It's a game whose many elements speak with one voice to address a subject and tell a story that has the potential to deeply touch those who identify firsthand with its themes, and if this game doesn't leave you feeling more civilized and empathetic toward those themes by the end of it, it's hard to imagine the game that can.

This intense exploration of a young woman's personal anguish is a triumph of interactive storytelling.

The fights are fun and flashy, with nice depth for players willing to spend the time learning those nuances. But Injustice 2 also sets a very high bar for content variety in a way that opens up the game to people who might just be fans of DC's heroes and villains, too. If you're open to the idea of a fighting game, you're almost certain to find something worth liking.

The long list of options available in Injustice 2 means that players of all skill levels should be able to find something exciting to do.

If you play enough Arms, you’re bound to have the occasional thrilling, close-fought bout. These brief moments are fleeting, however, and the game simply doesn’t give you enough reasons to keep coming back.

It's also an utter mess in a technical sense. There are a few enjoyable moments here and there, and over time you can see the skeletal framework of a better game start to emerge, but given the heights Mass Effect has reached in the past, it's hard to believe this is what we've been waiting five years for.

So stylish...I am diggin' it. [Quick look]

There's a pretty decent core to it, but everything from the monotonous mission design to the way the characters are introduced and immediately discarded to the lame audio to the overpowered AI just chips away at different parts of the game until you're left with a game that's probably only enjoyable if you're playing with friends and ignoring large parts of the world building and lore. If "shoot first, ask nothing later" is your style, you'll probably have a pretty good time. It's a dumb game with decent combat and effective co-op. But the game isn't good enough to recommend to anyone in any other situation. If you like playing alone, I'd recommend you look somewhere else.

This sense of wonder is something that I haven’t felt so strongly since I played A Link to the Past when I was seven years old. Ocarina of Time was able to capture some of that same magic in my teenage years. Now that I’m in my thirties, I don’t think that I expected it to be possible for a game to make me feel like that again.

Quick Look.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is familiar but also really refreshing. It's not a short game (I spent around 30 hours with it), but the storytelling still feels concise and efficient. The combat has some nice options that make encounters fun, even when you're just stacking up stealth kills from the relative safety of a bush. And the presentation end of the game holds up its end of things with a solid soundtrack, great voice acting, and a cohesive design that makes all its disparate parts fit together. All in all, it's a great game, it's Guerrilla's strongest release to date.

Quick look.

Resident Evil 7 features just the right amount of modern twists mixed into the traditional formula. It may not reach the same heights as an industry-changer like Resident Evil 4, but it certainly ranks among the best entries in the series.

The IW campaign is great, but not long or replayable enough to warrant a full-priced purchase on its own.

Titanfall 2 goes for feel above all else, and it feels fantastic.

Titanfall 2 might not fix every issue you had with the previous game (and depending on your tastes, it might introduce one or two new ones), but it's a bigger, bolder game that takes a few chances and comes out better and more distinctive for it. On top of all that, it simply feels great.

Titanfall 2 goes for feel above all else, and it feels fantastic.

Ultimately, technical gaffes and issues of design repetition weren't enough to stop me from appreciating Mafia III. The writers and voice actors turn in the strongest work, crafting and performing a story that manages to rise above the conventional open-world structure it's working within.

It might not stick the landing, but Gears of War 4 puts the franchise back on the map in a big way, and large parts of it are a great time.

My time with Gears of War 4 left me with a feeling that the game could have been a little more ambitious in spots. It feels a little too safe and too unwilling to ditch some of the traditions of the initial trilogy. But the ways it plays around with and reintroduces the characters from those Gears of War games is expertly handled, making for some great moments along the way.

A dreadful combat system brings down an otherwise beautiful and funny Mario adventure.

It's a fantastic-looking game that takes some of the best simulation-style driving to be found on a console and plops it into a great open world.

Parts of it could be less repetitive and the PC version seems like it probably needs a patch or two to help smooth things out a bit, but those end up being minor complaints peppered into an otherwise delightful experience. Just do yourself a favor and try to cruise around from time to time instead of just banging through one event after another.

The combat, platforming, crafting and customization, even the parts of the story that work were clearly built with care and seem like they'll amount to a really engaging game with a lovable cast of characters and an intriguing world, but the game's rampant problems are just impossible to look past. This game deserved to be so much more.

