WWE 2K17 is an excellent wrestling game with a lot of superficial trappings to it that bog it down. The flow of matches is better than ever outside of triple threats and fatal four ways, which are now a stop and go affair. Career mode remains fairly aimless even with it being given something resembling goals now. Universe mode is improved, but a bit more time-consuming than ever before thanks to the presentation.

Forza Horizon 3 doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any way – but it does perfect it. Everything that worked about past games is better here. There’s more terrain to traverse, more variety, and the inclusion of off-road racing alone expands the game’s already-expansive replay value. If you have always wanted to enjoy a Forza game, but don’t like the idea of sim racers, the Horizon series makes for a great gateway.

I played for about 10 hours total, and it was a chore. The game doesn’t look good, nothing interesting happens while you’re playing, and the strategic elements are minimal.

It combines some of the best elements of Metroid and Mega Man and blends them together seamlessly. Other than camera problems and occasionally excessive load times, ReCore is an exciting experience and one of the Xbox One’s best action games.

MoO scratched a very specific itch for me that no other 4X game has. This iteration of MoO:CtS doesn’t do it for me. I get that a lot of people are looking for a more involved, more detailed 4X experience, and my problem is not that I’m overwhelmed by all the activity in MoO. It’s just that if I’m looking for this kind of thing I have the excellent Civ V to turn to. It’s not that it’s bad, but except for a narrow slice of nostalgia, I don’t see what the new MoO:CtS brings to the table that the plentitude of other 4X games don’t.

It’s painfully easy and the story falls apart under scrutiny, but it still hits a lot of the buttons that make a Deus Ex game what it is.

Years from now, No Man’s Sky will be on the books as the game that shifted the paradigm of console gaming as a whole, but only on a technical level. It is not too late for that to change, however, as Hello Games has a lot of opportunities to improve what they have created, should they choose to continue to develop it.

And so Batman: The Telltale Series is looking like a mixed bag at the moment. The first episode is all set-up, so there isn’t any way to tell if the series is going to be interesting or not, or even what the series is going to be about.

It is with a heavy heart that I tell you, dear reader, to avoid this game at all costs. It barely qualifies as the sum of the features it claims, and this port was given absolutely zero effort in making it functional for a console audience. Robbing a real “fun pimp” of thirty dollars will provide you with a more satisfying experience in survival horror than this thing will.

It tells a compelling story, and so few RPGs have done that recently that it makes this game shine ever brighter.

Much like Limbo, Inside also has a timeless quality to it and is yet another must-play experience from Playdead.

I was disappointed by the clunky combat, dreary color palette, and meh leveling options of 2013’s Mars: War Logs, and I remain doubly so by The Technomancer, a second entry in the Mars RPG universe also from Spiders Studio.

It doesn’t feel like it’s finished, and even if it were to be further refined, it would just be a low-budget Gears of War-style shoot-‘em-up. There’s no reason to play it.

Mighty No. 9 isn’t perfect, but it is something that anyone who grew up loving any kind of Mega Man game should check out.

I’d still argue that Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst is a failure, but it’s an interesting failure. It started from an idea that nobody’s been able to make work, and it still didn’t make it work, but an attempt was made. I’ll take that over a game that’s simply mediocre any day of the week.

Those who already have Xrd may want to wait for a price drop since there isn’t a ton of new content, but if you’re jonesing for more Guilty Gear, then this is an outstanding entry in the series and well-worth your time.

Looking for that perfect escape from the daily grind of supermutants, synths, railroad activists, raiders, rust devils, and Brotherhood of Steel do-gooder types who parade around the post-apocalyptic Boston wasteland like they frigging own the place? Then welcome to Far Harbor, a lovely, picturesque, stupendously highly radioactive island off the coast of Maine.

Just about every mechanic is interesting, and would have been fine if it had been executed even slightly better.

It’s a great-looking game that could use some work in the soundtrack department, but is well worth a pickup for fans of light-hearted adventures even if you weren’t a fan of the Borderlands franchise.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is the PS4’s best exclusive to date, and one of the best reasons yet to own the console.

