As an introduction to flight simulation, Microsoft Flight does a sterling job. It is immediately accessible and offers a gentle but genuine challenge. Veteran pilots may find its leaning towards arcade-type challenges a bit of a turn off at first, but flight stick compatibility, a versatile free flight mode, and aerocache hunting all indicate the presence of a deeper game with lasting appeal.

Despite the awful A.I and dull locations, this game offers an enjoyable challenge. Each mission is so finely poised that pre-planning and scouting ahead is an absolute must.

Rock Band 4 feels like both a necessity and an afterthought.

As a modern video game, a few things hold it back from being truly great, but as a nod to the days when developers created characters just to have more 'tude than that fat plumber, it's a lot of fun.

Sure, some of the objective design really bogs down the progression, but that's just a facade. The real progression happens with a fully maxed out character and a player that's willing to engage with the design. That's when THPS HD is at its best.

NSMB2 begins as just another night of nostalgic anecdotes. It eventually overcomes that on the strength of its world-class gameplay and level design, but pieces of that awkwardness remain.

With limited multiplayer options (and no single-player modes other than bot training), long waits for matches to start, boring weapons, and a carrot-on-a-stick progression system that is way more stick than carrot, Nexuiz is doomed to obscurity.

The wax-figure-like NPCs and mostly uneventful story, however, dampen a lot of the fun. It’s possible that once both parts of the two-episode Burial at Sea series are out, the story issues will evaporate. That’s just not the case right now.

The writing in the main story put me to sleep. And the Kinect controls are so inaccurate that they take you out of what should be a magical fantasy experience. Clearly, more time wouldn't have helped this game. Better writers might have salvaged it, but it amazes me that no one told the team to start over and get it right.

ReCore is fun game betrayed by technical woes. I love the combination of shooting and platforming, but it just doesn’t have enough polish to back up its solid mechanics. It could have used some extra time in development to smooth the experience out.

Judgment just might be the game that drops Gears of War out of the triple-A tier. It is competently done and no more. The rock-solid gameplay returns intact — virtually identical, in fact — and the Declassified options bump the entertainment value up a few notches, but the epic scope and precision level designs that elevated the franchise beyond its mechanics simply aren’t here.

It’s not as varied or exciting as a Mario Kart title, but it’ll keep you busy and entertained — especially once you mute those sound effects.

Games don’t have to be fun. They can have more value than that. And I’m not saying The Witness can’t be fun, but it’s just as often frustrating.

If you’re an experienced AC player, here’s my advice: Rogue feels like a good expansion, and it’s worth seeing Shay’s role in the ongoing drama. But because it’s so similar to Black Flag, I think you’re better off waiting for a price drop.

It’s weird when you feel so unenthusiastic about a game that you know is “good.” This used to be a series that I would never miss. These days, I’d probably take a long break from The Show if I could.

Chaos Theory can’t escape the shadow of its superior predecessor, but that’s not to say it’s a bad experience. Once you power through the dull fetch quests and irritating Chloe Time, it manages to provide some powerful moments and the best ending of any episode so far.

Although it's not as funny as past Ron Gilbert games, The Cave still manages to charm through its visuals and honey-tongued narrator, but it falls flat when it comes to storytelling.

Trading powers with scientifically enhanced critters is a ton of fun across Tiny Brains’ various puzzle rooms and combat arenas. But once the brief story campaign has been completed, there is little reason to play beyond the extra half-hour of unlocked challenges and Tiny Soccer matches.

Virtua Fighter 5 is a very good game, and Final Showdown makes it better in many ways…but it could have been even better than that with just a few reasonable changes.

I found the in-app purchases intrusive and destructive of the gameplay flow. If you don’t mind that sort of thing, add 10 points to this review score. If you’re highly irritated by freemium features you can’t avoid, then my only advice is to avoid Angry Birds 2 and opt for one of the earlier games in the series.

Yes, I wish it had more levels and less town-building, but Super Mario Run manages to feel like real Mario game even with only one button. It’s great to see that Nintendo is able to do so much with such a simple idea that most iOS users can easily pick up and enjoy...I just wish there was more of it.

