Toy Soldiers still has a lot to recommend it. The PC version comes with the Kaiser's Battle and Invasion DLC expansions, and its level designs have just enough variety to make at least one playthrough interesting. Some of those scenarios I'll probably come back to a few more times to improve my score. But still, Toy Soldiers is just a little too repetitive to enter the tower-defense hall of fame occupied by games like Defense Grid and Orcs Must Die! The clue is in the name: it's a brilliant toy, but just short of a truly great game.

Binary Domain looks and plays the third-person, cover-based shooter part, but it's really just a soulless imitation. And I'd love nothing more than to bash its robot brains in.

The game perfectly captures the most important part of the books: the tone and atmosphere. Fans of the comics will appreciate the familiar faces and places that do pop up, but even those of you that have completely avoided the stellar comics and so-so AMC TV series will be engrossed.

Capture and Hold and Raindance are strong additions to an already-strong free shooter, and it makes Tribes: Ascend an even more addictive "just one more match" FPS that's unlike any other shooter on the market. In the age of me-too shooters, that's not just a good thing, that's a great thing.

Fall of the Samurai isn't just a new Shogun experience, it's a new Total War experience, and one that every fan of the series should check out.

In lesser hands, the art design might have overwhelmed everything, leaving the levels to feel like an overly cluttered and repetitive mess. Instead, it's a wonderful platformer with its own unique style that's most definitely worth experiencing, and especially shared.

Lone Survivor, then, made me feel a lot of things. Frustration, rage, stress, exhaustion, fear, joy, hope, pride, sadness, wonder. Four hours and twenty-six minutes – plus some trial-and-error-based change. But this game's going to stick with me much, much longer than that, and there are few higher forms of praise I can offer.

It's clear they had as much fun making The Legend of Dead Kel -- a big, bawdy adventure that's loaded down with loot -- as I had playing it.

Legend of Grimrock is a strong debut for Almost Human, and I'm excited to see what other dungeons they put out and the mods that players create.

More than most other genres, if an adventure's core narrative foundations aren't solid enough to carry the rest of game, everything else is meaningless -- and Yesterday's is a story built on matchsticks and marbles. To play it is to see it come crashing down.

Modern Times' strengths really shine in sandbox mode -- an area Tropico 4 shied away from -- which will provide more than enough hours for $20 of game for those who left Tropico 4 wanting more.

It may end with a slog, but I'd already gotten dozens of hours of rewarding tactical play by that point. Especially with the impressive multiplayer mode, I can strongly recommending Wargame: European Escalation as an expert and innovative blend of the best of the wargame genre with the best of the RTS.

By the time I reached the end, Mass Effect 3 had secured the trilogy's spot amongst my favorite science-fiction stories in any medium.

Flight intends to carve out a niche for pilots who want a more casual, friendly, and inclusive sim, and that's something that's never really been done before. In a best-case scenario, Flight could introduce this genre to gamers who typically have brushed it aside under the assumption that it's too hardcore.

Frustrating moments aside, Vessel is another shining example of how the independent games scene is flourishing with creativity and originality. At just $14.99, Vessel is around a quarter of the price of a AAA game, but it contains more flair and ingenuity than most blockbuster games can muster. Do yourself a favor and invest in this indie gem, because Vessel is a rich, fulfilling and splash-tastic journey.

With apologies to The Little Mermaid, perhaps third-person shooters aren't one of those things that's "much better, down where it's wetter, under the sea."

The upside is that all of these problems are presumably fixable via a patch -- this isn't the first PC game in history to ship with something busted. And I sincerely hope the team at 2K Sports can get around to addressing the issues I've encountered, because MLB 2K12 is is a lot of fun to play in single-player, and should be just as fun online. But right now it's in dire need of some Tommy John surgery if it has any hope of reviving its career.

The historical accuracy of Crusader Kings II leaves a little bit to be desired, and the restriction of only being able to play Christian dynasties is frustrating given the dynamism of the Middle East in that era. Yet when actually playing the game, there's always something to keep me motivated to keep going. There's always a plot that can be instigated, or a war with victory just out of reach, or an heir to find a suitable wife for. That's what makes a great strategy game, albeit one that tantalizingly feels like it could be even greater if it'd cut out some of the barriers to entry.

I can't say I had no fun at all playing Jagged Alliance: Back in Action -- in fact, I'm having an entertaining time replaying the early missions with an all-melee hit squad and doing better than my first time around -- but I can say that of the 50 hours of my life it took to put a bullet in the queen, I want about half of them back. Even hardcore strategy players are going to have a hell of a time liberating Arulco without it turning into a frustrating quagmire.

The PC version of Alan Wake includes the two mildly interesting special episodes that debuted on Xbox 360 post-release as DLC. Continuing from the end of the main game, these gritty episodes delve deeper into the psyche of Alan after his adventure in Bright Falls, but rehash themes and environments seen in the first six episodes. They're worth playing if you just can't get enough of Alan and the darkness swirling inside his noggin, just don't expect new environments or a clear resolution to the character's fate.

Dear Esther, however, presents something truly different. It's an experiment to be sure -- and one that's not entirely successful -- but it hits far more often than it misses. It's a strong start to a new breed of adventure that asks players to think instead of clicking on items until something arbitrarily happens.

It's easy to see the potential for King Arthur 2 to have been a good game rather than "not bad." But it never gets there, mostly because it's doing a half-dozen unrelated things at once, and none of them very well.

Gotham City Impostors isn't a free-to-play shooter, but it sure feels like one. Even as a $15 purchase, it's a game that's as eager to get you into its cash shop as its paltry five maps, with one of the slowest character customization systems ever to be unlocked by DLC, and matchmaking so poor that getting into a full 6v6 game actually feels like an achievement.

Speaking of tacked on, the way the brief (roughly an hour) four-player co-op campaign mode is wedged into the story cheapens the entire thing a bit, even if it is pretty entertaining to play.

Deep RPG elements combined with the intuitive action mechanics immediately establish 38 Studios and Big Huge Games as a duo to be reckoned with (sorry, couldn't resist). Like its reanimated main character, Reckoning starts slow and creaky, but give it a chance. Once you start sampling its many action-role-playing flavors, you'll discover a new franchise that delivers like a series that has been polished and tweaked for years.

The Steam blurb for Oil Rush says it "combines strategic challenge of classic RTS with sheer fun of Tower Defense." But as far as I can tell there's nothing more Tower Defenseish about Oil Rush than any other RTS in which you build defensive towers -- which is pretty much all of them. I'm not sure Unigine knows what Tower Defense is.

It's encouraging, though, that in just the week since SOL's been out the developers at Seamless have done a great job patching issues, with three released so far. It's a damn shame there are so many issues that are likely beyond the power of mere patches, because the space shooter genre badly needs a new classic to really get it going again.

Even if it does look really cool with its robots, aliens, and model spaceships, Unstoppable Gorg is just an unbalanced mess of a tower defense game. It seems to spend more time setting the player up to fail, than to offer a compelling reason to keep playing.