Luftrausers is a very good time and it’s nice that it shakes up the genre of arcade shooters by making creatively escaping death and blasting away at bad guys carry the same weight. But it’s also mostly a momentary distraction, a game you come back to for a few minutes when you’ve got time to kill, and for that, Luftrausers feels like its asking price is a bit too high for what’s on offer.

If horror games are to be judged by their scares, then Daylight gives players their money’s worth. The game never failed to hit me with numerous jump-inducing moments, and smartly keeps the tension ratcheted through its mazes, only to let it out slowly in between — but just barely. Though short, the procedural generation adds replay value to the overall package, as does the Twitch functionality that makes streaming a bit more than just an experience in watching someone else scream like an idiot.

It’s a deeper, much more beautiful take on what remains a brilliant and simple concept. The additions are good, but there could stand to be more of them.

The one thing The Stick of Truth was meant to do more than anything else — capture South Park in game form — the title does incredibly well. As a licensed property, it may well stand alone in that sense; you’ll never get closer to headin’ on down to South Park than in The Stick of Truth.

There’s a lot about Far Cry 4 to like: it’s beautiful and huge, and little additions like elephants to ride and helicopters to fly can make it great. But it’s less than a sum of its parts, and often is bloated and confused. For as big a world as Kyrat is, it lacks life and cohesion; it’s fun as long as you don’t think too much about the wheel beneath your feet.

I think it is a better foundation to build on than The Sims 3 had at launch.

This War of Mine is a great counterpoint to the yearly influx of war games, and uses the language of video games to present a harrowing real-life experience in a way that’s often particularly engaging. It’s dark, it’s sad, it’s often crushing and difficult. It might not be fun, but it’s definitely worth experiencing.

Papo & Yo deals in some fundamental truths about abuse, addiction, and maturity, and I certainly didn’t expect it. It may be short and easy, but it uses games to convey a psychological message that would be otherwise impossible without interaction.

Operating from the shadows should feel great, and it does. It’s just a shame that the great sneaking gameplay has been wedded to a story that doesn’t quite feel like it fits the classic character you’re cast as. It doesn’t ruin the game, but it definitely keeps it from living up to its potential.

While the setting of Among The Sleep is different, the cogs and gears underneath are a bit too familiar, and that stops Among The Sleep from being quite as scary as it could be.

The trouble is that, stapled onto what is a good game at the core, are a number of mishandled features that don’t add anything and occasionally detract from the experience. Co-op is a take-it-or-leave-it gesture that is only sometimes really interesting (in some missions, Carver hallucinates things the player controlling Isaac can’t see at all), but crafting can get fun, and many of the missions and a lot of the lore are stellar reasons to play the game. It is a fun time, despite a few failings.

Despite some missteps common to the adventure game genre, and a third act that loses itself in the details and machinations of its fantasy world, The Night of the Rabbit is a journey adventure game fans won’t regret or soon forget.

A Story About My Uncle accomplishes its goal of creating a feeling through controls that many games aspire to, but fail to grasp. My biggest takeaway from the game was wishing there was more of it; the game does a phenomenal job of making it exciting merely to be present in and move about its world, if only for a fleeting visit.

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.

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.

The Novelist asks you questions about your own life through the lens of Dan and his family, and shows well the ways that games can challenge their players, and be more than the sum of their parts.

Even with its crap boss fights, the good things in No Time to Explain manage to outweigh the bad. As a major fan of time travel, I had a solidly fun time with it.

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.

The game's biggest problem, however, is the reliance on some of the very worst gaming tropes. Challenging is good, and I'm willing to argue it's not even a disaster when you can plainly feel the game cheating in the AI's favor (I'm looking your way, Civilization series). But missions that come down to either memorizing patterns or to simple luck are excruciating.

For the inspiration alone, it’s worth spending a little time on Dejobaan’s dead worlds.

