Jeff, Brad, and Ben jump into Respawn's new free-to-play battle royale game.

Quick look.

Quick look.

This sequel offers plenty of reasons to revisit the world of assassination, whether you're an experienced hitman or just trying out the fiber wire for the first time.

Hitman 2's locations cover almost as much exotic ground as those in the first game, from a high-tech Miami speedway to a drug cartel's jungle compound, suburban Anytown USA and a secret island meeting of billionaires who not-so-secretly run the world.

Tetris Effect, from top to bottom, is my favorite iteration of Tetris yet. The music and visuals work together to create a truly unique Tetris experience, that is only enhanced by VR.

It is an incredible achievement in open world gaming, an intricate machine that disguises its machinery better than just about anything else that's come before. In addition to its lengthy and engrossing campaign, it delivers moments of emergent storytelling more compelling than anything I can ever remember playing. Graphically and aurally, it is top-to-bottom stunning.

This big year-two expansion irons out most of Destiny 2's wrinkles and offers some of the most mysterious, enjoyable content the series has seen so far.

If all you want is another huge, slightly lukewarm portion of a meal it feels like we just finished, then Odyssey certainly delivers that. Personally, I feel like I'm going to explode.

Forza Horizon 4 isn't going to be a huge surprise to anyone who played a previous entry, but in a world where the other big open-world games have ranged from mildly to extremely disappointing, it's great to have another solid entry in the genre to tear through.

Forza Horizon 4's connected world and seasonal weather help make what's otherwise a very familiar-feeling experience feel fresh one more time.

Spider-Man combines elements from plenty of other games to deliver a game with expansive combat, exciting traversal, and a solid, authentic story.

Quick Look...

Quick look.

Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t know how much more ground could be covered with Kratos as a character. The new Nordic mythology obviously gives Sony Santa Monica plenty of new material to play with, but it’s the new Kratos that’s responsible for the game’s most striking evolution...God of War grew up, and the result is the best entry in the series.

The ambitious setting doesn't pay off in this story that seems to want to hedge every chance it gets. The end result is a story that goes nowhere, says nothing, and fails to live up to the previous settings and villains in the franchise. If you can get past that... the rest is pretty much fine if you're up for another Far Cry game.

Far Cry 5's story is a real let-down, but the action still makes for a solid co-op experience.

A decent video game undermined by bad pacing, weak characters, and a wishy-washy world view. Play it cooperatively with a friend, ignore the characters and their motivations, and you'll probably have a good time.

Every aspect of the base game feels designed to work well with every other aspect. The cars are fast and most of them drift at the tap of your brake, and there are sweeping curves ready to accept those drifts. The shortcuts lead you some wild places, jumping and smashing your way ahead of the pack. By comparison, most driving games feel like a compromise between trying to design a real city for you to race real cars in while also trying to make an exciting video game. Burnout Paradise evokes reality but never at the expense of gameplay. That's something that other racing games could still stand to steal from this one.

There are some elements around the edges that haven't aged all that well, but Burnout Paradise is still a fantastic racing game.

It has all the trappings of a game that should probably be free-to-play, but Konami is asking $40 for it up front. That's a bad deal.

After Phantom Pain was released and the split between publisher Konami and series creator Hideo Kojima became public, some folks lamented that we'd never see another game on Konami's Fox Engine ever again. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Metal Gear Survive is both a bad survival game and a bad Metal Gear game.

The end result feels like a game that was created in a boardroom, its DNA formed by focus testing and market research. Time will tell what EA does in an attempt to remedy its grave errors with Battlefront II, but the game as it stands today is little more than a disappointing mess. Its technical prowess, beloved characters, and shiny spacecraft serve as little more than a distracting facade that covers an embarrassing attempt at a marquee Star Wars game.

This rollercoaster ride of a turn-based strategy game starts out almost impossibly strong, but by the end I mostly wished it'd been over three hours earlier.

This feels like the most wheel-spinning, by-the-numbers Call of Duty they've made thus far.

Call of Duty's return to World War II looks great, but feels flat and uninspired from start to finish.

Each kingdom is absolutely packed with charm, clever objectives, gorgeous visuals, a stellar soundtrack, and a huge variety of ways to have fun. One moon would have me leaping across tiny platforms with pinpoint precision, and the next would have me cheering up a businessman by dressing like a clown. At no point did I feel like I was checking boxes just to up my completion percentage. Even now that I've collected every moon and purple coin in the game, I still want to play more of it. It’s one of the most joyous and entertaining gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time, and it stands tall among the all-time great Mario games.