IGN

• PC
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

Pizza Tower is a very special 2D platformer that transcends its inspirations and becomes something even greater. It’s a short ride, and it’ll be most appealing to those who are keen to restart levels in an effort to improve their score, but even if that’s not you, there’s a ton to like here. It is one of the most straight up fun and refreshing platformers I’ve played in recent memory, sporting an unforgettably unique art style, excellent animations, immensely rewarding platforming, wonderfully creative level design, a joyful sense of humor, and one of the best soundtracks of the year so far. Move over Wario, Peppino Spaghetti is-a number one now.

• SWITCH
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

It’s no small feat that Fire Emblem Engage is able to tell a simple-but-fun story that celebrates the vast history of its series in a way that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of that legacy. Building the perfect team of diverse characters and pairing them with the Emblem Rings of past heroes allows for tons of customization and strategy, and blasting through the enemy ranks with their special powers is always immensely satisfying. Both its main and side missions provide a good deal of challenge, and clever twists and obstacles offset a reliance on overly familiar mission objectives. Couple all that with a suite of quality-of-life improvements that immediately feel vital and Fire Emblem Engage proves itself worthy enough to be counted alongside the legacy it honors so well.

• PC
• PS4
• PS5
• XSX/S
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

The power of One Piece’s story, world, art, and characters does a lot of the heavy lifting in making One Piece Odyssey a joy to play, even if I could beat most of the battles in my sleep. It really could have used some sort of way to adjust the difficulty and add even just a little more tension to its fights to make them more satisfying to get through, and a lot of the quest design in the middle relies too much on backtracking through already-visited areas, but One Piece Odyssey nails the most important parts: The heart, humor, and soul of One Piece.

• PC
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

Dragonflight reignites the sense of wonder and exploration that originally drew me to World of Warcraft, for about the first 30 or 40 hours. Beyond that, it definitely starts to feel a bit threadbare. Dragon riding is fun as hell, and I love the design of the new zones. But this expansion's back-to-basics approach is very much a double-edged sword. I probably won't burn out as fast because there aren't a million things to do every day just to feel like I'm keeping up like there were in Shadowlands. But at the same time, I don't feel like there's enough to do that's genuinely interesting once I've cleared all the very well-written side quests. An excellent new crafting system is gated behind mind-numbing amounts of mindless grinding for resources, in addition to weekly caps, which feels like a double jeopardy situation. I like Dragonflight, but I fell out of love with it not long after hitting max level. I really hope Blizzard looks at this as a rebuilding year for WoW, and doesn't hesitate to iterate on some of the inventive ideas in Shadowlands that were maybe only a step or two away from being great.

• PC
• PS5
• XSX/S
• PS4
• XONE
• SWITCH
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Whether you're a long-time fan of these games, or you’ve just been recently introduced to the beat-’em-up by the genre’s renaissance over the past few years, River City should be your next stop. River City Girls 2’s RPG elements, dense combat, and witty sense of humor is a real shot in the arm to a genre that has been celebrating its history lately, but also in need of some innovation. Here, by expanding on its 2019 revival of the foundational design concept laid all the way back in 1989, Wayforward has blended history seamlessly with modern day vibes to create something true to its roots and new on the scene at the same time. You might call being led back and forth through the city’s map stale, but you can’t say those locations aren’t gorgeous and full of great music.

• XSX/S
• XONE
• PS4
• PS5
• SWITCH
• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Crisis Core –Final Fantasy 7– Reunion pushes the definition of a remaster to the edge, completely renovating the 15-year-old PSP game’s graphics, combat, and more. That said, many of the design choices made for the handheld original – like bite-sized side missions and an abundance of loading screens – are left intact, keeping this experience from feeling completely modern. But even with a few aging quirks, Crisis Core remains a fun, compelling, and integral chapter in the ongoing Compilation of Final Fantasy 7, and Reunion is the absolute best way to experience it.

