Anyone with an affinity for RPGs and a love for the bizarre should check out Criminal Girls: Invite Only.

Like a breakaway that results in a lay-up. Where's the slammah jammah? As usual, the overall presentation, variety of game modes, and new additions are fantastic, but there are a handful of issues that hurt the game.

Special attention was paid to capturing the athletic tumbling abilities that Spider-Man exhibited in both the comic books and the movies, and it shows. The incredibly agile moves that a player can pull off with Spidey are astounding.

Broadening the racing arenas to include a complete city, the number of race types and vehicles significantly increases the number of things to do in the game. However, the quirks of the world map, lack of visual speed and other gameplay issues keep it from surpassing the original title.

I’m torn between calling Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus brave or merely unexpected. The core of The New Colossus remains as good as, and largely unchanged from, the earlier game. It’s great, explosive, and violent. The other half, so to speak, the heavy emphasis on story doesn’t drive the FPS experience so much as shift your focus into directions that FPS games don’t normally go. That’s not to say that FPS games don’t tell a story or even a complex story (Bioshock told an incredibly involved story and even explored the extrapolation of a Randian economics as a political movement), but they rarely (AFAIK never) attempt to tell a story so full of sadness and self-examination. The two parts sometimes fit well, sometimes less than well, and I think individual gamers will react very differently to the result.

Outside of the problematic issues that hinder the Slam Dunk contest, dynasty mode and hiccups with gameplay, NBA Live 2005 still manages to deliver a decent basketball experience for fans of all kinds.

As it stands now, Biomutant is a flawed, but super-fun game that is well-worth picking up as long as you come into it with an open-mind and are prepared for an experience that may not top the charts visually, but offers a fun blend of combat that can’t be found anywhere else.

The game remains worth playing because for the most part, it avoids tinkering with successful formulas, while still incorporating distinctive aspects like its levels and complex objectives.

It’s quite tricky to evaluate this rendition of the Bard’s Tale compared to the older titles in Fargo’s legendary series. This is particularly true when you consider that this Bard would’ve skewered it with his wit.

Here’s the kicker for those of you who already completed the Instincts chapter in the previous Xbox version: you cannot unlock the Evolution chapter in Far Cry: Instincts – Predator without finishing the Instincts chapter first (unless you know the cheat code, of course).

Included in this very good expansion pack is what amounts to a patch for AOE2. Their 'you want us to clean up some gameplay issues for AOE2, you've got to buy the expansion pack' attitude gripes my cookies.

While NBA Live 06 makes a couple of steps forward with the Freestyle Superstar Controls, it manages to make a couple steps backward at the same time.

DiRT 4 isn’t the greatest entry in the series, but it is still quite good. It lacks the feeling of life that prior games had and trades that in for a more sterile feeling. It’s a shame too because the festival setting injected a lot of fun into things, while the casual atmosphere let you go at your own pace through your career. Now, things are more rigid and while the core game is still fun, it feels like you have to do well as opposed to simply having fun being its own reward and better play resulted in faster progress. The core mechanics are excellent, though, and anyone looking for a high-quality rally racer will find one here. Series veterans who have become lapsed fans may not be won over by it, but should at least give it a rental while newcomers should give it a whirl as a rental and then give it a buy if they fall in love with it.

Over the top gameplay coupled with nicely timed humor and the inclusion of online play makes this a great way to pass the time during the summer. Now if they can expand on the idea and drop some of the realism, Slugfest could become a true classic in the sports gaming pantheon.

All in all, if you’re one of the lucky ones that avoided the first version due to low scores or bad word-of-mouth, then this one might just do it for you.

MX vs. ATV Alive is a blast to play. The controls are perfect, the gameplay is engaging thanks to the collision system, and the vehicles, riders, and tracks all look great – not to mention one of the best online racing experiences this year. It's a shame that these elements are packaged into such a bare-bones game. For $40, I can definitely recommend it to fans of the series. In the future, however, here's to hoping that THQ will take these same gameplay mechanics and build around them a full-fledged racing career experience.

The control scheme and the dependency on rote memorization, not to mention the immense difficulty level diminishes the quality of the game.

