Here goes, I’m going to try and review two games in one. Yes, Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake is a revival of the legendary series’ first two titles, combined into one shiny package. Square Enix and Artdink are back again after their triumphant remake of Dragon Quest III, bringing a similar promise forward. A promise of significantly revamped visuals, full voice acting, new in-game content, and a much more user-friendly experience for modern gamers.

And good news, Dragon Quest fans, this is yet another brilliant remake, sure to win the series new admirers and satisfy long-time fans simultaneously. With this 2-in-1 release, the so-called Erdrick trilogy is complete, as the first two chapters in the Dragon Quest story follow up on the events that took place in the third game. A little confusing, I know.

For anyone unfamiliar with the first two stories, allow me to introduce you. In Dragon Quest I, you play as a solitary Hero who is descended from Erdrick. In the past, Erdrick foiled the dastardly plans of a character known as the Lord of the Underworld and restored peace to the land of Alefgard. But now, the scheming Dragonlord has made an unwelcome return, and it is up to you, and you alone, to deliver the land from evil.

And then, after the Hero of Dragon Quest I was able to save Alefgard again, we move to Dragon Quest II, where you take control of four young princes and princesses, themselves also descended from Erdrick. After foul beasts suddenly invade Alefgard, it is up to the band of young nobles to honor Erdrick’s legacy and ensure the realm’s safety once more.

So, how engaging are these stories? And just how well do these remakes bring the world, combat, and characters of classic Dragon Quest into the modern era of gaming? Having played this duology for well over 40 hours on my Nintendo Switch 2, I’ll break it all down for you below.

A remake fit for a king

I want to start by discussing some of my general feelings about the duology before I speak about the two games individually.

As soon as you’ve been thrust into either title’s fantasy world, you’re treated to a delicious cocktail of sublime HD-2D graphics, wonderful voice acting, and head-spinningly beautiful music. No, seriously, the score here is majestic. It’s grandiose, orchestral, and emotive – it really does complement the medieval-inspired fantasy world to absolute perfection.

Meanwhile, the duology is a visual delight. Character sprites are detailed and faithful to the series' origin, while light is used in a way that makes each environment feel deeply natural. The polish on display through each building, mountain, and piece of equipment makes the game a joy to look at.

Square Enix is the pioneer of the HD-2D graphical style, so it may not be a huge surprise that it nailed the visuals, but I was still bowled over by the appearance of each new area and enemy I encountered.

As I mentioned above, the voice acting across both games is top-notch, too. There’s so much character running through the veins of each performance.

Comedic moments are delivered with expert timing, while moments of heartbreak feel raw and convincing. I criticized Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles for a few flat-sounding performances and small inconsistencies, but this wasn’t the case here at all.

But one thing that was slightly disappointing was the decision to only partially voice the main story. A few segments have no voice acting whatsoever, which can really break up your immersion in the action. As the voice acting is so great, I would have loved it to have featured throughout, although this is a minor gripe in the grand scheme of things.

Me against the world

Right, let’s drill into both games in a little more depth. Naturally, I started with Dragon Quest I, and I had a fantastic time during my playthrough.

In this title, it’s you against the world. No, really, there are no additional team members to recruit. You’ve got to fight your way through enemy encounters – where you can sometimes be significantly outnumbered – totally by yourself.

This remake does a masterful job of making you feel like David in his plight against Goliath. Especially because combat is no longer one-on-one only – you can face large groups of enemies now. I faced some absolutely gruelling turn-based battles during my time playing, both from aggressive hordes of foes and ruthless standalone bosses.

Luckily, the game has an auto-save feature, so if you die (spoiler alert, this will probably happen quite a bit), you can continue from the point of the last successful battle. This means you can rapidly progress through the game without having to trek through entire areas from the beginning. What an addition!

At times, I did feel like the odds were stacked a little too far against me. A few bosses, like the very last one, caused me a fair bit of bother. But the game gives you the tools to overcome your challenges. If I went away and grinded up against random enemies, I was always able to level up enough to best my enemies. Levelling increases stats like HP, MP, strength, and resilience (defense), and you’ll often learn new abilities and spells too.

Scrolls have also been added, which can be found scattered across the world, and contain abilities that can be learned at any time. They’ll disappear after use – a bit like how TMs used to work in Pokémon (in the good old days, at least). Combine that with Sigils, which can ‘soup up’ the skills you already possess, and you’ve got everything you need to crack through the Hero’s quest.

At its core, Dragon Quest I is still a classic JRPG. You’ll have to grind now and then. Sometimes, you’ll get straight up unlucky and get wiped out in an instant.

Turn-based combat is fairly simple too – it just comes down to attacking, defending against incoming attacks, and healing. But when you master the balance of those three actions, seemingly basic battle becomes addictive, surprisingly strategic, and straight up exhilarating.

Narrative-wise, there’s nothing crazy going on. The kingdom is in trouble, you’re tasked with saving it, and you overcome the threat. It’s really classic stuff, but I found beauty in the simplicity, with endearing characters like the faeries, Princess Gwaelin, and of course Robin ‘Ood. And there have been plenty of new additions to the plot, with new battles, character dialogue, and areas to explore. I’m a big fan of this one.

Me… and my three pals against the world

Moving on to Dragon Quest II now, and the added variation of having four members in the party is very refreshing. That’s one additional team member than the original game had, but it still feels like your party is excellently balanced.

I found myself dying a lot less in the sequel, with the expanded team enabling me to dedicate one unit to healing, and others to hitting hard with magic and physical attacks, for instance. As a result of the larger team, you’ll have to manage scrolls a little more carefully, though – you have to consider who will suit the relevant ability best before waving goodbye to your scroll forever!

The world is more developed in the sequel, with multiple kingdoms established through Erdrick’s descendants. Said world is vast (and expanded for this remake), the runtime of your adventure is considerably longer than DQ I, and the amount of content additions is larger than that found in the revamped editions of DQ I and indeed DQ III. I found the story to be engaging, and I felt compelled to explore the world that lay before me.

