NPCs spawning into walls so you can see their name when you're in front of them but not talk to them, etc.  The kind of thing that Bethesda's QA team probably would have caught and either fixed before release or quickly patched.  And that's not to say that dev team hasn't been catching and fixing bugs via updates; they absolutely have.  There's just a limit to what fan modders can realistically do vs a team of paid corporate but testers.  Then, of course, you have the typical Bethesda bugs where you kill a guy and his head drops to the ground like normal but his body rockets off into space like Team Rocket.  That's not really something they could likely fix as it's universal in vanilla Fallout 4.  It's a shame that PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch 2 players can't experience this mod, but if you have Fallout 4 on PC, this is definitely a mod that you need to play, even if it means buying Fallout 4 a second time.

Also available on Switch

Metroid Prime - and Metroid as a whole, really - is one of the game series that I think best exemplifies what makes Nintendo special while also being one of its most overlooked.  Metroid definitely doesn't have the commercial staying power of Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon, but it's been here since the beginning, and the original Metroid Prime was, in my opinion, one of the best first party games on the Gamecube.  Metroid Prime 4 has been a LOOOONG time coming; it released eighteen years after Metroid Prime 3 and eight years after its initial reveal.  It does, however, prove Miyamoto's adage of "A delayed game is eventually good; a rushed game is forever bad."  Nintendo ordered the project completely scrapped and reworked in 2019 after the Bandai Namco team initially booked to develop the game failed to produce a product that Nintendo thought was up to its standards.  In 2019, they turned development of the game over to the tried-and-true Retro Studios, and six years later, we got what in some ways is the most fun Metroid Prime game to date.

To be totally up front, I think Metroid Prime 4 is probably the best Metroid Prime game to date from an objective sense, but the original Metroid Prime will always be my favorite due to my millennial nostalgia goggles.  Prime 4 comes pretty neck and neck with it for me, though.  Canonically, Metroid Prime 4 takes place under the - in my opinion - unfairly hated Metroid: Other M and Metroid Fusion.  The premise of the game is that Space Pirates, led by the Galactic Federation-hating former bounty hunter, Sylux, attacks a Federation facility that had unearthed an ancient relic.  In the fight with Sylux, he accidentally damages the artifact, causing it to activate and transport him, Samus, and any Federation soldiers nearby to the uncharted planet of Viewros.

Metroid Prime 4, releasing 23 years and three consoles (or four with Switch 2) after the original Metroid Prime, obviously has a ton of quality-of-life features that the original game, even in its slightly updated Wii version in Metroid Prime Trilogy, lacked and additions that make it feel like an overall more modern experience.  The most significant bit of modernization which is really just an evolution of the motion controls introduced in the Wii's Metroid Prime 3 is the gyroscopic aiming.  For the most part, I played the game like a traditional dual analog FPS game, but I enabled the gyroscopic motion with sensitivity set low to make fine adjustments to my aim as I find I can make minor adjustments more quickly and accurately with motion controls than I can an analog stick.  That's an option for both Switch and Switch 2.  If you're playing on Switch 2, you can take advantage of the Joycon 2's unique capabilities and play in mouse mode where you use the control stick on the left joycon to move like normal, but you hold the right joycon on its edge so that the small IR sensor that's on the side usually covered by the system or joycon grip can read the surface its on and act as a computer mouse, letting you aim as if it were a PC game.  I absolutely love this feature and would have used it as my primary control method if I weren't so in love with the ergonomic feel of the Switch 2 Pro Controller.

Switch is obviously enormously more powerful than the Gamecube or Wii, and the Switch 2 is a lot more powerful than the Switch, so it makes sense that Metroid Prime 4 looks infinitely better visually than the three previous Prime games.  Most importantly, though, it runs as smooth as butter.  The original Metroid Prime on Gamecube wavered between 30 and 60 fps, and Metroid Prime 2 on Gamecube targeted 60 fps as did Metroid Prime 3 on Wii.  All three of those games ran at 480i.  Metroid Prime 4 on Switch renders between 720p and 900p when docked with a 60 fps target that it pretty consistently hits.  On Switch 2, you have two performance profiles that you can use.  The default (Quality) runs at 2160p and 60 fps, but Performance runs at 1080p and 120 fps.  My vision is terrible in general, so personally, my eyes aren't good enough to tell a huge difference between 60 fps and 120 fps in Prime 4.  Some games I can, some I can't; unfortunately, this was one where I really couldn't tell the difference.  I used Quality mode, then, to take full advantage of the system's 4K capabilities, but if you have eyes healthy enough to see a clear difference in frame rates above 60, absolutely go for Performance; the game definitely looked noticeably better on Quality, but it wasn't such a stark difference that it would be worth losing out on a perceptible fame rate bump.