MX vs. ATV Alive is a blast to play. The controls are perfect, the gameplay is engaging thanks to the collision system, and the vehicles, riders, and tracks all look great – not to mention one of the best online racing experiences this year. It's a shame that these elements are packaged into such a bare-bones game. For $40, I can definitely recommend it to fans of the series. In the future, however, here's to hoping that THQ will take these same gameplay mechanics and build around them a full-fledged racing career experience.

Basically, Crusader is just Stronghold but browner, and whether you like it or not will probably have a lot to do with whether you played Stronghold and how much you liked it.

A very nice expansion pack. It gives you enough new things to do that even if you played Zoo Tycoon 2 a lot when it came out, you’ll now have an excuse to play it some more.

The racing itself is reasonably good as are the graphics – despite them having a lot of little flaws. The sound design is solid, but the soundtrack lacks any soul and that holds true for the voice work. Still, it’s a fun time and fans of many kinds of racing will find something to enjoy.

It’s obvious from the beginning that this game isn’t trying to do anything new or terribly innovative. Origins does action, and does it well.

The gameplay improvements make it at least worth a rental if you’re a bit jaded towards the series, but give it a few days and you’ll likely be won over by just how big a difference the small changes make in actually having great matches.

Overall, The 40th Day, which is an awful name by the way, is actually a great game. Is it as much of an improvement over the original as we might’ve hoped? Not really, but there is a ton more content including a hefty arsenal of weaponry for you to pimp out and an expanded multiplayer that makes this game well worth playing.

If you can get past traveling the world map on rails, every location and quest chosen in order for you, the combat is rich enough to make Blackguards worthwhile, and I think comfortably places it near the upper end of that range.

Does Dungeon Defenders stand out from the crowd? If I had to judge this game based solely on the action/tower defense/RPG gameplay, I would have to say no. None of those three features really shines and the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts. However, the multiplayer component is done so well, with fluid matchmaking, well-balanced dungeons (for a group), and even the ability to hang out in a communal tavern between missions, it does present itself well as a great party game (either LAN or headset-over-internet). And at only fifteen dollars, it won't be too difficult to convince your friends to join in.

With an enhanced battle system, extra game modes, tweaked gameplay and cooperative wireless play on the DS, the game delivers on one of the single most overlooked factors in game production: fun. Space Invaders Extreme 2 is addictive and fun.

Does Dungeon Defenders stand out from the crowd? If I had to judge this game based solely on the action/tower defense/RPG gameplay, I would have to say no. None of those three features really shines and the whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts. However, the multiplayer component is done so well, with fluid matchmaking, well-balanced dungeons (for a group), and even the ability to hang out in a communal tavern between missions, it does present itself well as a great party game (either LAN or headset-over-internet). And at only fifteen dollars, it won't be too difficult to convince your friends to join in.

If you played through Dead Rising 2 and you're not particularly enthused about Frank, the reason to look at Off the Record is to spend a few days with a friend bouncing around the mall in Sandbox Mode. I wouldn't recommend this on any other basis, but that's pretty much enough on its own.

Dragon Quest VI is another great title in this series that still manages to hold intrigue and charm amongst hardcore and casual RPG fans.

If you played through Dead Rising 2 and you're not particularly enthused about Frank, the reason to look at Off the Record is to spend a few days with a friend bouncing around the mall in Sandbox Mode. I wouldn't recommend this on any other basis, but that's pretty much enough on its own.

You could do a lot worse with your Microsoft Points than to pick it up.

On the whole, I really like B4B. I’d like to see the difficulty spikes addressed and some expanded PvP choices, both of which I think can and will be pretty easily added and fixed. I’m also hoping that more people start playing it, as most of the runs I’ve joined have at least one BOT in it and is often nothing but BOTs (and when I’m playing with nothing but BOTs, why do I have to wait for online server space to play it?). The BOTs are competent shooters, and use their player advantages pretty well, but have zero ability with regards to the additional level objectives – they won’t plant explosives or carry supplies, and they tend to hang near you, which is good from a survival perspective, but doesn’t help in finding weapon and healing caches. But for a team that plays well together, and I’m hoping to get my crew to move over from L4D, it’s a fine zombie run and gun.

The depth of the diplomacy, the many well-balanced factions, the intelligent layout of the interface, that all indicates to me a game design crew that really had its stuff together. While I don’t think as a game reviewer it would be appropriate for me to penalize a game for being too involved, I do think the pace of this game, the amount of plotting and planning versus the amount of payoff, is a little out of whack.

