All of these changes serve to make Civ V's late-game a much more enjoyable endeavor. The inevitability of victory is greatly lessened, and it's entirely possible to totally throw the established order of things into disarray if you happen to get some big tourism and/or culture boosts later on. For those reasons, Brave New World is easy to recommend to anyone who still has an active interest in the game.

While I can usually get behind forgiving some problems in the face of quality fan service, Deadpool's fan service is highly specific to those who want the character taken to the most hyperactive extremes imaginable. Maybe that particular subset of fans will be able to look past the game's issues more easily, but anyone else will likely find Deadpool intensely grating and largely frustrating in equal measure.

Combine those problems with the game's generally chuggy, unattractive visuals, generic-as-hell soundtrack, painfully obnoxious late-game difficulty spike, and breezily short campaign (I beat most of it in a single afternoon), and you've got yourself a game that really doesn't offer much to anyone, outside of the most dedicated fans of the Merc with the Mouth.

The Last of Us is not simply Uncharted with zombies, but it couldn't exist without Naughty Dog having made Uncharted first, either. It's a dark adventure, one rarely filled with laughs or joy. There are bitter pills to swallow along the way, and nothing is taken for granted, not even characters. People live, people die. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not. It's still a zombie game, but a sobering one. Take a deep breath.

That art design, the game's intriguing story, and the terrific score by composer Olivier Deriviere are ultimately betrayed by Remember Me's slavish dedication to a game design that just doesn't quite work.

Remember Me is a better story than a game, a mixture of Philip K. Dick-style plotting and Luc Besson's sci-fi aesthetics grafted onto an initially nifty, but ultimately repetitive gameplay design.

Fuse's bland art design and overall lack of personality are disappointing in the context of that initial reveal trailer, but under the hood it's still a generally well made third-person shooter with a clear emphasis on co-op and the imaginative weapons Insomniac is so good at dreaming up. But there are too few of those weapons, and a few too many irksome issues, to lift Fuse significantly above the many, many other cover-based shooters it's competing with.

Did I mention it has the creepiest spiders since Deadly Creatures? By its very nature of being a sequel, Last Light doesn’t feel as fresh as Metro 2033 did, but there’s still nothing else like it.

Possibly the most surprising addition are the amount of stealth sequences.

By its very nature of being a sequel, Last Light doesn’t feel as fresh as Metro 2033 did, but there’s still nothing else like it. Few games generate immersion through gameplay and transport you to their world the way Metro does.

This '80s action movie twist on the Far Cry 3 mechanics has a killer aesthetic, but it flinches a little too often, resulting an a game that oscillates between dumb B-movie tropes and a self-awareness that prevents the look and tone from working as well as it should.

There are glitches and other unfortunate quirks to talk about, but those problems barely register over the din of utter mediocrity that pervades so much of Star Trek: The Video Game's campaign. Outside of a horrid, poorly-explained turret sequence in which you (barely) pilot the Enterprise in battle, there is scarcely an acknowledgment anywhere in this game that Star Trek fans might want to do something other than just run around and shoot aliens. Such a concept ultimately belies the very point of Star Trek in practically all of its many incarnations.

While I admittedly became less enamored with Monaco as it ramped up its difficulty and turned some of its later missions into tedious exercises in trial-and-error, the vast majority of Monaco's content is simply a delight to play, especially when enjoyed alongside a rogue's gallery of your most deviously skilled friends. It may not best serve the solitary brand of player, but for a cooperative group of would-be thieves, Monaco can be terrific fun.

If I'd come out of Dead Island with a burning desire for more Dead Island, Riptide would go down a lot easier, but since that original game started out strong and just got weaker as it wore on, playing through another 15 hours of almost exactly the same thing, when the first one already felt like more than enough, instead just becomes a tiresome exercise.

The fights are flashy and full of personality, making the action stand out, and producing a spectacle worth seeing.

I rolled my eyes more than a few times during the story mode, but the ridiculous super moves offset that stuff and make it a pretty good time.

It's short, sure, but it also doesn't wear out its welcome, focusing solely on the necessary pieces of an adventure that's often as challenging as it is thrilling. In Guacamelee!, DrinkBox has both provided a wonderfully crafted action game for old school and new players alike, and established itself as a developer very much worth paying attention to.

