Not even a month into the year and we have a solid GOTY contender. Just wild to me that they shadowdropped a game this polished and inventive, from an unproven developer in the genre, and not at full price (or as most will probably experience it, on Game Pass). I can't think of a moment in this game where I was bored or not having fun.
Lavish presentation, tight gameplay, good music (even the originals), a good amount of variety, and a simple but surprisingly great story that hits all the right notes. Plus it has a pretty decent suite of post-game unlockables! I earnestly can't think of anything to knock it on outside of maybe a few of the jokes being kinda hit and miss, and even then as the game went on and I understood more what they were going for, the sort of self-indulgent cheesy fun really grew on me.
Absolute must-play, I'm already thinking about my next playthrough, probably later in the year... I hope Tango has more projects like this in the pipeline.

It has its fair share of problems, but for me, this is easily the best One Piece game we’ve gotten in years.
Yes, as you have doubtlessly heard, the backtracking is excessive in places, the game isn't particularly hard, and the localization is completely all over the place. Alabasta is unforgivably long for no reason compared to the rest of the game, and by comparison the latter half feels like it’s rushing to end. I'm also simply exhausted of One Piece recap games and the fact that it doesn’t touch on any content not previously covered by a game hurts it more. It abridges and occasionally changes plot events which I technically prefer to get through things faster, but also gives these strange recap segments that feel aimed at newbies to the series, so it ends up feeling like it won’t really make anyone happy outside of said changes and fanservice moments.
But despite these many flaws, a JRPG is the perfect format for a One Piece game, and I had a great time with it. Even though you’re never really being pushed to use it to its fullest, the combat system is very well done and fun. The monster designs are excellent and charming, if reused slightly too much. Sakuraba’s soundtracks are pretty hit and miss, and thankfully he really pulled out the stops here, the music is excellent. The original story feels like something that could have been straight out of one of the movies, it’s decently well thought through and the characters are good. I also admittedly enjoyed some of the backtracking, considering many RPGs these days may as well be a straight line.
But most importantly, in a way that’s hard to really quantify, this game actually feels like a part of One Piece. I do like the Pirate Warriors games , but at times they barely feel like they’re in the same series with how absolutely plain vanilla and by the books the adaptation is. They got the vibe down here perfectly, every character feels like themselves, and the interactions feel pretty authentic to the series at large.
If it was too much longer than it is I might have felt differently, but for a 30ish hour RPG? I had a good time. I hope whatever they do with the Season Pass expands on this excellent foundation they’ve put down, and that the future of One Piece games can continue to be something different and special.
also stop using the fishman island outfits please get oda to design new ones or at least let the classic costumes carry through the whole game i beg of you
(also also minor vague spoilers: but it’s incredibly funny that there’s a plot important character who is one of the many reused character models but wearing a different hat lmao)

Weirdly, going back to Spark 2 after finishing 3 made me enjoy and respect both games a bit more. 2's level design definitely takes its time to find its footing and the non-space level themes are pretty weak, but there is some fun stuff in there, despite the fact that a lot of the time you can just simply opt to not play the game. I generally think they nailed 3's physics, but I will say one thing I would have carried over from here is how much more momentum you maintain when running up and along walls by default. 3's jester dash momentum was also sorely missed.
In particular, I wanted to point out that I think the bosses are much better and more memorable here, and because the parry behaves a differently it gives the combat a much more interesting flavor suited to janky yet unique high speed battles (compared to 3, which feels like it wants to be more of a straight character action game at times). I definitely had a newfound appreciation for that.
Maybe I should go back to Spark 1 now... One day. lol

The same fun Taiko as ever, but I feel like the last couple games' tracklists have been a little weak for my taste. I also don't particularly like the push toward the music pass, even if it's very reasonably priced for what it is. I wish I could have an option to purchase the tracks outright and play them at my leisure rather than worrying about yet another subscription when I go on a Taiko binge, as someone who doesn't play these games consistently... Not huge on the weird battle pass-adjacent progression system either, but that's more inoffensive than anything.
.....I also really really need a drum controller lol

Wow.
A bit scattered here, but this is not only a major improvement from the last two Spark titles, but a game that manages to hold its own compared to the Sonic Adventure titles themselves! Great music, fun levels, near-perfect physics, lots of variety, just an absolute blast of a game. Really glad I decided to grab it, and a perfect way to end the year/ring in a new one.
I really wanna rate this a bit higher because I had a ton of fun with it, but the minor issues sorta pile up. At times I do feel it is perhaps a bit too self indulgent, the combat is just a tad too clunky with encounters that drag, the art style still feels a bit all over the place, and I experienced enough general buggy weirdness throughout my time with the game that it feels right at this score. I'm hopeful they'll at the very least fix the camera going crazy almost every single time you reload at a checkpoint.
Also it's kinda insane that they went and added all the Spark 2 levels for free. How great is that? Can't wait to see what's in store for the future of this game, much less the series.

