There's been a veritable cornucopia of Dynasty Warriors spin-offs over the years, including anime adaptations like Gundam, Berserk, and One Piece and video game collaborations with Persona and Fire Emblem. The 2014 collab Hyrule Warriors and its sequel, Age of Calamity, are perhaps the most warmly received of them all, owing to their blend of Omega Force's overblown hack-and-slash action with The Legend of Zelda's iconic characters, locations, and enemies.

With Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, the two long-running series are more intertwined than ever, to the point where it feels more like a brand-new Zelda release than just another musou spin-off. It's not without its faults and is unlikely to convert anyone unconvinced by this style of game already, but Age of Imprisonment improves upon its predecessors in numerous ways.

The game's story is the most obvious aspect where the two series are aligned. Unlike Age of Calamity and its alternate timeline ideas, Age of Imprisonment is considered canon by Nintendo, expanding on the fragments of information shown in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to reveal the full extent of Hyrule's founding, Ganondorf's rise as the Demon King, and the subsequent Imprisonment War. If you've played Tears of the Kingdom, there aren't many surprises to be found here. Its most crucial story beats have already been covered, so part of the game involves revisiting these inciting incidents and exploring their aftermath.

Since releasing Atari 50 in 2022, Digital Eclipse has established itself as a champion for game preservation, thanks in large part to its "interactive documentary" approach. The Making of Karateka, Tetris Forever, and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story have all explored notable names and games of the past with great success. For its next project, the studio set its sights on the history behind one of the most famous properties in gaming: Mortal Kombat.

Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection is a loving tribute to the early years of the trailblazing fighting game franchise. Over 20 games from kombats past, across multiple formats, are expertly restored, all highlighted by a deep-dive documentary into the history of the series, as well as the studios, and the notable names responsible for them. And Digital Eclipse has once again set the bar for preservation, as this is a collection worthy of Mortal Kombat's legacy.

MK Legacy Collection immediately impresses with its game selection. Twenty-three Mortal Kombat games, including arcade, console, and handheld versions, are all included here, and they look and feel exactly as they did when they originally launched. All of the fighters, features, and modes are included, and a few even have some notable improvements.

When I reviewed Dragon Quest III HD last year, I talked a fair bit about what an important game it was to JRPGs as a whole and why its reissue was a big deal. One thing I didn't mention is part of why it had such a big impact: It was a massive improvement in scope, gameplay, and storytelling over the two preceding Dragon Quest titles. With DQIII HD's sales success and its chronological position as the first part of a story trilogy, Square Enix releasing a similar HD-2D remake of the first two titles made perfect sense.

And here we are now, with Dragon Quest I and II HD Remake--the other chapters in the Erdrick trilogy, now gussied up with Square Enix's lavish 2D-sprites-on-3D-backgrounds style of graphical presentation. Jumping into these games for the first time in well over two decades, I was surprised to see just how much effort went into "modernizing" them--not just in terms of mechanics, but also to build upon their basic "hero(es) take up arms against an evil force" narratives with more dialogue, setpieces, and story beats. Yet even with all of the enhancements, one game in this bundle clearly comes out as the superior adventure--but still not quite up to the heights of the previous release.

If you're at all familiar with Dragon Quest, you know what to expect here: classic fantasy JRPG adventures, packed with random-encounter turn-based combat, dungeon exploration, fetch quests, and vanquishing the forces of darkness with the light of heroism. Dragon Quest I is a strictly solo journey--it's just your brave little hero, going mano-a-mano with the enemy hordes--while DQII uses the series' now-traditional party system. Though the two games play similarly, having a party makes a world of difference in combat: extra meatshields and actions allow for distinct strategies to take shape, making for more dynamic and enjoyable fights.

If you don't know what The Backrooms are, you probably don't have kids of a certain age. Born as a more specific branch of the liminal-space genre, The Backrooms is the all-encompassing name for a horror lore bible of sorts that's been handcrafted by communities online over several years. Each inhuman monster and each unnerving location becomes a chapter of a horror universe that the internet built together. It's grown so big that it's spawned dozens of related games, an upcoming horror movie from A24, and what feels like an endless stream of YouTube content to watch. But through it all, Escape The Backrooms has remained one of the most popular portrayals of the fictional world, and now plays like a labyrinthine museum to one of the internet's favorite scary stories.

Escape The Backrooms is a first-person defenseless horror game for up to four players in co-op. It's been popular as a Steam Early Access title for a few years, but its 1.0 version has finally arrived. In Escape The Backrooms, you'll explore a great number of the internet-created pocket universes of the wider Backrooms lore. Each "room" of The Backrooms presents a different take on liminal horror. This includes the iconic yellow labyrinth that kicked off the entire subgenre, as well as other popular landing spots, like Level Fun, the Poolrooms, and the Grassrooms. One of the game's best feats is simply the number of locations it explores. By nature of being owned by, well, everyone in a sense, lore is played fast and loose. Escape The Backrooms does well in involving many of these different rooms, giving players a history lesson on its unsettling universe.

The gameplay loop is very simple. You'll explore each eerie, liminal space while seeking different means of exiting. Mechanically, you'll hardly do anything at all beyond waving a flashlight around and consuming found cartons of almond water to restore your ever-draining sanity meter. Sometimes, you'll need to solve environmental puzzles, like learning which playground slide you can safely head down (since most eject you in several bloody chunks). Occasionally, key items, including literal keys, must be found to progress, forcing you to repeatedly head off in search of semi-randomly placed quest items. In an early level, you'll need to rebuild a ladder to reach a key to the exit door, for example, while in another, you'll search for elevators in a darkened parking garage that would be totally empty if not for the roaming "skin-stealer" monster hidden in the shadows.

It's surprising that Plants Vs. Zombies hasn't attracted more imitators. The charming and intuitive strategy game helped make a name for PopCap and spawned a massive franchise including merch, comic books, and interestingly, more competitive team shooters than strategy games. But while it lends itself to comparisons to tower-defense games, its key mechanics are still basically singular to PvZ itself. Plants Vs. Zombies: Replanted brings a nicely modernized facelift to the original game, and while this remaster offers only a few new frills, the game itself is still one of a kind.

For those new to the series, or who have only played the Garden Warfare spin-offs, the core idea of Plants Vs. Zombies is deceptively simple. You're the owner of a house beset by a zombie apocalypse, and your only defense is an army of living plants. You collect sunlight to power your seeds, which you plant across five horizontal rows as zombies approach from the right side. You can plant Sunflowers to generate extra sunlight, and you're constantly juggling priorities as zombies approach from the other lanes. If they reach your plants, they'll chomp down on them and you'll have to replant them, so it's best to keep them from reaching that far at all. As the game continues, it constantly adds new wrinkles, like nighttime levels where you have less access to sunlight and need to rely on fungi, or a pool where you need to plant lilypads for your other offensive plants to sit on. This is alongside a steady stream of new zombie types that demand different configurations of plant defenses.

And the zombies themselves, in this case, are far from threatening. They're goofy and often even kind of cute, with cartoonish affectations like a propeller hat or a disco outfit to signify which type of zombie they are. A zombie with a cone or metal bucket on its head will take more hits before you can knock the cone off and finish it off, a football zombie has heavy defense and also charges more quickly at you, and so on.