You'll see a lot of BioShock in Infinite, but even if you try to make direct comparisons between the two, it's clear that Infinite is a far better game than its predecessor. It moves at a better pace, with more meaningful and more playable big encounters than BioShock. But it still carries that sense of exploration and the feeling of dread that comes with knowing that everything is just continuing to unravel before your very eyes.

Dark Moon takes what was basically a really good sketch of a game in the original Luigi's Mansion, and fleshes it out into a more robust, and arguably far more entertaining romp, all while retaining the distinctive flavor of that first game.

As awful as Survival Instinct is mechanically, the really depressing thing about it is that it offers no meaningful information or commentary on the characters it revolves around. Yes, Daryl and Merle's lives are a bit more fleshed out, but nothing you learn is anything you couldn't have gone the rest of your life not knowing.

There's just enough exposition there to keep things moving and just enough of a gameplay tweak to make you wish they had made these changes two games ago. It's a fun but feature-light shooter for people who already enjoy the basic style of Gears of War. Nothing more, nothing less.

For those of us who still deeply love this specific style of real-time strategy and want more of it, this is a must-have add-on.

This is a game with startling clarity of vision, but that vision often feels narrow and intractable. It knows precisely what it wants to be, and in most key ways, executes on those ideas with precision. But in setting that course, it all but dismisses the way in which many played SimCity sequel after sequel. And while I expect many will fall head-over-heels in love with this SimCity's cooperative design, at its best, the game feels more like a really thoughtfully designed multiplayer mode for a larger, single-player capable game that, sadly, doesn't exist.

The Xbox 360 version is grungy, by comparison [to the PC], with lower texture quality and a lower framerate. That's unsurprising, but when taken against the other games on the platform, the 360 version still looks OK. It's certainly playable, anyway, though a weird audio bug made one of the early open-area segments practically unplayable, since it's hard to know when to take cover and hide from incoming rockets if the audio isn't playing back at all.

It's serviceable and, again, it looks great on the PC, but was this trip really necessary? It's an average experience, overall, and in a genre that continues to be packed full of competition, you'd probably be better off finding a discounted copy of Crysis 2, or, if the open-world combat of the original Crysis really floats your boat, spend some time with Far Cry 3, instead.

Tomb Raider might be guilty of trying to do too many things at once, but the relative quality of each one of those individual things is high enough that the whole is still pretty satisfying.

A thrilling and engaging experience. The swordplay is fun, and it's really fascinating to see the different spots where either Kojima's or Platinum's signature styles shine through. It also has a wild final confrontation that shows elements of both.

In short, it's a quick cut through the world of Metal Gear that mentions just enough about the Patriots and the War Economy to let you feel like you're keeping up on the state of post-MGS4 Metal Gear while also filling it full of ridiculous, entertaining combat sequences and, for whatever reason, a whole lot of cursing.

Both functionally broken and creatively bankrupt, Aliens: Colonial Marines is an extinction-level disaster.

A wonderfully pleasant experience that is best served in smaller chunks, which left me in my own personal nightmare: I was having such a great time that I felt like I wanted to continue playing, but I had used up all of my smarts for the evening, leaving me bumping up against puzzles that I wasn't even sure could be solved with the version of the tool I had at the time.

This final chapter in the trilogy certainly gives you your money's worth in necromorphs waiting to be dismembered, but the overall quality of the game just doesn't feel equal to the high standard set by its excellent predecessors.

I'm still glad I saw the Dead Space trilogy through to the end--and if you're invested in the series it's absolutely worth playing--but it's too bad this respectable series, which felt so exciting and fresh when it debuted just a few years ago, had to go out on a middling note.

It's a sharp-looking game, the voice acting is largely on-point and funny (if occasionally obnoxiously repetitive), and there are at least a few solid hours worth of puzzle-solving to be had here. It's just that those hours don't really add up to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, ultimately relegating The Cave to an interesting curiosity that sadly doesn't have much sticking power.

Whether you're a longtime fan (with an open mind) or a total newcomer just looking for a solid character action game, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling overly dissatisfied with this new game.

Everything in this new game exists in service of making it a great game in its own right, not in stoking your nostalgia for the games you played over the last decade. As a character action game, it hits all the notes--fast, robust action, marvelous visual style, and a tremendous sense of attitude--you could want in this type of game.

The story mode has one of the strongest starts I can remember in years.

It's a smartly designed open-world game with a ton of stuff to do, and the random acts of hilarity that occur out in the jungle will constantly leave you with unique stories you'll be desperate to tell your friends. If the story had made good on the strength of its initial premise, Far Cry 3 would have been shoo-in for best game of the year.

