This sequel utterly fails to establish Homefront as a solid franchise. Skip it.

The best sign that Doom was doing something right came at the end of many of the game's firefights. Only when the driving music faded away and the "checkpoint reached" message appeared would I realize my entire body had been clenched up with the nonstop, adrenaline-soaked tension of it all for the last few minutes. I'll be damned if it didn't take me right back to playing Doom on that old 486 in my parents' living room decades ago. [Single-Player review]

While Uncharted 4 is a beautiful and thrilling way to pass the time, it feels like an insubstantial experience in the end. What will probably be Nathan Drake's final tale feels mostly slick and forgettable, lacking the strong character drama or plotting that can make other cinematic games stick with you long after they're completed. I doubt I'll be spending much time working over the events of Uncharted 4 in my head the way I have for games like Dishonored, Bioshock Infinite, or even Naughty Dog's own The Last of Us. That doesn't matter when you're in the middle of a thrilling firefight, but it becomes apparent quickly once those credits begin to roll.

This is one of the most intriguing "two-screen" games we've ever played, and while its potential to grow stale is worth exploring, that worry is easily eclipsed by the game's accessibility, flexibility, and party-friendly nature.

But by the time I got done with Star Fox Zero’s incredibly annoying final boss, roughly five hours after I first started the game, I found myself not all that eager to replay any of its levels a second time (though I did, for the sake of completeness). Instead, what I really felt the urge to do was replay Star Fox 64, which captured all the good parts of Star Fox Zero 20 years ago without any of the chaff that constantly gets in the way.

By the end, Ratchet and Clank (2016) isn't just a better-playing copy of a now-classic action game; it packs in enough surprises to keep a decade-plus fan like myself surprised. For that matter, "better-playing" doesn't do this remake justice. This is the best blend of shooting, hopping, and humor the series has struck yet. Whether that's enough to overcome origin story fatigue—or general Ratchet and Clank fatigue—is an open question.

It's 50 hours of arduous combat trials speckled with some of the best boss design this series has ever had. And just like so many times before, it's a battle of attrition I came to love.

Quantum Break’s story and visual prowess are reason enough to recommend this game to anyone looking for a rote shooter with a more-than-usual focus on compelling narrative. The best I can say about the action sequences is that they’re tolerable en route to uncovering the game’s core of science-fueled existential crises. So while I feel comfortable recommending this ultimately uneven adventure, in a gaming world where we’ve already played so many super-charged, inFamous-styled action games, I feel pretty disappointed by “just good enough" for QB's action portions.

Adr1ft is an easy game to get lost in, in multiple senses of the word. Floating around in circles, slowly trying every possible door, and keeping an eye out for life-giving air canisters is only interesting for so long, especially if you're used to games with more action. If you give yourself over to the desolation, though, you can reach a kind of Zen state where the gentle pulse of your EVA thrusters, the musical cues, and the sight of some stunning outer space architecture provide a break from a pedestrian world of Earthly troubles. Struggling for survival in the cold expanse of space has never been more relaxing.

Compared to other always-online games meant to draw users back time and again, Hitman is something quite novel: a game meant to be replayed and eventually exhausted. Sooner or later you'll run out of challenges, optional targets, and nooks and crannies to explore. More are on the way, sure, but eventually those too will dry up. It's a nice, alternate school of thought to games that build a continued connection on semi-random drops and repeated actions, rather than execution. How novel.

Describing The Division, much like playing it, feels a lot like compiling and checking off a series of lists. There’s a lot of stuff on those lists, for sure, but very little to actually do. What you do, overwhelmingly, is shoot things. Sometimes you’re shooting at napalm canisters, sometimes at rioters armed with baseball bats and hoodies. Sometimes you find them, and sometimes they come to you while defending whatever it was you activated by holding the X button. As a reward, your numbers — armor, DPS, ability power, etc. — go up in order to help you shoot things even better next time...It’s an old formula, and often a good one, but one that still feels strange in the context of a shooter (even in this post-Destiny world).

Stardew Valley is a sweet, well-made, and forward-thinking meditation on country life that borrows intelligently from games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and Zelda, without simply being a tired copy.

The Town of Light is an admirable exploration of mental health issues, and a disturbing horror experience to boot. Just don't expect to solve any puzzles or shoot things in the face with a shotgun.

The overall effect is a good simulation of what it must feel like to have super-speed and recalls some of Quicksilver's memorable scenes in recent X-men movies. But there are a few clever design choices to prevent your superpower from becoming super-overpowering in a gunfight.

Far Cry Primal is video game aspirin — numbing, and nondescript, but basically pleasant.

GW2 has a lot of value as an online video game to play with kids and kids-at-heart. But it might be even more valuable in a different way: as an anthropological document of what happens to a great studio like Popcap after a $1.3 billion buyout. As a result, GW2 is probably a lot more fascinating than anybody at EA ever intended it to be.

The game's 16 thoughtfully designed fighters are all unlocked and ready to trade blows the moment you boot it up. Their combat takes place within a smooth fighting engine worth recommending, too. The trouble is nearly every single thing currently surrounding that engine should be covered in those tacky, animated "under construction" GIFs.

The slight story also makes going back to the game that much easier. Without much overt plot to get in the way, there's less to chug through in the search of collectibles. These extras are mostly hidden behind optional side paths and puzzles. If you just want to play Unravel without worrying about the story, it's probably worth making the return trip. By the end, I was certainly engaged enough with the game to make that return trip.

For a game that takes place in such a wide-open wilderness, the actual story is almost claustrophobic in its quick pace and clipped storylines—a short story rather than a great American novel of rugged adventure in the remote mountain west. It's a shame, too, because by the time the game ended I was finally starting to be able to feel my way around Firewatch's unique landmarks and winding paths without relying on that map overly much.

A near-perfect sequel and a great strategy game. XCOM 2 has the style to match its systems’ substance, and it rightfully stakes a new claim to be the king of tactics games.

Bombshell isn't an aggressively terrible game. It's just aggressively mediocre for long enough that it starts to seem that way.

The Witness juggles the seemingly contrary concepts of precision and ambiguity in ways I've never seen a game, nor a book or play or film, ever do—and that, more than the beauty or the puzzles or the clever twists, makes it one of the most impressive video games I've ever seen.

A game at war with itself. The continuity from mission to mission encourages you to play in the most boring fashion possible, while the game's challenge and length never makes doing so necessary.

We admit that Tharsis lacks the key aspect that often makes dice-rolling board games so much easier to stomach: a way to include other friends' successes, failures, and diplomatic strides in the mix. Failure by luck always goes down smoother as a communal activity, after all. But we're not sure how well this game's design would adapt to multiplayer play. So long as you gird your single-player loins for that failing, you're in for the slickest board-game/craps-table hybrid to ever reach gamers' bloody, cannibalistic hands.

While it's not new for indie and experimental games take on ambitious, emotional concepts and existential crises, never has one come along that has been so frank, so nakedly autobiographical, and so imbued with its creators' spiritual identities.

Grey Goo is definitely a throwback, albeit one with some compelling innovations. Those who remember the heyday of the RTS genre should get a kick out of it, while the unprepared may be scared away.

Buy it if you have kids or casual-gaming friends to share it with.

If you can survive the rough edges, it’s a great chance to finally see what all the fuss is about or relive an adventure classic.