Assassin's Creed Shadows
"What is impossible to avoid is the juxtaposition of a story about what amount to homicidal superheroes with the meticulous research needed to build a historically truthful world. Shadows is not designed to be realistic so much as authentic, but even so, there's a tension between its nature as a game and its developers' quasi-educational ambitions. Thematically, the story can't match the sophistication of its presentation, despite a skilful script. This is a game not only about justice, but about ideas of what 'justice' might mean. Freedom and order always come at a price, it suggests, be it in tithes to the church, rice for the local lord, or the blood of one's armies. But is the life of an assassin ever compatible with that of a peace-maker? As Naoe puts it, "How can we build a world of peace upon the back of a thousand dead?" There are no trite conclusions in this warring universe. In Assassin's Creed, the bloodthirsty are typically punished. For all its breadth and splendour, there is still not quite enough room to condemn its two most murderous inhabitants." [8]
Atomfall
"The main plot is the kind of thing Quatermass spent his time investigating. Atomfall understands that Britain has always had its own approach to mysticism, but also its own approach to pulp.
Atomfall isn't always a brilliant game, then, but it's often a surprisingly comforting one. Long before games about blending potions and running apothecaries were known as cosy, that term was applied to the speculative horrors of John Wyndham, a writer who is name-checked in a fairly central way in Atomfall. Wyndham's horrors were cosy because his middle-class heroes could often navigate them without missing out on a regular teatime. Atomfalls horrors are cosy because they deploy the familiar with real enthusiasm." [6]
Blue Prince
"True, the 'eureka!' moments don't come thick and fast here. They emerge from patient probing, pacing the same halls, waiting for opportunities. If Blue Prince has a flaw, it's in the fickleness of that RNG - the frustration of knowing what you need to do while a certain tool or room refuses to materialise. Any permanent gains only ever lightly load the dice in your favour. Yet ultimately this is a minor issue because Blue Prince rewards effort so greatly with its depth. So much is hiding in plain sight - why are there framed drawings and random objects everywhere? — or beyond the house's apparent boundaries. An unvisited room arriving on your drawing board may contain clues that point to new goals. Every familiar room demands a second look once you're armed with the right info, item or perspective. Clues tease out reasoned solutions that you're never fully led to, which only makes you wonder what else there is to find. And there is always something else. Taking notes is essential to track your many open lines of inquiry, and closing even one equates to a successful day. When we reach room 46 after some 17 hours, many loose ends remain, and that time doubles as we peel back more layers of a mystery we still haven't fully solved. (If this were Spelunky, we'd be past beating Olmec, but some way off conquering Hell.) The notion that Blue Prince is about finding a room is thus a beautiful lie. Beneath it, unlike the scatty layouts we create, is a grand construct of clockwork exactitude, wielding randomness as a means of conducting your emotions. As paradoxical as the thing itself, this single-storey mansion is a towering achievement." [9]
South Of Midnight
"At the same time, it's easy to dwell on South Of Midnight's presentation ahead of the experience of playing it because the latter is less fascinating. Locations, characters and stories matter most here, but might have been bolstered further by more subversive and frictional mechanics. When Hazel finds the tools of the weaver and discovers her powers, she doesn't react incredulously enough, as if she knows that the powers are standard action-adventure fare. And so it goes. A double jump and air dash/glide navigates gaps. Marked handholds can be grabbed, sidled along and jumped off. We can run along designated walls, or push and pull crates or carts to form platforms. Not much about all this feels magical or devious, although a disgusting variant on the gap squeeze in a flooded pig farm is a notable exception.
In the game's favour, battles are relatively infrequent. Compulsion seems to recognise that the violence of this world is far more personal than an onslaught of faceless fiends could convey. And overall, while there's little depth to Hazel's abilities, they provide a smoothness of function and occasional spikes of excitement. But if everything is good enough to see out the game's 12-hour runtime, there remains a gulf between the vast reservoir of imagination on display in what you're doing in South Of Midnight, along with the who, where and why, and how you do it. This is a vision of immense craft and feeling. Should there be more behind the curtain?" [7]
The First Berserker: Khazan
"But while The First Berserker does become a touch more daring, it never gains the courage to break the mould. Levels are large but their design rarely stretches the imagination, perhaps on a par with Nioh's equivalent, which was never that game's strongest feature. For the most part, we methodically clear them of miscreants and baubles, like conducting a security sweep. Minor enemies gather in repeating configurations - one archer amid a few infantry is common, forcing a little kiting and use of cover - while occasional elite foes demand concerted effort. Sometimes we scrape through. Sometimes we die, then return to exact our revenge, having learned their techniques. And on it goes.
