There are few gaming experiences more engrossing, engaging, and satisfying than a quality strategy-RPG. They offer the joy of building up a little ragtag army, bit by bit, into a gang of storied warriors with precision-specialized skills; the tension of seeing what sort of wrenches the next combat stage will throw into the mix; the utter thrill of eking out a victory with a wild strategy--or having an army that works so well together that they lay waste to all before them. Unicorn Overlord, the latest collaboration between developer Vanillaware and publisher Atlus, seeks its place among strategy-RPG royals--and, despite a few small missteps, lays claim to an honorable spot among its peers.

In its narrative, Prince Alain was spirited off to a faraway island a decade ago as his mother, the queen, was deposed from her throne by the wicked tyrant General Valmore and the Zenoiran Empire. Now, the Empire has all but conquered the continent of Fevrith, and an older Alain sets out to reclaim his throne and liberate the populace from their oppressors, all while bolstering the ranks of his Resistance army. But a mystery lies at the heart of everything: How did the Zenoiran Empire conquer all of the kingdoms so easily? Is there a much darker power at play?

The visuals in Unicorn Overlord dazzle right from the opening cutscene, with Vanillaware's well-loved 2D art bringing a detailed fantasy realm to life. There are a great many characters and environments throughout so there's plenty of variety to the eye candy--but even if that hadn't been the case, it would be hard to draw your eyes away from the attractive character designs, exquisite backgrounds, and weighty battle animations that are there. Occasionally, things can get a bit cluttered and confusing--some parts of the UI are messy to navigate--but after a while, it becomes no big deal.

More than almost any other game from its era, Contra made its name on being brutally difficult: a legacy with an impact that can still be felt today. Even cultural touchstones like the Konami Code owe at least some of their fame to the Contra series--after all, half the reason we memorized that particular sequence of button presses was to get extra lives for our battle against the alien hordes. With Contra: Operation Galuga, WayForward had a peculiar challenge: Sand off the rough edges of the original Contra to make it tolerable to modern audiences without losing the mystique that owes so much to its absurd difficulty. Thanks to some smart improvements, it's found an enjoyable balance, although it's not enough to elevate Galuga to greatness.

This is a retelling of the first game, which means that once again you're Contra operatives Bill and Lance dispatched to the island of Galuga to get to the bottom of strange goings-on there. After a slightly too-wordy introduction in Story mode, you're dropped right into the run-and-gun action, and despite looking and feeling very similar to the first game, the differences will quickly become apparent to series veterans. To start, you have a double jump by default, as well as a dash maneuver that can be used on the ground or in mid-air. Together, these make you much more nimble at dodging enemy fire, allow more room for error when crossing chasms, and turn combat into a quicker, more acrobatic experience.

Despite borrowing the most iconic weapons from the first three games--the Machine Gun, Spread, Laser, Flame Thrower, Homing, and Crush weapons--your arsenal has gotten an upgrade, too. Each signifies a considerable power boost from your default gun by itself, but each can also be upgraded by stacking another weapon pick-up on top of it. Picking up another Homing power-up when you already have Homing equipped makes it a Homing Lv 2, for example. Sometimes this extends the range or breadth of the weapon, like in the case of the Spread and Flame Thrower, while other times it can change a weapon's behavior more significantly. An upgraded Laser will ricochet off targets, while the upgraded Crush changes the weapon from an explosive missile to a firearm that opens small black holes that do continuous damage. And in a welcome quality-of-life tweak, picking up a new weapon will automatically replace a blank weapon slot if you have one. I spent half the game manually switching out of habit before I realized that little nice-to-have.

I was a bit apprehensive before playing Disney Dreamlight Valley. Although I've been a huge fan of Disney's animated films since I was a kid, developer Gameloft is primarily known for developing mobile titles, some of which have egregious microtransaction systems, such as Disney Magic Kingdoms. After playing Disney Dreamlight Valley for roughly 30 hours, I realized that it wasn't microtransactions that I had to be concerned about, as there were no paywalls or progress-blocking instances that required me to pay cash. The more prevalent issues with the game were the extremely grindy progression system and restrictions coming from the real-time systems.

Disney Dreamlight Valley begins just as my character was whisked away into a magical fantasy kingdom. Approached by Merlin, it was revealed that a curse known as the Forgetting turned the once-whimsical land into a realm of despair and darkness. Merlin provides a tutorial through the basic mechanics such as removing obstacles called Night Roots and using tools like the pickaxe, shovel, and fishing pole.

