You wouldn't know just from looking at it--with its vivid, comic book-esque art style and irreverent punk-rock tone--but Redacted (officially styled as [REDACTED]) actually takes place in the same sci-fi universe as 2022's The Callisto Protocol. While that was a third-person survival-horror game trying to capture the same magic that Dead Space bottled up over a decade and a half ago, Striking Distance Studios has taken a wildly different approach with this spin-off, repurposing various elements from its debut game to create an isometric roguelike dungeon crawler.

It's a drastic shift for the young series, ditching the grisly melodrama and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em combat of The Callisto Protocol by pivoting to referential humor and twin-stick shooting. It still feels immediately familiar thanks to how loudly it wears its Hades inspiration on its sleeve--even the title is seemingly a nod to Supergiant Games' seminal roguelike. This isn't inherently negative, and Redacted has some impactful ideas of its own. Yet, looking past the game's derivative design can often be difficult when it struggles to reach the same heights as its primary influence.

Much like The Callisto Protocol, Redacted takes place within the icey, industrial walls of Black Iron Prison. With mutated biophages running amok--turning prisoners and staff into hostile, zombie-like creatures--you're cast as a modest prison guard attempting to reach the penitentiary's final escape pod and get the hell out of dodge. Unfortunately for you, other survivors--made up of coworkers and inmates called Rivals--are trying to do the same thing, forcing you into conflict with biophages and humans alike.

It's hard to believe it's been nearly a decade since the last mainline Batman Arkham game. Since then, we've seen several Arkham-adjacent projects come out, only to feel hamstrung or otherwise lacking. 2016's Batman Arkham VR was a neat tech demo, but it encompassed only the series' investigative elements. Both traditional Arkham studios, Rocksteady and WB Montreal, launched Batman-esque co-op games in recent years, but each struggled for several, sometimes similar reasons. Batman: Arkham Shadow stops the tailspin by authentically recapturing the essence of the Arkham series in ways other recent Batmanverse games disappointingly and intentionally avoided, making this the best Batman game since Arkham Knight, even if it doesn't soar to the same heights as the series' finest moments.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a VR-only, direct sequel to Arkham Origins, taking place roughly a year later. That means this version of Batman--once again played by Roger Craig Smith doing a solid Kevin Conroy impression--is still relatively untested and ornery. He's learning how to become the unflappable Batman we typically know him to be, so his temper can still get the best of him, and his uncanny ability to stay 10 steps ahead of his enemies isn't guaranteed. Played in first-person, you'll explore some enclosed sections of Gotham before ultimately landing in Blackgate Prison for the bulk of the game, giving this game a structure very much like the metroidvania-style design of 2009's Arkham Asylum.

The Dark Knight's mission is to identify and stop The Rat King--a new enemy in the Batman mythology--who's thought to be hiding out in the prison just days before his catastrophic strike on Gotham unfolds. This sees Shadow's story unfold over the course of an in-game week rather than the usual overnight structure of Arkham plots, and sometimes, it shows.

Each new entry in the Dragon Age series is always transformative, so it's not uncommon for a fan to really love one of the entries but feel lukewarm about another. 2009's Origins played like a spiritual successor to 1998's Baldur's Gate, while its 2011 sequel took the series in a more third-person-action-game direction, and then 2014's Inquisition opted for gameplay that felt like a single-player MMO. If anything, the one constant to a Dragon Age game is that you can expect that each new game will be different from the last. During my first playthrough, Dragon Age: The Veilguard looked like it was not going to surpass my enjoyment of past games, existing as no more than a safe return to form for developer BioWare instead of a bold step forward for the franchise. But after dozens of hours with the game, I decided to try something different and now The Veilguard is inching its way into my good graces, something I didn't think was going to happen for my Inquisition-loving heart.

