Josh Broadwell
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The First Berserker: Khazan is an unusual Soulslike. Most Dark Souls imitators don't quite get what makes FromSoftware's formula work or they tone down the difficulty to be more approachable. Developer Neople made Khazan more demanding and, at times, even more rewarding than the games that inspired it. It's a shame the rest of Khazan didn't get that level of attention, though.
FragPunk is the video game equivalent of a picture you put on the wall that looks nice at a glance, but never quite seems to balance right. The latest multiplayer game from NetEase following Marvel Rivals' launch in December 2024 works hard to give itself a strong identity, with a punk attitude it pulls off more effectively than Ubisoft's XDefiant ever did, a striking visual direction, and a unique card-based power-up system that adds a welcome layer of strategy to each match. Or, it would do, if FragPunk didn't undermine itself.
Wanderstop is like Spiritfarer for burnout sufferers and overachievers. The central focus is meaningful and expertly executed in its own right. However, it's the attention to detail in every other area that makes Wanderstop feel special, to the point where anything, even just planting flowers, enriches everything else. Ivy Road just gets it.
Marvel Rivals wants to reinvent the hero shooter genre with its complex characters and special synergies, but it's so preoccupied with trying to be like Overwatch that it forgets to play to its own strengths. Its oversized roster also needs more balancing – and more differentiation from Blizzard's stable of heroes.
MySims Cozy Bundle is fun in the moment, and I enjoyed spending small bursts of time on building projects or gathering materials. It’s just that MySims itself is really quite bland and hardly even feels like a Sims game most of the time. MySims Kingdom might just be a fantasy repackaging of MySims, but it makes the most of the foundation EA created with the first game and is definitely the stronger of the two in this bundle.
You might have to take notes outside the game to keep up, but it’s worth putting up with the annoyance. Rise of the Golden Idol is one of the most captivating mystery games around, one that makes clever use of every tool available to it and expands the possibilities of what a logical deduction game can achieve.
Age of Mythology Retold is fun, don’t get me wrong. The visual overhaul alone is enough to make playing this 22-year-old game easier, and the quality-of-life improvements sand down some of the older versions’ more annoying edges. However, with more substantial structural improvements in later Age of Empires games, plus with the likes of Ara: History Untold just around the corner, I’m just not sure Retold needed to exist.
Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the cleverest and most enjoyable tactics games I've played in a long old time. A handful of useful features remove some of the genre's most frustrating pain points, and the forgiving structure lets you experiment with all manner of off-the-wall solutions, even if there really is just one ideal path forward. It's a blueprint for how tactics games should be designed, and I can't wait to dive back into it again.
Either way, I’m more than ready to put The First Descendant down and not come back for a while. Its character playstyles are fresh and interesting, but underbaked gimmicks, overly familiar ideas, and underwhelming encounters make it hard to recommend. I’m hopeful that The First Descendant can outgrow its need to imitate other games and eventually turn into something interesting in its own right. It’s a live service game and Nexon’s first shot at making something in this style, so there’s every chance it might turn around in future updates.
As a hub for video game preservation, Digital Eclipse's latest is fine. It does the absolute minimum and not a bit more. As a piece of history, though, it’s baffling, incomplete, and rushed. I can’t help but think that perhaps the Jeff Minter story that Digital Eclipse wanted to tell proved too unwieldy and maybe too expensive to fit into this release, and what we end up with is this pared down version. Even that doesn't explain the lack of effort to actually tell a story and put any of Minter's life and work in worthwhile context.