And that’s because both of these games, especially the sequel, reward curiosity handsomely. If you take that extra time to look around a castle, to wander off into a random part of the overworld, or even search the local inn, you’re almost certain to find something of interest. I’m talking scrolls, money, armor, weapons…you name it! You can also find mini medals now, which can be redeemed for swanky prizes.

There are just so many excellent quality of life additions across both games. Difficulty options are there if you want to make things a touch easier…or if you want to punish yourself and turn up the heat. Fast-travel has been refined, there are more customization settings, and objective markers make for a much more accessible user experience.

If I were to nitpick, I’d argue that the new UI is still too basic, and menus could’ve been both a little more stylish and developed. For instance, the ‘Misc.’ menu feels quite cluttered, holding everything from unit status, through to system settings and traveller’s tips. It does appear faithful to its classic JRPG roots, though, which some may still appreciate.

Overall, I had the adventure of a lifetime during my playthrough of Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake. Not only did it run like a dream on my Nintendo Switch 2, but I felt genuinely excited to fire this game up every single time. I knew there would be new items to discover, new enemies that would probably beat the life out of me, and new areas to soak in. Combine that with a legendary score, excellent voice acting, and a gorgeous visual overhaul, and you’re looking at a very special remake indeed.

Should you play Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake?

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Accessibility features

You can adjust the camera to a zoomed-in mode if you prefer, and adjust aspects like text and battle speed using the system settings menu. You can also toggle controls like running, removing the need to hold down a button.

Voices can be set to English or Japanese, with text available in a wider range of languages, such as Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, and Spanish. There is no color blind mode, unfortunately.

How I reviewed Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake

I spent more than 40 hours playing Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, playing through the main story of both titles and tackling a bunch of side content. I played both titles in the ‘Dragon Quest’ mode, which is the normal difficulty equivalent.

As I downloaded the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, I was able to split my time fairly evenly between TV and handheld play. When in docked mode, I had my console hooked up to the Sky Glass Gen 2 television and the Marshall Heston 120 soundbar. In handheld mode, I sometimes connected my Sony WH-1000XM6 headphones to the Switch 2 via a 3.5mm cable.

Personally, I’ve reviewed a variety of games here at TechRadar, including a number of RPGs like Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army and Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I’m also a seasoned RPG player, with some of my favorite games of all time including Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Yakuza 0, and Final Fantasy VII (the original, of course).

First reviewed October 2025

Nothing pains me more than facing continued disappointment at video game adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, but unfortunately, cozy Hobbit life simulator Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game has me right back at rock bottom. It attempts to capture the world and lives of Tolkien’s halfling heroes, but instead posits a torturously slow and boring glimpse into the joys of such menial tasks as walking with slight urgency and inventory management.

A wizard arrives precisely when he means to, but Tales of the Shire did not. Numerous delays plagued developer Wētā Workshop, resulting in its release being pushed back from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025, then to its ultimate release date in July 2025. Having played the demo, it was a wise choice; the Shire should be brimming with life, simple joys, and fellowship, and yet our earliest glimpses of the game in demos last year showed there was much room for improvement.

A wizard arrives precisely when he means to, but Tales of the Shire did not. Numerous delays plagued developer Wētā Workshop, resulting in its release being pushed back from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025, then to its ultimate release date in July 2025. Having played the demo, it was a wise choice; the Shire should be brimming with life, simple joys, and fellowship, and yet our earliest glimpses of the game in demos last year showed there was much room for improvement.

Sadly, reader, I must inform you that such improvements were not made. I finally got around to finishing the game a few months after its release, and it was genuinely quite draining to make my way through its watery plotlines, half-baked features, and flavorless characters. In fact, one of Tales of the Shire’s greatest achievements is that it somehow makes Gandalf seem bland for the little screen time he gets.

The part of me that really, really wanted this game to win has done the rounds of questioning how this happened, but honestly, it just feels like poor direction. Where Tales of the Shire should reward patience, it punishes efficiency and speed; where it should encourage creativity, it incentivizes shortcuts; and where it should be fun and light, it’s downright boring and forces you to trudge through fields to find near-invisible Butterfly Cup mushrooms for days on end just to feed them to your socially awkward neighbors.

I genuinely don’t enjoy poo-pooing creative endeavors, but Tales of the Shire is a disappointing step into the game development limelight for Wētā Workshop, and one has to wonder if they had the IP just lying around and fancied giving game design a go. It’s not without good ideas, but it certainly lacks heart and execution.

“Nary a squib, cracker or backarapper”

The game opens with a familiar face: that of Gandalf towering over your custom character Hobbit on the roadside. He offers you a ride to your new home, Bywater, before ingraciously jet-setting off on his own travels around the Shire, leaving you to your fledgling journey. The tutorial sees you meeting most of the townsfolk, learning the ropes of Hobbit life through farming, foraging, fishing, and feeding neighbors to grow your reputation and the prosperity of Bywater.

The main plotline sees a small collective of local Hobbits band together on a mission to officially gain township for Bywater, a quest decorated by typical Hobbit foolery. The abstract and oft whimsical ways in which these Hobbits go about their problem-solving make for some enjoyable momentum to its credit. For example, when a very dated rulebook suggests that one condition for a township is a wolf's head hung over the town gate, they approach it with great confidence despite none of them ever actually having seen a wolf in the peaceful Shire. Using remnants of forgotten knowledge from elder townsfolk, they piece together a rather rough and ready fake ​​– which, of course, they later discover was entirely unnecessary​.

It’s small moments of nonsense and whimsy like these that I was so excited for, but unfortunately, they are few and far between in Tales of the Shire. Dialogue in the game is extensive, but at least half of the characters offer no depth or development beyond their archetypal roles. You’ve got the grumpy, weird fishing man, lovely elderly cooking lady, slightly dumb farmer, generic cute kid, and brassy bar owner. That’s no sin; the joy of Hobbits is their simplicity, but there’s little original content here that makes dialogue feel worthwhile, and the lack of any voice-overs really hammers home the lifelessness.

