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.