Guitar Hero III ups the ante with increased difficulty and new modes, and though not everything it adds is fantastic, the excellent tracklist and stellar gameplay are sure to keep you hooked.

Signalis is great in spite of its lack of true scares and deserves to be played by anyone who enjoys games like it. I've enjoyed many horror movies and books that don't scare me because I like the subject matter, the settings, the characters, or some other elements of them, and the same can be true for games. Signalis isn't a scary horror game, but it is a memorable one that borrows from the past while helping secure a future for games like this--and the small but talented team, with any luck. For me, atmospheric, tense, and creepy are adequate stand-ins for true horror, and Signalis has plenty to offer along those lines.

Dragon Quest Builders 2 is a great game, combining exploration, sandbox-building, questing, and town-management into a delightful package that will gladly suck up your time and put a big smile on your face. It's the sort of game that you'll intend to play for a little while, only to find that hours have flown by once you manage to actually put it down. Don't dismiss this one when you see big square blocks on the box--you'll be missing out on a very fun twist on an excellent gaming foundation.

This story-focused on-rails shooter is a worthy follow-up to Dead Space that delivers the same sorts of thrills, chills, and kills, but in a whole new way.

Save for the aforementioned play-calling bug and the loading times, this is the most accessible and welcoming Madden in this console generation, which is an accomplishment for a sport that can appear complicated at first glance.

Papers, Please will stress you out. At times it may even make you hate yourself. And while it's weird to call such an experience "enjoyable," the gameplay itself is not a miserable time. It's worthwhile for the same reasons a depressing novel or a bleak movie can be worthwhile.

Fractured But Whole succeeds as an interactive South Park mini-series, while effectively emulating the show's current style of adult-targeted entertainment and satirization of political correctness. In other words, it's consistently amusing and provocative without the edginess the series used to be known for.

As the game itself states within the blog of a gone-but-not-forgotten ally from Episode 1, "It's not a happy ending, but maybe it can be a hopeful one."

Through well designed puzzles, intense escape room scenarios, and a kineticism absent in video games on standard screens, I Expect You to Die knows exactly how to leverage the magic of VR, and proves it almost every step of the way.

Smooth controls and a bunch of awesome tracks make this an exciting kart racer.

Insomniac Games has crafted an excellent game in Sunset Overdrive. It's not without a few niggling issues, but you'll be too busy enjoying yourself to care. You can compare it to games like Crackdown, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Ratchet and Clank, but by combining the best elements of those games into a single package and injecting it with an anything goes, rock and roll attitude, you'll never think of it as anything but a singular achievement that stands tall on its own merits.

Despite its mobile game roots, the world of Republique is meant to immerse, to beckon the player's curiosity, and to involve them enough in the city-state's ins and outs enough to get Hope out of danger. In transitioning to consoles, the game remains largely successful at that.

If EA Tiburon's goal with Madden 17 was to build upon the solid foundation set by the last two iterations, the studio mostly succeeded by fine tuning its production values on and off the field while also focusing on its strengths in its Ultimate Team and Franchise.

A bevy of bizarre obstacles and freaky power-ups gives Super Bust-A-Move a level of addictiveness and challenge rarely seen on handheld systems.

Saying goodbye to the Diaz brothers is as difficult as it was to leave Chloe and Max in the original Life Is Strange, which is a testament to the extraordinary strength of the game's character building.

Combining the stats demanded by baseball gearheads with great ease of use, Baseball Mogul 2008 hits the ball and touches 'em all.

Dawn of War III builds and maintains an organic tension that yields huge pay-offs, and there’s nothing else quite like it.

Tinykin is a delightful callback to '90s collectathons and platformers, with just the right amount of new ideas and iterations.

If a real-time version of Risk on steroids mixed with Diplomacy's double-dealing sounds appealing, then March of the Eagles is well worth picking up.

There’s a lot to love about The Alliance Alive: a well-paced story in an interesting world, a meaty mashup of unique combat elements, and a fantastic soundtrack that keeps you pumped and eager to explore. If you can put up with a bit of a learning curve, you’ll find a great portable adventure well worth dusting off your 3DS for.

It is not changing the future, but it is repackaging the past in a way that deserves praise while falling into a few old traps--and creating a few of its own--along the way.

Sky is both different to everything thatgamecompany has made before but also a smart evolution of what makes its games special. It's simple to play while feeling incredible at the same time, making the act of flight exciting every time your feet leave the ground. It also features a fascinating spin on in-game purchases, locking its most alluring rewards behind the action of making friends and making a positive enough impression on them. That means you have to play a lot of Sky to eventually work towards what you want, which saps some life out of the gorgeous vignettes you're free to explore. But it's no less memorable for the ideas it presents or calming in the way it gives you the freedom to pursue them, making it another journey worth seeing through.

Having South Asian developers, all with different experiences, means Venba is a narrative cooking adventure about an immigrant mother’s life that feels authentic. It is told through her culture’s cuisine in a way that will make players empathize and sympathize. But it isn’t downbeat or drab, it’s vivid, colorful, and inspiring. Its ending, however, had me sit there and grapple with my thoughts after its two-hour playtime, thinking about how it is never too late in life to discover or rediscover your racial/cultural identity as a South Asian individual. Sometimes a recipe for idli can be the first step in finding the resolve to be yourself and discovering pride in your roots.

This action-packed sequel isn't quite up to the standards of its precursors, but it's still a brutal blast.

Easily recommendable not only to anyone with an interest in collectible card games, including fans of the original, but also to those who enjoy turn-based strategy games with a twist.

That seems to be the pattern of XCOM. The tale always grows in the telling, and with this entry, you find yourself in a world richer and more enjoyable than the one you experienced before. With a world this finely crafted, it's fitting that we should get to save it all over again.

Kiwami does a great job as both a remake of the original Yakuza game and as a sequel to Zero. Despite that combat remains more of a bump in the road than a rewarding pursuit, it's a no-brainer for existing fans of the series, and shouldn't be overlooked by newcomers, even if Zero passed them by. There's nothing else quite like Yakuza, and Kiwami isn't afraid to show it.

If you haven't touched a classic Zelda game in a while, Link's Awakening will almost instantly transport you back to the '90s. It's simple, in many ways, but the orchestrated journey still conveys a sense of adventure, and this new version is without question the best way to experience it. And more than anything else, it will put a smile on your face. Remakes are a dime a dozen nowadays and often easy to overlook. Don't make that mistake with Link's Awakening.