By far the best part of this game is how well it captures each era of film it represents, it is really something to behold. I also greatly enjoyed most of the acting, with special regard to Manon Gage who steals the show.
I also can't help but personally feel that this is Barlow's most bloated game, with a much higher ratio of FMV clips that drag or feel unneeded. And maybe as a symptom of that, I personally think they could have stood to push you more toward relevant clips to some of the plot's core threads when you're imminently unraveling them.
As a whole, I came away positive and I definitely think it's a game worth trying, especially if you like film, and the less you know beforehand the better!

For me, this was that one game your friend owned that you always wanted to play when you went over to their house, one they were probably sick of watching, but damn if you didn't want it all the same. Now years later, I've always been nervous to revisit this one in case the fragmented memories of my adventures at Whispering Rock weren't all that they seemed to be.

Thankfully, this game is still absolutely delightful. It's a bit muddy looking but still adventurous and inspired, the platforming is as shockingly good as ever, the powers are fun, and most of the humor holds up much better than I would have ever expected. I do think it starts to drop off in the last couple levels, a couple parts of the game do drag, and there are some holdovers of its point-and-click lineage that haven't aged quite as gracefully, but I still loved it. I'm happy to say that Psychonauts gets to keep its special place in my heart.

This game has its fair share of issues and strange design choices, a (so far) middling story, plus it is shockingly unsubtle with its horror. All that said, I admire that they tried something different with its gameplay loop. The weird melee focus leading to punchout-lite bobbing and weaving with gun cancel combos feels immensely satisfying, if not particularly deep as far in as i got. It also has really nice production values, and I think the motion and facial capture in combination with the acting is enjoyable to behold. And I have to give a special shout-out: this game has some of the best Dualsense implementation I have experienced, with every small sound and action making a noticeably different ping on the controller; it was good enough to create yet another way to detect incoming threats I hadn't quite seen yet.
I'm not feeling it enough to play it til the end right now, but I definitely could certainly see myself coming back to it in the future.

A completely no fluff nonstop blast from beginning to end. The aesthetic is killer, the gameplay is tight and fun, and the pace at which they give you new tools is near-perfect. When you hit that perfect rhythm of quickly jumping between gunplay and melee, it feels absolutely phenomenal. I wouldn't have believed it before playing it, but they really did deliver in making a third person shooter character action game hybrid.
The points that keep it a good game rather than a great one are that the story is below average, it's a tad glitchy, enemy variety is kinda weak, some encounters feel designed as though they gave up and simply dumped every enemy possible on the field to make things a cluster, console display options are miserable (neither of the options look great imo), and in general nothing here is particularly innovative outside of being simply being good.
The perfect weekend game to play on your PC, maybe pick it up during a Steam sale.

Gungrave G.O.R.E. is so close to being a great 7/10 turn your brain off throwback PS2 shooter brought into the modern era, it's just way too long and unpolished.
The game actually looks pretty great, the character designs rock, some of the music is good, and at its core you can really feel the arcade influences. When it's hitting on all cylinders and you're mowing down waves of enemies flooding in from every crevice of a given area it feels wonderful, especially early on when the enemy types are much more simple to deal with. It really makes me wish it had a little extra something. I like the structure of it quite a lot as well, the straightforward fast paced levels, the loop of finishing the stage, putting in some quick upgrades, then moving next feels very nice.
That's where the positives end, unfortunately. The controls are my biggest point of contention. You will be mashing R2 a lot for most interactions in this game (give or take the occasional melee combo), and because it's a proper trigger rather than mapped to a button like its predecessors, you're highly likely to get tired of it. Even when conscientiously using the "R2 combo then hold it" move at every possible instance, my hands were still a bit fatigued after a longer play session. The story simply existed for the time I put in, and the localization is noticeably quite rough, despite the voice cast doing their best to salvage things. And again, I think it could have generally used a pass or two more of polish in some way or another, and maybe like one more interesting thing for Grave to do during gameplay. Halfway through the game I finally had to give in because I felt pretty confident I had a good idea of the game as a whole, the gameplay wasn't going to meaningfully evolve, and I wasn't going to see anything new and interesting.
I'm glad it got made regardless and enjoyed some of my time with it, I genuinely hope the game is just successful enough that they get their opportunity to make a much tighter sequel.

