I wasn't expecting much from Tekken 8 - I have fond memories of the early games but so much has changed in the landscape of fighting games since. Last year had both Street Fighter 6 and MK1 - what was Tekken going to do to make it stand out?

I've been blown away by just how good it feels to play even as someone who is going to forever be bad at fighting games. Hits feel and sound visceral, characters feel meaningfully different and it all looks fantastic.

I had tons of criticisms about MK1's story for not daring to do anything interesting until near the end, and while Tekken 8's story is also absolutely naff, it is engaging. More importantly it integrates the fights themselves as a way of communicating momentum in the story which is fantastic. It even seems to almost be fudging the difficulty of fights in favour of telling come-backs in a way that feels kind of genius. It is maybe a bit too Jin heavy but I'll take it.

Glad I gave it a shot and I can see myself playing a lot of the arcade mode to get a bit more variety!

When I first picked up My Time at Sandrock (MTaS), I didn't expect much. I had bounced off My Time at Portia pretty quickly but in a year full of interesting but imperfect life sims, I was still looking for one that would keep me engaged.

Almost sixty hours later and hitting credits, I was surprised at how much I had enjoyed the majority of my time and will likely have it in my top 5 GOTY.

This game nails one thing that other life sims do not - the sense and importance of community. Lots of other life sims have named NPCs you can talk to and who will ask you for help, but its rare that they'll ever meaningfully do anything themselves. And while I think MTaS could have gone further with this, it does a good job of creating the illusion that the community is all involved in its own way - whether its the other builder helping with big projects or the Civil Corps members attacking monsters they pass.

The narrative has the usual crescendo of a JRPG/anime where a big bad emerges and I think a lesser game would end on its defeat, but MTaS recognises that your job as a builder isn't done there, but in how you pick up when the dust settles, repair and continue to bring the town forward into a better world.

Where a lot of other life sims have a list of NPCs who I can socialise and romance but because they have no notable personalities I never remember their names, MTaS successfully made me like and care about the majority of townsfolk and the payoff for the romance questline I went on felt really great. The town also has its share of utter pricks who you can despise and that's also great - a town full of sugary sweethearts would be dull!

All in all, I only have two real significant complaints about the game:

1) The grind. Due to being more a factory simulation game than a farming game, it takes mechanics that are fun in a game like Satisfactory or Factorio, but are simply dull time barriers in a game with more narrative content. You need to balance multiple machines alongside resource management to effectively keep progressing the story at a good clip.

I wish more significant automation kicked in earlier in the game to let these things run more indivisibly in the background, if they wanted to keep these mechanics in at all. I ended up using cheats at a certain point because the sheer ask of the mat costs would have ruined my desire to keep playing.

2) The combat. I feel like every life sim wants to include combat despite it almost never feeling good. Compared to other games of this type from this year, the combat in MTaS is 'ok'. Its not particularly fun but its competent.

But if you can overlook these two things, its a fantastic game with a good message at its heart that puts it apart from other games of its like.