For the most well-known rally raid event in motorsport, there really haven’t been that many games based on the Dakar Rally over the last 40-odd years. There appear to be just five, actually – and one of those is an 8-bit, 1988 fever dream where your car has guns and you get from France to Africa by driving… under the sea avoiding giant starfish, lobsters, and many torpedoes. Perhaps adapting the Dakar into a game is as difficult as winning the thing in real life? This would certainly explain Dakar Desert Rally, where I’ve been zigzagging between enjoying its genuinely immersive moments of brilliance and cursing its bugs, uneven performance, odd design choices, and often unresponsive handling, which have effectively counteracted just about everything it does well.

There’s no denying...

Reviving a much-loved series can be a gamble. Stick too close to the original, and the project can feel like a retread. On the other hand, reinventing it completely can alienate stalwart supporters. Over a decade after the last chapter of Square Enix’s Norse-themed JRPG series, Valkyrie Elysium departs from its predecessors’ turn-based roots in favor of a new action-heavy, hack-and-slash direction. In that transition, Elysium has established a fun and flashy combat system but sacrifices part of what made the original PlayStation game memorable: a focus on the characters and worldbuilding.

In many ways, Valkyrie Elysium feels like a Square Enix take on Falcom’s Ys RPG series rather than a return to Valkyrie Profile’s original PlayStation-era DNA...

My desire for a new Pikmin game is borderline rabid, so I got very excited when I saw that Tinykin’s army of adorable followers might potentially fill the sprout-shaped void in my heart. But while its simple environmental puzzles may not have entirely sated that craving, its joyous world and extremely satisfying platforming unexpectedly fed a different hunger. Tinykin feels more like a modern evolution of the N64-era 3D platformer formula than most other attempts I’ve played, and its laidback exploration and collectible hunting was an absolute delight from start to finish.

You control a space explorer named Milodane as you wander your way through a fairly regular two-story home – of course, doing so is made decidedly irregular by the fact that you’re the size of a bug...

Here are my early impressions of Overwatch 2 after playing for several hours. For my full scored review check back next week when Overwatch 2 launches.

Is Overwatch 2 truly a sequel? It’s a question that has lingered around the second iteration of Blizzard’s multiplayer shooter ever since its unveiling in 2019, and one that intensified when it was revealed that it will fully replace the existing Overwatch, not exist alongside it. Well, now it’s finally in our hands, and I can say that while it’s less of a reinvention and more of an evolution of the intense, nuanced, and brilliantly colourful team-based battle that made its predecessor so enjoyable, it still brings enough new things to the table that it feels like its own distinct game and not simply Overwatch 1.5.

The bigger quest...

It’s easy to draw lines between The DioField Chronicle’s sweeping story of war, magic, and shady politics and those of Game of Thrones or Fire Emblem. I’d have to write off the whole fantasy genre if borrowing were a deal-breaker, but they still have to figure out how to assemble those parts into something that stands alone. In this case, it ends up feeling like, at best, a generic version of its inspirations. And while its real-time combat system is an exciting twist, it’s often difficult to work with the controls as you fight through its quick, engaging battles. Even the characters who end up having unexpected or interesting roles to play in the unfolding tale end up coming across a bit dull, though that’s no fault of the veteran voice cast.

The world of DioField feels like anyone’s ...

Warning: Session is a hard game and will test your patience. Those aren’t my words; they’re the words of the developer, Creā-ture Studios itself, splashed verbatim on each of Session’s trick list menus. That’s a belated caveat for the presumably bewildered people mining the menus for shreds of advice on how to actually do anything in this diabolically difficult skateboarding sim. With a two-stick control system that flies in the face of generations of muscle memory, Session is a complex but very grounded simulation of street skating that can appear wonderfully authentic when executed well...

Since 2014, Yacht Club Games has just been cranking out banger after banger when it comes to the Shovel Knight series, and Shovel Knight Dig is yet another turn of the crank. Developed in tandem between both Yacht Club and Nitrome, Shovel Knight Dig takes the main ideas of Shovel Knight’s 2D platformer gameplay – the shoveling, the bouncing, the secrets hidden in off-pattern sections of the wall, the Mega Man-esque boss battles, so on and so forth – and fits all of them into the structure of a spelunking roguelite. It turns out it’s a great fit, even if the adventure is over rather quickly and offers few compelling reasons to dig deeper.

Shovel Knight Dig is a roguelite, which comes with all the usual hallmarks of the genre: Permadeath, procedurally generated levels, and small elem...

Ah, Call of Duty – one of my favorite signs of autumn. Just as mornings are broken by the sound of Canadian geese migrating to warmer climates, the tranquility of my living room is interrupted each fall by the coming of the Call of Duty beta period. Modern Warfare II (no, the new one, you’re thinking of Modern Warfare 2) is the latest arrival – the 19th mainline game, if you’re keeping score – and it brings with it a return to a modern setting after last year’s… return to World War 2. Much like another fall favorite that returns each year, the pumpkin spice latte, Call of Duty is familiar, reliable, and doesn’t have any real surprises in store...

There are historical first-person shooters that attempt to capture the precise texture of their era — the limits of the technology, the archaic military traditions, the hierarchy of command. Then there’s Isonzo, a World War One shooter where you can drink from a canteen to briefly erase your stamina threshold, which allows you to sprint around the rugged warzones of Italy with reckless abandon. A comrade on your flank might bolster those efforts by blowing a whistle to inspire his compatriots, making them resilient to the hail of gunfire pouring out of the regiments encamped across the valley. This playful approach to the Great War is soaked with twitchy trigger-pulls, game-altering bombing runs, and goofy, video game-y perks, makes Isonzo approachable to even the most casual participants...

With the demon-rousing riffs of Eddie Munson’s Master of Puppets performance in Stranger Things still fresh in our social feeds, the timing could not be more ideal for Metal: Hellsinger to strut out onto the main stage and adopt an imposing power stance. Taking the love affair between Doom and heavy metal music and melding it into an official marriage, Metal: Hellsinger’s rhythm-based rampage through the fiery depths of Hell had me gleefully headbanging along to every heathen-seeking headshot. I couldn’t help but be disappointed, though, that much like the ethos of the musical genre that powers it, Metal: Hellsinger is here for a good time rather than a long time...