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.