It’s a fine starter entry for the series too since the plot is essentially a blank slate, so if you haven’t tried it out yet, give MegaTagmension a shot.

And so, overall, The Walking Dead: Michonne is a worthwhile game to try out.

Telltale is always good with their production values, so Story Mode looks like Minecraft and sounds excellent (with Patton Oswalt among others doing a nice job with their lines), but the story and gameplay elements are iffy at best.

With its Orwellian environment and story Republique succeeds in putting the player into the position of a person who needs to escape from a dark destiny. On the other hand this edition is plagued by some technical issues that sometimes keep you from enjoying what the game has to offer.

Young kids will enjoy the exaggerated looks of the characters, while older players will chuckle at some of the jokes the kids won’t get. There’s a wide variety of gameplay types to enjoy, so you’ll never get bored, and they’re executed very well – which is saying something since it goes from platforming, to shooting, to racing and they all feel natural. Whether you’re now to the franchise or an experienced veteran, Ratchet and Clank is a must-own.

It’s the best rally racer on modern consoles, and a fine debut for this DiRT sub-series.

Currently, the game has some synching issues between the dialogue and the subtitles, but that seems like an easy thing for Double Fine to fix with a patch. So if you’ve never played Day of the Tentacle, or if you’re like me and you haven’t played it in 20 years, then Day of the Tentacle Remastered is an easy game to recommend.

If nothing else, Automatron succeeded in dragging me away from the world of XCOM2 and back into the world of Fallout 4, which in itself is no small feat.

Quantum Break is Remedy’s best game to date. It is their most-polished game so far and accomplishes every goal it sets out to from a narrative perspective.

Overall, Sebastien Loeb Rally EVO is a disappointing affair. While it delivers a technically-good game, it rarely delivers exciting action.

Right now Sheltered is the most fun when you’re just starting out, and it gets less fun as you go along, but its developers are still working on the game and accepting feedback, so maybe they’ll adjust the difficulty and add some end-game content in their upcoming patches. Regardless, Sheltered is fun enough right now to be worth its budget price.

It’s a fun-focused game and something that should give you enjoyment for years to come.

Far Cry has gone the way of Assassin’s Creed, another source of income that’s been left to stagnate so everything that worked can be borrowed by the inevitable sequel.

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

At points where the car’s unusable, The Following is just more Dying Light, which is still a fun but flawed experience, and those are also the points where the expansion is at its best.

Anyone who enjoyed EA UFC should give this a shot because they’ve fine-tuned everything that made it great, while those who missed out should give the series a shot here.

Newcomers should give it a shot on the PS4, while those who already played through it might want to give it another go and see it look better than ever before.

Superhot almost seems like the teaser for a Kickstarter campaign, one that I think I would support, but as a standalone game it is just too thin.

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is an outstanding shooter well worth the time of anyone who enjoyed the first game. Newcomers to this sub-series can start off with this game without losing anything, and will be rewarded with a finely-tuned and highly-polished effort.

As a lifetime fan of horror, good, bad, and cheesetastic, I’m pleased that we’re experiencing a renaissance of horror in books, movies, and games. But recent games (SOMA, Penumbra, Amnesia) have set a pretty high bar, and in comparison to those Layers of Fear falls markedly short.

I don’t know if I’d buy Street Fighter V right now unless you plan on being a part of your area’s competitive scene. It’s not particularly casual-friendly and that’s mostly by design.

It may not reinvent the wheel, but Project X Zone 2 keeps things rolling along for the series.

I had been looking forward to this game for some time, and I’m not disappointed with the result. It fixes some of the niggles I had about the previous game while holding the core gameplay that I loved solidly.

Unravel is the best puzzle-platformer since Journey, and the best side-scrolling one since LIMBO.

Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel is just the kind of well-crafted 2D fighter that the PS4 needs more of.

Megadimension Neptunia VII is the best entry in the franchise to date.

It’s an eminently skippable entry in the franchise, and in its own way, it paves the way for RE4 to blow everything up and start over.

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.

Just Cause 3 is the game for you, so long as the game you’re looking for is almost exclusively about bending the laws of man, nature and physics until they break for comedic effect.