For the most part, Samus has the same abilities that longtime Prime players have to come to expect - arm cannon blasts, missiles, elemental shots (fire, ice, and electric in Prime 4), morph ball bombs, etc.  What's new for Prime 4 and adds some unique puzzle obstacles are the psychic abilities.  These include a whole host of new abilities when the "psychic visor" is active from shooting a guidable slow-motion blast to grabbing and throwing morph ball bombs to manipulating physical objects.  Environmental puzzles have always been a core staple of Metroid Prime, but these new psychic abilities elevate those puzzles to a new (and occasionally frustrating but always fun) level.  The other big gameplay difference between Prime 4 and the previous games is that there's a much larger emphasis on combat specifically with large battles.  You'll find yourself fighting numerous enemies at once more often than in previous Prime games, and some of the bosses will spawn in regular enemies with which you have to contend while also fighting the boss.  It doesn't take the focus away from the puzzles and exploring the way Resident Evil 5 took the focus away from horror, but it definitely makes combat a much more important and rewarding aspect of gameplay.  The last big shift which, despite taking up at least as much of my time as exploring any of the areas probably made the least impact on me, is the overworld traversal.  Instead of all of the areas just sort of being connected and running between them, each of your areas - the ice area, fire area, electric area, etc. - are connected by a gigantic desert hub overworld.  You traverse this huge desert on the space motorcycle that you mysteriously conjure from your magic space armor.  I don't actually remember what the in-game explanation for how that works was if there even is one, but it doesn't really matter.  While spending hours driving across a giant desert and smashing into green crystal formations while occasionally fighting an enemy or stumbling on a small puzzle shrine may not sound exciting, it's actually a LOT more fun and satisfying than I expected.  I thought I'd find it monotonous and tedious, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent traversing the desert and definitely spent more time doing so that I actually needed to.

I doubt Metroid Prime 4 will be remembered as a Switch 2 system seller nor would it even if it didn't also release on the original Switch, but I do think that it's a good enough game to be worthy of that accolade.  I may prefer the original Prime for nostalgia reasons, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that Prime 4 isn't the most fun game in the series.  Between the desert motorcycle riding to the psychic abilities to the bigger combat emphasis, Metroid Prime 4 pretty much takes what made the first three games great and builds on that.  It may have required an eighteen year wait since Metroid Prime 3 and eight agonizing years of waiting after it was revealed, but as Miyamoto said, after all of the delays, the game we got is amazing.  I wouldn't call it perfect - I would have to liked to see more dungeon-like areas to explore and more to do in the desert - but it's still a stellar game.

When Nintendo and Tecmo first collaborated on the original Hyrule Warriors back in 2014, it was exactly what I needed to get sucked into the musou games.  I had played one of the Dynasty Warriors games - lord knows I can't remember which is which - but it just didn't click with me.  It felt repetitive, bland, and too drawn out.  Giving me the exact same gameplay but with the backdrop of Hyrule and characters from the Legend of Zelda franchise, however, gave me a chance to experience the genre in a context I already knew and loved.  That made me a musou fan.  I couldn't see how Hyrule Warriors could get any better, but with the release of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity in 2020, the original Hyrule Warriors felt almost like a demo in comparison.  I'm not going to say that 2025's Age of Imprisonment was an equally drastic improvement, but it does feel like they took Age of Calamity and perfected the formula.  From story to gameplay to performance, this is the definitive Hyrule Warriors experience to date.

