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.

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

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.

Newcomers who persevere and keep on bashing away until they master the fundamentals will be rewarded greatly, but in all honesty, you might be best off tracking down at least the first NUNS game on PS3 and Xbox 360. For existing fans of the series, these are the ninjas you’re looking for. Network quirks aside, if you’ve got a PC capable of making NUNS3 sing, you won’t be disappointed.

If what you’re expecting is a much, much prettier version of Infamous 2, albeit with a frustrating mechanic of switching between your powers, then you’ll likely be happy with what you get in Second Son. If you’re thinking that a leap to a new console generation should mean more than just a leap in graphical fidelity, then I welcome you into my boat.

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.

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.

As far as shooters are concerned, Wolfenstein: The New Order beautifully taps some of the best elements and mechanics the genre has seen over the last generation. It also delivers on an expansive what-if world vision that can be pretty intriguing, and opens doors with its characters — specifically a franchise protagonist who’s never been too deep — that add some nuance to the exploration of that world.

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.

If Valiant Hearts’ gameplay could match most of its storytelling, it’d probably be the best game of the year to this point. As it stands, it’s still a remarkably beautiful piece of interactive entertainment that does a fantastic job of showing players a piece of history in a way that’s easily accessible and yet emotionally engaging.

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.

With a great pay model — you give money to play chapters as they release to help fund further development, but each is eventually free — and no lack of dread-inducing darkness, The Last Door is worthy of the unflinching, lidless eye of horror and adventure fans. Be warned, though: you’ll be waiting a while for the answers Devitt seeks.

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.

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.

Same strong characters and plotting that made Season 1 so powerful.

It’s a competent shooter that scratches exactly the itch that Call of Duty players want scratched — a new setting, some new abilities, and lots of new maps within which to shoot each other. Just don’t expect anything you haven’t already seen before.

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.

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.

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.

The story continues to develop in unexpected directions, and the suspense that’s building for Episode 5 is palpable and intense.

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 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.

Eldritch is almost two games for the price of one. Initially it could be said that it’s a comedy. The difficulty is un-obstructing and many of the enemy designs and animations are actually quite cute for nightmarish abominations. It welcomes you in and builds up your confidence, only to tear you back down again in New Game +, where Eldritch reveals its true colors as a first-person Spelunky with a horror slant.

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.

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.

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.