If the story had made good on the strength of its initial premise, Far Cry 3 would have been shoo-in for best game of the year. As it stands, it's still the most fun I've had in an open world in ages, a game that plays so well and looks so good, I wish every other piece of it reached the same high bar. But you should play it anyway.

If you're the sort of person who doesn't inherently find the concepts of greased-up deaf people, Amish people commenting on their sex lives, older women grotesquely demanding group sex from frat boys, people in wheelchairs falling over, or "the gays" completely hilarious, do not get angry at Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse.

Ooo is lovingly rendered here, and the character art and animation is really sharp. Unfortunately, visuals aren't everything, and the actual act of playing Hey Ice King! is something that cannot be ignored.

This is a sad game that will weigh heavy on you long after you've completed it--it even wrung some honest tears out of me on a couple of occasions. But you'll suffer through the emotional swings because they're ultimately worth it. No matter how depressing, gut-wrenching, or flat-out horrifying The Walking Dead gets, you will want--nay, need--to finish it. It's just that good.

From the very beginning, The Walking Dead sinks its teeth in and never lets you go. It's a journey in the truest sense of the word, replete with tragedy, heartache, tension, fear, and even brief moments of catharsis. Calling The Walking Dead a work of entertainment almost seems like a misnomer, considering the heavy tone and general lack of sentimentality in the writing.

PlayStation All-Stars makes a couple of design decisions that make the whole thing feel a little more awkward than it should. Also, for a game that's supposed to bring together the greatest heroes of the PlayStation platforms, it's missing too many key figures.

The 30 minutes I spent in a nursery are some of the most memorable time I've spent with a horror game or movie, punctuated by a jump scare that literally took my breath away. Survival horror fans disenchanted with the direction Capcom's taken the Resident Evil series will find much to love in ZombiU, and anybody looking for a quality launch title with deep, rewarding mechanics are encouraged to see what Ubisoft--yes, Ubisoft-has created.

Longtime Hitman fans will undoubtedly be put off by some of the changes Io has made here, but if you're willing to dig a little deeper, you'll find a game that's as rewarding as any Hitman prior.

Everything about New Super Mario Bros. U is pretty exciting, except the game itself. Is it possible that this is the best game in the "New" series to date--not to mention one of the best exclusive Wii U games on the market, by default--and at the same time kind of flatly uninteresting? Apparently so. The game is perfectly well made for what it is, and I had plenty of fun playing it in short bursts here and there, but at this point the series' by-the-numbers design philosophy is starting to lend the name "New Super Mario Bros." a degree of unintentional irony.

There's a good possibility that if you're interested in getting a Wii U at all, you'll end up with Nintendo Land anyway, since the game is bundled with the deluxe package that includes the black version of the console, four times as much internal storage, and a two-year discount on eShop games. That whole package is $10 less than buying the basic white Wii U model and Nintendo Land separately, and the good news is, Nintendo Land provides enough rousing minigames--provided you've got the players and the hardware--and a convincing enough case for the new control scheme to make it a worthwhile companion piece alongside your new Wii U.

A disjointed mess of meaningless missions played against a clock backed up with a multiplayer mode that occasionally approximates something that resembled proper Call of Duty combat. More often, though, the game feels too small to be entertaining, with maps so tiny that you'll literally spawn with an enemy in your crosshairs... or vice versa. This would be a questionable purchase at traditional downloadable pricing. But at $50? No way.

It's got its share of flaws, but overall Treyarch has assembled a great, fast, and fun first-person shooter that, even if you were thinking about finally skipping a year, is still worth your time.

Assassin's Creed III's methodical world-building and wealth of clever gameplay systems are impressive, even if they don't always confidently click together with all the other moving parts.

Assassin's Creed III's methodical world-building and wealth of clever gameplay systems are impressive, even if they don't always confidently click together with all the other moving parts.

Enjoying Hotline Miami doesn't make you a worse person, though you may find yourself wrestling with just why the act of deftly delivered murder is so damn much fun. It is because it's a lovingly crafted game, well-designed and deeply addictive.

Its protagonist is an intriguing one, and her mission frequently teases greatness. But it never quite arrives, due to the developers' inability to marry the "full-fledged" Assassin's Creed gameplay to the Vita's form and function.

It's good that the developers have backed this story up with sharp, time-tested gameplay that gets enhanced in meaningful ways across all modes.

