Atelier Shallie Plus: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea is a remake of the PlayStation 3 exclusive, and finds a fantastic landing spot on the PlayStation Vita with all new secrets and content to explore. The game is easy to learn, fun and well paced, and provides a nice mix of JRPG exploration and battles with an item creation system that serves as the series signature. Colorful, well designed, and only slightly stilted, Atelier Shallie Plus is another great title in the Atelier line.

Yakuza 0 is a great entry into the series, with plenty for old fans and newcomers alike. Its story is cheesy and melodramatic at times, and the graphics are a bit outdated, but between a nearly perfect melee combat system and a city bursting at the seams with activity, anyone looking for a sandbox crime game should definitely pick this one up.

2064: Read Only Memories is a free expansion to the original game, available on Steam for $19.99. With a cyber-punk setting and a retro vibe, Read Only Memories is filled with a host of interesting and colorful characters to get to know, a complex and escalating mystery to navigate, puzzles to solve, and a sinister plot or two to overthrow, making it a great investment for fans of the point-and-click adventure genre.

Gravity Rush 2 is a charming and fun game. The impressive AI does a fantastic job of building bonds between players and characters. A wonderful soundtrack alongside a wide variety of mission types come together to create a vivid and large open world. The game is hampered by poor camera controls and some hiccups in the story, but overall, the experience is one that I thoroughly enjoyed and will be playing again.

Stereo Aereo is a functional music game. While it has a very cool scoring method and control scheme, it’s ultimately plagued by unforgiving and frustrating gameplay plus a generic soundtrack. Play this one if you’re looking for a fun time-waster, but there are better titles to which you may rock out.

Montaro is an endless runner that does what it needs to. Its silly charm and low price of one dollar makes up for its sometimes unfair mechanics and limited content.

Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is a highly familiar, yet fresh take on 2D platforming, and the results are a game I can easily imagine scaled down to 16-bit on a Sega Genesis. A nostalgia hound for the 90s will find a lot to love with this game, from the gameplay down to the look, feel, and story it presents. Far from perfect, but charming beyond its expectations, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero is wonderfully fun.

An eccentric cast of villains and zany action make Teslapunk a decent bullet hell shooter, but a terrible soundtrack and performance issues mar an otherwise enjoyable title.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone is everything you love about J-pop. Its infectious music, snazzy visuals, and accessible yet challenging gameplay will have you shouting for an encore.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone is everything you love about J-pop. Its infectious music, snazzy visuals, and accessible yet challenging gameplay will have you shouting for an encore.

The Ties that Bind Part 2 is an excellent ending to what was already a great premiere to season three. While a little on the short side, the overall experience is memorable and has me anticipating the next episode.

The Ties that Bind Part 1 is a great start to a new entry in Telltale’s excellent series, one that does just enough to feel fresh.

While it’s a decently fun time for 5 bucks and easy to pick up and play, Mini Golf Resort is an unremarkable 3DS port of a game with generic design choices and some strange physics.

Space Hulk: Deathwing boasts the best, most stylistically accurate Warhammer 40,000 visuals yet created, bar none. It’s precisely how the grim darkness of the far future should look and feel. However, the incredible eye-candy of this new FPS is not enough to disguise its lackluster story, indistinct gameplay, and stability issues.

More than just a ‘locked in a room’ simulator, I Expect You To Die! Is a masterful use of VR and the Move controllers. The puzzles are just challenging enough to be fun, while not so easy as to be obvious. My only complaint is that the game is relatively short, but the promise of a sequel has me ready to hand over my money. You need this game in your VR library.

Rollercoaster Tycoon World has so much potential. All of the base pieces are here, and the game’s content is being expanded to match that promise, but stability problems and bugs hamstring what could be a solid park creator. There’s a fun game here…but you can’t experience it if the game won’t stop crashing.

A stellar interpretation of Bruce Wayne and Gotham can’t hide that Batman is one of Telltale’s biggest technical messes yet.

Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2017 is a generic simulator that is just not quite ready for the big leagues. There are plenty of great features, and a deep collection of players that show the potential expected. A series of fatal flaws and poor design throughout will frustrate you and make you want to send it back down for more development.

A very deep, complex, and well made game with high quality experiences from the lowest to the highest level of rule in Feudal Japan. It is also a tease, showing you all of this quality without taking the time to actually explain itself. Frustrating camera controls and a total lack of guidance leave a bad taste in the mouth when the game so easily could have avoided both and been truly great.

Steep is a triumph at merging gameplay and presentation to deliver players a sense of place in its beautiful open world. Controlling each sport feels simple yet laser precise, and the diversity in sports and challenges encouraged me to stay in the game even when challenges became too frustrating or uninteresting. Add to this a solid layer of social functionality, albeit shallow when playing with strangers, and you have a game that reaches the great heights it endeavors to recreate.

The initial concept of the Space Rift is original and compelling. However, the overall execution of the world is far below what have come to expect from most VR games. While the game does have some nice style and mechanics in the cockpit, the voice acting and artwork in the game make it an unpleasant and drab experience. Space Rift seems to be as devoid of life as the dried up Earth within it.

Final Fantasy XV’s seems to be confused as to what it wants to be, and it makes one game feel like several, none of which execute upon their ideas well enough to stand above its modern contemporaries.

Bethesda Pinball is an impressive collection of pinball experiences based on Bethesda’s A-List hits Skyrim, Fallout, and Doom. Surprisingly complex and dynamic, these tables do a great job of capturing the feel of the game they represent while staying true to the classic pinball dynamic. Visually pleasing, challenging, and highly replayable, these tables are a perfect addition to your Zen Pinball 2 collection.

The Last Guardian’s story is moving and beautifully told, but the poor execution of its dated mechanics hold it back from the greatness of its predecessors.

Dead Rising 4 is bloody, chaotic, and downright hilarious. If you’re looking to turn your brain off this holiday season, and de-stress with gratuitous violence, this is the game for you.

Super Mario Maker 3DS is a subpar port of a great game. While a lot of the fun is still there, the lack of sharing and search features make for an overall inferior experience.

1775 Rebellion successfully takes the fun of the original board game title and ports it on to iPad and Android. The game isn’t the prettiest one you’ll play, but a competitive AI and incredible balance will keep this in your regular rotation.

Football Manager 17 is a titan of a game, representing a depth of knowledge, complexity, customization, and humanity that would be a welcome addition to any game on any subject. If football, or soccer as many a westerner calls it, is not your favorite sport, that may very well be the only reason to not give this game a twirl. While an expert may find some small issue, as a greenhorn I can’t report a single drawback for the game, but I can pretty much find a complement for each and every aspect of this marvelous simulator.