It’s quite the achievement that Tales of the Shire even fails to make Gandalf seem interesting; sure, he offers some hijinks and at least a few salient moments, but it’s a shallow attempt at capturing the wise yet whimsical wizard. Oh, and don’t get me started on the pitiful attempt at recreating a Gandalf firework display, because that truly is a crime against the source material. Seriously, 5-10 peony fireworks and nary a squib, cracker, or backarapper? That should be considered criminal.

That being said, some characters feel more Hobbit-specific in their caricatures. I loved Hobson, Bywater’s bumbling tradesman who will try to fob off any junk he finds to locals, and Delphinium, the herbalist who lives in the shadow – and lingering grief – of her deceased mother. While I wouldn’t go as far as to call these better-rounded characters dynamic, they at least pack a bit more of the heart and depth needed to make me want to interact with them.

Befriending your neighbors is a pretty central part of the game, so you’ll need to put aside any feelings of apathy towards them and muck in to build your relationships. The main way of doing this is through shared meals, hosted at a variety of locations around Bywater and with different party sizes, to win their favor. On the day of a shared meal, you’ll receive in your letterbox a hint at their food preferences; any meals or flavors they’re craving, which can help to raise friendships quicker.

These are, for the most part, fine, and cooking is most definitely the most fun activity in Bywater. It’s pretty basic, although it does get more complex as the game progresses when new recipes and tools are unlocked; even so, it’s pretty easy to master.

Time goes by so slowly

Your new home of Bywater, is an interesting backdrop for a cozy adventure. Thematically, it hits all the right notes; rolling hills, pastoral beauty, and relatively organic-feeling, and I must give it at least some credit for winning me over later in the game. Navigation is intentionally slow-paced; there’s no map overlay, so after pinning your destination or quest to follow in the map menu, you have to follow a series of bluebirds that perch along pathways to point you in the right direction. For the first few hours, it’s grating at best, unhelped by the abundance of dead ends, impassible objects, and steep slopes you can’t walk down, but over time, you learn the layout and shortcuts for yourself. It’s one of the best ways the game teaches you patience, and it reminded me of my own experience learning the lay of the land when my mother moved to the countryside.

The same can’t be said for the game’s wider pacing issues, however. Some days crawl by, and having run out of things to do, those days often ended with my Hobbit Peony waiting at her bedside for night to fall to start a new day. Other days see a litany of villager requests stuffing your mailbox in the morning, ready to send you on a chain of fetch quests that will often take you across all four corners of Bywater; it would be better if the game paced these out better, as I was able to blast through a majority of the main plotline by the end of my second season in the game.

Another oddity in the game’s pacing is the guild feature, which comes into play relatively late in the main storyline progression. As part of Bywater’s quest for township, you create groups for each of the four main activities, and every day, the group leader will post new requests. You can pin up to 10 requests, which, once fulfilled, will gain you progression points towards group mastery. However, it comes in so late in the game that you feel incentivized to just grind through these to unlock perks like a bigger backpack and additional cooking stations, which feels contrary to the wider pacing.

Never mind the fact that, on top of this, there are a lot of bugs and optimization issues – or at least, there were in my Xbox playthrough, but from what I’ve seen online, these are still present months after release for many players.

Skipping around town for too long leads to frame rate drops, characters in the background of conversations stutter about the screen, and quests can sometimes bug out if you go to sleep mid-way through, making some days a mad panic to complete it all before the clock strikes midnight. My game also fatally crashed upwards of ten times during my time with it, requiring me to play my day from scratch – and you can imagine from my desperate desire to finish this game how frustrating it was to lose a full day’s work.

Home is where the existential crisis is

There are some parts of Tales of the Shire I unabashedly enjoy, and chief among them is home decoration. You begin the game with a humble smial that, over time, unlocks and expands, but from the get-go, there’s a good amount of personality you can add to the rooms. You’ll receive furnishings and decor as gifts from neighbors as you go about your lives together, but you can also head to town to shop for more. Character creation isn’t quite as fun, but there are some really fun items in the mix and, if nothing else, their existence makes saving and spending money a little more worthwhile.

While you adventure and quest about Bywater, you can find fishing spots and plants to forage, as well as villagers to trade with. Some take your hard-earned cash for useful ingredients, seeds, and decor, while others will trade for their favorite ingredients. The early game makes this quite challenging; your only avenue for earning money is selling whatever you find or farm, and I quite enjoyed the grind. Unfortunately, the game scales weirdly, meaning it’s very easy past a certain point to rinse the local economy.

The chief culprit here is farming due to the perplexing choice to let vegetables grow out of season. You have to plant them at the correct time of year, and they’ll certainly bear fruit more quickly during those seasons, but as soon as you unlock more farm space and flowerbeds, you can easily abandon in-depth farming strategy and support your voracious appetite for home-cooked meals with easily farmed and watered vegetables.

Of course, you’ll still need to forage and fish for more specific ingredients, but a fair amount of meals can be prepared with just farmed goods and purchased goods; the game could do with slightly higher stakes here, as it quickly became easy to cheese my way through.

It’s far harder to cheat your way to financial success with foraging or fishing, however. There are several designated fishing spots around the map, and while some do offer slightly rarer fish, most spots seem to generate the same species. Annoyingly, these aren’t stackable, and with a very limited 10-slot inventory space, you’ll probably find yourself heading to town to sell up your haul or back home to restock your pantry pretty often. This limitation makes some of the more rural fishing spots a real pain, but thankfully, you can pretty much ignore them without any real penalty.

The long and short of it is, almost everything I like about Tales of the Shire comes with a caveat, and it makes for an incredibly mixed bag experience. It certainly feels like, post demo, they had the opportunity to rework much of early reviewers’ criticism, but that was by and large ignored to the detriment of the end results.