Even if you’ve already spent hundreds of hours wandering Skyrim’s countryside, the mods available at launch provide new ways to play, new loot to acquire, new locations to explore, and much more. Skyrim Special Edition is the best version of one of the all-time great fantasy role-playing games, even if it has begun to show its age.

The escalated difficulty of mixing all these together (now instead of one or two game types, you have half a dozen) and inconsistency in pacing the sequences ironically makes the holistic package less accessible.

The radical game imbalance makes this one for the FPS hardcore gamer or the Sci-Fi player who loves futuristic titles.

It’s cute, funny, clever, and the controls are all very responsive and tight for a collection like this with so many different games to build. So, if you’ve got the itch for some light-hearted minigame fun, go out and pick this one up.

It's not easy, it's pretty funny, and you'll only rarely do the same thing twice. It's there to test a wide variety of skills, or to simply entertain those with short attention spans, and it succeeds at both.

If you liked the movie, you'll probably like the game, as it's a near-perfect blend of classic gameplay with the production values and design of the film.

Despite the lack of online play and the humdrum combat system, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is a lot fun to play.

It’s polished and well made, it has a long campaign, and there’s even some re-playability to it, both for starting a new character and playing the campaign again, and for upping the difficulty level and continuing the exploits of your first character.

Despite its shortcomings (with the emphasis on short), Voodoo Vince is an imaginative and fun platform game, full of wit and charm.

If you like your kung-fu and melodrama mixed together and brought to a rolling boil like a nabeyaki udon, download yourself a copy right away.

It’s a title for fans of both mystery and point-and-clicks, and, despite its technical shortcomings, is worth the price of admission.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is an electric veg-o-matic of FPS gaming bits and pieces set thrown into the hopper and set for puree. It lacks some stuff that we’re sort of gotten used to seeing in our FPS games these days and adds, a thousand collectable widgets aside, not much that we haven’t seen elsewhere before.

It's not easy, it's pretty funny, and you'll only rarely do the same thing twice. It's there to test a wide variety of skills, or to simply entertain those with short attention spans, and it succeeds at both.

Brotherhood of Steel can be described like this: "Dark Alliance" minus encumbrance minus magic minus feats plus guns plus grenades. It's "Dark Alliance" for dummies.

King of Fighters 2003 is a great addition to anyone's Xbox library, and it's another great 2D fighter on Xbox Live. Just try to pretend it's the only game in its case, and leave King of Fighters 2002 to gather dust.

The game is very polished and smooth – I hit zero bugs while playing it, and didn’t have to download a 10GB patch the day after it was released, and Gearbox should be congratulated for that if nothing else. So if what you’re looking for is more Borderlands, this would be the place to find it.

In the areas of visuals, features, mechanics, story, and such, it doesn't really do anything special. However, the tone of the game, and the sheer weight and dread that the player feels when trying to survive in this version of London is ZombiU's crowning achievement.

For $10, Black Knight Sword delivers a mostly good and entirely creepy experience.

With an emphasis on squad-based tactics, it’s equally a strategy game. It’s a little rough around the edges and multiplayer is generally forgettable, but with a poignant story, believable characters, and intense and varied battle scenes, it’s a single player experience well worth enlisting in, even if you think you’ve had enough of World War II.

When compared to the PC and console games, I would say there is enough material in The Fall for one, or if you really push it, maybe two chapters of a typical Deus Ex corpus.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is one of those games that will have you saying, “Just one more quest, one more battle, one more level,” and then you look at the clock and wonder where the last several hours went.

If you grew tiresome of the repetitive nature of the Sims, Livin' Large probably won't change your mind if for more than a few hours while you acquaint yourself with it's new additions. However, if you're still hooked on these virtual life forms, Livin' Large is a must-have expansion pack. For the majority of us, it's probably the later.

All considered though, Mercenaries 2 isn’t a complicated game to assess. It’s a stupid action game in a long and storied tradition of stupid action games.