There are some really cool ideas here, and given more attention and space to grow, the game might have been something truly special. But there’s a feeling that maybe Dontnod and Capcom felt they had to hedge their bets — if they were going to make a game under a new IP with a female antagonist and a fascinating future world, they also needed to bring it back to the mainstream with Batman-like combat and Tomb Raider-like climbing. And overall, Remember Me is significantly weaker for both.

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

While Chapter 2 might have its pacing issues, it accomplishes one thing beautifully: it leaves you wanting more, and it deftly raises new questions about the mystery just as it’s answering old ones.

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

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.

There’s a great game in Transistor, and a deceptive and strange world, and a touching character relationship between Red and the sword, even if it only makes sense once you’ve seen the ending cinematic. But Transistor won’t give you those things up front; you’ll have to earn them. That means putting up with a story that seems meaningless and a battle system that starts out feeling limited to the point of being potentially annoying.

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

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.

If you can look past the technical issues, the lackluster story, and some of the frustrating design decisions, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get lost in Citizens of Earth’s beautifully bizarre world.

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.

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.

Story might be getting a low priority in The Tyranny of King Washington, but at least The Betrayal lets you transform into invisible animals to better hunt your prey. At the very least, it makes Assassin’s Creed 3 fresh again.

A charming retro experience that captures the swing and swagger of the 1920s and the nostalgia of turn-based titles from the ’90s, but without incorporating anything that truly evolves the genre or that is even executed to the standards of similar games out presently.

As for the story of Chapter 3, it’s ultimately pretty satisfying, although there’s some narrative sleight-of-hand at work in the conclusion that felt a bit like cheating on part of the game’s writers.

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.

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.

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.

For the $20 price of entry, The Dark Below provides some quality skirmishes and will keep players busy for hours, if that’s how you measure value.

The Redemption itself ends on a ho-hum note and, while it occasionally can be a fun time, it never reaches the point of being exceptional or even especially compelling.

Without a narrative that really drives the episode forward, The Infamy doesn’t feel like a real meaningful addition to Assassin’s Creed 3. It does hint that The Tyranny of King Washington will be a solid add-on as we move further into it, but this introduction mostly leaves the player confused and waiting.

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.

What it really comes down to with Hidden Secrets is its price tag. For $5, you get maybe an hour of content and some new costumes, and that's just a little steep for content that doesn't offer much to players.

Quotation forthcoming.

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.

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’s a B movie in Dead Island: Riptide that entertains in that laughable B-movie sort of way: that “don’t take it so seriously, characters so bad they’re good, what ridiculous thing might happen next” sort of way. But like the B horror genre itself, Riptide can’t stand on that appeal forever. Eventually, the endless zombie head-crushing just isn’t entertaining anymore.

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.

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.

It feels cheap, it feels rushed, and it is also very short.

There’s a great game hidden somewhere in the shadows of Contrast, and every now and then you see brief glimpses of that potential brilliance. But one can’t help but feel like the game either ran out of time or ran out of ideas.

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.

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.

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.

A mediocre cover-based shooter combined with a mediocre turn-based tactics experience that is peppered with RPG seasoning, and the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

The problem with the big battles of Helm’s Deep is that it’s a story we all know, and it’s possible the concept could have been stronger if Turbine had included other battles from Middle Earth’s history for variety. All too quickly, the repetition grows tiring and the appeal wears thin, and that’s true of the questing content as well.

At its heart, Space Hulk is still a classic board game highly recommended by a legion of fans and well worth playing, but this adaptation is littered with thorny little issues, from superficial graphical glitches and incorrect text on the main menu to occasional UI quirks–like incorrectly calculating the optimal movement paths for marines, forcing you to do it square-by-square, and even a few exploits involving being able to re-roll or undo actions that really shouldn’t be allowed.

Other rickety spots aside, How To Survive’s biggest issue is that it doesn’t do enough to keep you engaged across its short, repetitive campaign.

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

With dodgy controls and a compendium of worn platforming conventions, Oozi: Earth Adventure just doesn’t pack a lot of punch. It’s by no means a terrible game or a terrible platformer, but my time with it ultimately amounted to more irritation than elation.

