PS4 and PS5 players get access to Moving Out 2, Destiny 2: The Witch Queen (which requires the base game to play), Lost Judgment, Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed, Source of Madness, Cursed to Golf,  PJ Masks: Heroes of the Night, Hotel Transylvania: Scary-Tale Adventures and Lawn Mowing Simulator: Landmark Edition.

PS4 players get access to Spellforce 3 Reforced, Two Point Hospital: Jumbo Edition, Dreams (which recently received Tren in a free update), and Midnight Fight Express. All four titles should be backwards compatible on PS5.

As for the Classics coming to Premium subscribers, there’s MediEvil: Resurrection, Ape Escape: On the Loose and Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice, all playable on PS4 and PS5.

Subject Alpha – The Callisto Protocol

There’s only one real “boss” in The Callisto Protocol, and it’s the mutated Captain Leon Ferris, aka Subject Alpha. In the first phase, he swings here and there, sometimes grabbing you, and you just hit/shoot back. His second phase sees him mutating further, but don’t worry. Just shoot and dodge, take down the smaller Biophages, and repeat till he keels over. Mechanically boring, and one-note, but it sucks more when the game ends abruptly several minutes later.

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 Waylanders

Developer Gato Studio’s recent The Waylanders is an interesting concept with hints of promise here and there, but all of these good aspects come with their own sets of caveats. While the story is interesting on some levels, it’s marred down by unimpressive voice acting and pacing that’s all over the place. Then there’s the gameplay, which is engaging but is plagued with bugs and glitches galore. Taken as a whole, however – it’s recommended that you pass on this game.

While Source of Madness doesn’t immediately set itself apart, it has an intriguing, if familiar setup. You play as a series of Acolytes trying to fight through demons in a harrowing, unexplained world. There are people who are part of a cult standing around the starting castle who deliver short, mysterious sayings warning you of what lies beyond the castle and how they appeared. These people, alongside a brief Prologue sequence and a couple of cutscenes, set the stage for the game’s story. It’s a typical Lovecraftian affair of monsters, demons, and other atrocities that you need to slay to cleanse the world, but it’s more visually appealing than narratively interesting. While games like Hades take advantage of the roguelite framework to tell a compelling story, this story feels more like a background addition to set the stage for the gameplay and provide context rather than a deep integration of the two.

"While I enjoyed some moments from run to run and see potential in its randomness, I never got the feeling with Source of Madness that it fully capitalizes on any of its big ideas, and it’s neither cohesive nor unique enough to stand out."

The real gameplay begins when you step out of the castle and face the monsters head on. Similar to games like Rogue Legacy, each of your runs follows a different Acolyte, and each time you die you get to pick a new character with slightly different stats. Unlike Rogue Legacy, though, it takes a while for the changes in stats to become truly noticeable, as they are more focused on minor increases to overall health or elemental damage than with fundamental changes to gameplay. Although it does begin to change more significantly when you unlock later classes, I would have liked to see more differentiation between the choices from the jump. There are also multiple skill trees that constitute the title of roguelite and increase certain stats or item drops, and help progress you overall, especially when they allow you to increase the number of dashes at once or life regeneration vials at the start of each run.

Source of Madness’ gameplay, like most roguelites, hinges on the different occurrences within each run. Character builds are somewhat streamlined compared to others in the field, as you can have up to one piece of armor, two weapons, and a handful of active and passive boosts to your stats. Every piece of equipment feeds your overall stats, which include things like health, movement speed, and elemental damage and resistance, and are where the classes begin to have an effect, such as the Pyromancer’s higher damage with and resistance to fire. Much of the equipment feels familiar after a few runs, as there aren’t full armor sets or incredibly unique weapon types. Instead, it focuses on differences in elements and a handful of attack speeds.

You can, for example, get a ring that performs a very fast melee Slash attack and deals Arcane damage and use it in combination with one that shoots a big fireball and deals a ton of damage but can deal friendly fire and has a long cooldown. As someone who enjoys melee attacks more than ranged ones, I was disappointed in how frequently the ranged attack rings pop up, but usually the short-range rings pop up eventually. What this means is that unlike some other roguelikes and roguelites, you’re more likely going to gravitate toward a single playstyle, rather than adapting your playstyle to the equipment you get each run. While this is great for continuity, Source of Madness has a great number of different enemies and equipment, so it would have been enjoyable to play around with the loadouts with more effect.

