It is also diminished by the inability to keep the results you've tallied during a mission; namely the veteran status of your officers and soldiers.

College Hoops 2K8 is your best college basketball option for this year. The game looks good, the gameplay is as sharp as ever, and the feel of college basketball is there. If you're a college basketball fan, then this one is easy to recommend.

All in all, I found that Midnight Club: L.A. is an incredibly enjoyable, but flawed racing game that succeeds at offering an excellent virtual L.A. and a great deal of fun racing action, but also requires you to jump through far too many hoops to fully enjoy the game.

If you’re a fan of the board game or strategy games in general, there’s no better way to spend your Microsoft Points.

While the game does have it's moments, it ends up leaving a mediocre impression at best due to a lack of creative gameplay.

An excellent and vast real-time strategy game that is complex yet fun to play, and which provides almost unlimited replayability.

It may be a lot easier than the original, but in almost every other way--graphics, sound, atmosphere, storytelling, sheer style--it's a drastic improvement.

The lack of difficulty levels, imbalanced gameplay mechanics and lack of multiplayer support reduce this game from being much more than a rent for anyone other than the most hardcore flight fanatic.

Provides an enjoyable hockey experience that’s easy to pick up and play, graphically sound and aurally interesting just like before. However, this experiment with more realism injected into the series lacks a certain amount of zip that diehard fans have come to know and love.

Fast RMX doesn’t reinvent the series, but it does bring anti-gravity racing to a Nintendo console at launch for the first time in many years. It is a perfect pick-up for fans of the genre that grew up on F-Zero and wanted something to follow in its footsteps. It controls like a dream using the JoyCon grip and feels as natural as using a more traditional controller. It’s also one of the best-looking games on the system and takes what was already an incredible experience on the Wii U and improves it with more content. The online setup is flawed, but what little is there is executed well. Fast RMX is an outstanding game and one of the Switch’s best launch titles.

So Age of Empires IV is well put together and polished to high hell. I wish that something new had been done to bring the RTS genre that has been sitting more or less idle for a decade or so into the modern era, but you can’t have everything, and I suspect that more stuff like a map editor will be added in the future. Beyond that, with the recently released AOE2 Definitive Edition, that title, now 22 years old and $30 cheaper, already comes with a map editor that AOE4 lacks, and roughly a trillion player-made maps, and is probably the better bargain for your gaming dollar, especially if somehow you never got around to playing it previously.

Overall, FIFA 08 is a wonderful soccer game that improves on its predecessor in almost every way. It looks great, plays great, and is back on the right track for taking the crown back from the Winning Eleven series.

In the end, Rage reminds me a lot of Borderlands, another game that, while uniquely awesome in its own way, ultimately left me disappointed: same basic locale, same silent protagonist, same pseudo-open world, same focus on driving to missions, same side quest driven, bare-bones story. To be honest, the fact that Rage is a better shooter with much better vehicle controls is tempered by the lack of RPG elements that would allow you to invest in, or "own," your character. Instead, you're just sort of... there.

"X-Men Legends" on steroids. It’s bigger and better.

Aside from some lingering issues with the gameplay and horrendous online issues, it’s a well-crafted game that should satisfy fans of the series, and bring back those who have lost faith in it in the past.

Technically, BFV remains a really nicely constructed game for the most part. The weapons feel and sound great. The environments of snow and water and sand are stunning. The game is relatively bug free (other than AI shortcomings) and the servers are stable. The menu structures however are terrible, with a layout reminiscent of the windows tiles and a functionality that would best be described as counterintuitive. Sometimes I found myself just clicking on boxes almost randomly, curious where they would take me because I didn’t really know.

The included game modes expands the replayability for Deception significantly, and the stability of online play will guarantee that this title will stay in consoles for a long, long time.

The singleplayer campaign lacks polish and as a result, some of the objectives are confusing and ultimately meaningless, and the levels feel disjointed. Where Perfect Dark Zero excels is multiplayer, co-operatively and competitively, with a vast selection of cool weapons, a number of clever game types and a seemlingly endless number of options.

The largest improvement in the game, the one that I’m sure without even checking that all the forums are buzzing about, is that halfway or so through the game you get to customize your light saber.

The point here is despite all its flaws, Ninja Gaiden 2 was still able to deliver some excitement and thrills and every now and then it exhibits some of the pure kung-fu insanity that placed its predecessor on the mantle of genre-defining action titles.

NBA Live 10 looks great, and finally plays great as well. The Dynamic Season mode is the highlight of the game, and is worth the price of admission by itself.

Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with A Plague Tale: Innocence. It’s unique in premise and content, it looks and sounds good, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. I probably would have liked it even better if it had stayed more stealthy than action-oriented, but I’m not going to complain. A Plague Take definitely isn’t for kids — violence and gruesome deaths abound, and there is also some (completely unnecessary) profanity — but for everyone else, it’s a worthwhile game to check out, just perhaps at a slightly cheaper price.

Provides an enjoyable hockey experience that’s easy to pick up and play, graphically sound and aurally interesting just like before. However, this experiment with more realism injected into the series lacks a certain amount of zip that diehard fans have come to know and love.

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

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.

The audio is about what you’d expect from an Outrun game - nearly perfect. Both the remixes and original OR songs enhance the action, and accurately reflect the casual vibe given off throughout it.

Even with the technical snafus that sometimes plague Legends, this is still the best X-Men title ever produced. The Action/RPG elements are nicely integrated within an epic storyline with plenty of intrigue and a huge amount of gameplay that can take 20 hours or more to fully complete.

With the variety of ghosts and ghostly powers, there are many ways to complete missions, and so even though you could probably finish the campaign in well under 10 hours, there’s lots of room for re-playability, and you might find Ghost Master haunting your hard drive for weeks to come.