Overpriced despite being exactly $0. Has the aesthetics and presentation of a mobile game and was clearly a cynically made attempt to make an F2P also-ran hero shooter to siphon money from the credit cards of the parents of children with lots of time and no taste. If you told me that this game was 100% AI generated, I would believe you.

If you want a terrible copy of Overwatch, Overwatch 2 already exists. Just play that.

Warning: Mortal Kombat 1 unfortunately seems to have issues with some people's hardware - mine included - which results in very severe stuttering during gameplay. This appears to happen on both very high end systems as well as lower end machines and although some online seem to have found fixes, many, myself included, have no way of making the game run properly. Even with a top-of-the-line CPU and graphics card, I find the game borderline unplayable in multiplayer.

I think the story mode is very silly, very fun, and has some great cinematics. However, the gameplay is definitely worse than MK11, and the online experience and competitiveness of the game does not hold up to the likes of Strive and SF6.

Putting all of that together, I don't think this is worth the buy at full retail price unless you are a die-hard fan. But, if it goes on a big sale and you've like the previous MK cinematic story modes, give it a shot.

Yet another entry in the annals of "modern developers do not know how to make multiplayer FPS games fun or functional." After squinting to see through fifteen different particle effects, I saw the person shooting at me and returned fire. Unfortunately, I was killed in a fraction of a second by someone off to the side hidden, I kid you not, by an on-screen UI element telling me where an objective was. Make games, not "E-sports."

The original Talos Principle was a phenomenal puzzle game and its successor, the Talos Principle 2, is even better. It strikes me as a game that was meticulously play tested in a way that most puzzle games simply aren't. The difficulty is spot on and the puzzles build on each other extremely well such that, by the end of the game, you feel that you've really learned a lot about how to rationally tackle these challenges as thought exercises instead of just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what sticks.

On top of the great gameplay, though, is a truly excellent narrative. The Talos Principle 2 is, along with a very select cadre of other games (the Outer Wilds comes to mind), genuinely interested in the moral dilemmas posed by progress, discovery, and exploration. Without spoiling anything, it reminded me of ideas I'd long forgotten and genuinely reinvigorated my passion for the scientific research I do.

So, if a peerless puzzle experience with a lot to say about human striving sounds up your alley, give this game a try.

MultiVersus is truly horrendous and, I think, the worst game I have ever played. Awful. Absolutely awful.

To elaborate: take Super Smash Brothers and remove any sense of weight, momentum, or even basic physics. Make all movement and animations so ugly and jittery that you can almost not tell that your connection to the other player (who, according to the game, is also in North America) has been routed through fifty different toaster ovens all across Europe before getting beamed out via radio to Voyager II and then back again. Finally, as the piece de resistance, remove blocking, so the game consists entirely of spamming aerials and dodging. Look at that, you made MultiVersus.

If you make a game free and have some commercial tie-ins for the kids, even a real trash heap like this can get Very Positive reviews on Steam.

I think there is something truly remarkable about the Splitgate developers' ability to shamelessly ripoff ideas and gameplay from other sources while still managing to create something as sterile, boring, and unremarkable as this game. This is not a fast-paced multiplayer shooter - it is a slow, clumsy mess with a poorly tacked on portal mechanic, bad gun play, and uninspired aesthetics. Do yourself a favor and skip. It's free insofar as you don't have to spend any money on it, but surely your time is worth something.

Guilty Gear Strive is exceptionally easy to get into if you have at least a passing familiarity with fighting games and it's obvious that the developers have done a lot to try to get new players into an otherwise intimidating genre. In many ways, as someone who would like to casually enjoy a fighting game, this is a best-in-class product.

With that being said, unless you love the obnoxious anime character designs and the almost-so-bad-it's-good music, there is something hollow about Strive. More so than with other mainstream fighters, like Street Fighter 5, I found myself realizing very quickly that I have understood, even if I can't quite execute, most of the main mechanics of the game. And once that had been established and I had some basic understanding of how the various match-ups for my favorite character played out, all there was left was to ... keep playing the same thing over and over again until I was the best rock-paper-scissors master. But I already have a job. Why wouldn't I play something lower key and keep the grind and the practicing in my chosen vocation?

In summary: Great game on the surface. May cause an existential crisis that makes you question why you bought it in the first place. Would recommend.

NB: This is a fighting game, so keep in mind that you will spend a truly remarkable amount of time not playing other people, but instead waiting to play against other people.

Street Fighter V is a game that doesn't want you to play it. You will suffer through an interminably long startup sequence, be forced to exit out of several popups telling you about events you don't care about, wait for one of the five other people in your region and near (and I'm using that term very loosely here) your rank to match up with you, and then after several unnecessary animations you'll get served one last barrier before starting a match: a literal advertisement in a game you just paid around, at this time, $30 for.

At this point, you remember that the game also doesn't contain any useful information about how its gameplay really works and how to, you know, play at a level where it becomes fun. If you'd like to do that, you'll need to listen to some man yell on YouTube for a 30 minutes to an hour as he explains all the basic genre conventions the tutorial didn't think were relevant enough to share. Did your last attack miss because you mistimed it? Because it's just not possible for it to hit in that situation? Because your connection to your opponent is terrible and that threw it off? Who knows!

Some of the character art, stages, and music are very nice. There's clearly a lot of production that's gone into the game and I'm sure die-hard fans of the series will find a lot to love here. But, as a newcomer who's just interested in playing a fun game, there is absolutely nothing here.

A fun and easy-to-learn fighting game that I could see serving as a great entry point for newcomers to the genre. As someone who's played a decent number of fighting games (poorly!) I really appreciated the effort the developers put into making it mechanically simple enough that even a novice like myself can start to understand the more interesting aspects of the gameplay like learning the other person's patterns, mixing up approaches, etc.

My biggest complaint is the extreme lack of production value. All of the art, models, and voice-lines in the game are comically terrible.

If you can look past the very rough exterior of the game, I think it is worth trying out if only to see what a stripped-down version of a fighting game can look like.

The game lives and dies by its combat system. If you like the "carefully pick when to start your never-ending animation" style of combat found in some other Japanese titles a whole lot, you'll probably get a ton out of this game. If you'd like something more responsive and fast-paced, look elsewhere. I'll be doing the latter.