Nostalgists will have close to a dozen hours worth of matches and stories from one of the WWE's greatest eras to play through. It's been a long time since I've been able to earnestly recommend a wrestling game to just about any type of fan, but WWE '13 is most definitely worth such a recommendation.

WWE '13 remembers when wrestling, and by proxy, wrestling video games were great. It remembers the pageantry, the silliness, and the death-defying stunts that made wrestling such a hot commodity a decade ago.

If you're looking for a solid, lengthy solo campaign from a driving game, this isn't what you're looking for. Most Wanted is a multiplayer-first game, and taken in that context, few games do it better than this.

A game with some amazing moments and enough little issues to make you constantly wish that it was slightly better, slightly smoother, and (on consoles) slightly cleaner.

It does all the things that sort of game is supposed to do, but not with the flair or invention that would make it possible to care again about playing something you remember having played so many times before.

Far from the loving tribute to an important milestone in modern games it could have been, BFG only adds a couple of esoteric technical features and a short, mediocre new campaign add-on to Doom 3, at the expense of some of the core graphics and gameplay features that defined the game's identity on its initial release.

The BFG Edition is the best you're going to do right now if you want to buy a new copy of a shooter that, for better or worse, ranks among the most hyped video game releases of all time.

The idea of an anthology-like tribute to Bond films of the past isn't a bad one, but 007 Legends wastes whatever potential for fun there might have been. Instead, all Bond fans are left with is a heavily rewritten, Cliff's Notes version of some great (and not-so-great) films with a bunch of forgettable shooting and stealth sequences shoved into the mix. Ultimately, nothing 007 Legends offers is worth the effort of trudging through it.

Extreme fastidiousness notwithstanding, it can take around 30 hours to see through the single-player campaign in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, though like Firaxis' Civilization series, there are so many different ways to prioritize the research, engineering, economic, and tactical elements of the game that it almost begs for multiple playthroughs.

This game will test your mettle in a way that will make old fans tingle with a sense of unforgiving nostalgia, and will make clear to newcomers just exactly what XCOM is all about.

The cleverest part of XCOM: Enemy Unknown is how it bundles up all of its complexities and interdependencies and presents them in a package that, while not easy, is at least easily digested. It's often overwhelming, but in the best way possible.

Most importantly, it manages to simultaneously feel like a Forza game while also letting in more of what makes racing games fun for all players, rather than staying strictly focused on those of us who want strict simulations of varying realism.

The whole thing is just so gosh darn British, too, which I imagine is less of a selling point if you are British. That pervasive sprinkling of refined, humorous nonsense makes The Journey feel a little more like one worth taking, even when some of its nuts and bolts are less appealing.

NBA 2K13 is phenomenal, if familiar. Go in with the right expectations, and you'll be enjoying it all season long.

A meaningful and successful reinvention of the core ideas behind Deus Ex with a singular focus on making this dense style of game more accessible.

An excellent game, and one worthy of your attention. Dishonored's greatest contribution to the genre games like Deus Ex helped establish will be best appreciated by those who've been with it from the start, but Arkane has made a game rooted in manipulating artificial intelligence that plays just as well to the guy or gal who wants to shoot stuff. That's impressive.

Resident Evil 6 is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can't help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad.

Tokyo Jungle is bold, well-designed, and very funny. One can't imagine Tokyo Jungle coming from anywhere but Japan, and it's a case where such a statement is an enormous compliment.

I enjoyed it in spurts, but there's just too much wrong here to hold your attention for long. As amusing as it can be, it's really just a janky wrestling game with avatars stapled on for maximum stupidity.

Mark of the Ninja executes its formula to such a high degree of near-perfection that I could hardly think of a way it could be meaningfully improved the whole way through it.

In general, playing with other people is pretty much painless, even on PC, which now uses Steamworks across the board instead of that GameSpy nonsense. The PC version of the game is much friendlier overall, and the in-game menus for inventory are easily manipulated with a mouse. Playing the game with a mouse and keyboard feels just fine, but you can still play the PC version with a controller just as easily.

As someone who went into Borderlands 2 with a sickness that I thought only more Borderlands could cure, I'm left feeling like I didn't receive a full dose this time around.

Borderlands 2 is a better game in most of the ways that matter, but some of that is brought down by the familiarity of the experience.