"Unlike some other roguelikes and roguelites, you’re more likely going to gravitate toward a single playstyle, rather than adapting your playstyle to the equipment you get each run."

The biggest source of overall differentiation between runs comes from Source of Madness’ procedural generation. Roguelikes and roguelites are built on procedural generation, and Source of Madness uses it for map layout and enemy creation, but it also utilizes neural network AI for enemy activity, attempting to react to your playstyle and become more difficult over time. The environments themselves are generally interesting to look at in all of their gory, grotesque ways. Each biome is laid out usually in one of a handful of ways with slight tweaks, though they can get somewhat labyrinthian and it’s easy to get lost if you’re not careful.

The enemies are less exciting. There are certainly many different variations of monsters, but aside from a few minibosses and the true bosses, they’re more variations of the same blob than they are different enemies entirely. The idea of machine learning is also a bit of a letdown, as enemies are more prone to ragdolling than making any nuanced changes in their activity. It’s more common that they will barrel at you or come flying out of the sky than show any kind of real strategy, and I didn’t ultimately notice that enemies really adapted to my playstyle in particular.

At the same time, enemy unpredictability makes it very difficult to anticipate anything they can or will do, and this is where the gameplay of Source of Madness begins to lose me. Enemies’ move sets change so frequently that it’s virtually impossible to learn their moves like you would in other comparable games, and because all of the enemies look so much like a big demon blob, it’s often very difficult to determine where you are or what’s really happening on screen, especially when multiple enemies are attacking at once. I found myself mashing buttons to perform my attacks as quickly as possible because it was more effective than trying to strategically aim. Gameplay itself is also floaty and imprecise, so even if I have my favorite loadout, it’s often difficult to say where my next projectile will reach or where I will land on my next jump.

"Source of Madness falls short of the roguelite ideal of getting progressively better with each run. It’s often brutally difficult, but unlike other brutally difficult games, I didn’t end up feeling like every death was a learning experience."

Because of that, Source of Madness falls short of the roguelite ideal of getting progressively better with each run. It’s often brutally difficult, but unlike other brutally difficult games, I didn’t end up feeling like every death was a learning experience. I didn’t understand why so many of the deaths were happening, and there was no way for me to understand what attacks an enemy would come at me with or where I needed to move to get out of the way. It’s because of this that gameplay starts to get more frustrating than rewarding at certain times. Making your way through a boss for the first time is certainly a satisfying experience, but I again noticed it happen more because I got lucky than because I really made progress with the game’s mechanics, and it’s more common that you’ll have a frustrating death than a real battle with a tough enemy.

On the whole, Source of Madness doesn’t provide enough of the benefits of a roguelite to stand out from a crowded field of its peers. While it has some good ideas to take influence from other games and media to build in a new take on procedural generation, it doesn’t nail the core gameplay, nor does it really capitalize on the strengths of its new ideas. The act of playing Source of Madness is a lot less exciting than the ideas behind it, and while I think there are building blocks for the future, there isn’t enough of a reason to recommend it over other, better roguelites.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.

Trek to Yomi

Flying Wild Hog’s side-scrolling hack and slash title takes clear inspiration from the works of Akira Kurosawa. It focuses on Hiroki who embarks on a mission of revenge against those who destroyed his village. Light and heavy attacks are your bread and butter in combat but combined with directional inputs, it’s possible to execute thrusting attacks or slice enemies that are behind you. Of course you can also use a bow and arrows, bo-shurikens and environmental hazards to slay foes. With four different endings, a Cinematic mode with a lower difficulty and a tougher One-Hit Kill mode, Trek to Yomi caters to a wide variety of players. It’s out on May 5^th for Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC and PS5.