Should you play Tales of the Shire?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

There are some accessibility features, but not an all-encompassing selection. For example, you can change text size, adjust camera sensitivity, and toggle auto-assist features for both the camera and the cooking station gameplay, as well as difficulty. There’s controller support, but with limited remappable buttons, and a major oversight is the lack of a sprint toggle here. Add to this the lack of a mini-map, poor performance, and frequent crashes, and you have yet another mixed bag for Tales of the Shire.

How I reviewed Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game

I played over 25 hours of Tales of the Shire on my Xbox Series S, completing the main storyline and quests and significantly progressing my villager relationships and guild quests. I played on my Sony KD-49XH8096 TV using Logitech Multimedia Z200 speakers and a standard Xbox wireless controller.

I used standard settings, comparing the experience to other popular farming and life sims like Stardew Valley, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Palia, as well as indie titles like Coral Island.

First reviewed October 2025

It’s genuinely a shame that role-playing game The Outer Worlds 2 developer Obsidian Entertainment operates under the current Microsoft umbrella. This is a company that, in the past couple of years alone, has laid off an unimaginable number of workers, dramatically raised prices on its hardware and subscription models, and completed one of the most costly acquisitions in the medium’s history. That's all on top of cancelling a slew of games and shuttering studios.

It’s precisely this kind of overbearing capitalist mindset that The Outer Worlds 2 has a bone to pick with, and it’s left me with some pretty complicated feelings. On the one hand, the game’s critique of late-stage capitalism is scathing and steeped in the developer’s trademark wit. On the other, I can’t help but feel it all rings a little hollow when the target of said critiques is also the one funding and publishing The Outer Worlds 2.

Ultimately, Obsidian itself deserves praise for crafting yet another brilliant choice-driven role-playing game (RPG). Like Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, and Avowed before it, The Outer Worlds 2 provides an absorbing world to explore, chock-full of interesting characters and quests, and countless opportunities to make the most of your chosen build.

Skills in The Outer Worlds 2 aren’t just for bypassing doors or clearing speech checks; like in many of the best RPGs, some can genuinely open up the game in meaningful ways. The Observation skill, for example, is one I can’t do without. Especially not after it guided me to a secret room that revealed a quest to win the favor of a lucrative black market vendor. Even weapon-based skills like Guns or Science! (yes, that is how it’s formatted) are good for more than just shooting, and can be used to intimidate characters during dialog.

One of my favorite things about The Outer Worlds 2, then, is that you actually won’t be able to solve every problem, bypass every lock in a single playthrough. You will have times where an NPC isn’t swayed by your charms, and then stumble upon a quest or avenue of progression that suits your skill set to a tee. It's an ever-so-satisfying gameplay experience.

This interplay between success and failure isn’t quite a perfect balance, however; across my playthrough, I did find that some skills and traits barred progress more than others (for example, Engineering is used to get past jammed doors much more frequently than the Hack or Lockpicking skills are in their respective fields).

There are also some pacing issues through the mid-game, especially as quests tend to stack up on themselves and enemies start having tedious amounts of health to all but the most gun-slinging of character builds.

Minor issues aside, I won’t soon forget my time in the hyper-capitalist nightmare that is the Arcadia system, and chances are I’ll be diving back in again with a completely different approach and ending in mind.

Shoot the moon

In terms of background, The Outer Worlds 2 gives you a bit more to work with compared to its prequel, with your character being an established and respected agent of the Earth Directorate - a sort of task force that prides itself on the very idealistic and somewhat fantastical notion of bringing peace to the galaxy. Turns out, the Earth Directorate might not be very good at their jobs, though.

The opening mission, an infiltration of a space station run by a cultish sect known as the Protectorate, goes horribly wrong when a fellow agent double-crosses us, detonating the station and killing everyone on board save for ourselves and a previously injured squad member by the name of Niles Ibara.

Ten years on, you’re woken from an extended hibernation period by Niles, who informs you that the detonation has caused a rift in the fabric of space that threatens to destroy the entire system in an undetermined amount of time. It’s a race against the clock to track down the double-crossing agent and save the system of Arcadia from a grisly fate.

Your quest for justice (whatever form that may take based on your own choices throughout the game) isn’t one you’ll emerge from without someone’s blood on your hands. Like it or not, you will often have to side with one or two dubious factions in order to get your way. That could be the previously established Protectorate, or Auntie’s Choice - a mega corporation that’s the result of a hostile merger of the first game’s Auntie Cleo’s and Spacer’s Choice companies.

You won’t always like who you’re choosing to work for, but there is at least a good variety of dialog flavor to have your character respond in a way that suits your desired personality - whether that be good-natured or unfathomably cruel, or everything in between.

Choices, so many choices

Like its prequel, The Outer Worlds 2’s explorable planets are smaller, individual biomes, as opposed to having one larger map a la Fallout: New Vegas. For this game, it’s an approach that really works. Each of the main planets has its own central conflict, even if most offer a general theme of Auntie’s Choice and the Protectorate battling it out for control.

Each map is smattered with characters to meet, side quests to take on, buildings to explore, and no shortage of secrets to unearth. Exploration really is the focal point of progress in The Outer Worlds 2. Combat is, of course, one way of getting things done. And in terms of feel and feedback, it’s a huge improvement over the first game, with satisfying gun play and plenty of weapon types - from stealthy knives and silenced pistols to ammo-hungry SMGs and energy weapons.

Personally, I preferred a more low-key approach to progressing through the game’s main missions. Problems can be solved with combat, sure, but as the game went on, a frustrating tendency to pad out enemy health bars often made such encounters a tedious affair.

As a result, I rolled a charismatic character able to pass speech checks to bypass combat wherever possible. Some points in Sneak and Observation also helped in stealthily getting through busy areas and finding secret routes. You absolutely can play a passive character in The Outer Worlds 2, and you’re more often than not rewarded for doing so.