It is a game that plays extremely well, yet offers little beyond the expected in terms of supplementary entertainment. Offline, GM mode is about as much fun as you'd generally want it to be, and the Ultimate Team stuff can be amusing in stretches, but the remaining features are mostly minor distractions at best, and outright arduous to use at worst.

The differences between the platforms is something of a toss-up, with the PS3 version taking slightly longer to load your custom costumes up at select time and the 360 version doing that astoundingly annoying thing where it seizes up for a few seconds every time you unlock an achievement.

But it's only truly great if you're playing against like-minded, similarly skilled opposition. If you can rustle up a community of people that fit that bill, go nuts, it's a great time. But if you're a Tekken neophyte hoping to pick it up along the way, you'll probably be brutally rebuffed by what you find.

In spite of its misfires and glitches, Madden NFL 13 is a step forward for this franchise. It's a small, clumsy step, but considering how little forward progress this series has made in recent years, any kind of step is a cause for minor celebration. If you can forgive the technical problems and often cumbersome menus, there's a football game worth liking here.

The clunky social integration and overabundance of games systems strata ultimately don't negate the old-school rhythm game fun in Rock Band Blitz, and if you're already invested in the Rock Band platform, it almost seems foolish not to spend the $15 to extend the life of your library.

Hybrid's peripheral shortcomings are easy enough to ignore, though, since the core idea is so well executed.

It has the right idea with character-specific abilities that help to make the individual Transformers feel different. But it doesn't go far enough in that direction to stand out, and it ultimately feels like it's being held back by its by-the-numbers shooting. There are some great ideas here, but you'll have to wade through a pretty thick set of drawbacks to enjoy them.

A game that improves upon the developer's past work. But it's still a pretty lackluster shooter that doesn't perk up until the end, and it's only truly suited for people who are fiending for a Transformers game.

Cramming this many elements into a single downloadable game seems like an audacious move, but Dust pulls it off with confidence, style, and heart, resulting in a game that deserves to be played by a lot of people.

In an age where indie games are finally beginning to bloom as a way to experiment with narrative, Papo & Yo still feels like a brave step forward into uncharted territory. And as with all first steps, it's something of a clumsy one, perhaps unsure of itself and its own limitations.

The finished game--which only made it to release thanks to a last-minute rescue from Square Enix--won't be remembered as one of the world's great open-world crime games. But it will be thought of as a good, solid one that did enough right to be mostly fun from start to finish. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

So perhaps Sleeping Dogs isn't one of those games you'll want to keep on playing long after you've seen its story's conclusion. But while you're engaged with that story, this is an effective open-world experience, filled with interesting characters, some exciting action, and enough unpredictability to keep you hooked. It might feel familiar, but that doesn't make it any less fun.

The technical side of Darksiders II isn't as laudable, especially on consoles, where the frame rate gets rough when the action picks up and little things like shadow detail are noticeably drawing in as you run around.

A smart, original evolution of the previous game's concepts with plenty of new things to see and do, from its new protagonist to its faster combat and engaging loot system.

An exciting and lengthy adventure with interesting characters and a host of items and features that make its mix of combat and puzzle-solving very attractive. It's better if you also played the original game, but even if you didn't, Darksiders II is definitely worth looking at.

This is a game where visuals, audio, and mechanics sync up in a way that feels effortlessly organic. I'm sure the work put in to making it that way was anything but effortless, but it paid off. Sound Shapes is a reminder that great, creative things can be done in the music gaming genre.

If you honestly care about the universe and its characters, you'll probably take what you can get in whatever format you can get your hands on, but at times this story feels like it'd be better suited for a short manga series than a video game.

It's a weird mixing of genres that might leave diehard fans on either side of the genre line wondering if they'd even be capable of fully enjoying the game. But it ends up working out reasonably well.

This is most definitely a lazy, slapped together, overly expensive waste of time that nobody need bother play. And yet, for some bizarre reason, all I could think about while playing The Expendables 2 was that it didn't have to be this way.

There aren't many action games in this particular mold to begin with these days, so those with fond memories of Deadlight's spiritual predecessors will likely have a reasonably fulfilling few hours here. Without an existing sense of nostalgia for the source material, though, you may find Deadlight's minor flaws collectively outweigh all the things it does right.

A terrific idea that just doesn't pan out as well as it feels like it should. All the little tweaks and decisions, from level list to the soundtrack to the decisions about which moves to include or exclude eventually start to weigh on the overall experience in a meaningful way. It turns something that should have been a joyous update and revival of a tarnished franchise into something that simply misses the mark.