It may have its flaws, but Neverwinter is highly enjoyable and accessible to veteran, beginner, and casual players alike.

It's worth 10 bucks, plus the trouble of getting enough friends together to ensure a properly chaotic loot-grabbing experience.

While Omega has its good parts, it doesn't bring enough of that signature storytelling to the forefront. I love pulling the right trigger to shoot dudes, but I enjoy using the same button to interrupt a cutscene even more. This DLC doesn't understand that.

Fun and endearing, and it advances a game long lost to thoughtless rereleases and troubled mechanics. But it doesn't quite know how to solve all of Zelda II's problems, and where it succeeds, it also struggles.

The Need for Speed reboot improves upon several of the more recent installments in the game, which were plagued with problems more serious than these. But I was disappointed when my pure joy in the look and driving feel of NFS drained away over time, sucked out by boring treks across the city and one too many encounters with unfair A.I.

It succeeds most as a tribute to Marvel. Its giant roster offers a great variety of heroes. And while the gameplay is simple, it can still be satisfying with some cool cinematic moments and boss fights that I won’t spoil for you here. I think most people know what they’re going to get with this one: a simple Marvel-themed beat-’em-up game. Just don’t expect anything more than that.

An unusual adventure with better-than-average fighting mechanics and a mostly likable cast. But it falls short nearly everywhere else.

Despite my disappointment with Thief’s setting and story, I did enjoy my time with it. Sneaking about, pickpocketing guards, picking locks, and finding new ways to infiltrate a building are as satisfying as ever, and the game looks and sounds great (despite some janky audio mixing).

Guardians of Middle-earth sacrifices a lot of complexity to work as a console game. Hardcore MOBA fans will disapprove of the changes, but genre newbies looking for some team-based, Tolkien-inspired fun will happily take these heroes and villains to war.

Nintendo Land epitomizes the minigame-compilation genre - occasional flashes of brilliance surrounded by things you just don't want to exist.

Despite my issues with it, I’m having way more fun with Battleborn than I thought I would. It took a while, but I’ve managed to find a couple of characters whose playstyle I really like, and that’s enough to keep me going for a while longer. And I’ve had enough exciting matches that I see its potential. But it assumes its fundamental conceit is good enough that you’ll spend dozens of hours unlocking its full potential.

The end product seems like it’ll be one of the better original titles to come out of the system’s early exclusives. It hits enough checkboxes to warrant a look, but that $60 price should call for some thought before you buy in.

Counterspy successfully gives you the feeling of being a powerful and deadly third wheel in a Spy vs. Spy game of one-upmanship. Moving to and removing your target of choice amounts to the most gratifying stealth since 2012’s Mark of the Ninja. But the problems start flying as soon as the bullets do.

Guns Up! will look familiar to a lot of players through its similarities to Clash of Clans. But, it has enough going for it to be unique and enjoyable. It is vastly more interactive than a lot of asynchronous multiplayer offerings that have proliferated on mobile, and it successfully brings some of the accessibility and simplicity of mobile games to the PS4 console.

While the newest Cut the Rope is one of the most creative and entertaining games you’ll download on the App Store this month, you may already be bored with Om Nom and the trouble you go through to give him sweets.

I really do hate Spelunky. It is frustrating in a way that few console games ever are. It's audio-visual trappings don't really help the matter for me, but the sense of discovery has me intrigued to find out what happens next. That doesn't make Spelunky a good game, but I can't wait to get back to playing it.

As much as I can gripe about its flaws, it’s hard not to grin when you’re shoving a running motorcycle wheel into a demon’s face. But this won’t become another action game classic.

Every level offers a new challenge from the last, and for that, Tumble VR never gets boring.

This collection isn't for everyone. But if you're a big fan of the Blue Bomber, this is still a great package that helps you complete your digital Mega Man collection.

I'm a fan of more King's Bounty, yet the magic is missing with this latest expansion. The Viking faction isn't as fun to play as other groups. The tweaks to combat, though, give players more tactical options, something any player of a strategy-RPG can appreciate.