Overall, I didn’t like Hard West as much as I thought I would. The campaign is interesting, but developer CreativeForge spent so much time on “flashback” scenarios that it was difficult for me to connect with anybody or care what happened.

The biggest shame might be sinking money into the game and being unable to play it because of the dreaded server connection issues and that’s why in its current state, Rayman Adventures is difficult to recommend.

Tragically named, Freeblade proves the old adage that no iTunes or Google Play app is truly free. You’ll need the starter pack if you want to make serious head way into the campaign.

If Telltale can figure out a way to weave together all of the possible branches in the story to create a second season (and beyond), then that will hopefully make all of the doom and gloom from the first season more worthwhile. But if Telltale has painted themselves into a corner, and this season is it, then I wouldn’t recommend the game at all, unless your idea of fun is getting punched in the face repeatedly.

While its controls have a high learning curve, and the graphics don’t dazzle like one might expect from a latter-day Wii U release, Rodea the Sky Soldier is still an outstanding experience.

I love the idea of Pokémon Picross, and it is executed well. The core game got its hooks into me quickly, but as a puzzle game with no random elements, it doesn’t translate well to the world of free-to-play. Even patient and skilled Picross players will find their entertainment held hostage behind paywalls.

I felt at some moments that the mechanics of a great, or at least good, game was buried under all the blandness.

Overall, Black Ops 3 is an outstanding entry in the franchise.

On the heels of Unity, Syndicate is an easy recommendation for Assassin’s Creed fans and a step in the right direction for this long-running franchise.

So, that mini-rant aside, Blizzard continues, as they did with Heart of the Swarm, to mix in little elements, throw a few curveballs into the old mission structures, add some new units, and the result, I’ll admit, almost against my better nature, I enjoyed playing it.

This is easily the best 3D action game on the Xbox One, and hopefully it isn’t swept under the rug sales-wise in a crowded holiday season.

If you’re a fan of the franchise, and if you really want to play Heroes VII, then I’d recommend waiting for another month or two, until some more patches have come out and maybe the price has dropped down. If you don’t know anything about the franchise, then Heroes VII definitely isn’t the right version for you to use as your introduction. For you I’d recommend trying out just about any other version of the game, since most of them can be purchased for very little money these days.

If you had enough of Fallout between 3 and New Vegas, Fallout 4 is like signing up for more of that. However, if you, like me, haven’t given a lot of thought or playtime to Fallout since NV, and were kind of thinking “What the heck, I’ll give it a go again,” you’re in for a treat.

Need For Speed is a better-playing game than The Run, but still falls far short of any of the Criterion games or the early ’00s games as well.

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.

There’s more to the gameplay than may initially meet the eye, but there are a lot of annoying hiccups in the flow that make it more of a chore than a fun game to play at times – and hurt the experience as a whole quite a bit.

But overall, the first episode of Minecraft: Story Mode felt like a disaster to me, which is why I’m hoping that it’s because I don’t know anything about the game it’s based on.

In some sense, though Sword Coast Legends is no Baldur’s Gate or NWN or Icewind Dale, I appreciate what they’ve tried to do here, even if the outcome could use some help. To their credit, they say in interviews they’re going to stick with it and try and fix issues as they hear about them.

Halo 5 is an outstanding game and one of the finest first-person shooters ever made. Its design is versatile, and it’s the best-playing entry in the series so far.

If you can get invested in the characters and their bizarre circumstances, it’s a good use of your time.

All in all, Rising Tide is a decent addition to Beyond Earth, and yes, it finally feels like a game that has achieved escape velocity and left the atmosphere and gravitational pull of planet Civ 5.

It’s one of the more surprising, thoughtful games to come out this year, and while there are several half-baked puzzles, it’s still a clever and memorable experience.

Every game in the franchise looks great, sounds even better, and will have you chuckling with the spot-on chemistry of the cast in each entry.

It’s more confusing and frustrating than fun, and since there’s almost no dialogue or story, there isn’t anybody to root for (or against) or care about. As a result, the game was a fairly boring slog through repetitive puzzles, and I was actually happy that it was so short.

