Matterfall is a challenging and creative take on the twin-stick shooter. Even if it's sci-fi setting is bland, the multitasking gameplay rarely offers a dull moment. This is a strong followup to Resogun, and one of the PlayStation 4's better digital exclusives.

Pid is just as atmospheric as Fez and as grueling as Braid, but it's the little details of its execution that keep it from flawlessness.

Rain is a wonderful, atmospheric game that’s too short but well worth the experience. It takes turns that I never expected it to.

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.

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.

So, yeah, Stranger of Paradise doesn't look good. Its story is a bunch of nonsense. Maybe you'll find that amusing, maybe you'll find it annoying. But all of that doesn't matter as much as you might imagine. Because you spend the bulk of the experience fighting monsters. Stranger of Paradise makes fighting monsters fun.

Papo & Yo is a welcome addition to the growing library of creative indie games whose purpose is greater than just engineering fun gameplay, but minor technical issues turn into major woes for Minority Media's debut release.

I was not expecting to love Unity, but I do. Ubisoft nailed the big assassination missions and everything in between.

I think any gamers who want a farming sim with less grind and hustle will enjoy Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. It trims a lot of the fat that has become common in the genre. You’re not a warrior or a spelunker or a craftsman. You’re simply a farmer trying to live a quiet life and make your way with the resources you have. If you played the original and loved it, you’ll definitely enjoy the remake because it’s almost the same game but prettier. However, if you’re more used to modern farming sims and want one that will give you more to do on a daily basis, AWL might be too simplistic for you. There’s just not a lot happening in Forgotten Valley. Regardless of your preference, the in-game marriage being pushed within the very first chapter felt way too rushed and forced. If you were hoping to have fun, interesting characters to spend your in-game life with, you’ll again likely be disappointed.

Die-hard Danganronpa lovers: add seven points to this score. For everyone else: 85.

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.

The Last Tinker: City of Colors is best shared with friends or family who enjoy a good story and pretty artwork. It’s not difficult, it’s not aggressive, and it’s not online, so it definitely belongs in the gentler category of family games like the Lego series.

Two of its major aspects, character progression and narrative choice-making, will take some more time to get a full read on, but I will say I’ve run into some great scenarios so far that have made me feel like the choices I’m making in both of those areas will have real consequences. If that’s the case, Greedfall could be an RPG sleeper-hit.

It's not as big and beautiful as I want it to be, but Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite still has plenty to offer fans of the series.

This is Nintendo’s best mobile effort yet.

This is the 10th Battlefield game, and at this stage in the franchise’s history, it isn’t easy to come up with fresh takes. Visceral Games has done that.

Fallout Shelter is an endlessly engaging mobile title that gives you plenty to do without overwhelming you with menus and meters. It has both of those things aplenty, but you’re always in control. This game will charm you while challenging you.

Dawn of Titans has some strong and fun moments, and people that are willing to dump money into it may have different experiences, but it’s a busy time of year — especially for gaming — and there’s plenty of other games out there that better respect a player’s time.

The action and the feeling of many right paths make Styx truly engrossing for hardcore stealth fans, at a bargain price. Be ready to save often and die a lot — with a smile on your face.

Mega Man & Bass's omission sucks, and I wish the whole thing had more extras, but these are still four great 2D platformers.

A solid mixture of polish, inventiveness, and just plain fun. Its blended style of fantasy and authenticity supplements its accessibility with pleasing flair.

This one has the potential to have some staying power in your living room, as long you don’t mind coughing up some money to feed the beast.

The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep delivers on the faith its Kickstarter backers put into the project. It weaves combat, exploration, music, and puzzles into a game that stands out in a crowded market.

Tomodachi Life reminds me what I love about Nintendo. Another developer might try an experience like this on iOS or Android, but it’s unlikely they would leave it unsullied by in-game purchases. I also doubt that many other studios could nail the effortless humor that makes this so refreshing to play.

The game has weak shooting systems and some bad weapons, much like Red Dead Redemption II. But while the other games have been highly rated, Days Gone has had its legs cut out by the bugs.

A dynamic, fun, and challenging experience in a unique setting. The simple presentation belies the complexity and variety of gameplay. Gamers looking for a cerebral puzzler with a high replay value would be well-advised to check it out. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyable prison experience.