Whenever I decide to try and play Outriders, I enjoy it, but it is a visible crapshoot whether it’ll crash or disconnect on me before I have the chance to do anything fun. Other players have reported losing their entire inventories or having consistent fatal errors. The game flat-out doesn’t feel complete. Again, though, I have cleared the story campaign, so Outriders has a few things going for it. I’d like to see a sequel that addresses some of this, by getting rid of the always-online functionality, ditching some of the petty annoyances like how fast travel works between zones, and generally getting the game to a place where it doesn’t crash every hour or so. As it stands, it’s good, but obnoxious, and might be better after a few solid patches.

The singleplayer portion is a little on the shallow side, what with the brief campaign and the one-night stand nature of the Galactic Conquest mode, but the multiplayer portion is ripe with replay value.

The puzzles are tough enough that you probably won't figure them out right away, but they're not so tough that they'll stump you for days at a time, either. For me, that's exactly where I want the difficulty of an adventure to be, and combined with the humor of the game, it makes Chaos on Deponia an easy game to recommend.

Rush'N Attack: Ex-Patriot is pretty short and sits on a weird transition point between a side-scroller and an exploration-based adventure game. It takes a little bit of getting used to, since some of the stealth elements are counterproductive (i.e. if you whistle to lure an enemy over to your hiding place, it also alerts them to your presence, thus ensuring your discovery). It's not a bad use of ten bucks, as it gives you a pretty decent weekend's worth of entertainment.

The storyline is too goofy to take seriously, with a cast that you can get behind on a surface level, but aren’t fleshed out enough to really hook you for a significant length of time. Still, the battle system is really fun to use and is so exciting that it’s worth playing through the game just to keep using it.

"King of Fighters 2003" is a great addition to anyone's PS2 library. Just try to pretend it's the only game in its case.

ilomilo is a must-have for anyone who loves visual logic puzzles, or co-op puzzle games like the Lost Vikings, as this is basically that mixed with a bit of Katamari Damacy-esque strangeness.

Rush'N Attack: Ex-Patriot is pretty short and sits on a weird transition point between a side-scroller and an exploration-based adventure game. It takes a little bit of getting used to, since some of the stealth elements are counterproductive (i.e. if you whistle to lure an enemy over to your hiding place, it also alerts them to your presence, thus ensuring your discovery). It's not a bad use of ten bucks, as it gives you a pretty decent weekend's worth of entertainment.

Overall, I’d say that Twisted Metal: Head On - Extra Twisted Edition is a great buy for both long-time and new fans to the series.

Overall, I think Trine remains a clever little side-scrolling puzzler, which, four iterations in, is a genuinely pleasant surprise for me. The puzzles remain fresh, and build kind of organically as the game progresses, so the difficulty curve is rather constant throughout. The multiplayer isn’t all that great unless you have a friend and a yen to really play it that way. I’m at about the 75% point in just four hours of play, so I think something like 5-7 hours is about what you’ll get out of it, multiplayer aside. I seem to recall in an earlier review that I said that Trine takes the side scroller about as far as it can go, and I think that remains true of Trine 4 as well.

Dazzling scenery.

Golden Sun is a very enjoyable game and one that remains true to the series. Despite the game's shortcomings when it comes to dialogue and pacing, Dark Dawn is fun while it lasts and a worthy addition to the series. Here's to hoping the wait for the next Golden Sun game won't be nearly as long.

There isn’t anything new here, but the format works as well as ever, and the 30 campaign missions are good for over 60 hours of playing time.

The game is literally begging for a random scenario generator. Truth be told, creating one shouldn't be too hard either.

Perhaps rather than think of it as a horror adventure, it would be better to think of it as an interactive horror movie, possibly a mildly interactive horror movie. Explore a little – stay within the velvet ropes at all times, please – then run for your life a little – keep in mind there is only one way out and all others lead to death. I would have preferred a more open world experience, but that horror game doesn’t seem to exist yet. In the meantime, I am for the most part happy with the popular resurgence of horror, and think Red Barrel is doing a better job than most.

The quintessential difference between this title and its competitors ("Earth and Beyond" and "Freelancer" come to mind) is the detail. There is so much detail and so much planned to expand on those details that you could literally be enthused on tangents for months at a time.

All in all this is a great game with solid gameplay, beautiful worlds, tons of customization, and an excellent multiplayer component.

For the twenty dollar price tag, Fable is worth it if your expectations are realistic and you understand what your dollars are buying: a typical action RPG that plays like Zelda and looks and sounds quite beautiful, but is not the groundbreaking change in the way role-playing games are done as its creator once promised.

