With each new release from Dynasty Warriors developer Omega Force, the word "Warriors" gets further away from the word "Dynasty". The Musou action genre it created, where you play as an ultra powerful soldier against an army of hundreds, is borrowing more and more from the franchises it licenses story and characters from. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity looked and even sometimes felt like Breath of the Wild. Persona 5 Strikers (which lacks "Warriors" in the title, but is a Musou game) played like an extension of Persona 5, but with a different combat style. This trend among Omega Force’s games is a positive one, as you can only press the Y button so many times before you want to do something different. Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes offers perhaps the most opportunity to entertain yourself outside of comboing through thousands of enemies that the studio has released yet thanks to its Fire Emblem: Three Houses-inspired content between missions. The result is a better-paced, more interesting experience than previous Omega Force games, but one that is still very much a Musou game.

Where the original Fire Emblem Warriors presented an ultimately unfulfilled opportunity to meet and play with the larger history of Fire Emblem characters, Three Hopes reigns in the focus and is essentially a pseudo-sequel/alternate telling of Three Houses that is an action game instead of a tactics RPG. You won’t run into characters like Roy or Marth, but you do have the choice to join Edelgard’s Black Eagles, Prince Dimitri’s Blue Lions, or--the correct choice--Claude’s Golden Deers. If you’ve played Three Houses, seeing these characters and agonizing over the choice again is nice, but this time you’re playing as a new character named Shez, whose appearance throws the timeline out of sync and forces former Three Houses protagonist Byleth into the antagonist role. The departure gives an illuminating new look at that story, allowing you to interact with familiar characters under new circumstances. This change also made me admire Byleth in a new way, as she destroyed me the first time I met her, and proved to be a worthy challenge on nearly every subsequent rematch.

Before and after combat encounters is where Three Hopes is the closest to Three Houses and doesn’t feel like a typical Musou game. Between pressing Y arguably too much, you visit base camp, where you can upgrade facilities, train, speak with your soldiers, make a meal, or even take care of horses. I enjoyed the reprieve from the repetitive combat and though I didn’t want to hear from every character between battles (and often elected not to), the opportunity to get to know the cast of characters, improve all the interpersonal relationships, and make them stronger during combat, made me eager to return to base camp. I even enjoyed the strangeness of going on the occasional date between slaughtering opposing troops. Base camp doesn’t change visually as a result of upgrades, which is disappointing, but leveling up and improving the facilities is rewarding for the bonuses they provide, like faster training or stores being able to carry more supplies.

There is little to question that Diablo Immortal is a big and richly produced Diablo entry. It looks great, it evolves the formula of action role-playing introduced in Diablo III and matches it acutely to the hardware it was originally designed for, and it strikes a good balance of making you feel powerful while also enticing you to continue hunting down better loot. In that sense, Diablo Immortal is just another good Diablo game, but it's also one that can't always be played with the same obsessive cadence as prior titles given the number of barriers that can routinely force some time away from it.

The story takes place between Diablo II and III, with familiar faces popping up to provide some thin context for events that have transpired by the time you arrive in Tristram at the start of the last core title. Deckard Cain is back (why wouldn't he be?) and so is a new evil that is threatening to use shards of the same Worldstone to wreak havoc across the lands. Story conversations are fully voiced, which makes Immortal feel as premium as previous Diablo titles on PC. There's really nothing here that suggests it's anything less than that either, with large open spaces for you to explore and numerous side quests to undertake as you progress the story.

What is different is obviously where you'll be playing. Diablo Immortal was designed for smartphones, and it's unsurprising then that it plays best on them, too. The touch controls employ the familiar digital analog stick on the left side of the screen, while the right features a cluster of buttons for your various abilities. You have a single main attack along with four equippable skills to choose from, with a fifth ultimate ability button appearing once you have access to it. It's simple and well-spaced out, and I never found myself accidentally pressing any skills I didn't want to. You can move and have attacks target enemies automatically, which simplifies your focus further, but also helps you accurately aim certain skills that require it. With my Necromancer, I often need to choose the area in which I want to explode a bunch of corpses, which is easily done by just holding down the skill in question and rotating my finger to position it. In a chaotic fight where I needed to pull this off fast, the accuracy could be a little wonky, but these moments were mostly fleeting.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is fueled by the power of nostalgia and (presumably) dozens upon dozens of slices of New York pizza. 1992's Turtles in Time is one of the most beloved Super Nintendo games of all time, arriving at a time when the Heroes in a Half-Shell were at the peak of their popularity. It's clear that the beat-'em-up connoisseurs at developer Tribute Games have a deep reverence for both that game and the Turtles of the late '80s and early '90s, because Shredder's Revenge is essentially a sequel 30 years in the making. It faithfully re-captures what made Turtles in Time such a cherished brawler, all while introducing a few new ideas to freshen up the classic 16-bit gameplay for a modern audience.