This is the best Pokemon has been in ages.
Where Arceus felt like an overhaul of the core of Pokemon's gameplay, Scarlet and Violet are an overhaul of everything surrounding the core gameplay... with a few bits and bobs from Arceus anyways, just for good measure. The world feels so carefully designed, every objective placed with intention to push the player to explore. The writing is vastly improved, and every storyline is a treat. Most of the new Pokemon are hits, and Terrastalizing is a legitimately fun and well-thought out "super" mechanic, putting the series' other attempts to shame handily. The difficulty is also surprisingly good for a modern day Pokemon. I loved this game from beginning to end, and I can't believe I might be considering a Pokemon game of all things for my top 10 of the year.
Just a few small dings here: for starters, the very last area does drag a little bit and doesn't fully take advantage of its cool concept, but at the very least the story beats are enjoyable and done well. Performance is rough, but it never hit the point of unplayability for me (though admittedly later areas with more effects on screen push the envelope). I also didn't experience any of the rampant glitchiness people were talking about, aside from one persistent glitch where Pokemon would spawn in walls when an outbreak was placed strangely on the map; hopefully that gets fixed or tweaked.

God of War 2018 was the game that really sold me on the series, with my biggest complaint being that I wished there was more of it. After finishing Ragnarok, I feel my biggest takeaway is that I wish there was less of it.

It's a very well put together, beautiful game with combat that remains as good as the first (if maybe a bit to much of the same), enchanting music, and a story that ultimately ends in a very satisfying way. The new weapon is fun, and I enjoyed the alternate gameplay style they added. All of the performances were great, and especially some of the later bits will remain in my mind for a long time to come.

But the journey to get there is some of the most strangely unevenly paced content I have seen in a game recently. I don't mind slow levels focused on worldbuilding and general plot setup, but some of these chapters are not only slow, they simply do not know when to end. Especially in the first half most chapters simply drag on the same simple points for way too long, presumably to hammer in the plot if for some reason you did not get it.

Hell, the main story of this game doesn't trust the player with any sort of adversity. All of the main story encounters are remarkably easy on normal, and the characters CONSTANTLY quip out the solutions to puzzles just as you find them. It is actual insanity how simple most of the puzzles in this game are, but it's doubly insane how often your companion will pipe up with the solution not even 5 seconds after seeing it. Let the player think and experiment if they have to!! Meanwhile, side content literally 10 feet off the main path will beat the bricks off of you just for looking in its direction. The balancing is just so strange.

I feel like I have been pretty negative here, but again, I enjoyed the game enough by the end. I just wish I liked it more than that.

Sonic Frontiers is great. That alone is a relief to say, but I didn’t expect to think it was quite this great. There are still things that could use some major tightening up, but Frontiers was predominantly an absolute joy. My cautious optimism has turned to genuine excitement, both for the game itself and the future of the series.

The story starts with Sonic and crew flying to the mysterious Starfall Islands, a mysterious set of landmasses that the Chaos Emeralds were suddenly drawn to. Just as they begin to approach the islands, a portal opens up and sucks the crew into a realm called Cyberspace. Sonic quickly escapes, finding himself alone on Kronos Island, unsure of the whereabouts of his friends.

I won’t go too far into the weeds here, but I will say that the story is indeed a step in the right direction. It has a pretty good balance of serious moments and lightheartedness, and most surprisingly it not only makes an effort to link a lot of the canon, but it actually has wider lore implications for the series as a whole. The characters are great here and their arcs are by far the most captivating part of the story, finally being handled with some semblance of consistency, and there are a lot of really nice moments. Tails specifically has had a rough go of it over the years so it’s good to see him characterized well again. I also found Sage to be a pretty great villain who works pretty well in the plot.

The wider mystery of the islands takes center stage most of the time, and I found it a bit weak in the end, especially as a heavy point of advertisement. And while I appreciate that the game acknowledges the series’ past, at times it is a bit heavy handed with characters remarking quite a bit about their memory of some past event or character who will not be appearing. And across the board the presentation hurts it a lot; while some cutscenes show Sonic more fun, expressive, and cartoony than he has been in a hot minute, others have his head slowly swiveling like a Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic and standing in a static position for the duration of the scene.

The gameplay is the real star of the show here though. It comes in 3 flavors, the “open zone” as they call it (it’s just an open world with stages in it shut up Iizuka), 3D cyberspace levels (think like a normal 3D boost era stage), and 2D cyberspace levels (the same but in 2D). The open zone in particular is the standout here as it is easily the most polished, controls near-perfectly to my taste, and is genuinely always a joy to explore. I was worried about this more than anything pre-release, but I think having small level segments as open world activities as well as a large variety of puzzles makes it actually engaging and fun to run around in.

There are small combat challenges scattered throughout the open zone, and to my surprise they are really well-designed as encounters. They are mostly pretty brief, have a clear gimmick to them that keeps them mostly fresh, and they are quite punchy and fun. The bosses are also a highlight, truly tapping into modern Sonic’s shonen roots with crazy over the top bouts, some of the best cutscenes in the game (perhaps even the series), and awesome vocal themes. Visually they don’t quite fit with the rest of Sonic if I had one complaint, I know they’re supposed to be strange-looking abstract creatures, but they maybe went a bit too far in that respect.