Anyone who has wanted a new fighting game to play should give it a shot – especially if your PS3 is filled up with them, as you’ll find a lot to enjoy here thanks to its combination of a fairly robust roster and tight gameplay.

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.

Longtime Disgaea fans will want to get Disgaea 5 as soon as possible. It takes everything that has worked before and makes the gameplay better than ever. While the storyline isn’t all that amazing, it does have some excellent characters and Killia is a blast.

My early assertion that Skyshine’s Bedlam is a lot like The Banner Saga with a sci-fi setting is pretty close. The story in Bedlam is far thinner, but they’ve tweaked the combat and added some resources to balance and I think they’ve ended up with a better game.

If you’re late to this particular party, the Definitive Edition is a good way to get caught up on one of the strongest action-adventure games of the decade, right in time for its sequel to come out in 2016.

Forza Motorsport 6 rights a lot of Forza 5’s wrongs.

It’s a throwback to C&C: Generals, which was one of my favorite RTS games of all time, but lacks the fun of that campaign and the kind of cartoonish feeling that infused that entire series so successfully.

All that said, Trine 3 is a pretty short game – ten or so levels, maybe another dozen side quests. I cleared it all in less than five hours, and I don’t see myself playing it through again even though I didn’t successfully collect all of the Trine-angles (though I might load up Trine 2 and give that another go now that Trine 3 gameplay was so disappointing).

That seems like a pretty good deal for $12.99, and I think will make some hardcore CoH2 guys thrilled. For the rest of us, it’s kind of a blur of explosions set in yet more mostly bombed out cities featuring capture points and choke points and guys running around and tanks.

Between the campaign and the challenges, I spent over 60 hours with the game, and it didn’t seem like a long time at all. So if you were a fan of the Commandos games back in the day, or if you like the idea of dodging guards and disabling security devices, then Crookz is definitely a game to try out.

The idea of a zombie-apocalypse “Metroidvania” set in what used to be a modern city is an excellent hook for a game, but Zombi is too busy showing off Wii-U features that aren’t there anymore to fulfill that premise.

This game does enough to qualify as a remake rather than a remaster, so if the slew of HD re-releases we’ve seen since the new consoles launched has turned you off to the concept of remasters, you may want to reconsider checking this one out.

For all those minor issues, my initial run through Until Dawn is still one of the more satisfying games I’ve played this year.

The Mega Man Legacy Collection may seem lacking in core game content given how vast the Mega Man franchise is, but what it delivers is executed perfectly.

Escape Plan Bravo in particular ends with a massive cliffhanger, and I’m probably going to end up replaying it just to see the other side of that.

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Fire Emblem fan, this might also hold your attention. As far as I’m concerned, though, this game just isn’t for me. I find the sacrifice mechanic more frustrating than fun.

Rare Replay is one of the best compilations ever created even if it does have some less-than-stellar games in it.

Fallout Shelter is an interesting game until you reach the fifty dweller mark. After that, the game gets easy and monotonous.

Godzilla has laid many eggs in gaming, and this is another one. Other than the presentation, Godzilla doesn’t do anything perfectly.

Unfortunately, J-Stars Victory VS+ isn’t quite good enough to warrant a buy for most people. If you are a big fan of the anime/manga franchises contained within it, check it out.

And so overall I didn’t much like Anna’s Quest. It’s just so nice and pleasant that it’s boring. That being said, there isn’t any profanity or violence or meanness to be seen, so it’s definitely a family-friendly game. It also appears to be targeted at young girls, and since that’s not the usual audience for games, it could work in the right situation.

Batman: Arkham Knight closes out Rocksteady’s trilogy in a big way. It’s the most epic entry in the series to date in terms of sheer scope for the world and the story it’s telling.

Those who already own Chrono Phantasma can probably wait a bit, but if you’re new to the franchise, there is no better jumping off point than this game.

I wasn’t really looking forward to this chapter after I was so cold on “Atlas Mugged,” but “Catch A Ride” turned me around a bit. I’d still like a bit more engagement in the game–more puzzles, more sequences that involve actual skill–but this is good.

It has some rough edges that will hopefully be ironed out in time and remains a must-buy for racing fans even with its flaws.