Glixel

The Nintendo mobile game feels like an Animal Crossing game and an extension of the franchise, but like my hometown, it’s changed—and that’s not always for the better.

For now, as a Mario game that continues the Switch's moves to blur the line between the portable and the home-based console, Super Mario Odyssey is a beautiful, rewarding example of what Nintendo has in store for the system.

One of the Year's Best Games.

To my delight, the story's at least as long as the classic Halo games I fell in love with so many years ago, and there's a whole world – four of them, in fact – to investigate with my fellow Guardians. In the depths of Nessus, Ghost has even heard tell of a planet-eating worldship and a pissed-off emperor named Calus, who might have an axe to grind with Ghaul. Sounds like we're in for a long wild ride. [Review-in-Progress]

The slasher genre's always fascinated me when it comes to the movies. Smart, self-conscious stories that subvert our expectations – films like Scream (1996), You're Next (2011), and Hush (2016) – serve as reminders of the essential purity, and limitations, of the slasher flick. By setting the stage and then forcing the actors to improvise, Gun's Friday the 13th feels like the next bold step in that evolution.

There's something deeply unsettling about how enjoyable this game is. It's a reminder of why, despite their timeless resonance and narrative potential, it can be hard to admit how much we love a good horror movie. However, Friday the 13th: The Game doesn't give you many chances to stop and dwell on the grotesqueries. Most of the time, you're simply having too much fun to care. The thrill of the chase, the primordial impulses of cat and mouse, the satisfaction as you land that last fatal blow – it's a genuine delight to experience in a group setting, with everyone wearing a headset and communicating, or taunting Jason, as you work together to round up a can of gasoline, car keys, and a spare battery to just get the hell out of there.

If Farpoint were a regular non-VR game it would be unremarkable at best. As a VR experience though, and as a demonstration of the effectiveness of a gun-shaped prop in virtual reality, it represents a ballsy, if embryonic, attempt to try and push things forward. It's experimental and – as something that tries to be a fully-fledged multi-hour "blockbuster" action game – is unusually daring for this period in VR. While we certainly won't ever look back on it as one of the great shooters of all time, we may come to look back at it as significant landmark in VR games.

Hot Wheels demonstrates that Playground Games are so assured and steadfast in their vision for Forza Horizon that they can make something so patently absurd feel like the most obvious and natural thing in the world. It shows that games can be rooted in realism while reveling in the preposterous and that's what guarantees Forza Horizon 3's place as one of the all time great driving games.

Turns out it's not quite the "Dishonored in space" experience we were expecting, although it does seem to borrow heavily from Bioshock and Half-Life as well as more systems-based survival games...I have a feeling it's a lot longer than we thought. [First Impressions]

Longtime Dawn of War fans will find much to their liking, and, with a little bit of patience, MOBA fans and RTS fans probably can, too. But the game also speaks to the difficulty of splicing two genres, hitching the living to the dead. With Dawn of War 3, Relic was hoping for a virile chimera, but it ended up with something more like Frankenstein: innovative, untamable, and unknowable – but not quite alive.