Personal Pick(Image credit: Future)In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.We try pretty hard to avoid lazily dropping cliches into our writing here at PC Gamer, which puts me in an awkward position as I sit down to pitch to you why a remaster, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, is one of the best games of 2025, despite mostly being a fresh Unreal Engine 5 skin for a game that came out in 2008. So if I must sin, I may as well see just how many forbidden phrases from the style guide I can use at once.2025’s brand new Ninja Gaiden 4, despite being a visceral action romp with more bloody decapitations than you can shake a stick at, is ultimately a bit of a mixed bag. At its core is a pulse-pounding combat system that echoes the greats of yesteryear, but it’s rough around the edges. Fans of the genre will still find a lot to like, but at the end of the day it’s not without flaws. If you turn off your brain you’ll get a kick out of PlatinumGames’ no-holds-barred attempt to make Ninja Gaiden combat on crack, but it never lives up to the heights of the esteemed franchise.In other words: They really don’t make ’em…