• PC
• XSX/S
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

High on Life is an irreverent, absurd shooter that manages to shine with its outrageous humor, silly setting and story, and some really goofy, foul-mouthed guns that pull the whole thing together for the vast majority of the time. Combat is a bit sloppy, especially during the first act, and the whole sci-fi adventure sometimes has an unpolished feel to it, but once you get some new tools of destruction and movement options, it rises to the occasion. Not all of its jokes find their punchline, but with memorable boss fights, unique alt-fire abilities and exploration, and way more terrible movies to watch than I expected, this wacky journey is definitely worth your time.

• PC
• 4 / 10
• États-Unis

Choo-Choo Charles is a silly mess of an adventure, with its joke of a premise falling short of ever delivering the punchline. Combat against the evil train is always tedious and repetitive, and running quests on foot is even more unappealing with awful stealth sections through dilapidated hallways. Throw in some annoying bugs and a lifeless, empty map, and this funny nugget of an idea disappoints in so many ways it actually makes me angry. Sadly, I have to recommend you choo-choose a different way to spend your time.

• PC
• PS5
• XSX/S
• PS4
• XONE
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

The Callisto Protocol is a supremely atmospheric and action-heavy tour through a spectacular slaughterhouse set in distant space. Its largely linear design makes for minimal backtracking, meaning it trims the fat while leaving no shortage of bone and gristle to rip and tear. However, it also betrays its survival horror roots by regularly tipping the balance of power too far in favour of the player, and while there’s plenty of murderous fun to be had using giant grinding mechanisms to make mulch out of mutants, such cheap thrills come at the high cost of puncturing any tension and dread that the tremendous art and audio design work so hard to invoke. Aside from the meaty melee combat, there’s also the overriding sense that there’s not a lot here that hasn’t been done before – and there’s disappointingly little to do once you’ve beaten the campaign. Thus The Callisto Protocol is a satisfyingly gory spiritual successor to the Dead Space series, but it’s ultimately more of a striking modern mimic than a scary new mutation.

• PC
• SWITCH
• PS4
• PS5
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

With Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Firaxis has put itself in the league of RPG developers like BioWare, Obsidian, Bethesda, and Larian. Its innovative turn-based hero combat system takes a bit of time to get going, but once it does it makes excellent use of card game mechanics to keep battles fresh, evolving, and unpredictable over the course of an epic-length campaign – bashing enemies into things for increased damage is endlessly entertaining. The supernatural apocalypse story is given emotional weight by the family relationship between the hero and villain at the heart of it. Building intense friendships with famed Marvel superheroes we’ve seen in comics, movies, and games for decades does tend to feel forced and weird, but learning all their backstories and conflicts with teammates can be intriguing, and the fact that nearly everything you do outside of combat makes you more powerful in the next fight means it all tends to be worth doing.

• PC
• PS4
• PS5
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 6 / 10
• États-Unis

When you get right down to it, most of Gungrave G.O.R.E feels like a missed opportunity. There’s a great combat system here, but the lack of variety and repetitive enemy design often let it down. The art, courtesy of Trigun’s Yasuhiro Nightow and Ikumi Nakamura, is fantastic and oozes style, but the story told in that attractive setting isn’t very interesting. The music and sound design are largely wonderful, too, but the voice acting is a little uneven. I can easily see its potential, but a mishmash of missteps prevent Gungrave G.O.R.E from ever reaching it.

• PS4
• PS5
• XONE
• XSX/S
• PC
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

Evil West is a refreshing blast from the past that nails the most important parts of its old-school, vampire-hunting action. The combat is smooth and its weapon options are ludicrously entertaining, but low enemy variety and overly similar level layouts can grow somewhat monotonous after a while. This is far from being the most complex or innovative action game I’ve played, but every so often you just want to have some fun smashing in monster skulls.