The end-of-stage bosses remain something of a saving grace. Their vicious attack patterns demand careful study, until the arc from nigh-impossible to eminently surmountable is complete. Still, readability can suffer as they zip around, and there's overreliance on cheap tricks - that old favourite, the unnatural pause between backswing and strike, like a footballer stuttering a penalty runup, is out in force. Most are also cut from the same cloth: roughly humanoid roadblocks, intricately sculpted but lacking a certain wit. Even as they flex, rage and rain down blows, then, there's a lingering sense that we're going through the motions." [6]
Promise Mascot Agency
"Crucially, we never lose our will to continue. Rarely has busywork been wrapped in such delightful aesthetics, or deployed to serve characters and places we root for so hard. Somehow, Kaizen makes cleaning up rubbish feel like a worthwhile task. As the final act focuses on the game's story, all that driving has achieved something - we've come to feel at home in Kaso-Machi by touring its every road, and part of its community. Kaizen's strengths thus remain those revealed in Paradise Killer (dialogue, mystery, imagination), even if the vehicle this time is less cohesively engineered." [6]
Commandos: Origins
"Yet there's also a sneaking sense that Origins is stuck in the past. As a reimagining of the original game with modern visuals, it's a triumph, but it doesn't do much to move the realtime tactics genre forward, with little of the innovation seen in, say, Mimimi's Shadow Gambit. The Cursed Crew. It also lacks incentives for replay. A handful of war-trivia collectables exist on each level, as well as one or two optional objectives, but none of them have any meaningful effect. In that sense, Origins feels barebones. How about some additional incentives for exploring more thoroughly? As it is, playing through 14 increasingly large missions can start to feel like an exhausting war of attrition, an epic of quick-saving and restarting, more daunting than fun. Origins succeeds as a faithful reboot of a much-missed series, but if the Commandos series is to have a future, it might benefit from embracing the captivating tin-soldier energy at its core and offering greater rewards for experimental play." [7]
Fragpunk
"Very few of our many rounds of FragPunk are won as a result of the bomb being planted or defused. Instead, with no respawns, most games devolve into a deathmatch where each side tries to whittle the other's combatants down from five to none. Some of that can be put down to impatient, bloodthirsty players flooding into this free-to-play game – and it -does seem to ease off a bit as we climb the ranks.
Really, though, this seems an inevitable consequence of mashing up the two-minute timer and brutally quick time-to-kill of a Counter-Strike with the gamechanging abilities of a hero shooter, not to mention those introduced by the card system. And so, at the first suggestion of an encounter, the screen fills with rockets, smoke clouds and sandstorms, as everyone empties out a bar of skills they mightn't otherwise get the chance to use before getting headshotted or the match ending. No wonder these heroes' powersets don't include an Ultimate -when would they even charge them up?
This rush to the conclusion means that, when we do try to play the objective, entire rounds can pass without us seeing action, let alone the effects of our chosen cards at work. It's frustrating because the card-selection process can run as long as the round that follows, and also because of how enlivening a gimmick they can be. As the clear standout elements in a shooter that otherwise feels like it's been drafted out of pre-existing parts, we'd like more chance to actually play with our cards after tearing the packet open." [6]
Despelote
"Colloquially, 'despelote' also means stripping, and by leaning into artifice, its makers denude the artistic process, confronting the impossibility of authentically recapturing a specific time and place - particularly something as subjective as a childhood memory. True, its more audacious formal flourishes occasionally mean that, like Julián's players in Tino Tini's Soccer '99, its makers don't always feel entirely in control. But when those big swings connect, just as when we manage to knock several bottles off a wall with a single shot, Despelote offers an exhilarating reminder of the narrative ground games have yet to cover. It's not a Delgado-sized leap to suggest that at times it almost feels like a completely new way to tell a story. You certainly don't get that from FIFA." [9]
Sonokuni
"The result is perhaps the finest - and certainly the most distinctive - game soundtrack of 2025 so far. So, while Sonokuni is a flawed action experience, we're grateful for it as a showcase of music we might well not have heard otherwise, and perhaps not appreciated in the same way. If nothing else, it's a fun way to discover that "skrt skrť" and "brrrap" are the same in Japanese as they are in English." [6]
Koira
"Interactions are straightforward but enjoyable, then, and when it comes to the game's wider themes, Koira is firmly back in the realm of children's literature. This is a game about being lost but becoming brave, about keeping your friends safe and learning to find a place in the natural world. It may not linger in the mind for too long once it's over, but it provides at least an evening's worth of quiet magic." [7]