One piece of advice I have would be to think very carefully about your specializations while initially creating your character. Get comfortable with the idea that many choices and solutions will be locked off to you, as a trade-off for excelling in two or three areas instead. You’ll have one chance to respec after the tutorial section, but beyond that, no such option exists.

I like this change overall. Not being able to respec on a whim meant that I had to approach most scenarios with my chosen skill sets in mind. For me, this largely meant that going guns blazing was simply off the table. On the other hand, I can see indecisive players - or those who like to take a flexible approach based on the situation - may struggle with this. I certainly restarted the game a handful of times until I settled on skills that satisfied my preferences.

One returning feature from the first game that I really enjoy, though, is flaws. These are reactive, passive effects that you can accrue, and they’re essentially the game’s way of adding additional challenge to your playstyle. Flaws pop up if you adopt a certain way of playing enough. One is based on a hoarder mentality, lowering vendor prices but also reducing money you earn from selling.

Another flaw plays on indecisiveness, letting you only increase the level of skills with zero points, or ones you have the lowest total in, the upside being you’ll get one extra skill point to spend at each level up. Flaws are optional, but if you accept them, they’re with you for good, so think carefully about how useful you think they’ll be in the long run.

Horizon point

I did find that The Outer Worlds 2 started to lose its luster as the campaign went on. It’s not the longest RPG out there, coming in at around 40-50 hours, but it’s definitely one that started to feel a bit formulaic. There’s only so many firefights to endure, air ducts to crawl through, or terminals to hack before the game starts to feel like it’s shown its entire hand. And it does so long before credits roll. It remains an enjoyable game throughout, but I definitely had the most fun solving the problems in the first major biome when it still felt fresh and vast.

That repetition does tend to hurt the game’s overall pacing, too. There are some nice surprises here and there; recruiting new companions for your squad is often something you’ll just stumble upon, rather than being outright told where you can pick them up. And digging into the depths of an installation or base to uncover a cool weapon or decision-making opportunity is always a satisfying reward. But such moments felt few and far between in the midst of trudging from township to outpost, ticking off various elements of busy work in the hopes of expanding my choices for the main quest.

What I can’t fault The Outer Worlds 2 on is its gorgeous visual style. It’s something I found really impressive about Avowed, and it’s much the same case here. Outdoor environments are awash with color and interesting landmarks, while interiors often feel cold and oppressive in the best way possible. While the soundtrack didn’t do much to move me, I did often find myself taking in the impressive amount of environmental detail on offer.

It’s a winner on the performance front, too, and I noticed only a handful of dips at 60fps across both Xbox Series X and PC. Load times can be uncomfortably long on occasion (exacerbated by reloading quick saves to try out alternate routes), but by and large the game’s performance is acceptable.

Should you play The Outer Worlds 2?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

As is the case with many Xbox Game Studios titles, The Outer Worlds 2 offers a solid amount of accessibility options for gamers of all stripes. For starters, you can adjust motion blur and field of view to a granular degree, as well as apply subtitles to general, background, and audio log speech.

There are also two motion sickness modes for reducing on-screen motions to varying degrees. You can also adjust overall text size and HUD scaling, as well as apply colors and outlines to subtitles and their backgrounds.

How I reviewed The Outer Worlds 2

I played The Outer Worlds 2 for 40 hours across both my Xbox Series X Digital Edition and my gaming PC. I was able to transfer my save across both versions thanks to Xbox’s handy Play Anywhere feature. During my playthrough, I opted for a character capable of hacking and uncovering secrets via the Observation skill, with some points in Speech and Guns to get myself out of tight situations in a pinch.

I primarily played on console using the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro Xbox controller, on an LG CX OLED TV display. My audio device of choice here was the RIG R5 Spear Pro, a multiplatform wired gaming headset that delivered exceptional, immersive audio during my playthrough.

First reviewed October 2025

Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a beast of a management simulation game that allows you to manage your own prehistoric park. It’s by far the most creative entry in the series so far, offering you the ability to create your own buildings and scenery from scratch for the first time. The challenge mode, sandbox mode, and innovative campaign are crammed full of things to research and create, not to mention 70 different dinosaur species. But Jurassic World Evolution 3 also sometimes gets in its own way with systems that distract from, rather than deepen, your core objectives.

I should probably mention that I’m a bit of a park management games addict, particularly those developed by Frontier Games. Not only did I write our Planet Coaster 2 review, but I’ve poured a truly disgusting amount of time into some of their other games. My current play time on Planet Zoo totals 1,100 hours – or six and a half weeks solid – so even though I’m new to the Jurassic World Evolution franchise, I’ve invested probably more of my life in park sim games than is entirely good for me.

While Jurassic World Evolution 3 might not offer quite the same absurd open sandbox experience of its sister titles, it does offer far more satisfying and comprehensive management, bringing it far more in line with some of the best simulation games. I could always take or leave park management in the Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo games – which is why I often switched it off entirely. But in Jurassic World Evolution 3, management is much more in its genes.

At the heart of Evolution 3, there’s a really tight management loop. You hire scientists, send them on expeditions to harvest fossils, use them to extract the juicy dino DNA contained within, and then set them to work synthesizing any of the 70 species included in the game. You can then peruse the traits of the eggs this creates and decide which ones to hatch before incubating and releasing them into your chosen exhibit.

Naturally, though, this is only half of the experience. Keen though the game is to stress that you’re running a sanctuary for all these saurians, they sure look a lot like zoos, and, as with any zoo, you have commercial considerations to take into account. You’ll create viewing galleries to allow your guests to spy on your cretaceous critters, tours to get them up close and personal, and amenities to make a fast buck keep them fed and watered.

Simple as this sounds, there’s way more layered on top of this. There’s dinosaur breeding to manage, research to conduct, and diseases to diagnose and treat. And unless you’re quick to tranquilize and return any carnivorous dinosaurs that break out to their pens, they’ll scarf down your guests – bringing a whole new meaning to the term ‘paleo diet’.