For the most part, the game is an accompaniment to Tears of the Kingdom.  If you've played that game, you basically know the overall narrative and every major plot point in Age of Imprisonment.  That's not to say that it's not worth playing or somehow diminished if you've played Tears of the Kingdom, though.  Tears of the Kingdom had you experience the story from the perspective of a single person; Age of Imprisonment lets you see and experience the Imprisoning War on the scale that the name "war" implies.  It also fleshes out characters a lot, so it's absolutely a worthwhile storytelling piece in its own right.  The storytelling is a bit constrained here and there by being largely relegated to cutscenes before, during, or after battles, but that's kind of the nature of the beast with the musou genre.

The game features 19 playable characters each with their own unique special attacks and sync attacks (when you and an NPC character team up for a super charged attack).  Every character (with two exceptions) uses one of three types of weapons - a sword-and-shield combo, a two-handed sword, or a spear.  The exceptions are Raphica, who is the only character to use a bow, and the Knight Construct, who can use any of the three non-bow weapon types.  Throughout the game, you'll collect different weapons as well as zonai steel which can be used to upgrade your weapons.  Eight of your characters can't change weapons (for lore purposes), but the other eleven can, so it's worth it to spend some time comparing weapons and changing as you get a better one.  It's important to keep in mind that leveling up your character isn't the only thing that will help you keep up with the ever-strengthening enemies; you have to make sure that you're upgrading your weapons, too.  Each weapon can be upgraded to level 20, so even if you're using a level 70 character, you're leaving a lot of potential on the table if your weapon is only level 2.

Being exclusive to Switch 2, it should be obvious that Age of Imprisonment is a huge leap graphically over Age of Calamity.  Better textures, more enemies on screen, more intricate animations, and less pop-in all make Age of Imprisonment an easier-on-the-eyes experience than Age of Calamity ever could have been even with the fact that, for the Switch hardware, that was an impressive game in my opinion.  That said, it's not perfect.  The brilliant guys at Digital Foundry, in their in-depth analysis of the game's performance, noted occasional texture pop-in, visible compression in some (but oddly not all) of the cutscenes, Nintendo's typical lack of anti-aliasing, and a dynamic resolution that varies from 720p to 900p docked and goes even lower handheld.  Performance, likewise, is a huge step up from Age of Calamity but still not perfect.  Age of Calamity's performance was...not great.  It was totally playable, but it targeted 30 fps and routinely fell well below that during busy fights.  Age of Imprisonment, on the other hand, targets 60 fps, and while it's not a locked 60 fps with numerous dips into the high 40s and 50s, it maintains 60 fps astoundingly more reliably than Age of Calamity maintained 30 fps.  Split-screen local multiplayer, unsurprisingly, drops the target to 30 fps, and I've read that there is some frame pacing problem with that (although my middle-aged eyes have a hard time noticing that unless the problem is egregious), but it's still leagues more playable than Age of Calamity's split-screen multiplayer was.

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment is exactly the kind of game that the Switch 2's first six months after launch needed.  It successfully takes the ideas introduced in Age of Calamity and polishes them into a smoother more refined experience. The improved performance alone makes the game drastically more playable, and the graphical step up lets the environments that the developers envisioned shine.  That's not to say that it's a perfect game.  There are still some minor texture pop-in issues and frame rate drops, the missions can become repetitive, some characters can feel pretty mechanically similar, and the story sometimes struggles to capitalize on the deep lore set down in Tears of the Kingdom.  All that said, though, this is probably - at least in my openly biased opinion - Tecmo's best musou game ever with a whole that feels like more than merely the sum of its parts.  Hyrule Warriors was rather bare bones, and Age of Calamity struggled a lot with frame rate, but Age of Imprisonment is the dream made real.  This is a game that belongs on anyone's Switch 2 shelf.

Also available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC

Also available on iOS and Android

​Pokemon Champions, in the state it’s currently in, feels like it falls somewhere between a really impressive demo and a lackluster final product.  That’s not great considering that no released game should feel like a demo.  That said, it’s completely free-to-play with the only paid elements being 100% optional and unnecessary to enjoy the game fully; ignore the drama queen pearl-clutchers who are screaming greed and consumer exploitation because they asked you to pay a little money for some extra in-game currency you can easily get for free.  What game primarily sets out to do, it does right, and that’s faster paced and exciting Pokemon battles.  It does give you an opportunity to reconnect and rejoin your game if you briefly lose connection instead of just automatically forfeiting and penalizing you, and that’s a really nice feature that’s worth praising.  The positives, unfortunately, are just overshadowed by the bugs, the mostly low-quality visuals and locked 30 fps even on Switch 2, and the massive amount of Pokemon and held items mysteriously absent from the game.  To be clear, I’m thoroughly enjoying Pokemon Champions, and it’s absolutely worth downloading and playing since it’s free, but GameFreak definitely isn’t impressing anyone whatsoever with this meager effort no matter how fun what little content there is may be.