ReCore offers a lighthearted, fun first few hours, but all that promise is quickly buried in a torrent of bugs and oversights, poor storytelling, and disjointed pacing that all make the game a pale shadow of what it could have been.

Drifting over the polygonal landscape looking for crystals is still a peaceful good time, if you can overlook a few flaws.

Drifting over the polygonal landscape looking for crystals is still a peaceful good time, if you can overlook a few flaws.

It's light years from being a great game, but there's still something at the heart of No Man's Sky that speaks to the would-be explorer in all of us.

Adam Jensen's return is largely successful, even if the conspiracy surrounding him could've been a little more engaging.

I'm left with the feeling that a sequel to Human Revolution could've told a more engaging story, but at the same time I had a really great time crouch-walking through Prague. It might not be an especially surprising sequel, but it all comes together quite nicely, with solid side missions and a mix of action and stealth that lets you mess around and find your own way of doing things.

Adam Jensen's return is largely successful, even if the conspiracy surrounding him could've been a little more engaging.

Inside expands on the concepts and scope of its predecessor in wildly creative ways, and it's so immaculately designed and constructed from top to bottom that it almost feels suitable for display in an art museum. This is one hell of a followup.

Homefront may look pretty, but it's a monotonous and confused slog.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

It ticks off every item on a list of things a modern Doom should have, including several items you didn't even know were on the list in the first place. They may not make shooters like this anymore, but the runaway success of this game serves as long overdue proof that they really should.

It's hard to imagine a better Doom game in 2016 than this exhilarating, darkly witty new take on id's classic.

This is one of the most fully-realized action campaigns of all time, and it sets a new bar of quality for what’s possible in the genre.

All of this would have been welcome in the early 2000s, but the years of disappointing follow-ups and the overall progression of industry standards leads to Star Fox Zero having the impact of an HD rerelease rather than a full sequel. Being able to beat the game in 2-3 hours doesn't help, no matter how many branching paths or lackluster challenge missions are included. Even the moment-to-moment action doesn't have anywhere near the impact that it had almost two decades ago, as this limited style of gameplay feels dated in 2016.

This reimagining of Ratchet & Clank is successful on every front.

My recommendation for the PC build has to come with a firmer qualification. Yes, I still really enjoyed my time with Dark Souls 3 on PC. Yes, I’ll probably play through at least one run of NG+. But my enjoyment was seriously impacted by the unpredictable performance and crashing.

On Xbox One, Dark Souls III runs at a noticeably choppier frame rate and a slightly lower resolution than the PS4 build, but it's still very a playable and stable and solid port of the game.

On PS4, it runs at least as smooth as Bloodborne did and with much faster load times (with the trade-off of occasionally slow-loading textures.)

There are a lot of sound ideas in the middle of Quantum Break and, hey, if you're a sucker for goofy time travel hijinks this game has that going for it, too. But those ideas are the only things holding this project together. The moment you look past that heady connective tissue, every single one of Quantum Break's individual elements fall flat.

Far more than just a farming game, this one-man labor of love is filled with seemingly endless content and heart.

As a solo game, The Division gets quite boring, and trying to marathon your way through all the side stuff you'll need to do to unlock every upgrade feels more like a chore than a thrilling video game. But enough of the different components work well enough to make for a good start. At times I had my doubts, but I came out of this one wanting to see at least the first couple of planned updates and ready to play more, when it's available.

It's a shame that more attention wasn't paid to The Division's story. The side missions didn't need to be as repetitive as they are, and that's disappointing. But there's a real foundation here that makes this worth paying some attention to, provided you don't intend to just shoot your way through the missions by yourself.

The side content is too repetitive, but The Division's main content and exciting multiplayer component stand out and make this thing worth seeing, provided you've got some like-minded friends around.

With its less-than-full-price and short list of features, the first Garden Warfare felt like EA wasn't willing to risk much on the odd idea of turning a cutesy mobile free-to-play tower defense game into a console online shooter. It feels like a little piece of cosmic justice that while the Medal of Honor reboot failed to make any inroads with that audience, Garden Warfare somehow became a runaway success that warranted a full-priced, fully featured sequel.

This oddball shooter sequel piles on more of everything from the first game, which is exactly what that game needed.