At first, I was worried since regular tasks like mining ores with the pickaxe or removing clumps of roots quickly drained my character's stamina. My initial concerns were quickly assuaged, as stamina is regularly refilled whenever I leveled up, ate food, or spent just a few seconds in my character's home.

Poker has endured as a popular and immensely enjoyable card game because of how malleable it is. The purest form of poker is predominantly played in your hand, with you deciding on cards to discard and redraw in the hopes of creating a better hand than your opponents. Texas Hold'Em, by far the most popular variation on poker, eschews these rules by giving all players five shared cards on the table, and two cards in their hand to try and outwit other players with. A small change like this has a dramatic impact on how the game ultimately plays out, inviting the assumption that other small tweaks might have similar effects. Balatro operates directly in this space. It creates distinct scenarios through both deck building and randomization that force you to think about poker hands differently during short, captivating runs in its roguelite structure. It injects new life into the fundamental rules of poker without requiring any previous knowledge of the game, feeling deftly balanced for both newcomers and experts of the card game alike.

Balatro is deceptively straightforward. Each round you play features a blind, which here is a total score you need to beat in order to progress. Each card has its own chip value, while different poker hands add on multipliers to the total score you hand tallies to. Play better hands with better cards, and you'll progress from the small blind to the big blind and ultimately a boss blind before the ante is raised and you're challenged to repeat the process with more challenging totals to topple. You're limited to a certain number of hands you can play during each round, as well as a limited amount of discard opportunities that let you toss away cards you don't want to use. A handy glossary makes the action approachable even if you're unfamiliar with the basics of poker, and the means to progress through each round aren't fundamentally rooted in a deep understanding of the odd differences between each hand.

Knowing the odds of different poker hands and why you might want to pursue simple straights and flushes over the combination of the two will probably help initially in earlier rounds, but as you go on, Balatro exposes its random roguelite elements to great effect. Joker cards are Balatro's big modifiers, offering a suite of effects that can quickly define a build that will ultimately influence the theme of your run. The combination of a joker that adds multipliers for playing Club cards with another that rewards the use of only face cards (Kings, Queens, and Jacks) can turn otherwise simple flushes or straights into incredibly high-scoring hands--a strategy you may need to progress through more challenging blinds. Other jokers can be delightfully chaotic, like one that randomizes its multiplier each time you play a hand or another that consumes other joker cards and adds their value to its overall multiplier. The game quickly starts encouraging you to strategize around the jokers that you're given access to (each new one you purchase gets added to the pool of potential reappearances) and adjusting the hands you play around them in order to progress, making each run feel distinct in spite of the simple mechanics underpinning them.

The WWE 2K series has had a multi-year arc not unlike something you'd see watching WWE's shows on TV. Its 2020 installment was so broken, poorly received, and ultimately meme-ified that the team actually took a year off to fix its jobber-esque series--a rare sight in the world of annualized video games. But since then, it's been on the rise, getting pushed like a WWE superstar to the top of the card, and though WWE 2K24 doesn't yet finish the story, it seems like it's well on the path of cementing a new legacy for itself.

WWE 2K24 adds appreciable, albeit not revolutionary, improvements to last year's solid foundation across the board. The in-ring action is paramount, and WWE 2K24 thankfully builds on the already-excellent mechanics in that regard. There's more fluidity to chaining moves together, and it feels like, at any point in which your character has the upper hand, you can reliably emulate the escalation of a real-life match, with a deep assortment of move sets depending on where you are in the ring. An intuitive control scheme lets you set up a rival sitting atop the turnbuckle, staggered on the ropes, or lying on their back in the middle of the ring for an ankle lock with similar ease. The game simply always feels great to control.

Pairing those contextual attacks with a deep move set for every wrestler in which the left stick and face buttons combine to create excellent variety, 2K24 feels like it rolls out much of what made 2K23 already fun in my hands, but with a few new touches that I enjoy. This includes top-rope maneuvers onto a group of opponents rather than just one; Super Finishers, like Rhea Ripley's belt-winning Riptide from the second rope at last year's WrestleMania; and the ability to throw weapons. These are subtler changes than the complete overhaul the series received when it emerged from its darkest days a few years ago, but they're each welcome to the game and help further emulate the real-life product.