Tropical Freeze does little to justify the Wii U’s existence, but it’s still mostly a fun, challenging platformer. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this difficult, beautiful romp through Donkey Kong’s islands, but the game will frustrate less-enthusiastic players.

Everything in Resident Evil 6 is bigger, louder, and prettier than its predecessors, but that does not necessarily make it a better game. While it finally embraces the adrenaline-fueled action the series has slowly moved toward for so long, the rest is a schizophrenic mess.

It’s a game that’s enjoyable in small chunks but not really for a great length of time. And after a while, I felt that I had seen as much of Wonderlands as I needed to. I think at some point even the most die-hard Borderlands fans will simply lift their hands from their keyboard/controller and say, “You know what? That’s enough Tina for the foreseeable future.”

The career mode and realistic gameplay will gain the love of diehard UFC fans and hardcore sports gamers...However, the complicated controls and unpredictable striking mechanics will frustrate and confuse everyone else. There are also a number of bugs that need to be fixed.

You’ll find some great ideas here, and players who prefer Diablo 2 to its sequel will certainly love Helsing’s emphasis on character customization. But the story fails to elevate the familiar action to anything special. Mechanically, this is a great action RPG, but it lacks heart.

There's minimal pressure to spend any money, the AI-controlled bots are intelligent enough to fool particularly stupid game reviewers, and the battles manage to be adorable and epic at the same time. Unfortunately, the repetitiveness in the sound design and gameplay makes the excitement level drop too quickly.

It’s not as good as the original game. It’s merely solid, and it is also evidence that Nintendo should probably stop trying to recapture the 19-year-old magic.

It’s sometimes frustrating and sometimes monotonous, but it also transports you to an amazing world with striking designs, a deep culture, and interesting characters.

The Order is thrilling and frustrating. I should make it very clear that I did enjoy my time with it. I didn’t want to put the controller down because Ready at Dawn did such an exquisite job of doling out the action. And that, combined with its decent concept, story, and gameplay, would’ve been enough a long time ago. But in 2015 it left me feeling discontent. Is this what I bought a PlayStation 4 to play? Is this what Sony is passing off as a bold new experience? A different shade of Resident Evil 4?

Nothing’s wrong with paying a high price to gild the lily — but nothing’s wrong with not wanting to do so, either. I think The Last of Us Part 1 will make a great addition to the casual TLOU fan’s library when it inevitably goes on sale and maybe the PC players when it launches on that platform as well.

The Wonderful 101 is a good game … at times. Once I got the hang of its combo system, the battles were nearly always exciting and challenging, but Platinum’s Wii U debut has too much filler and a busted camera.

Do you like to hack, do you like to slash, do you like to chop heads, do you like sharp fantasy artwork? Then you might like to spend a few hours inside Crom's skull.

Vermintide gets so many things right, and its designers have made enough smart decisions about how to deviate from the Left 4 Dead, that it makes the difficulty knee-capping and technical mishaps all the more disappointing.

RymdResa is a gorgeous roguelike that has a significant amount of untapped potential that could lead to a much better game to play. For now, you’ll have to make do with passively exploring space and not much else.

I can overlook a lot because of Paper Mario's charm. I really enjoyed a lot of it in spite of it committing the terrible sin of wasting my time.

With its bright, cartoony visuals and easy-to-grasp concepts, Awesomenauts serves as a good introduction to the MOBA genre. While it might not have the longevity of a game like League of Legends, it's sure to provide hours of entertainment for anyone with the patience to endure some initial butt-kicking.

Monster Hunter 4 has a great game full of options, activities, and a vast world to explore and immerse yourself in living somewhere deep inside of it. And it will even show you these things. But its questionable design and control decisions suck all the fun out of it and make you feel every second of your time in the untamed wild.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is not all bad, it's just very bland. For a game that was in development for roughly seven years, the different gameplay systems don't seem all that well-thought-out. And perhaps the lengthy development also explains why Amalur brings absolutely nothing fresh to the table. It simply lacks its own identity.

