The PC version is sometimes difficult to control (the mouse is severely underused, and you’re not given any options for redefining hotkeys), but the game itself is bright and happy and optimistic, it’s well made, and it includes enough content to be well worth its $30 suggested retail price.

There’s a lot of stuff built up around the actual racing—pictures of pretty girls, a frenetic soundtrack, and a whole Driver DNA mechanic that doesn’t really seem to do anything at all—but once you cut through all that to the content itself it actually ain’t half bad.

Metroid: Other M has a lot of flaws, but winds up being greater than the sum of its parts. No matter how annoying the voice work is, or how disappointing the first-person view is, the core game itself is always fun.

As with Telltale’s other recent titles, Guardians of the Galaxy is basically an interactive movie where your choices make a minimal difference. There is only one “sort of” puzzle in the game, where you have to figure out how to open a door. Everything else happens linearly, and you only have one way to do it. Luckily, the writing is good, and the opening episode raises enough questions that I’m interested in seeing what happens next — which is certainly an improvement over Telltale’s recent Batman and Minecraft games. So everything looks good for Guardians of the Galaxy so far. Hopefully, Telltale can maintain the momentum.

The part that will grow on you will be the interaction between you and the monster. The developers have instilled a lot of detail in rendering emotional attributes to the monsters.

TC is an OK fighting game with a snappy plotline, and some unfortunately crappy driving segments thrown in for good measure. It would have been much better if they had been able to get the camera under control.

It possesses excellent technical qualities with a run-down view of the world that Nostradamus would be proud of. But it lacks any heart.

Despite its blemished presentation and short-lived overall game time, Disaster Report manages to stay entertaining on a by-the-moment tension-inducing level, and without the benefit of gratuitous violence or paranormal gimmicks to boot.

The sad fact is if you already played the main story of Splinter Cell, it'll only give you cause to lament on what this game could have been.

For me, Full Throttle was one of my least favorite of the LucasArts adventures, being about half the length you’d expect from an adventure and using a setting that I didn’t really care about. So I’m mixed in my feelings here. If you’ve never played the original version of the game, then it’s worthwhile to try out the remastered version — just to see some adventure game history if for no other reason. But if you’ve played Full Throttle before, then the remastered version is more of an iffy proposition. There is some new stuff to see (and hear) but it’s basically just the same game, and you’ll have to decide if that’s worth $15 to you.

While Grand Slam Tennis 2 is not a Game of the Year candidate, it's certainly a very good game of virtual tennis, and a great value – especially at $49.99 - $10 cheaper than your average retail sports game. It's not without its frustrations, and it's not a technical masterpiece, but the online modes, smooth career offering, and ESPN classic matches will give you plenty to do. For a fan of tennis games, if you're looking to scratch the itch of swinging the old racket, I can certainly recommend this one to you.

What was most surprising about Chessmaster was its inclusion of a tutorial that teaches you in set games how to best maximize the use of your pieces, including tricky moves like castles and turning pawns into queens.

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

LEGO The Hobbit is ultimately par for the course.

The AI isn't awful enough to really bother me. The lack of save feature is annoying. The graphics and sound are pleasant, and the gameplay works.

It’s just the details of the game I didn’t get along with, all the unnecessary walking back and forth, and the general simplicity of the puzzles. So The Black Mirror earns a borderline recommendation from me.

The missions are challenging, you get lots of options for how to play through them, and the 10-mission campaign takes about 20-30 hours to complete, which, all-in-all makes Death to Spies a pretty worthwhile purchase at its $30 suggested retail price.

Emperor’s Testament needs more variety. Even the surprise plot twist in the game doesn’t enable Emperor’s Testament to break the formula.

The audio effects and soundtrack have been pared down, but this is as close as Nintendo's handheld will get in recreating the arcade experience.

All in all, Sumioni is a very good game, but one hurt by its limited scope. It allows you to do a nice variety of things with the touch screen, and even made great use of the back panel, but its strict formula gets old pretty quickly. Its $20 price tag feels a tad steep given that, but most of what's offered is done really well, so I think you'll get your money's worth out of it if you like hack and slash games with some platforming and even a touch of bullet hell shooter gameplay thrown in.

With an interesting premise, four campaigns and a large amount of depth with the researchable technology tree, Earth 2160 allows hardcore strategy fans the option to tailor make their own units and plans for galactic conquest.

In all, Heretic Kingdoms does more new things in one game than I’ve seen in the last dozen games I’ve played combined. That’s a good thing, and it almost makes up for the game’s technical problems.

There’s a lot of unrealized potential in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. I don’t believe the developers were able to squeeze as much out of the open world island warfare concept as they could have.

Much better than last year’s title by leaps and bounds, and comes closer than ever to presenting a challenge to EA and other baseball titles.

However, the bottom line is that Kinect Sports: Season Two is a lot of fun to play. It's not a game you'll play for hours on end, but instead it's one you'll pull out when friends come over for a fun couple of minutes.

In the end, Dragon's Dogma is an average hack-n'-slash RPG with a great gimmick that falls short in execution.

A vast improvement on the EyeToy formula, and an engaging diversion for a short while.

A pretty average adventure. I think if Presto Studios made a mistake, it's that they tried to make the game too much like the original Myst. They got the look and feel right, and they created a good set of puzzles, but, like Myst, they completely ignored story elements and character interaction.