Other noteworthy titles include The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes, Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, FAR: Changing Tides, Gungrave G.O.R.E, Elite Dangerous, Dead Island Definitive Edition and Alien: Isolation. Interestingly, bilbil-kun said rumors have circulated about The Last of Us Part 2’s addition to the catalog for Extra and Premium, but it’s reportedly not happening.

There should be more games announced, including a new slate of classic games for Premium subscribers, so stay tuned for the official announcement. In the meantime, The Callisto Protocol, Farming Simulator 22, and Weird West are free to claim as part of PlayStation Plus Essential in October.

CrossfireX

Based on Smilegate’s super-popular free-to-play shooter, CrossfireX garnered attention because Remedy was behind its campaign. However, this was little more than two short “Operations” with bad writing, cliched and boring gameplay, and terrible AI. The studio’s trademark panache was missing here, though the Northlight Engine looked decent, and the “revamped” multiplayer didn’t offer much either.

Gungrave G.O.R.E

Some games are developed for years, and you hate to see them launch as Gungrave G.O.R.E has. Any notions of style that Overdose may have had all those years ago are overridden by an ugly visual style, from the characters to the levels. The story sounds like it could make for some B-movie-level fun but ends up confusing and outright time-wasting. Gameplay-wise, the sheer amount of jank in animations, movement, and combat are just awful all around.

Source of Madness

In theory, Source of Madness sounds cool. It uses procedural generation to create its Lovecraftian-esque nightmares and neural network AI to animate them. Unfortunately, this results in unpredictable enemies, further adding to the brutal difficulty alongside the shoddy controls. Even if you can appreciate the aesthetic, the sheer lack of strategy that enemies display, horrible bosses, and lackluster progression ensures little payoff for surviving this nightmare.

Winter Ember

As a dark fantasy stealth title, Winter Ember felt pretty ambitious with its 30 arrow types, 70 passive and active skills, and open-ended gameplay. The interesting aesthetic and setting are hampered by poor combat, awful enemy AI, shoddy cover while sneaking, and the same repetitive gameplay loop. Even the audio design, an essential part of a stealth experience, is not good, executing any hope one could have for this mess.

XEL

A sci-fi adventure inspired by Zelda with an appealing art style – what could go wrong? As XEL proves, quite a lot. The sheer number of bugs and lack of polish will put you off immediately. Once you make it further in, the combat and visuals can be somewhat satisfying, but the awful story undercuts them. Too much repetition and some baffling design decisions will further kill your interest if you’re still somehow playing.

The Last Oricru

Serving as one of the poster games for the new Prime Matter label, The Last Oricru takes clear inspiration from other Souls-like titles. But that’s all it is – a shallow inspiration where everything sticks out for all the wrong reasons. It may be the annoying main character, user interface, controls or how clunky everything looks. Whatever it may be, The Last Oricru doesn’t feel good to play, look at or think about.

Dolmen

Like The Last Oricru, Dolmen is a Souls-like but sci-fi with cosmic horror. It’s also terrible, with combat missing many key features and melee combat feeling janky and poorly tuned overall. Despite how interesting the sci-fi premise looks, it’s all fluff with no real purpose or sense that fails to hook you.

MX vs ATV Legends

MX vs ATV Legends isn’t bad enough to be truly awful, but it’s enough to be annoyingly mediocre. Multiple types of vehicles to race with? Good. The slippery controls and haphazard AI? Bad, though the former has reportedly improved. The open world aspect? Good. The lack of anything to do in it? Bad. We could go on with the physics, sound design, polish, and so on. While the new Trails mode and regular tracks are decent, it’s not enough when everything else is undercooked.

The House of the Dead: Remake

With all the remakes we’ve seen in the past few years, The House of the Dead: Remake could have been something good. Maybe not great, but still good. Developer MegaPixel Studio kept almost everything as is, but the visual upgrades look too dark and ugly. The remixed soundtrack comes across as bland, and the lack of much new content (save for the missable horde mode) makes it feel overpriced. The less said about the controls and performance issues, the better.

