When you get down to it, Shadow Warriors does an impressive job of straddling the line between its retro upbringings and the more advanced first-person shooter offerings of late.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Grand Theft Auto V is a remarkable achievement. Fun, challenging, satisfying and morally complex, it’s also proof of the ability of games to tackle mature subjects while still being enjoyable diversions, all in service to great characters and a gritty story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rayman Legends falls just short of being an absolutely timeless classic, but that’s just about the worst thing anyone can say about it. It’s every bit as good as its predecessor — stronger on some fronts and a little weaker on others — and continues to strengthen Rayman’s position as an enduring gaming mascot.

Even late in the game, it had the ability to get my blood racing and my spine tingling. It’s possible that by the end, Outlast does, in fact, slightly outlast its mechanics and AI, but the novelty of running and hiding and its phenomenal, no-holds-barred presentation definitely make up for it. This is a gross, scary, disturbing game: you should play it.

Blacklist sees Sam Fisher and his covert posse returning to the series’ sneaky-happy roots in good form, and it’s easily one of the best stealth offerings I’ve delved into in a long time.

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.

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.

Hammerwatch is good fun if you can looks past its armor chinks, and especially if you dig the kind of old school challenges it dishes out on the later levels.

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.

Play Gone Home because you want an engrossing and detailed environment to explore. Play it because you want something new and introspective from your games. Play it because you want to reconnect with a sibling or family member who has grown distant. Play it because ten years from now there will still be people playing and discussing its intricacies.

Midway through the game, one characters asks The Boss “you’re easily bored, aren’t you?”, to which the boss says “I don’t know, I’m too busy being awesome to notice.” Saints Row IV is all at once puerile, profane and touching, but mainly, it’s too busy being awesome for you to ever get bored.

Don’t even think about taking on hard or above missions all by your lonesome. While your AI companions weren’t the brightest bulbs in the original Payday, they still carried their weight. There were also three of them. This time around, you’re limited to two AI crew members, and they’re about as useful as a pen without ink.

In an industry that values selling content in an effort to keep game discs rooted in their trays despite the constant ebb and flow of novelty, Brigmore Witches shows how developers can really get expansion content right, making the extra expense worth it and increasing the value of the experience delivered from the original title.

The themes and ideas explored in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons are not new to video games, but very rarely are they executed upon as skillfully as they are here.

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.

Put it back in the oven; this game is not ready. Citadels is simply tedious to play. I never once found myself having any semblance of fun. Not only is Citadels not worth the $40 price tag it is somehow selling for, I couldn’t recommend this game even if it were free-to-play.

If you are fine with the grind, you’ll find a game with plenty of charm, wit, and character. Co-op is a blast, the visual style is the most fluid and detailed you’ll get short of Metal Slug, and the core concept of “shoot dudes a lot” is executed extremely well.

Overall, I would recommend Dragon’s Crown, but would warn people that the game still does suffer from that age-old problem that faces all 2D beat-em-ups: repetition.

Shadowrun Returns aims to bring back the classic RPG feeling — much like BioWare’s Dragon Age did when it was released — and succeeds wholeheartedly. It’s not too deep, has a short main campaign, and has design flaws from being built around a tablet, but it’s still the best RPG in ages.

Teleglitch is one of those rare few games that gets everything it attempts to do right. The oppressive atmosphere, crafting system, glitchy visuals, and careful combat are all done extremely well. The only negative thing that can be said for it is that it’s unforgiving.

It’s a total throwback that openly defies nearly every advancement of the last 15 years. But for once, this is in the service of a great play experience and not simple laziness (or a time/budget crunch).

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

Where The Raven excels is in the portrayal of its characters, its game world and its mystery.

There’s absolutely no doubt: Brave New World is the best expansion in recent memory, and easily the best Civilization expansion ever. It elevates Civilization 5 from the issues that plagued it at launch and turns it into one of the most addicting, entertaining, and deep 4X games around. If you have purchased or plan on purchasing Civilization 5, there is no reason not to buy Brave New World.

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.

But the power of The Walking Dead, of developing real, relatable characters and pushing players into tough decisions about how to treat and how to interact with them, is lost to a degree in 400 Days. Without more time spent with each of these characters, and without more context for the decisions players are asked to make, the experience becomes less emotional and more mechanical and cold.

It’s great, affordable fun, and a lesson in how far smart design, good writing and respect for players’ intelligence can take a game.

Magrunner does scratch an important itch, though: it gets the first-person puzzler genre, and it provides a new and dynamic set of mechanics that feel just different enough from other games in the genre.

Simple, familiar, but one that’s becoming increasingly rare: fans wanted a sequel that preserved the strengths of the original game, smoothed out flaws, and added new content. That’s exactly what they got. Company of Heroes 2 doesn’t reinvent the RTS, but it doesn’t have to. It’s got physics.

It’s not for everyone, and I’d hesitate to recommend Rogue Legacy to those who get discouraged and frustrated easily. But for those who are looking for a challenge, Rogue Legacy is a must-play and a steal at its $15 price tag.

