The best part of any Call of Duty game's Zombies mode is how it facilitates panic. The longer you play the round-based horde mode, in which the undead stream toward you from all directions, the tougher it becomes, and before long, you're sprinting around the map, trying desperately to stay alive as crowds of corpses shamble after you. Your only chance is to stop and fire away to thin out the approaching wave of undeath, hoping you don't run into any huge mutated monstrosity while your back is turned. Black Ops 6 is great at these moments.

Zombies in Black Ops 6 is a return to the best-known and best-enjoyed form of the four-player cooperative mode, which developer Treyarch originated back in Call of Duty: World at War and has been iterating on ever since. Gone is the approach from last year's Modern Warfare 3, a messy take that bolted Zombies mechanics onto elements of CoD's battle royale game, Warzone. What Black Ops 6 offers feels like classic Zombies but enhanced, with a bunch of small elements old and new added together to build out the experience in fun, engaging, and challenging ways.

The most notable change, and the one that works best with Zombies, is Omni-movement, Black Ops 6's adjustment to how you get around in the game. Omni-movement lets you move at the same speed in any direction, including sprinting, diving, and sliding, so you're able to change direction on a dime without losing momentum. It's a great addition to Zombies, where you will inevitably find yourself kiting a horde around the map as you fight to stay alive, only to suddenly realize that the path you're backpedaling down isn't as clear as you thought.

There's an argument to be made that speed is what makes Call of Duty multiplayer feel so good. As a franchise, the CoD games are great about getting you into the action as quickly as possible. When you shoot opponents, they tend to go down fast; when you die, you can be back in the fight in about a second. With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Treyarch leans into the speed of the franchise in just about every respect, starting with some meaningful adjustments to movement systems and ending with map designs that make sure you're never far from your next hail of bullets. Most of the time, those fast and intense battles are a lot of fun--but the design changes also result in Black Ops 6 feeling limited in the kinds of fights you're likely to face.

The major adjustment Black Ops 6 brings to the series is the Omni-movement system, and at least in terms of how the game feels to play, it's an excellent one. Omni-movement does away with the pesky natural limitations of a pair of human legs. You can run, sprint, slide, and dive in any direction, regardless of where you're facing or where your momentum would take you. It's kind of akin to the freedom a tank turret has from the vehicle beneath it, able to turn in any direction to address threats, but much faster and much cooler.

Omni-movement creates a really high degree of fluidity. The ability to move at full speed in any direction at any time makes it easy to quickly navigate maps and turn to address threats. The game never holds you back when it comes to movement, and paired with how fast you might gun down an enemy if you react quickly enough, or the speed with which they can shut you down, Omni-movement is an excellent improvement to your overall reactivity. This is a game that's about twitch reactions and sharp aim, and Omni-movement amplifies that twitchiness by giving you more freedom of motion in all cases.

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.