I guess it would be appropriate to mention the game’s RPG elements here. All I can say is that they’re inoffensive, they serve the purpose of providing some form of progression and that’s it. It could have been worse. The skill tree is simultaneously the most traditional progression and provides the bare minimum, and the preorder item pack unlocks like ⅓ of the entire thing, which is… strange, although the upgrades themselves are pretty fun. Your other upgrades are stat based, with collectible seeds and creatures that bolster your attack, defense (how many rings you lose from a hit), speed, and ring count. These are “fine”, though I think ring count could have easily been replaced with boost gauge expansion; why would you upgrade your ring count if you have an ability that gives an enhanced boost for topping off your rings?

3D cyberspace levels are a little less fun, the cracks start to show as you do more of them in how they throttle your control/speed and change your physics. I did enjoy the “tribute” levels and there were some genuine surprises in there, but I can’t help but feel some of them ruin the luster on remakes of past games just by being here made with reused assets. Even still, they’re all brief, decent fun, and either more complex than most of the boost game levels or rely upon a one-off gimmick that I can’t be too mad at.

The weakest part of the gameplay is unfortunately when you hit 2D segments, as I found them all quite mediocre. The 3D elements of the gameplay clearly got a lot of polish and customization, but I guess they thought the 2D was perfect as it was so they have essentially done next to nothing to it aside from (THANKFULLY) fixing Forces’ horrid physics and control issues. I also experienced by far the most jank in these segments; a good 80% of my deaths in this game were caused by the 2D physics not interacting properly with the environment (most notably boosting off ramps consistently gave me problems for some strange reason) or the transitions from 3D to 2D in the open world not properly functioning. But to give them some credit I did not find any of the levels outright awful, and despite there being an island focused around 2D segments, they become quite easy to avoid entirely.

Finally, I should briefly mention a bit of an elephant in the room: Hard Mode. The game tells you that you get “something extra” (I believe this is the wording) for playing through it, and that something is the true final boss. There is functionally no difference in story content aside from simply including that fight, just that and a new credits theme (given, said credits theme is one of my new favorite songs in the series so hey, worth it for that at least?). You can also simply switch to Hard right before the final stretch of the game, but I didn’t find Hard Mode particularly difficult otherwise so I wouldn’t hesitate to just go through the whole thing that way. Still, it was quite a strange choice to do this, it’s likely because the sequence itself is decently long and by far the most difficult part of the game. Be warned, I suppose!

The presentation is mostly functional and that’s all I can really say about it. The game looks fine and I feel they did about the best they could with what they must have been given, but it’s clear that despite this being their biggest most ambitious Sonic project in ages, their biggest obstacle was still some sort of production issue or lack of budget. The level themes are fairly dire, cyberspace alternates like 4 level themes, the palette is a bit drab… Given I don’t think it looks bad, there just isn’t a whole lot of variety nor memorable theming here, and none of it really screams “Sonic”.

As for sound, I think the music is intentionally a scattershot of different stylings from throughout the series, so you’re bound to find one or two tracks to like at minimum. There are adventure-style tunes, Sonic R-esque jams, even some of Ohtani’s coveted lofi made it in. I enjoyed most of it, but I’m not sure if I’ll remember most of it a year from now. Also specific shout-outs to the aforementioned hard mode exclusive credits theme, it’s legitimately the best Sonic song in ages and was a perfect cap-off to the experience.

Voice acting is pretty good here too, making good on the great script and character interactions, but interestingly they have significantly changed the direction for both Sonic and Eggman. Perhaps this was to match the more somber tone of the story, to delineate a new era for the franchise, to match closer to the movies and other media…. Who knows. Either way, Mike Pollock’s Eggman works quite well being slightly less hammy than he has been, but I feel early-game Sonic goes a little too far into voice actor Roger Craig Smith’s natural speaking voice at times and generally makes the performance feel weird. Luckily he settles into it as the game goes on, and eventually I enjoyed the take as something very different. Knuckles’ new voice also fluctuates, but more in such a way that it feels the actor isn’t accustomed to the role yet. Some of his delivery feels like it really gets the character, others ring very flat, but it’s not too bad overall. The rest of the cast is about as good as you would expect, and again, overall I felt positive on the voiceover in the end.

I wasn’t sure what to expect upon putting in my copy of Sonic Frontiers, but I certainly didn’t think it would end up on the shortlist of my favorite 3D Sonic games. While some aspects could still use some work, it does a lot of things really well and has enough polish that I came away genuinely impressed with the game. If I had to choose a way for the series to go next, I would go for a straight-up open world without having to go into stages with new physics and junk. But considering they seem set on the open zone that’s fine too. In the end, I just hope they can match, polish, and exceed the magic that they managed to find here.