The Wii U version of Rodea is simultaneously a game with a lot of charm and one that’s difficult to love as much as you want to. When Rodea works and all of its gears are cranking along smoothly, it’s an exhilarating joy to play. But everything can come crashing down at any time: an enemy encounter reliant on overly finicky aiming or a misplaced attack that sends you careening into the abyss can sour the sense of wonder in a flash...Rodea’s high points are lofty indeed, but the experience as a whole has too many pitfalls to be wondrous.

I had a lot of fun playing Strike Vector. It’s a good game held back by frustrating glitches and a lack of polish.

Killzone: Shadow Fall is a pretty game, gorgeous even. But the demand for moments to punctuate trailers or demos forced a sacrifice of story that it never quite recovers from. The OWL will find its place in history as one of the few controller-based mechanics to actually entertain, while the time spent in free fall may make players actually consider a plummet-related death.

Kingdom has solid ideas that get lost in its own simplicity. It’s a little too conceptual, and I found that it had a hard time holding my attention after a few in-game days. It has a whole kingdom out there to explore, but it just isn’t varied or interesting enough to warrant the type of commitment it ask of the player.

Everything about Gran Turismo feels functional but a bit soulless. Lonely, even.

While its story and graphics are uninspired, its sci-fi setting and skill-based combat are a refreshing change from its pointy-eared, min-maxing, level-grinding brethren.

While Epic Mickey is a treat to look at and provides some delight - mostly in the visual nods to older, more forgotten Disney character and environmental design - it finally falls far short of the wondrous, creative, simply magical experience it promises.

Its levels are predictable, the puzzles are obvious, and the four-player co-op adds little besides the literal ability to have four people playing at the same time.

It's an uninspiring distraction from games like Pure and Nail'd. The lack of congruency between the level design and control scheme definitely doesn't help.

The new game didn’t bring anything new, instead opting to jam Hiryu into a formulaic experience that looks good on a whiteboard...This is a competent platformer. But when it comes to Strider, I’m not looking for competent. I’m looking for crazy.

The patient build-up of plant defenses is almost entirely absent, and the zombies act just like competent human soldiers. Although Garden Warfare has some charm, most of it is borrowed from the original games.

If you love Destiny, Rise of Iron gives you enough new content to keep you invested and interested Bungie’s online shooter. But for more casual players like me, you won’t find anything here to really excite you. It’s just more. It’s all at the quality you’d expect, but little of it breaks through as exciting, creative, or daring.

Global happiness just doesn't work, and I don't know if fixing this is even possible, considering that so many other gameplay systems depend on the mechanic. The A.I. still doesn't provide an adequate challenge in combat, nor does it appear to even understand the rules.

Dust: An Elysian Tail is a pleasure to look at. The combat is deep and highly kinetic, but the rest of the game can't keep up with that energy. What's left is an inconsistent and sometimes boring product that doesn't live up to its potential.

What good is a fully 3D world when you can’t touch or interact with hardly anything? What sense does it make that you can’t run away from an encounter in which you’re clearly outmatched (or even move once you’re in melee rage, for that matter)?...These glaring issues, combined with a general lack of polish, make for an experience that just doesn’t live up to my fond memories of Might & Magic.

While Zone mode is damn near worth the price of admission alone, it's time for Studio Liverpool to refresh the franchise with some big ideas or hand it over to someone who will.

This is yet another Yoshi game that doesn't come close to reaching Yoshi's Island greatness.

It’s like a free game, and not an awful one. But when you judge on its own, it’s novelty quickly becomes tedious.

Resogun does everything it promises, and not a a bit more. It has gorgeous graphics and solid skill-based gameplay, with valuable online co-op support and just enough content to keep things interesting for a while.

It certainly isn’t up to Pokémon’s level: while exploring is fun, combat is a passive, frustrating slog that keeps it from being as enjoyable as it should be. Perhaps younger players will find more appeal in the fighting, but in terms of being strong enough to carry a global brand, the core game of Yo-Kai Watch still needs improvement.

Questionable game design choices and some irritating bugs just overpowered the storytelling for me.