Diablo Immortal

Maybe it’s fun on mobile, but Diablo Immortal on PC is a travesty. Its user interface is horrid, with annoying pop-ups – especially during gameplay, resulting in misclicks – and the combat is an even more dumbed-down version of Diablo 3. The campaign is there, but any interesting plot is offset by the stupid progression blockers and grinding required. The sheer scale of monetization is also appalling, to the extent that certain end-game activities are just locked off to free players. Even without it, Diablo Immortal would still be a mess as opposed to the ongoing trainwreck.

Monark

Lancarse’s track record has been a bit spotty this year, as anyone who played The DioField Chronicle will attest. There was some hope for Monark, developed by a few former Shin Megami Tensei series members. It has a school setting, Egos, and an Otherworld to explore, just like SMT and Persona. It differs, however, in the awful pacing, repetitive gameplay, and troubling characterization, to say nothing of the shallow visuals and environments. With so many other great RPG efforts this year, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Trails from Zero, and so on, Monark hardly warrants a look.

LEGO Brawls

A platform fighter based on LEGO sets sounds appealing in theory. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. Originally released for iOS in 2019, LEGO Brawls made its way to consoles and PC this past September. Despite its looks, the gameplay quickly becomes boring (with little difference between characters), and the sheer grind required to unlock things is a chore. The lack of stuff to do doesn’t help either.

ELEX 2

I found ELEX to be a drag, but Piranhabytes’ sci-fi action RPG garnered a dedicated cult following after its release. ELEX 2 seemed a good time to capitalize on this and deliver something better. Sadly, it’s also full of clunky combat, dull writing, boring open-world design, monotonous side quests, and an underwhelming presentation. Being able to fly with a jetpack doesn’t count for much when there are so many bugs, and the DirectX 12 rollout is a whole other rigmarole on its own.

IKAI

Despite its low production values, IKAI could have been a nice little horror title, weaving in Japanese folklore in unique ways. Alas, it falls flat. It’s very short, the plot makes little sense, and it abruptly ends with almost no payoff. This wouldn’t be too terrible if the gameplay and horror were up to par, but the former is too restrictive and lackluster, while the latter offers bland jumpscares.

Blackwind

In some alternate universe, Blackwind would have been a decent twin-stick shooter/action RPG hybrid. Unfortunately in this timeline, its premise can’t withstand the horrible story, mind-numbingly dull exploration and progression, and awful combat. The glitches and poor controls further hamper your attempts to squeeze any enjoyment out of the experience.

The story, by design, is a pretty mindless one. The (almost) silent (and undead) protagonist Grave returns, and with fellow members of ass-kicking and crime-fighting organization El-Al Canhel, heads into the city known as Scumland. Their target is the Raven Clan, a drug trafficking organization masquerading as a corporation, who, led by their four bosses, have been selling the drug known as SEED, which turns its victims into literal monsters. Yes, its pulpy as hell, and Gungrave G.O.R.E makes no bones about that fact- the story exists purely to facilitate the action.

"Launching twenty years after the cult classic PS2 shooter that kickstarted the franchise, Gungrave G.O.R.E tries to recapture that all-guns-blazing action loop that that generation of games so often went hand-in-hand with, but rather than trying to balance that with smart and necessary modernizations, it instead ends up delivering an experience that feels like it would have felt outdated even in the late 2000s."

Sadly, the game steers into that approach a little too hard for its own good. You can have a simple and straightforward story setup that doesn’t get in the way of the action while still telling an engaging narrative, but disappointingly, Gungrave G.O.R.E doesn’t even try to strike that balance. The cutscenes are thoroughly bland and uninteresting, even if they do occasionally convey a sense of style on a very superficial level, and there are almost no major story developments in the game worth paying to much attention to. Characters lack personality and are so bland and uninspired that even calling them one-dimensional might be a bit generous, and it doesn’t help that the voice acting and writing are shockingly bad at worst and of a barely acceptable level of quality at best.

Most of these issues would be relatively easy to forgive if Gungrave G.O.R.E was a home run on the action front – that’s very much the point of the game, after all, just like the cult classics it’s inspired by – but the game stumbles here as well. Admittedly, there is a lot more to like here, most of which boils down to the game’s insistence on gleefully bombastic and mindless action without any sort of tactical or strategic nuance. If you’re looking for a game where you can walk into a corridor and be faced with a seemingly never-ending stream of enemies, only to mow them down with a glorious and explosive barrage of gunfire, you’ll find plenty of that here. But if you’re also looking for anything close to resembling variety and depth, Gungrave G.O.R.E will leave you sorely disappointed.

