Cygames has been building the Granblue Fantasy series for a decade, first with a mobile gacha-style action-RPG, then with spin-offs ranging from an anime series to a pair of 2D fighting games. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a return to those RPG roots that attempts to retell the original story to a new audience. For the most part, the game succeeds by trimming the tale into a lean, roughly 20-hour experience, but the transition is not without its stumbles.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink follows The Captain--either Gran (male) or Djeeta (female), depending on your choice--who is the leader of a group of skybound adventurers looking for the island of Estalucia. Captain is linked via life force to Lyria, a girl with the ability to commune with Primal Beasts, who are essentially the gods of the world.

The two travel with a band of warriors, each with backstories that can be explored throughout the game. There are five constant companions: Katalina is Lyria's sworn protector, Io is the resident mage, Rackam helms the Grandcypher airship, Eugen is a former mercenary turned good guy, and Rosetta is the mysterious femme fatale. You can add more members to the party, but while they can spice up battle plans through new party compositions, they don't have as much impact on the overall story as the core group.

The tightrope to walk when writing a review is assessing a game for what it is, not what you wished it would be. Though some wished Rocksteady would make a game more like its Batman Arkham series, it's not fair to critique Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League for being something other than that. Instead, one must examine it for what it is: a game-as-a-service looter shooter applied to an all-star roster of DC Comics heroes and villains. You zip about a city, shoot aliens, get gear, and repeat. And, as it turns out, that game isn't very good.

In Suicide Squad, teams of one to four players step into the boots of DC Comics' wise-cracking villains Harley Quinn, Deadshot, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang. Designed in a similar vein as Crystal Dynamics' Avengers and WB Montreal's Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad is an open-world game littered with proper nouns like Afflictions, Boosts, and Shield Harvesting, buried in colorful resources, and intensely focused on having players chase better and better loot such as guns, shields, and melee weapons as it (and the all-important endgame) goes on. The intent is to keep players invested for months to come, and the game isn't shy about that.

Suicide Squad's premise--in which the titular foursome must battle the typical good guys as they've been taken over by Brainiac--would've made a hell of a comic book, and though it should work as a game just as seamlessly given how well superhero fare can translate to games, it sometimes struggles to do so given how it bizarrely moves past would-be major events with the spectacle of an office party.

Content warning: This review discusses Silent Hill: The Short Message's story, which includes references to self-harm.

As a lifelong horror fan and longtime horror critic, I didn't expect to review a free Silent Hill game that launched, PT-style, just a few minutes after it was revealed. And I certainly didn't expect it to be as forgettable as it is. After more than a decade away from consoles, Silent Hill: The Short Message revives the series as the first of several games over the next few years. I sincerely hope future installments in the franchise can rekindle the long-absent magic because The Short Message doesn’t do that. In more ways than one, it's not the playable teaser Silent Hill fans hoped for.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is a first-person horror game built on the idea of a time loop in which its tormented main character is trapped. If that sounds familiar, wait until you play it. The game is blatantly inspired by PT (or "Playable Teaser"), Hideo Kojima's guerrilla demo for the never-released Silent Hill title he was once working on. The Short Message is not Konami running back PT's story without its director. It's a brand-new entry into the series meant to be something of a jumping-on point for players uninitiated with the previously hibernating horror series. It's neither tied to any past entry, nor a teaser for a future installment.