Lucas White
Game industry critic and reviewer
Writing For
ShackNews 
TheGamer 
Playstation Lifestyle Latest Reviews
I still remember how hyped I was when BlazBlue first came out, all the way back in 2009. I was at my peak interest in fighting games, Guilty Gear was on some kind of hiatus, and this was the next best thing with its own cool twists. Eventually, I fell off. It was hard to keep up with all the new versions, and as I got older I lost the ability to hang in those faster-paced “anime” fighters. The world and story also felt incomprehensible, which made venturing into spinoffs and things like visual novels feel like silly prospects. But when 2026 kicks off with a sidescrolling action-flavored roguelike that just looks like Ragna the Bloodedge fighting ninjas with his demonic blood powers, someone like me pays attention. And in that respect, BlazBlue Entropy Effect X delivers in spades.
The somewhat controversial Yakuza Kiwami series continues, with its most controversial entry yet. There’s a lot to unpack here, but needless to say the internet has been alight with discourse, with hardcore, longtime Yakuza/Like a Dragon fans clashing with more casual or newer fans over retcons, casting decisions, gameplay changes, and more. The icing on the cake, of course, being Yakuza 3 Remastered’s looming execution date. Is this remake actually a problematic mess, a tipping point for a once strong franchise teetering on the edge of chaos? Probably, yeah. It’s a whole thing. Let’s try to break it down.
An easy comparison to make with Routine is Alien Isolation, due to its green-tinted, chunky technology, and invincible, free-roaming (ish) antagonist forces. While the actual timeline suggests Routine was in development early enough for some of those similarities to be coincidental rather than derivative, there’s no denying the aesthetic comparison to that era of spooky science fiction. Routine is slow, methodical, and creepier when it’s about what you can’t see than what’s staring you in the face. But where it really shines isn’t about the horror at all.
There’s a lurch in Unbeatable, the debut work from developer D-Cell Games, finally out after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2021. Pink-haired and surly protagonist Beat and her soon-to-be bandmates are locked up in a prison, with no choice but to get through the doldrums of inmate life before the inevitable escape. You have to run back and forth across a drab environment, repeat a boring “minigame,” win small combat encounters that don’t do the rhythm gameplay justice, and then get through a sewer maze like you’re playing the worst part of Xenogears reborn. I was worried this would color the whole experience, alongside some general jankiness and fumbly writing. But a few hours later the story was over, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
I know what it feels like to desperately want to sleep. A medication mishap left me unable to sleep for three or four days. I laid in bed each night trying to make it happen, then drifted through the following days struggling to focus on things like work. It started being painful after a couple days, and by the end of it I was scared to take those meds again. Sleep Awake, a horror-themed narrative adventure from Eyes Out and Blumhouse Games, showed me a situation in which that painful experience, stretched out and compounded over days, months, or even years, would be aligned with survival. In this scenario, sleep, something your mind and body will beg and scream for after only days of neglect, is explicitly deadly. With a premise so horrible, who needs monsters? Well, Sleep Awake also has monsters. They’re less scary.
Here at Shacknews, I’ve talked about Atelier a few times. GUST and Koei Tecmo’s item synthesis and cozy vibes RPG series has had a lot of ups and downs over the past few decades. If you’ve read my previous reviews, you might have a skewed perspective, as the most recent outing was a big down, and the one before was, excuse the cliche, a mixed bag. But dial the clock back just a bit more, and you have the current peak of Atelier mountain: Ryza. This time, we get to talk about Ryza.
Sometimes you see a game when you’re just scrolling through the eShop and you see the potential for a life-changing experience. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out the way you’d hoped, but you still have a few laughs along the way. That’s what happened when I tried Full Metal Schoolgirl, the second game to come out in October 2025 from former WWE developer and sometimes Earth Defense Force developer Yuke’s. While this game has a lot of energy and a dynamite sense of humor, the actual gameplay is deeply undercooked and fails to stand out in an oversaturated genre.
Unless you’re sitting in the ludicrously small mid-section of a Venn Diagram comparing “Katamari Damacy fans” and “Apple Arcade subscribers,” you’ve probably been waiting upwards of 14 years for a new Katamari game that isn’t a remaster or wacky spin-off. And Touch my Katamari was a PS Vita game, so that’s a barely deeper pool than the Apple one. Once Upon a Katamari is the series’ return to the “main” platforms, bringing a brand-new Katamari experience to consoles and PC. The goal here seems to be packing as much gosh-darned Katamari gameplay into this bad boy as possible, for better or worse. Yeah!
I find myself growing more and more tired of roguelikes lately, and I don’t really believe in “guilty pleasure” as a concept. But if you held a gun to my head and asked me to identify my gaming guilty pleasure, I’d probably answer with Vampire Survivors. It’s the perfect combination of brainless dopamine and just-thoughtful-enough build-crafting that makes me dump hours into something that isn’t up to my usual tastes. So when another game in the “like Vampire Survivors, but with Specific Twist” pool floats up to the surface, I’ll gladly check it out.
Playtonic Games’ Yooka-Laylee was one of many Kickstarter successes of its time, in an era in which spiritual successors for classic games were an easy hit. The 2017 original was a clear callback to Banjo-Kazooie, a Nintendo 64 platformer known for its googly eyes, wealth of collectibles, and complex platforming moveset. Nearly a decade later Playtonic has returned to the project with Yooka-Replayee, a “re-imagining” that uses the original almost like a blueprint to make something that feels like an entirely different game. It’s a fascinating approach that feels great to play, but loses some of its identity in the process.