But it wouldn’t be Jurassic World if you couldn’t conduct crazy experiments that cross a line man was not meant to cross. Before synthesizing species of dinosaurs, you can tinker around with their DNA, adding traits that modify their appetite and thirst, ups their resilience, improve their sociability, or even improve their combat potential. And if that’s too vanilla for you, you can also research awful genetic chimeras, including the Indominus Rex, Indoraptor, and Spinoceratops.

On the campaign tail

In fact, there are so many mechanics at play, I was glad the Campaign was there to hold my hand. It’s the first time I’ve found the Campaign mode of a management sim game to genuinely be unmissable, rather than something I can just dip my toes in. And there’s certainly plenty to get your teeth into here.

After the events of the Jurassic World franchise, you’re leading the Dinosaur Integration Network (DIN), an organisation dedicated to helping dinosaurs coexist alongside humanity. Conveniently, keeping the public safe from vicious man-eaters and helping endangered dinosaurs breed looks a lot like running a certain Jurassic-themed park, so you won’t find much of a tonal shift here.

While the campaign is structured across a series of parks around the world, you’ll work across them concurrently – although you’ll be moved on to new locations as you complete story objectives, as your international reputation improves, further objectives are unlocked in maps you’ve already visited. This feels far more dynamic an incentive to return to former parks than just improving a star rating: I genuinely felt like I was running a global network of sanctuaries that each impact one another, rather than just visiting isolated maps that I was done with the second I moved on to the next one.

The voice acting is generally excellent. Jeff Goldblum is fantastic as always as Ian Malcolm, even if his lines largely are just arch variations on: ‘Welp, here we go again!’ And while I wouldn’t say the story throws that many curveballs, there are just enough elements like interfering corporate interests and human-supremacist saboteurs to add some bumps in the road.

Should you want a more focused test of your skills, Challenge mode provides a variety of scenarios for you to tackle. From containing vicious carnivores with limited fencing to pacifying grouchy giants without tweaking their genome, I found there was a decent variety of trials to help me flex my management muscles.

Jurassic Parks & Recreation

Not everything in Jurassic World Evolution 3 is quite so high-stakes. There’s always the option to just kick back and enjoy the fun of creating your perfect park, whether in the campaign missions or in the dedicated sandbox mode. And this is where the game really shines: designing your dream habitats and getting up close and personal with the prehistoric beasts in them.

Part of the reason for this is that the creatures themselves are exquisite. Generally speaking, I found the graphics in Jurassic World Evolution 3 to be good, if unexceptional. On Ultra settings, the game ran at a smooth 60 fps on our Acer Predator Helios 300 laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, but from a bird's eye view, it was pretty, but didn’t necessarily blow me away in the way I expected.

However, once you get down to the level where you’re face-to-face with your dinosaurs, the 3D models are beautifully detailed and animated, while raytracing gives lighting effects and shadows a literal glow up. At one point, I watched some sauropods wading across the shallows in front of a guest’s canoe, and the way they were silhouetted against the sun was spectacular. I just wish my parks had quite the same pop when viewed from an overhead perspective.

Fortunately, there are plenty of excuses to immerse yourself in your parks. You view everything from your guests’ perspectives, whether that’s viewing their perspective from ride cameras or walking around in the in-game Google Street View. But, on top of this, you can take the wheel of every vehicle in your park to deliver meds to your dinosaurs or mend fences when the inevitable happens and there’s a breakout.

There’s also the opportunity to channel your inner architect and create your own scenery. Frontier’s games have always been creatively anarchic: you have complete freedom to design whatever you want to decorate your parks and zoos, but the tools at your disposal were frequently chaotic, often requiring all kinds of botches and hard work to make bespoke scenery that looked truly organic.

Up until now, Jurassic World Evolution has been the exception to this rule, limiting you to prefabricated buildings and scenery items.

Well, not anymore. In Jurassic World Evolution 3, Frontier has added the ability to create your own amenities and decorations from scratch, adding an enormous toybox of scenery parts for you to play with. From rock formations and fossils to gantries and girders, it enabled me to build up my own blueprints piece by piece, including aquatic coral reefs and a slightly wonky fountain centerpiece.

But while Jurassic World Evolution 3 has been learning elements from other games in Frontier’s fold, it’s also been refining them.

Path-placing mechanics are far more intelligent – I was able to quickly lay out straight routes and curving arcs simply by placing my cursor where I wanted it to go, rather than messing around with path angles. The part-scaling that was introduced in Planet Coaster 2 has been expanded here, allowing me to tweak the size of almost any model to achieve much more variety in my scenery design. And plants are now fully animated, swaying in the breeze and bending double during storms, making them feel far more alive.

In my opinion, there’s even more Jurassic World Evolution 3 could learn from its sister titles, though. Enclosures still aren’t as flexible as in Planet Zoo – guests really only interact with dinosaurs from set-pieces rather than marvelling over them from every viewpoint, and creature path-finding isn’t as sophisticated, making multi-height habitats impossible. And there’s no way to create raised paths, which makes multistory buildings and bridges over enclosures impossible, so maps are by necessity much flatter than I’d like. I’m not quite as free as I’d like to create sprawling, hyperrealistic dino parks, and that’s a shame.

Micromanageasaurus

Fundamentally, there’s a reason for this more restrictive gameplay. Unlike some of its sister titles, Jurassic World Evolution 3 is a management sim first and a creative sandbox second. And while this often works to its favour, there are points in the campaign where I started to find its mechanics became as gargantuan and unwieldy as the genetic revenants I was managing.

Regularly, while playing Jurassic World Evolution 3, I’d have to drop what I was doing because my prehistoric pets weren’t happy with the flora on offer in their exhibits. With a single species of dinosaur in an enclosure, this is trivial to satisfy – you quickly paint in different kinds of cover, water, fiber, nuts, and fruit until the sliders representing their preferences are satisfied.

