Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, PS5/XBox Series/PC)
I had my doubts about the Resident Evil 4 remake from the get-go, mostly because it felt totally unnecessary - 2005's Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece of design, with immaculately optimized mechanics, tight controls and a carefully-crafted rhythm to its action that kept the gameplay manageable even during the most intense moments, and it still holds up wonderfully today. Guess what the remake did away with? If you guessed "all of the above", then you're correct! The movement is slower and clunkier, aiming is pointlessly made more "realistic" as you have to point in the same direction and stay still for a second to tighten the reticle - in an intense action game, I'd like to reiterate - and enemies come at you constantly from every angle (even spawning just out of your field of view to get cheap hits in) so you can never take any time to actually line up your shots. Their answer to all of this was to shoehorn in a parry mechanic where you can hit L1 to parry most melee attacks and drive your attacker back a bit, but the prompt is stuck way down in the corner on the tiny HUD so you'll never see it in time anyway. Then you jam in lameForspoken (Luminous Productions, PS5/PC)

Starfield (Bethesda Softworks, XBox Series/PC)
Bethesda has been trapped in a rut of basically making the same game over and over since 2006 - vast, open, pretty to look at, but ultimately shallow, with forgettable main questlines and characters and dungeons and battles that start to feel very samey after a while. I'd hoped Starfield - their first new IP in 25 years - would be their big chance to step up and really break the mold, but... Nope, not really, it's just the same overall feel again, with a few light elements of Starflight, No Man's Sky and Elite sprinkled on top. In fact they've actually regressed to the Elder Scrolls 1 school of map design in that if you just go down and wander you'll never encounter anything other than blank terrain; you have to learn where something is via a book or quest order and then fast travel straight to it, and even then its usually just another samey building or space station full of carbon-copy mooks to take out. They've taken all the joy out of exploring; a killing blow to any open world RPG, but especially so when you're talking about a game set in the final frontier. The fact that it came out the same year as several other amazing big-name RPGs like Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate III and Sea of Stars also only makes its shortcomings all the more apparent and makes it feel mediocre and uninspired by comparison. Basically, Starfield is just another Bethesda game - safe and generic enough that casual fans and modders will get a kick out of it, but those searching for something deeper and more engaging on a mental and emotional level will forget about pretty quickly.