From a gameplay standpoint I would have been happier had they gone with a more open mission structure and something that feels a little less crushed by the weight of all the filmmaking going on. Still and all it’s well-polished, and undeniably continues the C&C legacy.

The bottom line here is with Diablo 2 ten years behind us and Diablo 3 still off in the distance somewhere, being a mediocre version of the great one is almost a compliment. Almost. And Sacred 2 almost succeeds in its imitation.

Its gameplay, stripped of challenge or context, is the same kind of switch-flipping, bomb-planting, key-hunting FPS we've been playing for years, with intensity-in-ten-cities combat to conceal the lack of innovation. It's slightly above average, but only slightly, and can be enjoyed on that level.

Despite the lack of online play and the humdrum combat system, LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures is a lot fun to play.

If you’re a soccer game fan, then you’ll either really enjoy this game, or really hate it. If you only have a 360, then it’s a definite must buy as a soccer fan. However, if you also have an Xbox or PS2, I have to recommend that you stick to the last-gen version.

One thing the GBA version eschews is the spotty camera system that was noted on just about every platform. That's not to say things look bad on the GBA version. Things look really good indeed.

Inquisition is a good game that suffers from a lack of editorial judgment and polish.

It’s obvious from the beginning that this game isn’t trying to do anything new or terribly innovative. Origins does action, and does it well.

It boasts plenty of game-time, because even when you finish there are always more collectables to go find... in the middle of driving games and, of course, you can always go back and fight people for the heck of it.

If you like singing or dug the first game, you’ll definitely want this edition, but other players should rent it to see if they want to become a lyrical superstar.

Overall, Just Cause 4 is a fairly big improvement as an experience compared to the third entry. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the second, which felt like the franchise’s peak at the time and has remained so to this day. This game lacks the thrill of “wow, the series is truly finding itself” – akin to Saints Row the Third doing that for the Saints Row games, and while it is better than the third entry, that’s a fairly low bar to fly over given how many issues plagued the console versions of the game. It performs a lot better, at the expense of the core graphics suffering a bit. The core gunplay and frantic action are better now than before though, but something still feels missing in the overall experience.

Elite Force ranked solidly OK as far as I was concerned, and, with very few changes to it, Elite Force 2 is OK as well. I would have liked to see some improvements for a game that was this close to something special.

The control scheme goes a long way in marring what would’ve been a great game for fans of flight sims or novices looking to get into the genre.

It's simply one of the best collections of winter event games available for the GBA, with great emphasis on the word 'game' because this is what Konami does best.

VA is a great story idea, the narrative of which really succeeds, but the actual gameplay itself is a letdown.

Dark Majesty doesn't make this a more social game than before, so the onus on making this a sociable experience is up to you.

Overall, I found the first episode of Back to the Future: The Game to be fun -- not amazing or anything, but fun.

It caters to beginners, challenges experts and offers an impressive variety of ways to play Sudoku.

Though there are slow places, some spots where you’re just kind of searching around looking to figure out how to make the plot advance, as the game progresses, as the story unfolds, it’s a bold and fascinating thing to experience.

Ground Zeroes is a tough recommendation. Yes, it contains all of the Metal Gear Solid goodness fans are hoping for, but clocking in at a total of three hours of gameplay (including the side missions) for the $29.99 price tag feels like a developer being presumptuous and arrogant, almost daring a fan to refuse.

The AI can be forgiven because it has its occasional brilliant moments; the mission design is in worse straits, being entirely predictable, but if nothing else it gives an excuse to tour the Holy Lands, ambush a few more enemies, and clamber up a few more minarets.

Overall, Gravel is Milestone’s finest game to date. It combines a surprisingly high amount of racing types together and does an exceptional job with all of them. The handling is far better than most of their prior work, and the level of on-screen excitement is at its highest point yet as well. There are some rough edges when it comes to the overall presentation, and the FMV-laden story mode of sorts is somewhat of a groaner, but it doesn’t take away from how fun the core racing action is. It uses rumble better than most games on the market today as well – at least for Xbox One controller users, and is a solid pickup for anyone craving some off-road racing.

Still, it’s a far better game than last year’s effort and well worth checking out for most wrestling fans out there – especially when the online issues get resolved.