When Kirby Air Riders was announced earlier this year, I was a bit confused. As much as I love the 2003 original, two Nintendo kart racing games in the same year felt odd--a fact that even game director Masahiro Sakurai candidly pointed out in a Nintendo Direct. It's especially strange given how intentional Nintendo has been with its steady stream of Switch 2 first-party releases. However, to reduce Kirby Air Riders to another kart racer feels disingenuous. Yes, racing is at the center of the experience, but what makes Kirby Air Riders stand out is how it bends its foundational mechanics to create new game modes and refine older ones. The result is a terrific sequel packed with clever ideas, fun challenges, and a lot of charm.

Mechanically, Kirby Air Riders is simple. You accelerate automatically, so aside from steering your racing machine left and right, there are two inputs: Boost Charge and Special. Boost Charge is essentially a brake that charges a brief speed boost. When released, your machine launches forward. If timed around a corner, Boost Charge functions like drifting in Mario Kart. Meanwhile, Special unleashes an attack or ability unique to your rider. Aside from the Quick Spin, which can be performed by waggling the control stick, you can inhale enemies on the track to obtain copy abilities. These are either used automatically or tied to the same input as your Boost Charge.

This two-button scheme makes Kirby Air Riders easy to pick up, but it could have benefitted from using one more input. Because inhaling enemies and activating copy abilities are bound to the same button as Boost Charge, firing off attacks can slow down your machine if you don't tap the Boost Charge input quick enough. While a tad annoying at first, this shortcoming is easy enough to overcome with practice.

Dispatch feels like it harkens back to the early 2010s--a time when Telltale Games was creating incredible episodic adventure games inspired by graphic novels, superhero stories were beginning to fill to the brim with quips to counterbalance the angst of the genre in the 2000s, and office-based TV comedies were everywhere. If not for snippets of gameplay, Dispatch would simply be a great TV show that I would want to tune into every week. It sometimes feels like it skews a little bit too much toward its TV show inspirations, but superb writing and voice acting maintains investment in this character-driven drama and makes for a story I want to replay.

In Dispatch, you play as Robert Robertson III, aka Mecha Man. Once a prominent hero without superpowers who had to rely on piloting a mechsuit to stop monstrous supervillains, Robert finds his life adrift after his suit is damaged beyond repair. He's approached by Blonde Blazer, a famous hero-for-hire, who offers him a job as a dispatcher--someone who directs and assists a team of paid heroes. The catch: Robert's assigned group of misfits is entirely composed of former supervillains, and their crass attitudes, explosive tempers, and lack of camaraderie make them a poor team and ill-suited for hero work.

It's a stellar set-up, made even stronger by an incredible cast of varied characters. While trailers and advertisements offered an initial impression of Robert being your typical washed-up hero defined by dour sarcasm, the character is a remarkably refreshing take for a protagonist in a superhero story. Yes, he's depressed and often uses humor to deflect, but he has an earnest desire to help people and continue being a force for good. He doesn't view the supervillains under his command as a hindrance, but a mission: He'll mentor the roster into a group of heroes even greater than he was because it's best for the city and for the former villains' lives.

Editor's note: Given the nature of Call of Duty games and the way the audience plays them, this review is split up into multiple components, each covering a specific aspect of Black Ops 7 with a score relevant to it. Alongside this, there is an overall score for the game at the bottom of this review. Alongside the campaign, this review will be updated with sections Zombies.

Black Ops 7 Campaign Review - New But The Same

The Call of Duty: Black Ops games lean into fantasy and often surprise with a mind-bending narrative, and the Black Ops 7 campaign is no exception. It's themed around the enemy using fear as a weapon, and you're dropped into a storyline filled with hallucinations of monsters, trippy locations, and bizarre scenarios. This is a specific flavor of Call of Duty story that only developer Treyarch has shown the capacity to tell, and despite a few stumbles, the Black Ops 7 campaign does enough to leverage the potential of its more psychological narratives, while also moving the satisfying shooter gameplay into a new framework.

Confusingly enough, Black Ops 7 takes place over 40 years after the events of last year's Black Ops 6 and 10 years following the events of Black Ops 2. The story is set in 2035 as a direct sequel to Black Ops 2, and it brings back David Mason from that game as the main protagonist. In Black Ops 7, you see the effects of Black Ops 2's canonical ending, where Mason kills villain Raul Menendez and an uprising occurs. The world is now ravaged by violent conflict and psychological warfare, and The Guild, a global tech corporation, has stepped in to "protect" humanity from the chaos created by Menendez's followers. But uh-oh: Menendez seemingly returns despite his apparent death.

Metroid Prime meets PowerWash Simulator is the elevator pitch for Ambrosia Sky: Act One. Set aboard a derelict space colony within the rings of Saturn, you'll explore the apartments, science labs, and interstellar farms of this once-thriving community, reading notes, examining corpses, and using a tether to navigate unstable gravity fields. Equipped with a versatile chemical sprayer, you'll also cleanse the colony of the deadly fungi contaminating its every nook and cranny--a first-person cleaning process that's both cathartic and urgent, as you cycle through nozzle types and chemical agents to fight back against a hostile ecosystem by clearing it away.

As a sci-fi cleaning game, Ambrosia Sky is relatively novel. Yet developer Soft Rains goes one step further by taking you on a melancholic and sentimental journey about death. Specifically, dying alone in the far reaches of our solar system.

Playing as a woman named Dalia, you assume dual roles as both a field scientist and a space-faring undertaker known as a Scarab. When you're not hosing down fungus and piecing together what happened before everything went to hell, you're collecting biological samples from the dead and laying them to rest. "Where catastrophe strikes, Scarabs go," is the mystical group's unofficial motto. Their mission is to sequence the DNA of the recently deceased and find a way to reverse cellular decay in humans, all in pursuit of achieving immortality. But this lofty ambition takes a back seat to Dalia's personal conflict as she's forced to confront her past.

As many video game studios continue to leverage technology in the pursuit of photorealism, developers Enhance and Monstars Inc. understand that technology can also be used in the pursuit of emotional impact. Their new game, Lumines Arise, exposes you to a display of perpetual creativity, where every inch of the screen is bathed in a cascade of visual effects that mesmerize you. It takes the foundation of a series that started back in 2004 and turns it on its head by giving it the Tetris Effect treatment, presenting a sensorial experience that's equally enchanting and confident.

Lumines has been largely dormant for the past decade. But while Arise is a synesthesia-fueled sequel, the core conceit of this popular series is largely unchanged. You're still presented with a playfield divided into a grid, in which 2x2 blocks descend from above. Each of those blocks is composed of four squares, and each of those squares is painted with one of two colors or patterns. The goal is to drop the blocks so that squares of the same pattern touch each other, combining them into larger squares of the same type--the bigger the combined square, the more points you earn.

All the while, a timeline--which is represented by a vertical line that moves from left to right with the tempo of the music--will sweep away the combined squares when it comes into contact with them. Therefore, the key is to make squares of a single type so the timeline will remove them and prevent the playfield from becoming full, which is an instant game over, while also attempting to make as many square combos as possible, either by enlarging existing ones or creating several at once. Your squares only score when the timeline sweeps through, so it's a race against the clock to make the biggest combos you can for each pass.