From the moment it was first revealed, it was clear that Sonic Frontiers is quite unlike any of its predecessors. Sonic's 3D adventures have been more miss than hit throughout the blue hedgehog's 31-year existence. For every Sonic Generations, there's been a Sonic Boom or Sonic '06 leaving behind a bitter taste and further diluting the speedy mascot's appeal. Each new game has offered some variation on the Sonic formula, hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and finally give the series a consistent direction moving forward, but none have succeeded--at least until now. Sonic Frontiers is that game.

It certainly has its flaws and still maintains many of the familiar elements you'd expect to find in a game starring the eponymous hedgehog, but it's in the differences where Sonic Frontiers stands out and occasionally excels, making it the best 3D Sonic game in more than a decade.

The biggest and most notable change is the shift to a semi-open world. Sega calls Frontiers "open-zone," meaning the game is split into multiple islands that Sonic is free to explore. Each zone has its own aesthetic, from verdant rolling hills to arid desert plains and a simmering volcanic island floating above the clouds, meshing together natural beauty with ancient alien temples, grind rails, and bounce pads. It's a curious amalgamation but one that works well enough within the game's sci-fi conceit. The environments are also part of a striking tonal shift for the series. The vibrant primary colors of classic Sonic levels like Green Hill Zone have been replaced by a color palette that's low on saturation and high on pastel hues. The obvious inspiration here is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, not just in the way Frontiers looks, but in its use of music and the shift to open-ended world design. It doesn't play anything like Link's five-year-old adventure, but you can see how Sonic Team was influenced by it throughout.

God of War Ragnarok is a lavish production with pristine visuals, jaw-dropping scale, crunchy combat that is as satisfying as it is brutal, and a world that begs to have its every corner and crevice explored. It's a spectacular blockbuster, but these are the least of its achievements.

In a game where a hulking god rips all manner of creatures limb from limb, the most shocking moments aren't bathed in blood, but carried by poignant words and heartfelt emotions. They are a former God of War--known for mercilessly killing his kin--finding the words to empathize with loss; a despondent child emploring a father to break a self-destructive cycle; a moment of tenderness in the life of a boy that has the weight of the world on his shoulders.

God of War Ragnarok's most impressive achievements are its exploration of loss and love; grief and growth; determinism and defiance. It's an astoundingly well-written game that deconstructs the mythology of Norse gods and rebuilds it as an odyssey about families. Its story isn't about the end of the world, but those that have a hand in it. They're revered as mythical gods but are characterized by deep flaws, twisted by skewed perspectives, and corrupted by questionable motivations in the same way the people they preside over are. And yet, some also have redemptive qualities. In that respect, Ragnarok's story is told from a grey area where nuances blur the line between heroes and villains; good and evil. By constantly challenging you to reconsider who they are and the factors that drive their actions, these characters remain compelling throughout.

Infinity Ward's rebooted Modern Warfare 2 brings back a more classic Call of Duty multiplayer experience than we've seen in recent years, with maps better tailored to traditional 6v6 play and dialed-back movement mechanics. Modern Warfare 2's gameplay really feels like a refreshing return to old times again for Call of Duty, but unfortunately, the package as a whole feels lacking and gun customization is overly complex.

As a whole, Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer is the fast-paced shooter you expect it to be. The standard maps are scaled down for 6v6 matches this year, so there are less quiet and campy moments, and you're almost always finding yourself in the thick of the action. Modern Warfare 2 does dial back the overly fast-paced movement of recent years too, but that doesn't mean you can't choose a run-and-gun playstyle. The gameplay is just a bit less twitchy too, as the movement feels more on par with the original Modern Warfare series than the 2019 version.

Sliding doesn't quite feel as fast and fluid as Modern Warfare 2019 and the bunny-hopping movement has been nerfed a little since the beta. You can still hop around a corner, but there's not a build-up of an overly-aggressive speed that lets you start hopping all over the map. This makes the multiplayer movement feel more grounded and slower-paced than the last few entries of the franchise, which is a great change. The last few years of Call of Duty has left the majority of the casual player base at a disadvantage in trying to counter the hopping and sliding frenzy.

The advent of digital collectible card games has led to an explosion of different approaches to the genre. Mostly, though, new games have adapted the fundamentals of physical CCGs. With Marvel Snap, Hearthstone veteran studio Second Dinner has reduced the collectible card game to its most essential pieces and reimagined them, creating a combination of systems that are elegantly simple without ever feeling simplistic.

Like many other modern card games, Marvel Snap automates its equivalent of mana or energy, adding one unit per turn. But then it streamlines the genre even further: Each game lasts only six turns, and there is no direct combat between characters or choosing whether to deal damage to enemy scrubs or "go face" for direct player damage. Instead, your goal is to accumulate the most power across three locations. At the end of six turns, whoever controls two of the three locations wins the match, and ties are determined by total power across all three.

Those three locations are randomly selected from a massive pool, each introducing their own intricacies and elements, and the areas range from the straightforward to the silly. The symbiote planet Klyntar will depower every card played on it, while NYC's Central Park adds a 1-power squirrel to each other location. The locations are revealed from left to right over the first three turns. The random nature means you can be halfway through a match when a surprise third location completely shakes up your strategy, and sometimes you'll need to gamble by blindly playing a hero into an unrevealed location.

If Illfonic Entertainment set out to make an authentic Ghostbusters experience, it's done so in Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed. The game's look, sound, and feel is true-to-form, right down to the voices of Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson as Ray Stantz and Winston Zeddemore, respectively. Manning a proton pack and PKE meter for the first time in order to track and trap ghosts is a shot of ectoplasmic adrenaline. As a video game, however, it falls into a devious trap of its own, one where excitement hastily shifts to monotonous repetition. Spirits Unleashed captures the Ghostbusters feeling well, but that authenticity belies a shallow, repetitive game that quickly wears out its welcome.

Spirits Unleashed puts you in the shoes of a new Ghostbusters recruit, a nameless grunt sent in to deal with the paranormal hauntings in New York City. The repurposed firehouse from the Ghostbusters franchise serves as your base of operations, and it features a workbench for upgrading gear, lockers to customize your Ghostbuster, and a training area to work out the kinks. Across the alley from the firehouse is an oddities shop run by Ray Stantz himself, where you can talk to the Dan Aykroyd-voiced character about the current goings-on.

The core gameplay loop is an asymmetrical multiplayer experience, where four Ghostbusters take on a single ghost; the Busters must trap the ghost with no chance of escape, while the Ghost must evade capture and scare NPCs through noise and possession in order to fill a "haunt meter." The ghost has three rifts that act as respawn points at its disposal, and when all three are destroyed, the ghost's next trip into a trap will mark victory for the Busters.