I loved every second of Ori and the Blind Forest. It’s as fun as it is pretty, which is an incredible achievement when its one of the most gorgeous games I’ve ever seen.

Helldivers is a fun romp through a tedious space system...The rapid co-op action makes for a great way to kill a few hours with your friends, but continued travels expose repetitive maps.

I’m blown away by how well thought out the base design in Dead or Alive 5: Last Round is.

Basically, if you were a fan of Canvas Curse, there’s no reason to think you won’t enjoy this sequel. A little bit of the uniqueness is gone, but this is still a fun twist on the traditional sidescroller.

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?

Redux: Dark Matters is not an exemplary shoot-em-up, but it is a rather a safe and well-executed one where fans of the genre can get an immediate sense of its influences.

Creative Assembly has been very ambitious with Total War: Attila, and the game is a lot more compelling than its predecessor. It feels more balanced. The A.I. is smarter, but a human general can still beat it. But the unrelenting weight of a collapsing empire pushes a human ruler to the limit.

It doesn’t offer enough yet, and what content options it does have is cloaked behind a clunky menu that doesn’t permit players to hop into its varying modes. Evolve had a beautiful start, but now it’s time to add to it. We need a queue for players that want to play one round of the nest, rescue or defend modes. We need more character choices, maps and play modes.

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.

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.

Grow Home is a better experiment than a game.

Majora’s Mask is an odd one, but it’s a legendary game from Nintendo’s library, and one that deserves a rerelease. With its graphical improvements and system enhancements, one of the best Zelda games is even better this time around — and that’s really saying something.

I really like Game of Thrones on HBO, but I’m enamored with this game. Something about having ownership of character decisions in a fantasy story that lives up to the legend of George R.R. Martin is incredible.

Painfully slow to play, out of tune and obnoxious when it came to handling Kyle’s character(s), and grating to listen to when people weren’t talking, it took what could have been a delightful story and stretched it on a rack, set it on fire, and forced me to randomly talk with four people before grabbing the bucket of water I could clearly see on the counter to try to help put it out.

Chapter 1 of this five-part series is off to a promising, if timid, start. It presents a lot of ideas and mechanics just to show you what you’ll be doing later, but it’s pretty clear that the really interesting bits are yet to come.

Grim Fandango is still one of the best stories any one has ever told in a game. If you’ve never played the original, the convenience of a multiplatform release (and the better control options) really should push you to finally try this classic.

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.

Gat Out of Hell can stand on its own. Yes, it is undercooked, and it has problems, but the core mechanics and gameplay still work.

It still manages to be deep and suspenseful some two decades later, which is a testament to how skillfully crafted the original was. By keeping true to its roots, Resident Evil HD Remaster manages to strip away all of the superfluous additions we’ve seen piled on over the years, leaving only survival horror in its purest form.

Elite: Dangerous is unforgiving, obfuscating, and occasionally dull, but it’s always immersive and beautiful. It offers an incredible universe to explore that, despite occasional graphical repetition, offers the tantalising possibility of wonders yet unseen at the end of each new hyperspace jump.

It wasn’t terrible. Maybe I will play it again. And maybe I will wake up in a cold sweat after dreams of masochistic racing missions.

Other than some really frustrating quirks, Sneaky Sneaky is a cute and challenging game that gives you plenty of options in how to survive its obstacles. Just stop walking in front of those damned guards, Sneaky.

You’ve got to be in the mood for Talos. It’s demanding of your time and attention, especially if you’re the type that wants to finish most things you start. And you’ve got to have a love affair with words...But if that describes you … this game can be magical. The result is a little melancholy, a little melodramatic, but one of the better puzzle game presentations I’ve ever played.

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.

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.

The choices I’ve made are sticking with me way more than any scene that HBO has aired.

Like Donkey Kong ’94, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a fun experience distilled down into digestible chunks.

If you already tried the 1.5 HD Remix and couldn’t get into the series, I doubt this will change your mind. But for Kingdom Hearts fans, this is a great package.