Fable isn't quite timeless, but its genial mood is infectious, and I'm happy that Fable Anniversary kept my fond memories intact.

Massages the retinas quite well, but the cheap AI and random power-ups place an unwanted emphasis on luck instead of skill.

Giant polygons go on the attack in this fun and inexpensive puzzle game.

Homefront's engrossing vision of the future and gratifying competitive multiplayer outweigh its squandered potential and workaday game mechanics.

While it sometimes feels as rough as a Grant City alley, Dead to Rights: Retribution's vigorous combat system and brutal energy make it an entertaining tale of corruption and vengeance.

The feature set remains fundamentally unchanged, but each of the core modes have increased in breadth and decreased in clutter, making it easy to dig into features that might have seemed too dense from a distance. Madden 15 looks sharper than ever, but its biggest achievement is its dedication to improving core systems that have held the series back in the past.

Cyber Shadow is a solid retro throwback with a few things that drag it down. The feeling of becoming more powerful and being able to take down huge enemy threats with your wits and skills is very rewarding, and the levels when you can use your abilities more freely to overcome challenges are quite fun. It's the trial-and-error areas littered with cheap deaths, demanding exact precision over long and frustrating stretches, that hamper the experience. Still, if you're looking for an old-school-styled ninja game that will test your skills (and sometimes your patience), Cyber Shadow is a worthy contender.

There's a substantive quality to the game's core combat and visuals, even if the rest remains somewhat clumsy.

Online play is a huge disappointment, but the frenetic action of the Meteos series has survived the journey to the Xbox Live Arcade intact.

Profuse scatterings of collectibles and items, each object labeled with an icon that urges you to interact with it, ensure you have lots of stuff to do, but it's undeniable busywork: interaction for the sake of interaction.

Good enough graphics, good enough sound, good enough mission design, and good enough action.

Deficiencies in the passing game along with technical hiccups stemming from the game's often-comical physics still exist, but Madden 15's few missteps do little to detract from an otherwise strong outing.

Your mileage may vary, but in our experience, the bugs are obtrusive and substantial across the board, often forcing us to reload saves or exit the game entirely. It's hard to get really into a world you constantly have to leave. But then it's hard to get into Cyberpunk 2077's world in general. So much of it is superficial set dressing, and there's so much happening all around you--ads going off at all times, gunfights breaking out in the streets, texts coming in about cars you'll never buy--that a lot of the game feels superfluous. The side quests and the characters they showcase are the shining beacon through the neon-soaked bleakness of Night City, and they give you room to explore the best the core RPG mechanics have to offer. These are what carried me through an otherwise disappointing experience.

Teardown's greatest strength then lies in its underlying premise. The ability to jump into highly reactive maps with an assortment of fun tools to tear them apart remains as entertaining now as it was when I first started playing, and the chaotic nature of its physics are a consistent source of joy. It's a pity that the campaign fails to leverage this well in its first half, exacerbated by a slow trickle of new objectives and tools to use. These help expose the smart design that Teardown has from the start, which only really becomes evident much later in its campaign. If you can get past that, or if you dive into the bursting modding scene, there's a lot of cathartic mayhem in Teardown that will likely keep you coming back for more.

Super Collapse 3 is a solid puzzler with seven unique game types and a lengthy quest mode.

Though not nearly as enticing as some of its downloadable predecessors, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution still provides hours of enjoyable mercenary mayhem.

Control issues and a lack of online play hamper what's otherwise an outstanding Monster Hunter game.

This Contra-style shooter is packed with pleasure and punishment.

This long space adventure isn't deep or refined, but it's still good, simple fun.

Cyber Shadow is a solid retro throwback with a few things that drag it down. The feeling of becoming more powerful and being able to take down huge enemy threats with your wits and skills is very rewarding, and the levels when you can use your abilities more freely to overcome challenges are quite fun. It's the trial-and-error areas littered with cheap deaths, demanding exact precision over long and frustrating stretches, that hamper the experience. Still, if you're looking for an old-school-styled ninja game that will test your skills (and sometimes your patience), Cyber Shadow is a worthy contender.

Madden NFL 08 is a good handheld football game, but it offers little new content to make it worthwhile to those who already bought last year's game.

As only the second open world game in the Clancyverse, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a middlingly safe tactical shooter and a slightly wasted opportunity given the ambitious scope of its seemingly boundless map. While its main strength is its mission diversity, it doesn’t take long to lose the motivation after reaching El Sueno's doorstep. Even with a foursome of highly trained friends, Wildlands eventually reveals its diminishing returns. The feeling of positive immediacy and dopamine hits begin to wane sooner than you expected from a game with such a large and diverse world.

This gory, gorgeous action game has plenty of flaws, but it will still satisfy your thirst for blood.

Simplistic combat and tedious backtracking don't fully diminish the pleasures of this attractive and festive fable.

MLB 11: The Show is a good handheld baseball game, but it offers little in the way of new features.

Soaked to the core in that quintessentially nineties cocktail of cynicism and an exultant love of violence, playing Act of Aggression feels like going back in time and returning to a home that only exists in your oldest memories. And that's special, even if it means dealing with some obtuse design issues.

While there's nothing unique about SkyDrift, it successfully delivers fun and frantic arcade racing that's best enjoyed online.

Cyber Shadow is a solid retro throwback with a few things that drag it down. The feeling of becoming more powerful and being able to take down huge enemy threats with your wits and skills is very rewarding, and the levels when you can use your abilities more freely to overcome challenges are quite fun. It's the trial-and-error areas littered with cheap deaths, demanding exact precision over long and frustrating stretches, that hamper the experience. Still, if you're looking for an old-school-styled ninja game that will test your skills (and sometimes your patience), Cyber Shadow is a worthy contender.