The first two Metro games—and the books by Dmitry Glukhovsy—wanted you to believe that the survivors scraping out a basic life in the Moscow metro tunnels were all that was left of humanity after World War III. It's a common feature of post-apocalyptic stories, which often focus on a specific region and ignore what's going…
Review
Weedcraft Inc (PC)
**Review copy provided by publisher** Weedcraft Inc is a game full of interesting ideas that are spread out too thin. Weedcraft doesn’t have enough depth to succeed as a tycoon game—or management sim, if you prefer—and while it wants players to think about the consumption of cannabis in American society, together with the role of…
Dangerous Driving (PC)
**Review copy provided by publisher** Developer Three Fields Entertainment—a small studio consisting of mainly ex-Criterion devs—has been trying to bring back that Burnout magic for a couple of years now. Its last two games, Danger Zone and Danger Zone 2, focused on imitating the crash mode from Burnout Revenge, which wasn’t one of my favorites.…
Baba Is You (Switch)
Baba Is You teaches you the absolute bare minimum you need to succeed and leaves you to figure out the rest through intuition and perhaps a bit of trial and error. It’s also damn hard. Yes, Baba Is You is essentially the Dark Souls of puzzle games. I know, I know, it’s cliche, but hear…
Hypnospace Outlaw (PC)
Hypnospace Outlaw managed the unusual feat of making me feel nostalgic for something I didn’t personally experience. Second-hand nostalgia, perhaps. Set in 1999, Hypnospace Outlaw has you playing as a moderator for Hypnospace, which is clearly a knock-off of GeoCities. Even though I was a teenager at the time, I never used GeoCities and I…
ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove (PC)
**Review copy provided by the publisher** I’ve been playing roguelikes for twenty-eight years now, although I didn’t realize that until I played ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove. I was eight years old when the original ToeJam and Earl was released in 1991 for my brand new Sega Mega Drive and at the time…
Xenon Racer (Switch)
**Review copy provided by the publisher** Not every indie game needs to be on the Nintendo Switch. As controversial as this may sound, developers may be better off avoiding the popular platform if it is simply not possible to get the game running on it. And if they absolutely must release a broken Switch port,…
Ape Out (Switch)
**Review Copy Provided by Publisher** In many ways, Ape Out is more of a rhythm game than an action game. You can stumble your way to the end of each level without too much difficulty, much like you can make it to the end of a song in Guitar Hero or Amplitude, but you haven't…
Aragami: Shadow Edition (Switch)
**Review Copy Provided by the Publisher** There aren’t enough stealth games. The Metal Gear Solid series is no more, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s been a while since we’ve had a new Splinter Cell and even longer since we’ve had a Splinter Cell game that puts stealth before action. The Dishonored series…
CrossCode (PC)
**Review copy provided by the publisher** At first glance, CrossCode looks like another one of those retro-inspired indie games designed to pay homage to an era when watching people play video games involved regular appearances from Sir Patrick Moore and microtransactions were only in arcades. With a few exceptions, these retro-inspired games are far too demanding…