For players who like story and experience to trump all else, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a low-key journey with some interesting ideas.

Perhaps when Broken Age is complete, it’ll feel like a stronger offering — it was never meant to be divided in half anyway, and the forced split feels like it comes just as the game finally hits a comfortable stride. But for a game about young people striking out on their own, made by a developer that set out to gain the financial freedom to do exactly what it wanted, Broken Age feels like it plays it safe; a cushy adventure game with some heart, but absent any sharp edges.

Blood Dragon’s distinctive concept provides some lively visuals and some funny jokes. But in its rush to cash in on the popularity of Far Cry 3 and the popularity of ’80s nostalgia in gaming in a general (and after Hotline: Miami in particular), Ubisoft released a game that lacks the cohesion between tone, art direction, and gameplay required to make it truly memorable. It’s a good gimmick — perhaps at that price point, a great one — but it’s still a gimmick.

It’s a shame that it’s so often frustrating and inscrutable, and a bigger shame that some of the humor skews toward the cringe-worthy. Goodbye Deponia feels as though this trilogy never quite made it to its own comedy Elysium, even though it was capable of reaching those heights.

So much of the experience is locked off due to an inbalanced in-game economy and even more has just been cut entirely. Forza 5 was just good enough enough to keep me from going back to Forza 4: the addition of drivatars and the desire to compete for slots on the global leader board in particular just managed to keep me invested.

Despite its shortcomings – strange animations, goofy characterizations, and stitched-together game mechanics – I liked Sang-Froid. It has a lot of charm, and it’s clear that the developers wanted to make a game that captured the dark, mysterious nature of North American mythos. For the most part, they succeeded.

Whether they go bigger, embracing convention, or smaller, embracing their more original ideas, they have to go somewhere, or be stuck making mediocrities, which is what Call of Juarez: Gunslinger ultimately is.

You might expect Call of Duty: Ghosts to play it safe and lean heavily on past formulas. Instead, it goes in the complete opposite direction and crafts its own path. In some areas, like the Campaign and Extinction, that works exceptionally well, but in others, such as the Squads mode, it falls woefully flat.

It’s expansive and fun, delivering plenty of game for the money, but it fails to bring much more to the table than its impressive style.

Its best moments feel like flashes of brilliance rather than sustained genius. Its weakest moments are formulaic, repetitious and banal — a reminder that the next generation is a lot like the old one, but with more gimmicks.

Bungie has said it has come up with 10 years of content for Destiny, but I was bored at around 10 hours. The game has its moments, but it needs more. It needs adventurous thinking and risky ideas. It needs challenges that go beyond racking up headshots. It needs engagement among players to make them feel useful and important. It needs people and places within it that have more character than just pretty helmets and vistas and lens flare.

Divinity: Dragon Commander oddly finds its comfort zone when it’s focused on interpersonal relationships rather than on sweeping tales of high adventure, and that’s bad news for players looking for anything resembling a truly challenging strategy experience on the battlefield.

It’s an atmospheric slog with some cool art direction, granted (although its anemic, somewhat confused mad science story doesn’t add much on that front). But it’s a slog nonetheless, constantly punishing the player for not reading its mind. Dying in a game isn’t scary — almost dying is. The Evil Within, however, never figures that out.

In a year without high-profile, high-quality MMOs, Neverwinter is the best so far.

Maybe the big lesson is that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have much left to say, or to offer. Maybe all of us, Assassins, Templars, players and developers, need to take a break.

There just wasn’t enough here to warrant a standalone purchase.

When at its best, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is every bit as capable of scaring the pants off of horror-seeking players as its predecessor. But uneven pacing, a nonsensical story, and a general lack of danger or risk breeds a sense of detachment that by the end didn’t give me chills–it just left me cold.

Unity is still one of the weaker entries of the series. Co-op, while fun, feels half-baked; the game is ultimately meaningless in terms of the series canon because of the lack of focus on the present day story line; and many of the design decisions feel driven by the unwelcome addition of micro-transactions. Better luck next year, I guess.

Nothing feels like it matters. Freedom Cry has an interesting protagonist with an interesting perspective in an interesting time and place, and reduces it all to numbers on a sheet and repetitive tasks, all while playing it incredibly safe with gameplay or storytelling.

Sniper Elite 3 gets its sniping pretty right, but all the things it gets wrong keep it from reaching its potential.

It may not have ended up being the first, but Doublebear has certainly earned its place among the zombie survival greats.

Burial at Sea is a DLC package that trades on the fan love for Rapture and little else, with nothing new to add to that place — and what’s more, it feels a bit lazy and a bit messy. Maybe it’s time this undersea city was left buried, finally.

In Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream had the tools necessary to make something great out of its quirky game design philosophy. But having the tools and using them are two different things. A game like this lives and dies by its story, and unfortunately for Beyond: Two Souls, the story was fatal.

Ultimately, the big contrast in excitement between Origin’s overt craziness and the more ho-hum moments that frequently pop-up throughout the four new multiplayer maps makes Apocalypse an uneven experience.

There’s a great game buried in the code of Lightning Returns, and if you’re the sort that’s willing to dig through a seemingly endless amount of mind numbing sidequests, then you might be able to find it. For me though, Lightning Returns was a draining gauntlet of fetch quests and gathering missions that occasionally allowed me to have fun with its deep combat and customization options. Unfortunately, occasional fun is not something I can recommend for a game that lasts upwards of 40 hours, especially when the rest of time spent playing feels like running errands.

Any game that can make me haul out quotes from both a 17thcentury philosopher and a 60’s era bard is worthy of note, but the technical shortcomings (i.e. camera wrangling) of several generations ago, and the fact that it can easily be completed in one sitting, really hamstring the overall experience that Shelter offers when it comes down to the brass tacks.

Stripped of the excitement of finding new places and exploring them on those second and third runs through, The Cave is just an exercise in repositioning slow-moving characters. It has its high points, like a beautiful art direction and some smart dialog moments, but they're not enough to offset so much spelunking tedium.

When firing on all cylinders, MWO is an enjoyable sim-shooter, but for all the overheating energy weapons in the world, the current product still feels a little half-baked.