If you're a fan of Turtles in Time, you'll feel right at home as soon as Shredder's Revenge begins. The opening cutscene sees the anthropomorphic brothers gathered around an old CRT TV watching a news report that's interrupted when a few of their notorious adversaries attack the Statue of Liberty. It's not exactly the same as Turtles in Time's opening, but it's very close. Once you hop into the first level, this feeling of familiarity doesn't wear off. The level introductions feature the same silhouette of the boss you'll be facing, and if you're playing as either Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, or Michelangelo, you'll notice that their abilities and combos have been faithfully adapted from their adventure in '92. Chaining together attacks is more fluid than it once was, but you can still perform a plethora of recognizable moves, from barreling enemies over with a running shoulder charge to canceling a dodge in order to launch into a slide kick. You can even grab Foot soldiers and toss them right at the camera.

Playing Shredder's Revenge feels like playing Turtles in Time--or, at least, how I remember it in my mind's eye--but there's still fun to be had even if you don't possess any of that potent nostalgia. It's still very much inspired by the beat-'em-ups of the era--including the earlier Turtles games released for the NES--with its fast, arcade-style action seeing enemies arrive on screen just as quickly as they're vanquished. There's a ton of enemy variety, too, which often forces you to diversify your offense to get behind a shielded foe or dispatch a flying nuisance. Defeating most of the bosses is a matter of learning their attack patterns and knowing when to dodge and when to inflict damage. A few of these end-of-level obstacles are more involved, though, such as the Rat King, who will jump out of harm's way and summon swarms of rats for you to evade. It's all relatively simple, but there's some depth beyond the surface with the likes of juggles and ground bounces, and the swift rhythm of the action is particularly satisfying.

Mario Strikers: Battle League may be the most mechanically dense Mario sports game I've played. The latest Mushroom Kingdom spin on soccer looks to take the sport seriously, allowing you to juggle passes, tackle, dodge, and cancel moves as the situation demands, even before factoring in its uniquely silly Mario twists. That makes for a high skill ceiling that could conceivably give the game a long lifespan, but its potential is held back by the fact that there just isn't all that much to do.

The mechanical complexity of the game is explained back-to-back-to-back in a dizzying set of tutorials. Rather than ease you in with a few basic lessons and then teach you some field skills and then progressively ramp up throughout practical games, Mario Strikers: Battle League asks if you'd like to do the tutorial, and then delivers you all of them in a row. Just as you're getting a handle on tackling and Hyper Shots, you start getting Expert-level lessons that teach advanced techniques like canceling a charged shot or the subtle differences between a free pass and a more powerful free pass. The mechanics themselves are complex so the hefty tutorials are understandable, but it can feel a little overwhelming when it's all dropped in your lap at once.

Once you enter into the game menu, single-player opportunities to test out your newfound soccer skills are sparse. You can take part in a Quick Match, the most basic of all sports game options, or you can play in a series of four-team, double-elimination tournaments called Cup Battles. That's it. There's no distinct career mode, progression ramp, or even alternate rule sets to mix things up. It's a remarkably anemic level of options, which makes the whole affair feel slightly unfinished. Mario Strikers has a great foundation, but there isn't much to do or see inside of it.

Roller Champions is an intriguing mixture of sports, strengthening the already-compelling baseline of roller derby by adding in elements of basketball and Mesoamerican ball game, ulama. This unique blend is a whole lot of fun, so it's a bit of a shame that it starts to feel so samey as quickly as it does.

In Roller Champions, players compete as teams of three, skating in a circular rink. Both teams fight over possession of a ball and then make as many consecutive laps as possible with it in hand, before then tossing it through a hoop to score points. If your team manages a full lap before scoring, you earn a single point, while two or three laps net you three or five points, respectively. If at any point the other team manages to get the ball away from you, it breaks the streak and you'll have to fight to get the ball back in order to break your opponent's streak and begin scoring again. The first team to reach five points (or have the most points after seven minutes) wins.

It's a straightforward premise, made more engaging and complex with the variety of moves at each player's disposal on both offense and defense, including multiple ways of tackling your opponents to the ground or passing the ball to a waiting teammate. Plus, there are the in-game physics to master, which dictate how a ball might roll or bounce depending on where and how hard you throw it.