On a fundamental level, going through the environments and blowing entire waves of fools to smithereens is a fun exercise, largely because even though Gungrave G.O.R.E’s core gameplay loop is pretty straightforward, it does have a decent moveset with a number of actions that encourage you to mix and match and rack up combos and style points (referred to as Beat Count in this game). You have your dual pistols, which serve as your primary weapons, and a massive coffin that Grave carries around on his back, which can be used for basic melee attacks. Beyond that, you have a chained hook that you can use to pull enemies to you (or pull yourself towards bigger enemies), a charged shot, finishers (which also  recharge your shields a little faster), and special abilities known as Demolition Shots (which also restore a chunk of your health). Absolutely none of that is ground-breaking, but it works on a fundamental level, keeping the moment-to-moment engaging to at least some level.

"You can have a simple and straightforward story setup that doesn’t get in the way of the action while still telling an engaging narrative, but disappointingly, Gungrave G.O.R.E doesn’t even try to strike that balance."

If those were the only things constituting the game’s skeleton, it would at least have a steady foundation to build off of, but the gameplay suffers from some glaring issues. The biggest of these, in my experience, is the plain and simple act of shooting. Bafflingly, Gungrave G.O.R.E doesn’t let you hold down the trigger to keep firing your weapon- you have to pull the trigger repeatedly for every single bullet that leaves your pistols, and that gets tiring very quickly. And when I say tiring, I mean it. You’re shooting a lot in this game – almost constantly, in fact, because the Beat Count system kind of demands it, even when there are no enemies around – and having to repeatedly pull the trigger rather than simply holding it down takes a toll on your finger. I can’t fathom why the developers would make this decision in what is essentially a bullet hell shooter.

Another major issue with the gameplay is how clunky the movement feels. It’s a pretty basic collection of moves to begin with, effectively boiling down to a simple jump and a dodge, and not only do even those movements feel choppy and inaccurate, they’re also just incredibly slow and sluggish. Even though Gungrave G.O.R.E maintains a pretty steady framerate, simply moving forward through the levels feels like an exercise in patience. It clashes massively with the heavily action-oriented nature of the game.

The game’s level design does it no favours either. Every level is incredibly linear- there are never any branching paths, and the few offshoots and side rooms that you will chance upon are all virtually useless. Gungave G.O.R.E has no collectibles or optional objectives, or any other tool to encourage players to explore its levels. Other than the visual aesthetic of the levels – which, to the game’s credits, do showcase decent environmental variety – there is nothing to separate them or give them any sort of visual identity. There are a few levels that do try to introduce some new ideas, but sadly, most of them involve annoying gimmicks or unfair and frustrating difficulty spikes.

"If you’re looking for a game where you can walk into a corridor and be faced with a seemingly never-ending stream of enemies, only to mow them down with a glorious and explosive barrage of gunfire, you’ll find plenty of that here. But if you’re also looking for anything close to resembling variety and depth, Gungrave G.O.R.E will leave you sorely disappointed. "

The level design combines with the incredibly simplistic and straightforward gameplay of Gungrave G.O.R.E to make for what quickly reveals itself to be a painfully repetitive experience. Yes, it can be mindlessly fun to mow down waves of enemies, but you an only do that for so long before it gets boring. Boss fights do break up the action and, more often than not, mix things up in some interesting ways, but they don’t manage to do enough to stave off how monotonous the entire experience feels on a macro level- neither do the barebones progression mechanics, which offer almost nothing worth speaking about.

It’s a shame that Gungrave G.O.R.E has so much working against it. If not for the developers’ misguided attempt at making a game that’s too old school for its own good, it could have been a solid enough action experience in its own right, but unfortunately, there’s just too much holding it back, and in ways that are far from easy to forgive. Whether its the bland story, the repetitive and straightforward gameplay, or some of its baffling design decisions, Gungave G.O.R.E keeps finding ways to keep tripping over itself. If you have a hankering for an old school action game that evokes the gameplay style of PS2 era titles, you’ll be far better served looking into something like Evil West.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.