But add multiple species to a single exhibit – something that is not only encouraged but mandatory in some scenarios – and requirements quickly conflict. For example, my Apatosaurs love tall leafy plants and pasture, while my Lokiceratops, Houdini, wouldn’t stop perennially trying to break out of her prison until I’d provided ground fiber and a wetland. And this is all exacerbated by the fact that juvenile dinosaurs have different requirements from adults, meaning exhibiting even just two species together means you’ll often have four radically opposed needs to meet.

Satisfying conflicting needs is a zero-sum game: painting in one removes another, and, as you seemingly can’t pin two different dinosaurs’ needs on screen at once, you’ll often come away happy that you’ve pleased one cretaceous critter only to discover the other is now sulking over the lack of swamps.

Even once you’ve reached an equilibrium, laying tours through exhibits will carve swathes through the undergrowth, meaning you need to repaint it all over again. Ultimately, I’d regularly find myself having to expand exhibit sizes after the fact, moving all my guest facilities in the process, just to ensure I could satisfy competing demands that were now impossible to meet within the existing space.

Now, I’ll readily acknowledge the game has mechanisms to ameliorate some of these issues. Once you have unlocked enough dinosaur species, you can select pairings that align better with their requirements. And tweaking Houdini’s genome could have allowed me to make her more relaxed about her environmental requirements. However, these are tools you’ll only research later in a map playthrough, and in the interim, you’re left with a bunch of busywork that commits the cardinal sin in a management game: it’s just not that fun.

This is a real shame because many other tasks in the game are a real blast, and I loved releasing new monsters into my exhibits or building unique scenery. But if I’m going to be pulled away from these enjoyable tasks to fight fires, the mechanics should support me in dousing them permanently, not reignite the same one the second my back is turned.

Should you play Jurassic World Evolution 3?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility

Jurassic World Evolution 3 has a good range of accessibility options. You can tweak the colors of both the UI and management views for Deuteranopia, Protonopia, Tritanopia, and high contrast. You can also switch on highlight mode for dinosaurs, tweak the highlight color according to these same profiles, and set the highlight distance.

On top of this, you can tweak the size and opacity of subtitles, set different colors for different speakers, and increase the scale of the HUD. There are also options to disable certain effects, allowing you to switch off camera shaking and flashing effects.

How I reviewed Jurassic World Evolution 3

I played Jurassic World Evolution 3 over the course of two weeks. Not only did I play my way through the campaign, but I also experimented with building my own park from scratch in Sandbox mode and explored the challenges available.

I reviewed the PC version, but I also tried it out on multiple platforms, including our Acer Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop and on my Steam Deck, to see how it fared on multiple devices. I also played it using a keyboard and mouse and using a PowerA Moga XP-Ultra multi-platform wireless controller to test out various control modes.

In terms of experience, not only have I been reviewing gaming hardware for around five years, but I've spent my whole life playing simulation games, dating right back to Theme Park on the PC. I've also played many of Frontier Developments' games to date, having played Planet Coaster and Planet Coaster 2 and clocked up a ridiculous 1,100 hours in Planet Zoo.

First reviewed: October 2025

Ninja Gaiden 4 is, without a shred of doubt in my mind, the best action game of 2025. It’s co-developers Team Ninja and PlatinumGames doing what they do best; firing on all cylinders to provide a wicked hard combat experience that puts priority on learning effective combo routes and enemy behavior - as well as spatial awareness - over bloated health bars or other cheap difficulty tricks.

Like the best of its peers, such as Devil May Cry 5 or the Bayonetta games, Ninja Gaiden 4 gives you all the tools you need to make quick work of almost any foe in the game. But getting to that point is a skill that demands utmost mastery at its higher difficulty levels. And embarking on that journey here manages to recapture that satisfaction of the best the character action subgenre has to offer.

If you’re already a Ninja Gaiden head, you’ll be pleased to know that all the staples are here. Multiple weapon types with expandable move sets, dismemberment for instant-kill obliteration attacks, and the need for a careful balance of offense and defense to get the better of the armies of enemy soldiers and daemons standing in your way.

It’s not without its faults. Environments can be quite dull, often lacking in the gorgeous vistas and arena variety of its predecessors - while prior games often had you fighting for your life in claustrophobic spaces, combat areas in Ninja Gaiden 4 are decidedly more open and boxy. There’s also an over-reliance on on-rails platforming sections that are largely scripted. They can look cool, but certainly lack the challenge and thrills of the main combat loop.

These slight hitches aside, Ninja Gaiden 4 provides an exhilarating combat experience with strong enemy variety and tremendous chapter-ending boss fights. And as a bonus, while the main plot isn’t spectacular, series fans can expect plenty of callbacks to Ninja Gaiden’s universe - albeit none that I will explicitly spoil for you in this review.

Raven's call

In Ninja Gaiden 4, the corpse of the colossal Dark Dragon continues to loom over Tokyo, emitting a rain of death and decay that threatens to destroy the city. Our newcomer protagonist, Yakumo, is a ninja of the Raven Clan that forms an uneasy alliance with a priestess named Seori. The goal of the partnership is to actively resurrect the Dark Dragon in order to slay it - body, soul, and all - for good.

Returning series legend Ryu Hayabusa, meanwhile, is none too happy at the prospect of bringing such a great evil back to life. He allies himself with the Divine Dragon Order (D.D.O. for short) - one of the game’s main enemy factions - in order to combat the Raven Clan’s plan.

This doesn’t so much set up Hayabusa as the villain as it does provide conflicting ways to solve the problem at hand. It’s the most interesting aspect of Ninja Gaiden 4’s plot, but don’t expect Nier Automata levels of storytelling here. Like other games in the series, the story serves a simple backdrop to the action, not the core focus.