• PC
• PS4
• PS5
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 5 / 10
• États-Unis

The Devil in Me’s twisted murder castle setting provides the literal foundations for what could have been an exciting horror adventure, but pacing problems and an insipid group of potential victims makes for a slaycation that’s low in stakes and lacking in any substantial thrills or hand-wringing decisions to make. Efforts to bring gameplay variety to each playable character haven’t really shaken things up to any notable degree, and the quicktime event-based survival sequences adhere to a stress-inducing formula that’s starting to feel a bit too familiar. Ominous animatronics and a hulking aggressor mean the concluding chapter of The Dark Pictures Anthology is still capable of inducing the occasional jump scare, but for the most part The Devil in Me’s tour through a maniac’s mansion is disappointingly lacking in any real menace or surprise.

• PS5
• XSX/S
• PC
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

Goat Simulator 3 is the evolution in idiocy I’d hoped for from this iconically weird series. It almost certainly won’t wow you with its level of polish or a deep, meaningful narrative, but sometimes it’s a good idea to turn your brain off and buck your hooves into an old lady’s face while she fires a rocket launcher at you. With a larger map, more ridiculous references and hilarious jokes, and multiplayer that only enhances the ludicrous good times, I can easily recommend this to anyone with a taste for its silly sense of humor and a few hours to kill.

• PC
• XONE
• XSX/S
• SWITCH
• PS4
• PS5
• 9 / 10
• États-Unis

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration offers a novel way to delve into the past that’s filled with fun and surprises, much like walking into the Atari section at Sears in 1982 must have felt like – I wouldn’t know, I missed out! That’s why it’s such a blast to have this window into the past. I can’t wait to see what gets the Atari 50 treatment next (SEGA would be my top choice). It’s not just the updated control schemes and gorgeous graphical recreations that make these games accessible, it’s the stories behind them. After hearing multiple people rave about Yars’ Revenge or Star Raiders in the documentary segments, you just want to check them out yourself. Just read the manual first! It’s provided, along with many other glittering artifacts that reveal the magic of the early arcade and console era. With Atari 50, you didn’t have to be there.

• PC
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 10 / 10
• États-Unis

As an engrossing 15 to 20-hour adventure game, a chronicle of a small town and its people in turbulent times, a reverent celebration of the finer details of Late Medieval history, and a clever detective story in which straight answers are hard to come by – Pentiment is a clear champion. My gripes about it are all relatively minor, and I look forward to playing it at least once or twice more to explore roads not taken. It never suffers for its simplicity, lacking in combat or traditional puzzles, because of how effectively it tangled me up in the complexities of its gorgeously-realized world and made me want to learn all I could about its people and its past. There isn't much more to say about Pentiment, other than I can hardly recommend it highly enough.

• PC
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 7 / 10
• États-Unis

Somerville follows its own unique path within the puzzle-adventure genre. That path isn’t always a smooth one, with camera annoyances and physics wonkiness occasionally serving as a pebble in your shoe while solving its series of pleasantly challenging puzzles, and the story is more strange for the sake of being strange than it is thought-provoking. But thanks to its strong visual storytelling techniques and the way the opening minutes inspire an irresistible desire to find out what happened to this man and whether or not he’ll ever find his family, Somerville is nevertheless a very good tour through an exceptionally bleak scenario – all of which is successfully conveyed without a single line of dialogue.

• PC
• MAC
• XONE
• XSX/S
• 8 / 10
• États-Unis

With its dead-simple graphics and basic map and enemy design, Vampire Survivors seems like it has no business sticking with me as much as it does. And yet, I felt compelled to put over a hundred hours into experimenting with its many weapon and ability upgrade combinations, starting round after round trying to reach the end and unlock all of its characters, evolve all of its weapons, and unlock all of its secrets. The bewitching spell of its appeal can be broken by the duller stretches between when you find a great build or unlock a challenging new mode, but it probably won’t be long until you find a new way to challenge yourself to survive just a few seconds longer.