Superhot is an intense and thrilling blend of action and puzzle with a solid bit of narrative to tie its murderous mysteries together into something worth seeing.

It feels like it has even less of a story than Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon has, but that's because that story is spread incredibly thinly across a large world that's packed with cookie cutter content. There's nothing inherently wrong with Primal, and I found the game's combat systems to be pretty exciting at times, but the structure of the game and most of the tasks you're given are one-note. It's a monotonous grind that gets a good lift from its approach to combat and a handful of other tweaks to the formula, but it's still the formula.

Far Cry: Primal feels like one long, optional side mission.

I have some very strong feelings towards Street Fighter V--positive and negative. The lack of single-player content is less of an issue for me personally and I’m sure a lot of people feel the same and are really only interested in local or online versus. But there are a surprising number of modes and features that are either missing completely or coming later that should have been included at launch...However, I don’t want to understate the fact that I am having an absolutely great time playing Street Fighter V.

If you're looking for anything other than a solid fighting game with strong netcode, you should probably hold off until the game sees a few more updates.

Firaxis delivers a fantastic sequel in many regards, but a large assortment of technical issues plague the overall experience.

Campo Santo's debut adventure offers up a taut mystery built around two tremendously engaging characters.

AlphaDream hits the mark again in terms of combat and dialogue, even if some new additions fall flat.

The intricate puzzles and tantalizing secrets of this starkly gorgeous, mystical island are enough to lose yourself in for dozens of hours.

If you’re aware of the game’s limitations and you’re still eager to blow an open world straight to hell, few games do it better than Just Cause 3.

A one-note experience isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it delivers on that one thing exceptionally well. Just Cause 3 has occasional physics problems and a lack of variety, but it’s fantastic if you just want to drop into a world and immediately start blowing it up.

Slick production values, solid controls, and tons of fan service can't make up for mediocre progression and a lack of content.

Slick production values, solid controls, and tons of fan service can't make up for mediocre progression and a lack of content.

The glitchy technical issues appear across the board in every version of the game. In that, Fallout 4 is universal. As such, a big part of deciding if you want to play Fallout 4 becomes a personal inventory of your desire to either revel in these glitches or your patience at dealing with them, should they appear. As someone who has really appreciated this line of games in both its Fallout and Elder Scrolls flavors, Fallout 4 was still harder to swallow than I initially suspected it would be. It's another one of those games, for better and for worse.

At some point, I just want the games to work reliably. Fallout 4 follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, which is to say that it's a large, sprawling world filled with so many different quests and locations that most players will miss entire subplots as they scavenge their way from one side of the world to the other. That's also to say that it's occasionally kind of broken, from performance issues specific to the console versions to scripting glitches that might just prevent you from progressing to the same sort of "physics gone wild" moments that make for killer animated gifs and such.

There's a great game in Fallout 4, but how much of that greatness gets through to you is largely dependent on your own tolerance levels for those glitches and how willing you are to play another game from the same template as Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, and Oblivion.

Nothing about Rise of the Tomb Raider is wildly original, but everything about it is executed with a high degree of quality and craft. The game nicely merges multiple styles of gameplay, tells a better story than the 2013 reboot, and leaves off with Lara Croft at the center of an expanding narrative universe that feels like it could become home to many more exciting adventures. The last game was a decent start, but for my money, this is where the new Tomb Raider really begins.

WWE 2K16 improves on the many things wrong with last year's game, but not nearly enough.

Syndicate represents the most fun I've had with an Assassin's Creed game since Black Flag. It's proof that there's still life in this franchise, even when it goes badly astray. Now, what say we give it a short rest, so that maybe it won't have to be defibrillated back from the brink yet again?

Perhaps some pockets of the still-large Call of Duty fanbase will enjoy different parts of it more than I did, but as I add it all up, Black Ops III is a pretty even mix of positive and negatives. It's OK.

The quality feel of the driving and nice-looking environment are buried under heaps of technical issues and bland objectives.

There will certainly be some players who find that the specific omissions in Halo 5 are extremely disappointing, and you'll see a rough edge or two, but all in all there's a fantastic big-budget shooter in Halo 5 with lots to see and enough multiplayer options to keep you going for quite some time.

Rock Band 4 feels more like a maintenance release than a proper relaunch of this once-popular franchise.