Yakumo himself begins as a fairly one-note entity. I do love his design, emulating a painfully 2010s level of edginess; clad entirely in black and sporting a haircut that threatens to cover his line of sight entirely. But he’s an effective contrast to the more traditional, arguably sensible look of Hayabusa. Something much more rebellious and unpredictable in nature.

Steeped in blood

That chaotic nature plays strongly into Yakumo’s weapons and abilities. While he has access to iconic Hayabusa-brand moves like the gap-closing Flying Swallow and cranium-obliterating Izuna Drop, Yakumo’s very much his own beast with his signature Bloodraven form.

At any time during combat, assuming you have a sufficient amount of gauge, Yakumo can enter Bloodraven stance by holding the left trigger. This powers up his light and heavy attacks, but is also able to break through guarding enemies and interrupt unblockable attacks noted by a handy exclamation point icon.

Shifting between Yakumo’s base and Bloodraven forms is a skill unto itself. It’s certainly fun to rip enemies to shreds with it at first. But as the game progresses, you’ll be pressured to use it only when necessary. Running out of Bloodraven gauge means you won’t be able to effectively deal with blocking enemies or punish charged attacks, and can leave you wide open to heavy damage.

Even without Bloodraven form, you’re still powerful. Hitting enemies with basic combos enough can dismember their limbs, leaving them vulnerable to an instant-kill Obliteration attack. Furthermore, holding the heavy attack button charges up your ‘Ultimate’ technique, which zips you to the nearest enemy for enormous damage and outright killing weaker foes.

Hayabusa, meanwhile, feels suitably distinct. You’ll get control of him around the second half of the game, and he’s a lot weightier and grounded than his edgy acrobatic counterpart. His sections feel a lot more like classic Ninja Gaiden, and feel noticeably harder as a result.

On the defensive side, both Yakumo and Hayabusa are able to block, dodge, and parry incoming attacks. Parries are ultra-satisfying here, creating a flashing glint that lets you immediately hit back with an attack of your own. Dodging is also incredibly useful; when done at the last moment, it creates a Bayonetta-esque ‘Witch Time’ slowdown effect that helps you effectively reposition and get some free hits in.

Slice and dice

You’ll be doing all of this at breakneck speeds in the average combat encounter. When the game starts mixing in multiple enemy types - and even some elites - knowing when to both attack and defend becomes a high priority, and it’s a skill that’s heavily rewarded. Better performance leads to higher stage ranks, resulting in more currency and weapon experience to spend on life-saving consumables and additional weapon techniques respectively.

It’s not all combat, though. Ninja Gaiden 4 occasionally breaks up the pace with avenues for exploration. These often let you tick off specific side missions, or gather hidden collectibles or take part in optional challenges for additional currency and weapon experience.

These are nice distractions, allowing you to momentarily take a breather in between ruthless bouts of combat. Platforming sections achieve this, too, but these do grow stale rather quickly. There’s a good variety, often making use of traversal items like a grappling hook, glider wings, and a surfboard (Joe Musashi would like a word here, I think). However, these often run a bit long and ultimately only serve to pad out any given stage’s run time. I often found myself just wanting to have them over with to get stuck into the next batch of bads.

Level design in general isn’t a particular strength of Ninja Gaiden 4, either. It certainly serves its basic purpose, but there isn’t a strong variety here. Most arenas are large and square-shaped. Some have differing levels of verticality and let you zip about with the grappling hook.

But most arenas feel designed to your advantage. In prior Ninja Gaiden games, you’d often struggle for space in smaller rooms and hallways, or have enemies charge you from either side or via hidden passageways. There’s little in the way of the element of surprise in Ninja Gaiden 4 - nothing to especially catch you off guard during most encounters. The core combat loop remains incredibly strong, but a bit more variety in level design would definitely have been nice.

Thankfully, the game’s incredible boss fights are always worth trudging through the most uninspired levels to get to. Bosses are massive and all feel distinct. They feel like unique challenges in and of themselves, often requiring you to figure out which weapon types are most effective, and having you deal with unpredictable attacks. They’re incredibly thrilling and almost always backed by a superb blood-pumping soundtrack.

While the overall look of levels are a bit dull, I can’t fault the game for its visual fidelity. Characters and weather effects especially look stunning. And as you might expect from these developers, animation and combat feedback are satisfyingly on point.

It’s a winner in the performance department, too. For me, Ninja Gaiden 4 ran at a near-immaculate 60 frames per second on both Xbox Series X Digital Edition and PC via the Xbox app. It’s worth noting that this is a ‘Play Anywhere’ title, too. Meaning if you buy on Xbox, you’re free to play your copy on PC, too, and vice versa (so long as your purchase was done via the Microsoft Store). It’s also available day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, so it’s definitely worth checking out and downloading if you’re subscribed.

Should you play Ninja Gaiden 4?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

There's a very robust amount of accessibility options in Ninja Gaiden 4. For starters, if you're not overly keen on its crushing difficulty, 'Hero' mode offers optional toggles for easier combos and auto dodge and block mechanics. Other game related options such as auto healing and quick-time events can also be enabled here.

For vision-related accessibility settings, players can enable color highlights for both player characters, enemies, and objects in the world, helping them stand out against the background. You can also enable a high-constrast background. On the controls front, options for left-handed and single-handed play are available, too.

How I reviewed Ninja Gaiden 4

I played Ninja Gaiden 4 for around 18 hours across for this review, completing the main campaign once. I went back and forth between playing on Xbox Series X Digital Edition and my gaming PC thanks to Xbox’s Play Anywhere feature. On Xbox, I primarily used the Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot and Razer Wolverine V3 Pro controllers for play, while on PC, I went with the old reliable 8BitDo Ultimate 2.

I also hooked my controllers up with the RIG R5 Spear Pro HS wired gaming headset for more immersive audio, with my LG CX OLED TV for display while playing on Xbox Series X. I also played through a good chunk of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black on via Xbox Game Pass to get a grip on how this new game feels in comparison to the remastered classic.

First reviewed October 2025