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.

In a rather convincing opening cutscene, the main character of Winter Ember, Arthur Artorias, narrowly escapes being killed in his father’s mansion but loses both his father and his fortune. Years later, Arthur returns to the city to find out what happened and seek revenge on the people who carried out this act. While it’s not a revolutionary premise, there’s a solid foundation for the story, and some major plot points are told with beautiful hand-drawn animated stills. I do wish these major moments happened more frequently, because the storytelling in between is almost entirely “tell, don’t show.” There’s a lot of overly melodramatic dialogue that frequently shifts tone and leaves little room for interpretation, and it can get exhausting to listen to repeatedly, especially through some overly long story sections that take you out of the core gameplay. It hurts, too, that the story doesn’t ultimately capitalize on its potential. While the first half or so of the story remains somewhat grounded, it begins to lose itself in the second half. Without wishing to spoil, it makes its story increasingly intricate and cerebral but doesn’t benefit from doing so, and it feels like the story would have benefited from staying contained.

"There’s a good game lying somewhere within Winter Ember, but there are too many questionable design choices and incomplete ideas that make the overall experience unsatisfying and lacking anything to set it apart from other, better stealth games."

It’s unfortunate that the story doesn’t entirely succeed because the game is frequently structured around it. While it is technically open world, there are multiple extended sequences that ostensibly lock you out of the open world and force you through linear missions with no chance to return to replenish your items or do side missions. This resulted on one occasion, for example, in my having to play for over an hour with minimal health, as I had used all my health potions and had no way to buy any more.

When it does become a truly open world, while the different environments aren’t huge, I appreciate what it’s going for. You’re encouraged to explore the map and see different types of side quests and find different types of loot, which gives you the chance to see the surprisingly intricate level design, which includes an impressive amount of verticality and intricately connected levels. In many cases, this level design is the most impressive aspect of Winter Ember. The biggest drawback with this type of level design is the camera, as Winter Ember opts for an isometric view where you can control the camera’s direction. This is great in allowing for 360 degrees of exploration, but it also means that it’s easy to get lost, especially with how samey some environments can get and how dark most of the levels are.

When it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay of Winter Ember, though, it’s frustratingly inconsistent. In theory, the core gameplay mechanic is stealth. You’re taught to be careful with your movements so as to take enemies out methodically and without having to get into any one-on-one battles. However, while being able to successfully take out all enemies stealthily is mostly satisfying, much of the foundation of the stealth gameplay is inconsistent, clunky, and frustratingly designed, leaving it to be easier in many cases to fight enemies directly rather than try to sneak through them.

"When it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay of Winter Ember, it’s frustratingly inconsistent."

For example, there is an interesting system around light and visibility. When in cover, you have to be peeking around a corner to see what’s around it, making it more of a risk-reward decision on how frequently to peek. However, in all cases, the amount that you can see of the surrounding areas is impacted by whether or not you are currently visible. If you are standing near a light, you can see people around you, but if you’re in the shadows, they are much more difficult to see, if not entirely invisible. It’s an interesting system, but this frequently makes enemies who are right in front of you invisible specifically because you are hidden, taking away the small benefit of an isometric camera and making it nearly impossible to see the level from a more holistic perspective.

In other ways, too, while Winter Ember does purport itself to be a stealth-focused game, it frequently feels like it would rather be an action game. Enemies can see you from far distances and with seemingly no lighting, and the game introduces tall grass to hide in that enemies see through almost every single time. What’s worse is that controls and inputs are frustratingly inexact for actions that need to be precise. Movement can feel far too weighty, and almost every action input needs to happen multiple times for the game to register. I had numerous occasions of trying to stealth kill a guard only for the game to not register my input and the guard to turn around and begin fighting. Then, when you do get into fighting, it’s often easier than stealth. There’s a basic sword fighting system of light and heavy attacks, blocking, and parrying, and while the timing takes some getting used to, parrying is almost universally the easiest way to play. I found myself more often than not trying to be stealthy because the game told me to, being spotted out of nowhere, and ultimately killing everyone anyway because I could parry my way out of it.

One of the other major systems is the intricate arrow crafting, which allows you to craft many different types of arrows based on different needs and elements. You can use electricity, for example, to shock an enemy or power a generator, while you can use rope to climb to different areas of the environments. There is a good amount of variety with these, and I found myself incorporating the arrows more frequently as I progressed, but the major hindrance again is the controls and interface. The crafting menu is obtuse and hard to comprehend, and the act of having to enter the menu and equip different materials and arrows every time feels incredibly cumbersome. It’s the type of issue that builds up over time and made me groan every time I had to open the menu.

"While stealth games are nothing new, there are a couple mechanics, like the visibility and the exploration, that Winter Ember seemingly could focus on, but for every interesting idea, there are multiple flawed design choices or gameplay inconsistencies that bring the experience down, especially in the cumbersome menus and heavy inputs."

There’s an interesting idea lying somewhere within Winter Ember, but the final product doesn’t bring out the best parts of it. While stealth games are nothing new, there are a couple mechanics, like the visibility and the exploration, that Winter Ember seemingly could focus on, but for every interesting idea, there are multiple flawed design choices or gameplay inconsistencies that bring the experience down, especially in the cumbersome menus and heavy inputs. I wanted to like Winter Ember far more than I did, because when it comes down to it, this is a stealth game that fails to abide by its own rules.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.