The Veilguard leans into real-time action-based combat to push the Dragon Age formula into feeling more akin to something like Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem, while utilizing a system of setups and detonations to pull off explosive combos. However, whereas Andromeda or Anthem have the benefit of being shooters--often leaving a comfortable distance between friend and foe to encourage strategic combinations of weapon attacks and powers--The Veilguard shortens that distance and leans into melee-focused combat by having its enemies swarm you and your party, pulling you and your allies into the thick of magical explosions and swinging swords.

Early on, this is easy enough to parse, but as the story goes on, the enemies get both more numerous and hardy. Your own attacks become grander and more explosive in response, leading to the screen filling with visual clutter. As a result, it can be frustratingly tricky to see the indicator for parries, and oftentimes dulls the combat to a repetitive slog of flinging magical explosions, a step down from the far more satisfyingly strategic combat of past BioWare games and other modern-day RPGs. I opted to play as a mage, my traditional go-to for Dragon Age, and was consistently bummed by how mindless and spammy the combat felt, forcing me to rely on the pause-and-play mechanic just to get by.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 remains my favorite of developer Treyarch's contributions to the long-running and sometimes formulaic shooter franchise, because it's the one that takes the most wild swings. It mixes traditional Call of Duty linear levels with a top-down, real-time-strategy-like experience that lets you move troops around the battlefield and then zoom down like a gunslinging ghost to possess any one of them and do the fighting yourself. It also logs your choices, your successes, and your failures, and adjusts its convoluted branching narrative to account for them.

The spirit of Black Ops 2 is alive in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and not just because it actually serves as a semi-prequel-sequel to that 12-year-old game. Black Ops 6 infuses the standard Call of Duty formula with level designs and mission ideas that challenge the usual Call of Duty framework in much the same way. It's not as brazen as Black Ops 2 was--that game was admirable for going all-out, but not all of its ideas were home runs in execution--and there's no branching narrative or major departure from Call of Duty gameplay in Black Ops 6. Instead, Treyarch works in creative but familiar design additions that break up and expand on its campaign, making for an experience that maintains the franchise's cinematic, high-yield explosiveness, while also providing numerous opportunities to feel like a super spy and super soldier.

There's a lot of story going on in Black Ops 6, but as is usually the case in the franchise, it's at once both pretty simple and weirdly complex. The gist is that, as part of a covert mission during Operation: Desert Storm, your CIA operative player character--a silent protagonist named Case--and his teammates Marshall and Harrow run into Russell Adler from Black Ops: Cold War. From Adler, you learn about The Pantheon, a paramilitary organization full of American ex-soldiers and others, operating secretly inside the CIA but with their own evil agenda. The rest of the game is about teaming up with Marshall, Adler, and Black Ops mainstay Frank Woods, recruiting a couple spies, and trying to figure out who The Pantheon is and how to stop them. It's all standard fare for a game like this.

A Quiet Place has quickly grown into one of the better horror franchises of the past decade. Three movies deep, the creature features have explored a fascinating world in which blind aliens use a highly keen sense of hearing to hunt humans desperate not to make a single peep. Translating that incredibly slow and silent story universe to a video game makes for a novel project, and I can see why A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead has launched so quietly itself. It's a strange mission to assign players, but it's one I'm glad to have experienced--despite a host of issues.

A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead is a first-person stealth-horror game starring a cast of characters new to the series but similarly seeking to find safety from the swarm of aliens who have commandeered Earth by force. As Alex--an asthmatic college-aged woman with a boyfriend, a dad, and a range of other perpetually silent allies--players embark on a road trip that will test her ability to crouch-walk pretty much forever.

That design direction could easily make for a frustrating video game. In games that allow me to upgrade my crouched movement speed, I've always unlocked it as soon as I can--I like stealth games a lot and so I tend to want to improve that facet of such a game. So it's notable to me that The Road Ahead doesn't just demand you crouch-walk through almost every moment of its 7-to-10-hour story, but forces you to do it very slowly, usually barely pushing on the left stick, because the aliens in the game behave unpredictably like Alien: Isolation's Xenomorph and tend to hear even a crouched footstep performed at full speed.