Also available on Switch

Also available on Xbox Series X, Switch 2, and PC

Since I was a kid, Resident Evil has been one of my favorite series.  I love horror games, and I love zombies, so Resident Evil was always basically perfect for me.  I wasn't a big fan of the shift to parasitic or fungal infections, but even the worst Resident Evil game (which, of course, is Resident Evil 5) is still a good time.  When the series kind of reinvented itself with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, I thought "This is it.  This is horror perfected.  No Resident Evil game will ever scare me this badly."  Resident Evil 8: Village kind of seemed to prove me right as, allegedly, Capcom execs told the devs to tone down the horror for Village because some people complained that Biohazard was "too scary."  Then the devs said "Y'all just some bitches.  Hold my beer," and made Requiem the scariest damn horror game I've ever played.  And I loved every second of it.

Requiem takes place in 2026, 28 years after the Racoon City Incident that began in the first game and played out on-screen in Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3.  The game is split between two protagonists - eternal badass and zombie daddy, Leon S. Kennedy, starring in his fourth Resident Evil game (alongside 2, 4, and 6); and Grace Ashcroft, an FBI information analyst and new character on the scene.  Grace's surname may sound familiar to hardcore Resident Evil fans; she is the adopted daughter of investigative journalist Alyssa Ashcroft from Resident Evil: Outbreak and Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2.  Grace is investigating a mysterious death that showed the same traits as a string of other recent mysterious deaths.  All victims showed the same extensive black bruising patterns.  Most concerning, though, is that all victims were survivors of the 1998 Racoon City Incident.  Are they being assassinated with blunt violence or perhaps a new biological weapon to silence them?  Is this somehow a result of their presence in Racoon City - a rare mutation or dormant T-virus infection, perhaps?  That's what Grace aims to find out.  This is personal for her, too; the abandoned hotel she is investigating is where her mother was murdered right in front of her eight years earlier, and like the victims, Grace and her mother were both survivors of Racoon City.

Leon, whose resume includes impressive accomplishments such as "Served as a cop in Racoon City without becoming a zombie," "Saved the president's daughter from parasite-infected cultists in Spain," and "Brought President Benford's assassin to justice," is also investigating the mysterious deaths of Racoon  City survivors on behalf of the Department of Security Operations.  So basically, Rambo ain't got shit on Leon.  This investigation is personal for Leon, too; although unbeknownst to the higher ups at DSO, Leon and his handler, Sherry Birkin (12 in Resident Evil 2, 40 in Requiem), are showing the same odd bruising symptoms themselves.  Leon and Grace meet when he sees her, unconscious, being carried off by Victor Gideon, a former Umbrella researcher who was involved in the Tyrant project in Racoon City, and gives chase, assuming (correctly) that Gideon is somehow involved in everything going on.  Leon's investigation into Gideon eventually takes him full circle back to where it all started - the nuked ruins of Racoon City.

Resident Evil, since the mid 2000s, has struggled to find the right balance between horror and action.  With Requiem, they finally find that Goldilocks spot to give us a game that feels both familiar and refreshingly modern. Requiem successfully combines the tension of earlier survival horror-focused titles we saw with Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, and Code Veronica with the more cinematic action-focused titles that began to dominate the franchise with Resident Evil 4, 5, and 6.  No Resident Evil game since the Gamecube's Resident Evil 4 has hit that horror/action balance as perfectly in my opinion.  With Capcom's impressive RE Engine and the power afforded by modern gaming hardware, they were able to give us a game that feels both feels like your worst nightmare while also having moments that could rival any Hollywood action movie.