Ryse has the look and feel of a stellar AAA action game, and it even has the makings of a combat system that can be positively compared to the highly regarded Batman games. Unfortunately that combat system remains underdeveloped as the game goes on, and as a result, the game becomes a repetitive trudge through its brief 6 hour campaign.

A wobbly title that misses the mark on both sides — keeping the wrong things of a bygone era while failing to introduce much of anything exciting to go with a new console generation.

Ignoring the visuals, it is an inferior product in every way compared to last year’s WWE 2K14, and even WWE 13 from the year before that. WWE 2K15 ofers fewer wrestlers, match types and creative options, a weaker story mode, and the same core gameplay that, honestly, is starting to feel a little stale.

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.

Rush Bros is a thoroughly mediocre platformer. The best reason to purchase it is, in fact, the soundtrack, which is probably worth the price of admission. If you buy it looking for an innovative platformer or exciting music game, you will be disappointed.

Defiance is a game that actively flaunts bad gunplay in the player’s face, has no real progression to speak of, lacks cohesion of design in both mechanics and art, and is missing the most important part of an MMO: variety.

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.

There’s a fun game to be had with the right mix of these elements — ghosts, crime-solving, a troubled cop and a serial killer — but Murdered: Soul Suspect just isn’t really it.

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.

Monochroma is a flawed but beautiful game that has a few shining moments, but for the most part struggles with the two most important aspects of a puzzle platformer: the puzzles and the platforming.

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.

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.

Awakened is a thin piece of DLC that really only subsists on what made Dead Space 3 good to begin with, and offers little else. It also sells you the real ending to a game you already bought, and the big cliffhanger setup for Dead Space 4, at the rate of $10 — and that kind of sucks.

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.

It does nothing particularly well – in fact, a number of mechanics are an active detriment to the experience, like food – but it also doesn’t do anything particularly poorly. The best way to describe it is tepid.

To top off a growing tower of gripes, navigation around space in Rebirth is an astounding hassle.

In time, it may well become a great strategy game to stand alongside the franchise’s true classics. But for now, it’s a bloated mess, and it’s unfair for the developers and publishers to take everyone’s money and then give them a game that has so many obvious problems. Maybe Creative Assembly and SEGA will learn a lesson. Maybe Total War fans will. Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic.

There’s just no reason to play Deus Ex: The Fall, even for big-time Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution fans. You can get the same experience out of reading a Wiki entry online. Better yet, if you must play the game, grab it on a mobile device, where it will actually work.

What’s most shocking is that it’s also a complete failure when it comes to basic game design. The gunplay is unconvincing, weightless, and repetitive. AI allies are literally bulletproof; AI enemies engage in a litany of truly bizarre behavior. Thanks to a long development cycle, the game arrives feeling and looking dated, offering ugly animations, textures, and cutscenes, cover-shooting with no cover, and lifeless, obsolete character models.

Updating an old game is always something of a balancing act as developers work to maintain what made the original game great, while bringing it up to speed with modern conventions. Unfortunately, Flashback HD fails on both accounts.

Not content with being the most mediocre and generic shooter I’ve played all year, Alien Rage makes its way into terrible territory. Countless bugs and a brutally unnecessary difficulty curve help artificially lengthen the game’s four hour campaign, while simultaneously ruining any chance that Alien Rage had to be enjoyable.

A strange thing happens when you review a game as bad as DARK. You get really, really good at it. So desperate was I to be done, to not think about it again, to not deal with the save system, that by the end I fashioned myself into a kind of DARK savant, flitting around levels with as much ease as the game would permit and a certain kind of Dark Souls-powered, no-room-for-error concentration. So far that reason, I’m sort of glad I played it. And for one other reason: so I can tell everyone else to never, ever play DARK.

Just like the island of Montague’s Mount is empty, so too is this game. There’s no substance — just darkness, rain, and the airy affectation of what “emotional” games should be like. But emotions are more than sad-looking photos, plodding pace, quiet narration and soft violin music. In Montague’s Mount, just like that ethereal mountain, emotion is decidedly absent. All that’s left is boredom.