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.

Enough defining design elements of the Elder Scrolls single-player RPGs have been successfully grafted onto the traditional MMO template to make The Elder Scrolls Online feel like what an Elder Scrolls massively multiplayer online game ought to be.

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.

Though the story and characters are more compelling in The Pact, it also sacrificed interactivity.

We’ve learned what the rogues are after, but at the halfway point in the series, we still don’t know why. With only two episodes left, Telltale needs to raise the stakes and ramp up the urgency of Batman’s mission.

The parts that are exceedingly well-polished (gorgeous cars, skill-based driving) make those that trip up (ugly A.I.) all the more disappointing. It sets a high bar for the inevitable competitors to follow, but like an inexperienced driver on a hot lap in a solo challenge, it’s sloppy in the turns.

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.

That’s the real beauty of Weather Factor’s debut title — the world feels so large and full of possibilities, even though everything is mainly told through small snippets of text. It’s filled with poetry, like descriptions of a vial of Greydawn Oil that’s “the precise color of the hours when one cannot sleep,” and it makes you want to explore and unravel its mysteries. And it makes you work for it, reading between the lines and imagining a realm unseen.

Minecraft: Story Mode will never have the same kind of success that Minecraft does. That’s OK — few things do. But what’s important here is that Telltale gets what makes Minecraft tick and has translated that into something that fits its story-focused mold.

Its scale and sense of isolation is special. The procedural nature imbues everything in the game with a sense of life that other, better-crafted games can’t match. And it nails the emergent storytelling that I want from a survival game.

Middle Manager of Justice goes on and on and on. Playing feels like walking a treadmill on the slowest speed with the best option being to just buckle down and pay for gastrointestinal surgery. But then, what's the point? You're paying to not play the game.

Asura's Wrath commits the cardinal sin of video games: It's not fun. I genuinely commend Capcom for backing such an ambitious, experimental project; I just wish they had read the script first. This was not a story worth telling, and it sure as hell isn't a story worth paying extra for to see how it "really" ends.

A glossier coat of paint can't hide Bugbear's signature unbalanced gameplay and defective physics. At worst, I barely had any fun no matter how hard I tried to. At best, this game makes me wish I was playing the vastly superior Split/Second instead.

If I put my nostalgia-tinted glasses aside when it comes to my affection for the Adventure games, I feel pretty comfortable calling this Sonic's best 3D effort. I hope Sega continues using and refining this open world formula. Who knows, we might even get two good 3D Sonic games in a row if they do.

A clever, fun, and challenging Nintendo 3DS game well worth your time.

Liberation feels like an unimportant side story in a far more ambitious tale, one that you don't really need to hear. If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before, then this is a terrible place to start.

Maneater is unique — tell me the last time you played an open-world RPG as a mutating shark. Its sense of humor winks at you. It’s challenging without being difficult. And it’s hard not to enjoy the absurdity of being an armored shark that can destroy 10 or so boats as hunters are shooting you with automatic rifles and machine guns and throwing TNT at you...I would’ve liked a bit more clarity on the storyline quests, and it would’ve been nice if Maneater would say a bit more about the imperiled state of sharks in our world. And if you don’t get the joke, you’re not going to get this game.

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.

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.

It’s not always a perfect combination. A few of the latter puzzles feel needlessly complicated, requiring you to place the objects at pixel-perfect angles to trigger the next area. But that doesn’t take away from how remarkable the game is. Like Portal before it, Maquette redefines what puzzle games are capable of, and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting about these characters any time soon.

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 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.

Beyond is hands-down one of the most emotionally accomplished experiences I have ever had in a video game, and it’s enjoyable from start to finish. The controls and gameplay are tiresome, and they can be difficult to manage (or boring), but they’re of little consequence compared to the well-written story, the depth of the characters, and the empathy you feel toward them.

The glaucoma-inducing choice of interface and the stretching of space and gameplay time beyond the point of breaking make this a hard game to broadly recommend. This would have been one hell of a 6-hour jaunt, but at upward of 20 hours for a basic playthrough, the amount of fluff is suffocating.

This first chapter casts a dull light that’s lost in the eclipse of its big-screen brother.

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.