The RE Engine allowed Requiem's developers to deliver some of the most detailed environments and character models I've ever seen. Facial animations are particularly impressive with subtle muscle movements, lifelike skin, and dynamic lighting lending scenes an exceptionally realistic emotional tone, especially once you couple that with the incredible voice acting done by Angela Sant'Albano (Grace) and Nick Apostolides (Leon).  The game's environments are equally impressive. There are lots of areas with densely cluttered debris, broken furniture, and rotting architecture that reinforce the unique sense of dread that only Racoon City can evoke. Seeing the Racoon City Police Department, once the scene of a valiant but futile attempt to protect the city's surviving citizenry from the zombie horde, after 28 years derelict, is a uniquely eerie experience for those who played the Resident Evil 2 remake but especially those who played the original Resident Evil 2 back in the day.

As a poor public-school teacher in the South, I don't have a PS5 Pro to speak to its fidelity first-hand, but even on base PS5, Requiem looks fantastic.  It may not be literally the absolute best-looking game I've seen on PS5, but from the footage I've seen online, the PS5 Pro enhancements really do add a good bit of oomph to the visuals, and it still looks amazing on base PS5.  What really surprised me was how good the game looks on Switch 2.  Obviously, there are some serious visual sacrifices that had to be made to get it running on Nintendo's current handheld system, but I'm shocked at how minimal those sacrifices are.  The textures, by and large, really don't look all that inferior despite the significantly lowered resolution.  The two big sacrifices I noticed were that characters' hair - especially Grace's - looks significantly worse, and some of the light reflection effects look pretty bad - almost like bad bloom effects - on Switch 2.  Other than that, though, I was genuinely shocked.  I've seen Digital Foundry do some comparisons between Switch 2 and Series S, and despite the fact that Series S runs at a higher resolution (720p) compared to the Switch 2 (540p docked and a paltry 360p undocked), the game actually looks better on Switch 2 than on Series S.  This had led me to the conclusion that Nvidia's DLSS technology is actually some manner of dark magic powered by the ritualistic sacrifice of orphaned Polish children.  There's no other explanation for how 540p could look better than 720p and not much worse than the PS5's 1080p upscaled to 2160p.  Switch 2 is definitely not the ideal way to play, but unlike the Wii days and a lot of the Switch versions of multiplatform games, it is in no way whatsoever a lesser experience or version of the game.  In my opinion, Requiem is the most visually impressive Switch 2 game to date and proof positive that modern AAA games can absolutely run at an acceptable level of performance and visual quality on Switch 2.  Sorry that the two images below aren't in exactly the same spot, but the top screenshot is only a few steps behind the second, and I think it gives a pretty good example of how comparable the Switch 2 version looks.

PlayStation 5

Switch 2

Looking at performance - something that's always important to consider when a game looks this good since performance and visual quality are basically the Phillips curve of gaming - base PS5 maintains a pretty unbroken 60 fps.  If there are any minor dips into the 50s, I couldn't tell.  Switch 2, obviously, is not nearly that robust, but performance on that system is still astounding given how good the game looks.  The game has an uncapped frame rate with a target 60 fps, and most of the time, it hits and pretty well maintains 60 fps.  During scenes with hectic movement or combat, frame rates will dip into the 40s and 50s, and in a small handful of extremely busy scenes and areas, you'll see the occasional drop into the 30s, but it runs extremely smoothly all things considered.  We're a far cry from Doom on the OG Switch where you have to set it to Easy for minimal enemies on screen to get any vaguely acceptable frame rate.  If I only had Nintendo's console - which was my entire childhood up until halfway through college - I would not be at all disappointed with playing Resident Evil: Requiem on Switch 2.

Because I really want to highlight how impressive Capcom's delivery of the game on Switch 2's significantly weaker hardware is, I want to take a moment to summarize the major comparisons between the game on Switch 2 vs PS5 to illustrate clearly how competent the Switch 2 version is since we've all been conditioned to expect a gimped experience on Nintendo's hardware most of the time.  While PS5 is obviously the better technical experience across the board, Switch 2 holds up really, really well.  PS5 obviously features significantly higher resolution, far more advanced lighting and particle effects, and a virtually unbroken 60 fps frame rate.  Loading times are also slightly faster on PS5 thanks to its advanced SSD, but the difference between loading times on PS5 and Switch 2 isn't as stark as one would expect.  What the PS5 doesn't do, however, is let you play Requiem on a plane, bus, or at your lunch break at work.  Yes, I have definitely done that last one.  Switch 2 lets you play on the toilet, on an airplane, or even at the office, and it does so with incredible (no, seriously, it's legit not credible despite being true) visuals thanks to Nvidia's DLSS voodoo and, thanks to the absurdly low native resolution, a completely inoffensive frame rate.