Rock Band 4 doesn't feel like a grand, triumphant return for rhythm games. It feels more like a minimum viable product than the fourth game in a long-running and popular game franchise.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is a mess of half-cocked ideas, astoundingly poor execution, and technical woes that layer a little insult on top of injury.

The only thing worth knowing is that no part of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 is worth your time. It's bad. Real bad. And not the type of bad that makes for good comedy, either. It'd be bad at any price, but it's especially egregious that the publisher is charging a full $60 for this sucker. It'd be something you'd want to avoid for even a third of that price. Don't waste your time. You deserve better. Tony Hawk deserves better. Hell, even guest skater Lil Wayne deserves better.

The Beginner’s Guide offers a personal and sometimes eerie perspective on amateur game development.

Destiny's biggest expansion to date makes the game a whole lot more enjoyable and easier to recommend.

It was a whispered reminder that great games can do more than impress with sheer complexity and breadth, they can also draw us in close to them as to engage with our humanity.

Uneven pacing and a handful of poor design decisions can't bring down Cradle's unique, sci-fi mystery.

Maybe the most impressive thing about this already very impressive game is just how damn weird it is. MGSV is bursting with the kinds of bizarre little touches this series is known for but which you never see in the biggest games that cost tens of millions and take years to create, especially the ones in this genre.

There's tons to do in Mad Max, but most of what you do are the same few things, over and over again. I did it because I felt like I was supposed to, because some piece of my weird brain told me what I was doing was fun.

For the second year in a row, Madden makes smart, interesting changes that genuinely improve the experience.

It's an approachable game of football, still complex in myriad ways, but better at communicating those complexities than ever before.

Super Mario Maker lets you make your own Super Mario Bros. levels and if that isn't enough for you then you're probably beyond help anyway.

The campaign has aged pretty poorly and the graphical updates to the campaign side of Gears of War feel half-baked, so unless you're really excited for the competitive part of Gears of War, there's nothing for you here.

More than just a checklist of familiar references, more than just the old stuff with a new coat of paint. It is a game that captures the feeling I had on that vinyl couch, watching those old animated machines on the screen and wondering what it was like to be so fast, so powerful, so invincible.

Despite some aging mechanics, I still had a blast whipping my Blades of Exile around ancient Greece once again. There's something visceral and rewarding about God of War's combat that manages to strike a nerve even after a lapse of several years.

A fascinating and exciting experiment. It certainly tells a strong story, but it's the unique way in which it presents that story that makes the game so compelling. I can safely say I've never played anything quite like Her Story before, and while I don't necessarily think the "search engine murder mystery" genre needs to become the Next Big Thing, I cannot help but greatly admire the unusual ideas Her Story presents about how we tell and interact with stories in games.

Arkham Knight sees Rocksteady becoming more confident in its design within the larger scope of an entire city, and despite a few uneven spots, this is overall a satisfying way to wrap up what the developer has referred to as its trilogy of Arkham games.

Splatoon is simultaneously proof that Nintendo can still deliver tremendously entertaining experiences outside of its usual wheelhouse, and an example of how even the most leaden genres can be twisted to new and delightfully creative ends.

The finishers in Mortal Kombat X are more gruesome than ever.

Mortal Kombat X moves forward with a snappier version of the previous game's fighting and some cool new characters, but the story and other features around the edges feel a bit rough in spots.

The speedier pace of combat and the addition of Injustice's background interaction are just two of the things that make Mortal Kombat X a better-playing game than its predecessor. Also, MKX feels like an attempt to move forward into new things, whereas MK9 was one large, albeit rebooted nostalgia trip. And it looks fantastic all the while. All of this is enough to make up for the game's handful of rough edges around story mode and some of its other options.

It looks great, controls really well, and has a level of difficulty that makes things challenging without making them overtly frustrating. If you've ever been into this sort of action-adventure game, Axiom Verge is positively terrific.

Where Hotline Miami felt lithe and creative, Hotline Miami 2 often feels sluggish and inflexible. There's fun to be had with this sequel, but it's the kind that only the original game's most ardent and obsessive fans will find in great supply.

Hotline Miami's thrillingly brutal gameplay is stretched to the point of breaking in this aesthetically pleasing, but otherwise disappointing sequel.

Given the embarrassingly long time spent patching and getting Battlefield 4 up to snuff, maybe a "stable" Battlefield will be enough for some players.