Polygon

Invincible VS’s gameplay is deeper than it might seem at first blush, with varied fighters and an easy-to-grasp, hard-to-master tag system central to fights. I just wish that applied to the story mode, too. It never achieves the same depth its gameplay has or its source material is known for. I haven’t thought much about the repercussions of violence in Invincible VS, but I’ve certainly had a good time dishing it out.

Based on around three hours of play across three missions from 007 First Light, yes, IO has made it work — although its grasp of the gameplay style that would make a perfect James Bond game is a good deal firmer than its grasp of the Bond character itself. [3-Hour Hands-On Impressions]

Aphelion is Don’t Nod doing what it does best. Ariane and Thomas’s journeys across Persephone are both high stakes and highly personal. Because, in some ways, every relationship is a world unto itself, and those worlds and the hope they contain are worth venturing through Hell for.

Being able to turn yourself into an overpowered king by flipping a few switches has its advantages. It gave me more breathing room to marvel at Carcosa’s ornate alien architecture. It let me try different artifacts and test out how a negative perk would mess with my play style. And it allowed me to get more aggressive in battle, which meant generating more glorious particle explosions that put my PS5 Pro to work. Even with my frustrations, Saros still had me glued to my controller as a work of pure sci-fi spectacle with an eerie atmosphere that bleeds out of your TV.

Where Survivors was indebted to old-school Castlevania games, Crawlers pulls off the same trick with Dungeon Master. That’s what elevates a potential gimmick into something that’s inventive and reverential at the same time. I can’t stay mad at it for long.

The remarkably funny Titanium Court is out to lampoon things that are hard to make sense of, be it complex video games, meaningless wars, or baseball. (Especially baseball.) It shreds their rule books, scrambles the scraps, and leaves you to hunt for understanding in the nonsense. Or maybe it’s just messing with you.

Lord of Hatred is a good, meaty expansion. But I find it striking that I enjoyed playing the Paladin through the otherwise unremarkable season 11 more than playing the Warlock through Lord of Hatred's campaign. Maybe it's personal taste in the classes; maybe it's more than that. The seasons' lightly orchestrated tours through Diablo 4's opulent grind find a more instinctive and rewarding rhythm than the campaigns' labored drama. Lord of Hatred puts on a hell of a show. But the real attraction is what comes next.

Tides of Tomorrow shattered my reluctance to interact with strangers, and even better, it made me think of TideLover and co. as my friends, despite the lack of direct interactions. I've enjoyed Tides of Tomorrow's story my own way, at my own pace, yet it still feels like a shared experience. It's genius, really.

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream makes you work for it. If you take the time to craft the perfect Doctor Manhattan Mii or painstakingly draw a can of Mountain Dew, your creative drive will always be rewarded when your work is immortalized in a hilarious life sim’s ongoing comedy routine. That’s the kind of play you can’t generate.

Mouse: P.I. For Hire isn't flawless, and it certainly isn't going to test your mettle as a challenging shooter (which, consequently, means it's much more approachable for non-FPS players), but it's worth playing for the vibes alone, even if the combat feels a little one-dimensional at times. From the fantastically groovy audio design in the jazzy soundtrack, sound effects, and voice acting across its diverse, larger-than-life characters, to the visually stunning rubber hose animation and hand-drawn levels, Fumi Games has outperformed all expectations. Everyone should play Mouse: P.I. For Hire, because it absolutely deserves to mouse its way into the awards rat race come the end of the year.