Resident Evil 2 remains my favorite game in the series, but Requiem has definitely forced its way to a VERY close #2 spot on my list.  The story, while not groundbreaking, is really good for those of us who've experienced the early games set in Racoon City, and its full of nods to past games that long-time fans will appreciate while keep it a game that you can still enjoy without having played the entire series.  It's one of the most visually impressive games I've played in a long time, and I'm pretty confident saying that it's the most overall impressive Switch 2 game to date when you factor in both how good it looks and how well it runs.  Normally it's only Nintendo that manages to deliver a game that I truly thought the hardware wasn't capable of, but Capcom has proven it can do it, too, which gives me hope for the future of gaming on Switch 2.  Resident Evil Requiem is the perfect balance of horror and action and introduces a new character with Grace who feels both fresh and genuinely important to the game's larger narrative rather than just being a one-and-done throwaway - something every game since 5 has struggled to do.  I consider Requiem to be required playing for any fan of Resident Evil, and I STRONGLY recommend it for fans of survival horror more broadly.

Also available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows

Also available on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii, Switch, Android, iOS, Linux, MacOS, and Windows

Also available on PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Switch, Android, iOS, and Windows

Also available on Neo Geo AES, Neo Geo CD, Wii, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS, Android, and Windows

​Metal Slug 2 has you fighting through some fairly common environments - desert towns, jungles, so on and so forth.  It also has you fight in some pretty cool and unexpected areas, such as a crypt filled with mummies that can mummify you with a breath attack and high-tech bases filled with alien soldiers.  With these environments comes new rideable vehicles in addition to the titular Metal Slug.  My favorite of these, for sheer absurdity, is the camel with machine guns where one would expect to see saddle bags.  Returning to the mummy enemies, when you’re mummified, it’s not an instant death; you can still shoot your pistol, although you’ll lose any special weapon you have been using.  Your movement is much slower, and your jumps are super stiff, so it’s definitely not a condition you want to have, but it’s a cool way to add in a new challenge without having it just be something new to kill you.

Also available on Xbox Series X and PC

Also available on Switch, PlayStation 5, and PC
Original version available on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Vita, Android, iOS, and PC

Also available on Switch

​I went into Pokemon Legends Z-A expecting to be disappointed and underwhelmed.  While there was definitely some disappointment with some aspects of the game, I had a lot more fun than I expected to, and I’m still having fun with it.  There are some mega stones that are locked behind achieving a certain rank in the online ranked battles, and while that’s a negative for some since they’re time locked and not otherwise available in the game, I think it’s cool because it’s actually really easy to reach that minimum rank, and it gives a solid reason to play online other than “get some stuff that’s also obtainable in the main game.”  It only took me five battles and about half an hour to achieve Rank K and unlock Greninja’s mega stone, so it’s really not the sweaty task that I first expected when I saw “ranked battles.”  All in all, Pokemon Legends Z-A, while my least favorite main series Pokemon game, continues the series’s signature addictive monster collecting gameplay, and it also continues GameFreak’s recent attempts to shake up the series to address complaints that “every game is the same.”  I don’t like all of the changes they’ve made with this or other recent games - the lack of online battles in Legends Arceus and the (really crappy) attempt at pseudo-real-time battles in the Scarlet and Violet raids were major points of contention for me in those games - but I do applaud them for trying something new, and some of the changes, like the changes to the Pokemon Catching mechanics in the two Legends games, were a very welcome change to me.  All in all, this was destined to be a very divisive game for long-time fans, but I had a good time with it, and I encourage all Pokemon fans to pick this one.  Just don’t expect it to live up to Legends Arceus or X and Y.

Also available on Xbox Series X and Windows

Also available on Windows