Despite its major victories and steps forward in storytelling, many of those same annoying video game conventions — the demand for action and high body counts, the lack of truly engaging and innovative play mechanics — continue to pull games like The Last of Us down toward the lowest common denominator.

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.

With its intuitive gameplay and in-game tutorials and hints, Legendary Heroes should be quick to pick up even for the 4X uninitiated.

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.

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.

There are some truly brilliant concepts on display here, and this is the first fantastic god game the genre has seen in a long time. It’s a shame that the lack of game modes hinders Reus so much, as it’s really something special.

Most importantly, Last Light incorporates a lot of lessons learned from the previous iteration. The big step from Metro 2033 in design, gameplay and polish make Last Light one of my favorite games of the year so far.

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.

Good, but not fantastic. It has all the necessary starting elements for a good survival game – hunting and gathering, base-building, and even a final objective – but it lacks the end-game intricacies and interests of similar titles. It is, in essence, half-finished.

It is complicated in one instance, and simple in the next. It seems generic at first, but then shows its uniqueness in setting and granular game mechanics. It’s a game by strategy enthusiasts, for strategy enthusiasts. Once you look past the awkward, pimply exterior, a game of surprising interest looks back.

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.

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.

The easy learning curve, the variety of characters, the sprawling levels, and the lovely sound and art all combine to make an extremely appealing and replayable game. It may only be April, but Monaco is already a strong contender for Game of the Year.

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 HD add-ons make it inviting, but it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no shame in tracking down a friendly FAQ to get through this one: it takes players to another world, and the game is certainly from another time.

While The Knife of Dunwall suffers in the story department, almost everything else about the pack is extremely well-polished, and the pathways through each mission are diverse and intricate, even if they’re not all as exciting as what’s in the main game.

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.

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.

AoE2 is an RTS with classic sensibilities, and it can be daunting for those used to simpler, more focused, and more modern RTS games. It will chew you up and spit you out if you aren’t careful.

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.

Like Columbia itself, BioShock Infinite straddles more than one world: sometimes transcendent, often tedious. It’s a game about characters choosing to lie to themselves and create the narrative they wish their lives followed, rather than succumb to reality. That’s the story of the game itself, too, as Infinite often acts as though it’s deeper, more groundbreaking, more willing to be relevant to the world of the player and strong enough to comment on that world, than it is.

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.

Gears of War: Judgment is the period at the end of the Gears of War sentence, and in creating it, Epic Games, People Can Fly, and Tom Bissell have created a masterpiece in video game punctuation. Personally, I look forward to their next sentence, when dust-choked, declassified chaos is the default, not the option, and Bissell’s huge talent is deployed in favor of something truly innovative.

A much more enjoyable and satisfying game than Wings of Liberty and is superior to the base game in every way. If I may paraphrase “Hey Jude,” Blizzard took a great game and made it better.

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.

The star is the multiplayer mode, and it’s often inventive and fun to play if you’re willing to stick with it. And single-player is no slouch either, packing around eight or so hours of play, but it’s both not as polished or engaging as earlier titles, and not as exciting a story to work through — even though I don’t hate Kratos this time out.

I’m sad that Tomb Raider is over. It’s a game I wish I could go back and start over again fresh to experience for the first time all over again.

Yes, the game and thus, the series, still is fundamentally wrecked by poor decisions, yes, the mission itself contains incredibly tin-eared dialogue and setting when you consider the context, and yes, we are still looking at Mass Effect being a mere brand name for future shooters and action games. But perhaps for the first time since the original Mass Effect, the people involved in making Mass Effect content really got what it means to play this thing, to spend so much time with it, and what you can do to tell a story within a video game.

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.

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.

Sure, it’d be nice to see the kind of PC support title such as Battlefield 3 and Crysis 3 are getting, but Dead Space 3 is more than a straight port and still quite a bit of fun.

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.

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.

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.

The mystery of Proteus continues and the game world created there is worth a visit, despite the inability to touch it or alter it. But at the same time, the game made me want to take an actual hike in the real world; and it’s a tough sell at $10 for anyone but those who enjoy thinking about video games as art, and wandering around an intriguing place without doing anything.

Antichamber requires you to realign your thinking, and there’s little that’s more satisfying than breaking through the mental barrier you’ve erected for yourself to discover a solution.

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.

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.

What it does, however, is give you some nifty playgrounds in which to mess with Arkane's intriguing and sophisticated set of tools. This sort of thing is a skill player or a completionist's idea of a really good time. If you're like me, Dunwall City Trials will be a $5 investment that'll provide several hours of infuriating, but ultimately rewarding, entertainment.

It's not fantastic, as the many small problems drag down the experience and often lead to frustration. It's certainly not mediocre, though, as the large-scale battles and necessary teamwork elevate it above simple shooting drudgery. As it is an MMO, the minor problems will be ironed out over time, and the core mechanics are just far too intriguing to ignore.

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.

Kentucky Route Zero is gorgeous, haunting and effecting. It's the kind of experience that's difficult to get out of your head once you've had it, and I'm hoping to go through and try different choices and paths for a chance to squeeze a little more out of this little chunk of the world.

Just like the perfect AC/DC song, Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt might occasionally drag, but whenever it counts, it gives you exactly what you paid for.

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.