Source of Madness

Roguelites have come and gone, some better than others. Then you have Source of Madness, a side-scrolling roguelite with Lovecraftian horrors born of procedural generation and powered by neural network AI. As a magic user, you venture through the Loam Lands and the Tower of Madness, battling these horrors with different skills and spells. Multiple classes and loot help keep things fresh while the art-style provides a surreal landscape to explore. Source of Madness is currently in early access on Steam but will launch on May 11^th for Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

Flippin Kaktus

Flippin Kaktus is a side-scrolling action platformer that embodies that 80s punk aesthetic. After Kaktus, who happens to be a living cactus, has his home raided by the cartel and his foster family abducted, he embarks on a journey for vengeance. There are a surprising number of ways to approach combat, either using traps and the environment or relying on the power of rage (with some decent armor and dodging). With 11 locations and hand-crafted levels, not to mention the spirit of pulpy VHS action films, Flippin Kaktus promises a rollicking good time when it releases for PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox and PlayStation platforms on May 12^th.

Evil Dead: The Game

The Deadites just never know when to quit, but thankfully, neither does Ash Williams. Evil Dead: The Game sees Ash teaming up with characters from across the franchise in a PvEvP game of survival. Up to four players team together, each choosing a character from four different classes with unique abilities. Explore different maps and acquire more than 25 different weapons like the classic boomstick and chainsaw.

Meanwhile, a single player chooses one of three demons – the Warlord, Puppeteer and Necromancer – to slay the Survivors. This can be done by possessing Deadites, spawning powerful enemies, and controlling environmental objects (including cars and trees). The asymmetrical multiplayer genre has had more lows than highs over the years but maybe Evil Dead: The Game ends up being groovy. We’ll find out when it releases on May 13^th for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC (via the Epic Games Store).

Deliver Us The Moon (Xbox Series X/S, PS5)

Deliver Us The Moon first released in 2018 for PC and after launching for Xbox One and PS4 last year, it’s getting an Xbox Series X/S and PS5 upgrade at last (that too for free). Set in the near future where Earth’s natural resources have been depleted, you play as an astronaut who must investigate a lunar colony with vital energy reserves after it goes dark. It’s a suspense thriller with puzzles, anti-gravity sections and even vehicles to control.

The current-gen versions will benefit from 4K support, ray traced shadows and reflections, and faster loading times. There’s even support for the DualSense’s adaptive triggers and speakers. If a creepy vacation in space sounds nice, then it’s worth checking out Deliver Us The Moon when it releases on May 19^th for Xbox Series X/S and PS5.

Sniper Elite 5

Rebellion’s definitive sniping experience returns with a brand new instalment. It sees protagonist Karl Fairburne venturing to dismantle the Nazis’ mysterious Project Kraken. Maps are larger than ever with multiple points of infiltration and traversal tools like ziplines, though a fair bit of platforming may also be necessary. Along with a campaign and multiplayer support for up to 16 players, there’s the new Invasion Mode where players can invade others’ games and hunt them. Of course, if you want to co-op the campaign with a friend, that’s also possible. Launching on May 26th, Sniper Elite 5 will be available for PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising

If the wait for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a Suikoden spiritual successor from the original creators, is too long, then Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising may help. As a prequel set in the same world, the story sees CJ, Garoo and Isha all exploring the Runebarrows that have emerged beneath New Nevaeh for their own reasons. The 2.5D side-scrolling action RPG lets players switch between each character, performing Link Attacks in combat. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising releases on May 10^th for PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, PS5 and Nintendo Switch.

My Time at Sandrock

Pathea Games’ My Time at Portia offered a nice little Harvest Moon-style adventure but faced its share of performance issues at launch. However, it received enough support to become a fun little life sim while paving the way for the sequel, My Time at Sandrock. Entering early access for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on May 26th, it takes place in a “wholesome” (their words, not ours), post-apocalyptic world where most modern technology has been destroyed.

You venture to Sandrock as the newest Builder and do everything necessary to fix it up. Gather materials, process them in your workshop, create structures and other unique items while handling various requests. Improvements to combat along with new weapons and mechanics are also promised. During open beta, players have access to some of the story’s first Act, though the exact range of content hasn’t been detailed. My Time at Sandrock will be in early access for a year and release for PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S down the line.