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.

What happens when you take a bunch of teenagers, strand them alone in the middle of the woods, and leave them with naught but a foreboding warning that's just begging to be ignored? "Nothing good," is the answer, but that's exactly why we're here. This is the devilishly appealing setup for The Quarry, Supermassive Games' spiritual successor to Until Dawn. After dabbling in shorter stories with The Dark Pictures Anthology series, The Quarry sees the studio return to its roots with a new 10-hour horror game that sticks closely to the well-received formula that made Until Dawn such a rousing success.

After a mysterious and unsettling prologue, The Quarry's first act begins on the last day of summer camp. With all of the kids sent home, only the counselors and the camp's owner remain. He's anxious for everyone to leave as quickly as possible, which immediately throws up a few red flags, but when their minivan fails to start, the counselors are forced to spend another night together. Being teenagers, they come up with the grand idea to throw one last party before heading home in the morning. No harm, no foul, right? Obviously, things don't quite go to plan--and not just because booze is hard to come by--so you'll spend the evening switching between control of all nine counselors as they attempt to survive the night against numerous unforeseen threats.

Delving into any more detail would infringe on spoiler territory, and part of The Quarry's charm comes from uncovering its enticing mysteries. There are some fairly obvious hints early on that should give you a good idea of what you'll be up against, but things aren't always as they seem, and the revelations keep unfolding right up until its final moments.

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.

It's easy to fall in love with the idea of Soundfall. Its action role-playing gameplay marries concepts from twin-stick shooters and rhythm games, challenging you to stick with the beat as you attack enemies while dodging their blows. It's a conceit that has been experimented with in multiple other games, sometimes to great effect. But those other successes manage to enhance the mechanic beyond its initial charm, which isn't something Soundfall ever quite replicates in its extensive campaign.

Everything in Soundfall moves to the beat of the song playing in the background. All your actions require you to time them according to the beat to be effective, whether that's your standard ranged attacks, up-close melee swipes, or damage-dodging dashes. Enemies are similarly tied to the same constraints. Their attack patterns don't change with the beat, but the speed of them does. The build-up time associated with the shot of a sniper will be faster or slower based on the song playing, for example, while the speed of environmental hazards is similarly affected.

Playing in tune with Soundfall’s music initially feels exhilarating. It doesn’t take long to match up to the new rhythm presented by a new song, but it still feels satisfying to settle in and fire off hundreds of perfectly timed attacks and execute precise dodges. Enemy variety is sparse at first, but there’s a decent number of combinations that keep most skirmishes engaging enough, and certainly challenging enough to encourage you to keep hitting well-timed attacks to do the most damage you can. It’s enough of a hook that it makes the otherwise routine isometric action fun, but also what quickly becomes monotomous as Soundfall fails to do anything new with it beyond the initial rush.

When the Hatsune Miku voice software debuted back in 2007, few could have guessed the tremendous impact it would have. The concept of a virtual singer--one whose songs were almost entirely user-generated--was a bizarre and intriguing novelty. 15 years later, Miku and her friends have endured, solidifying their reputations as pioneers across music, the internet, and gaming cultures. Sega's Hatsune Miku: Project Diva serves as a powerful testament to the aquamarine-haired songstress' lasting legacy, and Project Diva Megamix+ is a phenomenal reminder of Miku's musical significance.

Like previous games in the series, Project Diva Megamix+ is a rhythm game built around the popular Japanese "virtual singer" characters of Hatsune Miku, the Kagamine Rin and Len duo, Megurine Luka, Meiko, and Kaito. Each game in the series offers a selection of songs sourced from independent creators who've made songs using these characters. Most of these tracks also feature an elaborately choreographed, real-time music video that plays in the background, which can be customized with costumes and accessories for the characters you earn with in-game currency.

Megamix+ is an enhanced port of 2020's Hatsune Miku Project Diva Megamix for Switch, which itself was a “best-of” compilation based on the arcade and PS4 game Hatsune Miku Project Diva Future Tone. That might sound a little confusing if you're not familiar with the series chronology, but the important thing is that it means that Megamix+ has no shortage of music. From the moment you boot the game, over 100 tracks--including many that were DLC-only on the Switch version--are ready to play. There's also optional paid DLC to add most of the songs from PS4/arcade Future Tone that didn't make it into the Switch game, and with up to five uniquely charted difficulty levels available for each song, you get a huge amount of bang for your buck, regardless of if you spring for the DLC.