I have enjoyed my time with Soul Hackers 2. I’m a fan of the SMT series dating back to when they first came to America. This game has, as we’ve discussed, all of the features of any SMT game. The overall problem isn’t that it’s a bad game — it just doesn’t do much to stand out. Is that bad? Not necessarily. The story is interesting, the characters are likeable, and the voice acting is good. If you enjoy the core game loop for the SMT games, you are getting exactly that. Just don’t expect a huge new experience with a lot of new gameplay concepts.

Vampyr is good — flawed, but very good — and pleasurable.

For me, the experience was like taking your car to the shop. When you get it back, it’s shining, detailed, and purring: They’ve traded your Ford Focus for a Ford GT. Hooray! But then you get in and notice it’s a stick shift, with manual brakes and steering, no stereo, no A/C, and wait, where are the doors?

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.

A disappointing outing from a developer that has made some of Nintendo’s most exquisite games.

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.

I’m shocked. The Fall works. Bringing an experience as complicated as Deus Ex’s to a touchscreen should have been a mess, but I was easily sneaking, hacking, and headshotting my way through the short campaign. I don’t know if I’m ready to call myself a mobile gaming convert, but this is definitely one of the deeper experiences I’ve had on an iOS platform.

I think The Dark Pictures is very spooky, and the sense of fate that comes with it is very compelling. I think it was very smart for Supermassive Games to build a whole horror series around this concept. I’m looking forward to the next one, but I also hope that the graphics and gameplay will strike a better balance so that it’s more interactive.

This is a worthy entry in the Wolfenstein series. I hope that we get a lot more from these characters because they are so dang cool. And I hope the upgrade path continues to feel rewarding. We’ll see. [Impressions]

It’s a stylish game centered around an interesting moral dilemma. However, there just isn’t enough world-building to hammer the point home.

Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is a decent adventure game that lets you play as the great detective. The trouble is, it wants to be more than that. It wants to be an action-adventure game with an open world. It wants Sherlock to be a fun and interesting player character, but the game makes him drag around a buddy who’s even less helpful than Watson. That said, I am curious to see where Frogwares goes from here. Mysteries, not action, make for a good Sherlock Holmes game (as should be obvious), and I want to see if Frogwares sheds the latter or chooses to double-down instead.

The lack of real instruction and clunky controls further wear down the initial charm of this spell-clinging comic adventure.

It’s a little sad that Star Fox Zero, a game that wonderfully shows the benefits of the Wii U Gamepad, came out so late in the system’s life. Still, it’s worth getting for anyone who owns the console, especially if you were a fan of the series in the ’90s.

Jurassic World: Evolution is more of a pure sim game than Planet Coaster, but it does a good job of taking advantage of its license.

In the absence of an epic tale, a torrent of doodads to collect, or some time-devouring crafting system — all the fixtures big business gaming says you need to survive today — Knack 2 just works.

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

Mad Max isn’t a terrible game — it’s actually well crafted. The problem here isn’t that it’s broken or unplayable but that it’s just boring.

In a time when most games want to baby us with giant "go here!" waypoints, regenerating health, and an overabundance of save and checkpoints, I Am Alive kicks us in the ass with heart-pounding, intense, and unforgiving gameplay. It takes a lot of chances, and as a result, it's one that will stick in my memory for a long time to come.

Octodad is a great example of a game that conveys a message through gameplay. In conjunction with its story, characters, and setting, the controls offer an empathetic look into the life of an extreme outsider trying to fit in and trying to do right by his family...I love that. Gaming is growing up, and Octodad is some of the best evidence of that.

Despite its problems, Pokémon Go is something that I’m going to be playing for a long time to come (I mean, I have to catch ’em all, right?). Go has a solid base, and if Niantic can sustain and cultivate the community and Go as a platform, it has real potential. And by that measure alone, it’s quite a success, even if it still has a lot of room left to grow.

It remains a solid adventure today despite the late-game efforts of one of the worst system-based game mechanics of this or any other year. The afternoon of graph diving it takes to beat Metrico is all that’s needed to forever see a small silhouette jumping to and fro on all of the financial documents in your future.

Star Wars: Battlefront II tries to straddle the hardcore and casual audiences. It succeeds some of the time, and it also fails some of the time. So far, the cut scenes in the single-player campaign are excellent, but I’m waiting to get into some really fun gameplay.

