TechRadar Gaming

With engaging, high-octane combat, enticing visuals, and well-designed boss fights, The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales delivers a pretty enjoyable overall experience. Unfortunately, its underwhelming dialogue, unremarkable cast of characters, and slightly lacking environments prevent it from reaching the heights of classic Square Enix titles.

Halo: Campaign Evolved brings back the classic shooter in a new remake that’s shockingly faithful, but offers just enough gameplay improvements, updates, and additions. It’s worth revisiting if you’ve played Master Chief’s first adventure before, and the best way to experience it if you haven’t yet. The lack of multiplayer, however, makes it feel incomplete.

Splatoon Raiders is a wonderful solo reinvention of the popular multiplayer series filled with smartly designed missions and endlessly engaging progression systems. Underpinned by the franchise’s fantastic shooting mechanics, it’s a fresh and exciting adventure that should be in every Nintendo Switch 2 owner’s library.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is a great remake of a classic game and does a great job of walking the tightrope between respecting the original source material and introducing new content and modernizing aged features. Cut content is a shame, and the game’s more repetitive elements don’t age well, but there’s a lot to love here for new and returning players. The overhauled combat, beautiful world, and chock-full map truly got the game’s hooks in me — all over again.

Despite its simplistic control scheme, there’s an awful lot of fun to be had with Rhythm Heaven Groove's brilliantly unorthodox set of levels, characters, and tunes — all packed with tons of personality and vibrancy. The new Beatspell mode may not exude the charm of the core experience, and the basic nature of gameplay won’t be for all, but the game remains a blast whether you’re riding solo or competing against friends.

Star Fox is a solid remake of an excellent game, maintaining everything that made the original a cult classic while sprucing it up with a new lick of paint. Still, it feels overpriced given the campaign’s short length and the unfortunate lack of new content aside from the decently enjoyable, albeit rather threadbare, multiplayer mode.

A fantastic but flawed spacefaring adventure, Starfield struggled to stand out from Bethesda's heavy RPG hitters when it was originally released. Over two years later, it's an incredibly deep, compelling sci-fi story that's only gotten better with age – and updates and expansions, plus new PS5-specific features. If you're a fan of the genre craving your next fix, this definitive take on the sci-fi epic shouldn't be missed.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was one of 2024's best on PC and Xbox, an achievement it crystallized like an alien skull when it set PlayStation platforms firing on all cylinders last year. Now, on Nintendo's hardware, MachineGame's cinematic epic takes a victory lap, losing none of its size, scope, ambition or appeal in the process of being ported to the innovative, but less powerful, system that also allows armchair archaeologists to adventure anywhere.

007 First Light is perhaps the closest a game has ever come to making me feel like I’m starring in a Bond film. IO Interactive takes the stealth sandbox of Hitman, the intense thrills of Uncharted, and experimental spycraft of Batman: Arkham, and reshapes them into a globe-trotting cinematic spy thriller filled with covert missions, explosive action, and cool gadgets. While the immersiveness of the campaign occasionally lags, this stylish origin story still feels like a triumphant return for the most iconic secret agent.

Outbound is an easy-going survival game that puts risk-free exploration above all else. Its core gameplay loop is satisfying enough to keep you and a friend or three hooked for a couple of hours, but the lack of variety and ultimate purpose wears thin beyond that. Of course, the same can be said about many a cozy game, but the best examples always make the process immensely satisfying. Outbound is still a refreshing antidote to a fast-paced world, but barring any additional content updates, this might be one road trip you’ll want to cut short.