X is a grand adventure that satiates your appetite for exploration and combat in ways that few games ever do, but because getting started is half the battle, it’s an experience reserved for dedicated players who have the patience and energy to unearth its greatest treasures.

The UI is still an unintuitive mess, the story is still laughably bad and impossible for new players to avoid, and finding players to join my Crew frequently took far too long. And while the driving mechanics and general visuals have undoubtedly improved, they still haven't caught up to other, better racing games like Forza and Need For Speed. As a result, The Crew as a whole remains a lackluster experience, even with its monster truck half-pipes.

Combat feels good enough, but there's not much to it, and little to strive for.

This is another short episode (my first playthrough clocked in at less than 90 minutes), which makes Story Mode a little on the brief side compared to recent Telltale offerings. But that brevity is my biggest complaint, which, if you look at it from the most charitable view, means the game never outstayed its welcome. Story Mode remains a great experience--especially if you're playing with younger fans of Minecraft--and my anticipation for the next episode remains high.

Minecraft Story Mode's third episode is the best so far, weaving action and story in a tight, focused package.

It's a shame that Anno 2205 takes the game so far into the future and does so little of substance with that premise. Not much has changed from Anno 2070, and what has is almost always worse. Anno 2205 still has a sturdy core of satisfying city planning and construction, but so much has been cut out as to make the game barely worth playing at all.

The Old Hunters is Bloodborne from another time and place, and with more difficult bosses and confounding stories to unravel, it's a fitting complement to the original, gruesome adventure.

Without spoiling the many ways it will screw with your expectations, it isn't possible to truly capture how wonderful Undertale is. You wouldn't know it with a passing glance, but it's one of the most progressive and innovative RPGs to come in a long time, breaking down tradition for the sake of invention, with great success.

Legacy of the Void doesn't quite manage the brilliance of Wings of Liberty, but it's a worthy note to leave the franchise on.

It front loads its best content, only to fade in quality as the hours roll by. Star Wars Battlefront's skin is beautiful, but its legs are shaking, and threaten to buckle with time.

Considered as a whole, Ultra Smash does just enough to get by. At moments it shines and at others it frustrates, but mostly it just coasts.

If nothing else, Star Wars Battlefront is an exercise in pure spectacle, laid out in all of its neon glory.

In the end, Telltale's Game of Thrones succeeds in telling a violent, sad story that feels very much at home in the world of Westeros. By the finale, the danger feels real and your choices feel like they have mattered.

Battlefront doesn't go much deeper than its ambitious surface appeal. It front loads its best content, only to fade in quality as the hours roll by. Star Wars Battlefront's skin is beautiful, but its legs are shaking, and threaten to buckle with time.

It's a bold, declarative statement backed with aesthetic skill on nearly every front. ROM is a resounding success and one of the most affecting adventures I've ever had.

Interestingly, Sports Interactive has said it plans to sell a standalone version of Football Manager Touch, with a release date of "sometime before Christmas." If you’re the same kind of Football Manager player as me, you may be better off waiting for that. For now, you can find Football Manager Touch here in Football Manager 16. Many of the new features--the Set Piece Creator, Create a Club and a lightly tweaked tactics UI--are available in Touch while almost everything I dislike has been cut. This, coupled with the fact that the match engine feels just a little bit more Joachim Löw than Tony Pulis this year, was enough to draw me back in.

The bread and butter co-op experience shines just bright enough to compensate for this relative lack of content.

Worse than the technical shortcomings, off-the-mark combat, and terrible omissions from the roster, Yuke's failure to capture the heart of WWE makes WWE 2K16 such a disappointment. The modern WWE is overflowing with talent. The series’ inability to deliver on the magic of WWE's characters and athletes, beyond number crunching and subpar combat, indicates that this series is still far from being able to relive the magic of the squared circle inside your living room.

The fact that your decisions stick with you after walking away from the game is a testament to the great storytelling on hand. Fallout 4 is an argument for substance over style, and an excellent addition to the revered open-world series.

Fallout 4 is an engrossing game that lures you in with mystery and the promise of adventure. Its wretched wasteland can be captivating, and you never know what odd person or settlement lies around the next bend.

The fact that your decisions stick with you after walking away from the game is a testament to the great storytelling on hand. Fallout 4 is an argument for substance over style, and an excellent addition to the revered open-world series.

As a third-person adventure game, Rise of the Tomb Raider excels. Rather than collide, gameplay and story share the space, supplementing each other and emerging as a cohesive whole.

Learning the skills and vocabulary of the game gives you the confidence to risk chaining large combos, and it’s at this level where you can experience Downwell's most exhilarating moments again and again.

Black Ops III's narrative doesn't support the campaign in any meaningful way, either. It tells an incomprehensible story about AI ascendancy and the moral grays of a hyper-connected future, raising intriguing questions but never bothering to answer them. At the end of it all, after hours of soulless shooting and unremarkable storytelling, Black Ops III delivered its nebulous twist, and I didn't dwell on it.

In its undead modes, and the first 10 hours of multiplayer, it excels. But in its campaign, it merely crawls forward. Black Ops III doesn't offer anything remarkable to the series, but does just enough to maintain the Call of Duty status quo. The franchise, however slowly, continues its inexorable march.

Considering how much processing oomph it seems to need, Sword Coast Legends looks muddy and unremarkable. The world is easily forgotten. Sewers, woods, tumbledown buildings, castles and keeps--perhaps the game’s beauty is limited by the necessity to stick to reusable tilesets, or perhaps the lack of clarity is down to that 3D style.

It's a neat twist on the creature-collecting game with a lot of heart.

Despite its lacking final moments, The Park makes the experience of searching a haunting, abandoned amusement park feel genuinely tense. This, rather than a specific plot point, is what sticks with you after you turn off the game and return to your normal, less disturbing reality.