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.

It offers nothing outside of mindless shooting and gun-looting. But that's also why I admire it. It's a throwback to an era when technology limited storytelling and games were simpler. EDF 2017 is not a deep experience, but it's a very pure one.

Alien: Blackout is a cleverly crafted piece of work that shapes itself around the limitations of its mobile canvas, and then it takes ownership of its boundaries with uncanny confidence. As a total package, it is miles ahead of anything a straight Alien: Isolation mobile port would’ve been, and it is a strong enough concept to stand on its own as a separate game series.

Like Crashmo, I'd rather play Tokyo Crash Mobs than just about any smartphone game.

RE Zero is a great example of why old-school horror releases are beloved and special. With a few new technical upgrades, it has largely made a graceful return on current systems.

The Gunstacker system offers an impressive variety of ways to throw bits of metal around at incredible speeds, and the enemy and level designs are (mostly) as creative as you’re going to see this year. It’s not too big on plot, but you’ll probably be too busy using ridiculous guns to mow down waves of grotesque enemies to care.

The satisfaction of solving well-designed puzzles set in a visually interesting post-apocalyptic version of an alternate-history Seattle is worth it. The tone and excellent aesthetic design of the title only increases its value as a gaming piece of art.

The Bureau is Enemy Unknown’s hyperactive younger sibling who delivers something different while still fitting in well with its predecessors.

It’s most compelling as a one-and-done. If you have a difficult time grasping the concept of abstract narrative in pinball, it will be a fantastic eye-opener. Taken any further than that, expecting the replay of almost every other pinball option out there, and it disappoints.

Legasista isn't fun. If you desperately need a new JRPG to play, pick up Tales of Graces F, Eternal Sonata, or even NIS's Atelier series. All of those games are infinitely better than this mediocre adventure full of annoying, stereotypical characters and needlessly frustrating mechanics.

I wish I liked Knights of Pen and Paper 2 a lot more than I did. It has a lot of charm and heart — I can see it in the gorgeous pixel art and in all the neat jokes and references built into Paperos. But it just isn’t very fun to play.

As team-carnage games go, you'll get some mileage out of this one. Grab a few of your drinkin' buddies, and have yourselves a fun (and cheap) night of gratuitous hillbilly firepower and richly deserved robo-death. Preferably with your beer goggles on.

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.

I hope Rare has a lot more to this game as I get further into it in terms of quests, but for now, I’m happy to let the visuals and social factor carry me like a wind across the sea.

Besides adding a wealth of content, Tecmo Koei hasn’t done much to bring this series into a new generation, and its difficulty and tedium might alienate anyone but the most hardcore fans. This is one classic that should have stayed where it belongs — in the past.

In case I hadn’t made it clear already, I really didn’t like Gotham Knights. It lacks the speed, flow and character of previous Batman games, and its action-oriented gameplay is hamstrung by the 30 FPS lock. It became such an exercise in boredom that I couldn’t bring myself to continue playing — and because I didn’t finish, I’m leaving a score off the end of this review.

Too many factors weigh down the gameplay, too much depth appeared to be there for the sake of providing “options” that weren’t, and frankly, it just wasn’t that fun.

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.

If I were rating the story and acting, I would put it at a 95 out of 100. But with all of the bugs and flaws in the gameplay, I am rating the entire package at 75 out of 100. I hope my feedback will be useful as a reminder to developers that six months more work on a game can pay off with huge dividends in quality.

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).

If you're looking for a fun distraction and you're a fan of the series, then Fight for Fortune will tickle your treasure-hunting fancy. Besides, it's not exactly a risky purchase at $5.

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.

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.

Chinatown Detective Agency is made in the image of classic adventure games and never aspires beyond that. Meeting it on its own terms, it’s an adequate cybernoir mystery with a compelling lead and colorful scenery. If you’re not into that already, this game probably won’t tickle your fancy very much. But if you are, you’ll find this to be a decently written and designed adventure. It’ll take a bit of research on your part, but I have the feeling that a lot of gamers out there will find that as fun as I do. Just know that, even weeks after its release, the game still has some sound problems that might make diminish your enjoyment.