While Dead Island: Riptide serves the zombie genre well, it doesn’t do anything new with it. You’ve killed a million enemies like this before, and the only real differences this time around are aesthetic. The developers at Techland are adamant that Riptide is more of a spin-off than a true sequel, so maybe next time they’ll find some brains for this undead series.

The Legend of Legacy is tantalizingly close to being a good game, but its anachronistic design is too much of an underdeveloped double-edged sword.

Grow Home is a better experiment than a game.

Some life-long players of the franchise may not feel like Explorers has enough Final Fantasy for them. It has a lot — and lets you customize much of it along the way — but it just doesn’t have that “magic feeling” I get when playing a Final Fantasy and knowing that game’s world is at stake.

This is the most satisfying battle system the series has had since Final Fantasy X, and it stands strong enough on its own to merit a recommendation for most players.

I found myself mostly thrilled with Kid Icarus: Uprising right up until the very end of the ninth chapter. It's almost impressive how quickly this game goes from being a great, well-rounded experience to a total narrative disaster that drags on for far too long.

In other ways, I really can’t find an enjoyable groove in the fighting system itself, which is the most important part of the experience. I’ll admit that it’s partially my fault. I like my mind games to have certain things going on, which maybe isn’t compatible with Mortal Kombat X. But part of the blame is definitely on NetherRealm Studios, with strange system decisions and move animations that are implemented poorly.

Know that the single-player components of Halo: The Master Chief Collection are excellent and well worth the purchase; however, if you intend to spend months tearing through multiplayer, reliving glory days or forging new conquests in sci-fi shooter perfection, you’re going to be sorely disappointed right now.

Modern Combat 5: Blackout is at its best when it’s not trying to replicate the FPS experience from consoles and PC. The touch screen doesn’t give you the type of responsiveness you need for a game like this. The only reason it works for the linear campaign and quick-fire Spec Ops challenges is because of player-friendly options that make up for all the sluggishness.

For the two or three things that SpellUp does right, it has too much frustration and confusion to deserve a permanent spot on your iPhone or iPad.

When it works, Loadout hooks you in with its deep weapon-crafting system and frantic battles where everyone is trying out their own crazy creations. And to its credit, Edge of Reality has shown incredible resilience in responding to the server problems so quickly. But Loadout isn’t worth playing until it solves them.

Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash is fun. I enjoyed my time with it — much more so than I did with Mario Tennis Open. It’s a step up over the last iteration in some areas, yet still it manages to be a lackluster entry in a series that seems to be sadly suffering from continual decline.

It’s hard to recommend Breach & Clear in its current state for anyone but the most devoted of tactical players or military fanboys. Maybe the upcoming modes and maps will add some variety, but as it stands now, it’s a pretty empty and shallow experience.

I commend ACE Team for trying to come up with something that’s authentic and clever. But the developer only got The Deadly Tower of Monsters halfway right. The excellent premise and likeable characters outshine the streamlined gameplay.

Many people will like the repetitive challenge and the racing-styled, score-based progression. Others will enjoy playing a game from their past, reliving the sights and sounds of a revered, almost mythical console, the Saturn.

This lack of variety in the style of play makes every run feel samey, and they begin to blur together. That leads to a roteness that made me want to put down the game when I was struggling with the difficulty. I like challenging games, but roguelites need to walk a fine line between familiarity and routine. Familiarity is the warm embrace of something that feels like home. Routine is boredom, and it is poison for a game like this.

It's a good-looking game with a unique style that screams Goichi Suda's name, but the gameplay is rarely rewarding. So much is working against you that you feel like the only reason you're making any progress at all is because of pure luck rather than skill.

Ideally, the game would have some sort of asynchronous multiplayer system that I could compete in so I could compare my performance to my friends whenever they get around to playing. The 3DS game had tournaments that worked that way, but this does not. I want to call that omission baffling, but it’s not. Nintendo did not make this game for me. And that is leaving me wondering if I’m ever going to pick it up again. I suspect that I will not even though I still liked it while I was playing it. Or, at least, I won’t pick it up again until my young kids are old enough to care about a golf video game so I have someone to play with.