It is impressive. Since the five-year hiatus, however, there have been others that were more so than it.

All in all, though, for sheer violent, messy, often immature fun, Bulletstorm was probably my favorite shooter for the last console generation, and six years later, it still puts a big smile on my face. Even in as stacked a year as 2017 is turning out to be, it deserves a second look.

WWE All-Stars is a highly-polished and tremendously fun game.

Cloudberry Kingdom may initially petrify those who aren’t good at precision platformers.

The villains weren’t that intriguing in New Dawn, the heightened focus on resource gathering and crafting led to some grinding stretches of gameplay, and I’m not quite sure how to feel about bullet sponge and floating damage appearing in a Far Cry game. Luckily, combat is just as chaotic and explosive as ever, especially with a co-op buddy, and I would still recommend the game to Far Cry fans.

In Fable III you can purchase houses, buy businesses, get married, and have kids. Like B&W you have a pet, a dog in this case, but he's more useful and less idiosyncratic, and you can train him to help you in combat and he sniffs out treasure for you. By and large good stuff. Those things work. And in general dealing with the leaders of the various towns to get them to ally with you is good RPG fodder (and deciding later whether or not to keep the promises you make is an interesting wrinkle). But the dreary nature of performing menial tasks repeatedly with individual people to scrape experience? Not so much. In fact as an activity it likely ranks down there with gold farming. And while it was ludicrous as a god to be expected to find every lost child, as a prince trying to stabilize an entire kingdom it's only slightly less asinine. And in Fable III it's all been linked together, inextricably.

Similar gameplay for both characters, aimless objectives and technical issues strangle and mar what would otherwise be a solid addition to an excellent series. Despite that, however, the plot is still well done and answers a number of questions that fans have been looking forward to.

While there's no new technical advancement and no significantly new discoveries with The Sims, the social aspect of this game remains, de facto, at the top of all gaming genres.

Pitted against other 4X titles, the individual parts of Hegemonia never seem to glue or mesh into a compelling and cohesive whole.

Arguably the best poker game on the market these days. The enhanced AI and depth of the career mode make the game more than just poker. However with the overlooks of the few visual effects, it has room for improvement in the coming editions.

A good shooter, perched on the boundary between realistic and cinematic. It's got a great story, too.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about Evil Genius 2. It does a nice enough job of modernizing the original game, and it has far more replay value than the original game had (with four evil geniuses and three islands to choose from, where each choice changes the way you play the game). But the 60+ hour campaign is a slow slog, and it wears out its welcome so thoroughly that you might not even care about replay value by the time you finally grind your way through it. I could see Evil Genius 2 getting better after patching and DLC, but it’s tough to see how Revolution can possibly fix the campaign. And so Evil Genius 2 is a coin flip for me. Get it if you loved the original game, or if base-building / tower defense games are your cup of tea. Wait for patches and a sale otherwise.

WWE All-Stars is a highly-polished and tremendously fun game.

It's got the same flaws as Painkiller, as well as all its considerable merits.

B&W2 has funny bits and strategic bits and dramatic moments and the creature represents at points a fascinating AI with which to interact, but in terms of a game (and I know I probably use this phrase far too much) the total is much less than the sum of the parts.

Overall, Pursuit Force has all the elements of an exciting high-speed Hollywood pursuit: fast cars, loud guns, and daredevil jumps. The gameplay does get a little repetitive at times.

If you’re a fan of older adventure games, like Syberia or Still Life, The Medium was made almost specifically for you. If you’re an old-school survival horror fan who doesn’t think the genre’s done better than Silent Hill 2 in 20 years, The Medium is very much in your wheelhouse. If you’re not in either of those categories, I’m not sure if you’d get past the first 20 minutes. For me, it’s a 90%, because I’ll be thinking about this one for a while, but I can’t give it more than an extremely qualified recommendation.

Solid but unspectacular.

Unfortunately, the additions and improvements weren't impressive: the new campaigns were bad and much shorter than the ones in Earth 2150, the opponent AI might have actually gotten worse, the engine tweaking didn't do a whole lot other than increase the minimum system requirements for the game, and the new units, weapons, and buildings were hit and miss.

It’s for the most part far too easy, and that tends to dilute any tension that builds up.

This is basically an open-world first-person shooter that’s visibly inspired by and using a lot of the toys from survival horror, and it doesn’t quite manage that fusion with grace. However, Ghostwire is charming, interesting, and creepy enough that I’ve enjoyed my time with it.

There is a very specific kind of player for whom Hard Corps: Uprising is going to be better than crack. These are the people that keep Cave employed, who lined up for Gradius V, and who have characters from Metal Slug tattooed on their unmentionables. It's an arcade game for serious shooter fans, and only for serious shooter fans.

Emergence should serve as a great launching point for Ritual’s experiment. It’s a solid game that knows its audience, and while it is pared down, that’s only as far as needed for a game half the length and cost of an average one.

The game does deserve some respect because, admittedly, despite its shortcomings players are likely to be compelled enough to finish it. The fun that the game does deliver when it decides to is nail-bitingly entertaining and, as stated above, the storyline is fantastic.

A nice game but not a great one. It’s slow-paced and thoughtful, it looks nice and it’s polished, and while it has some problems here and there, none of them are major. It’s just that nothing about the game made me say "wow!"

As it is, this new installment still remains a must-have simply due to the Havok physics - it adds that much to the game that it's worth buying it just for crazy extreme rules and TLC matches.

At $30, it’s a great value and a fine example of a high-quality game being released late in a system’s lifespan.

If you enjoy (and have time for) hour-long tug-of-war matches with a huge array of vehicles and weapons, then it’s hard to go wrong with Frontlines: Fuel of War.