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.