Far from being a chore, there's something genuinely satisfying about the way Super Mario Run rewards skillful play and practice. If you're predisposed to this kind of immensely satisfying, repetition-based play, this is a game that is going to consume a huge chunk of your time and a significant amount of your phone's battery life.

Setting decapitation against the backdrop of jaunty, big band renditions of holiday classics is at least a new twist on the same idea, but it’s a temporary fix at best. Dead Rising 4's saving grace is its Christmas setting – the strange mix of mayhem and holiday cheer gets more mileage than you'd expect. But it also signals that this series might be on its last legs.

By many standards, Guardian isn’t an exceptional game. It bears the scars of its nearly decade-long development with an almost perverse sense of pride. The game's performance often struggles, overwhelmed by its own transcendent beauty. Its environment puzzles are mostly fun, but can be rage-inducingly opaque. It's not a journey meant for everyone – but those who heed its call will find themselves sadder, wiser, and maybe just a little better when they’ve seen it through to the end.

Hot Wheels demonstrates that Playground Games are so assured and steadfast in their vision for Forza Horizon that they can make something so patently absurd feel like the most obvious and natural thing in the world. It shows that games can be rooted in realism while reveling in the preposterous and that's what guarantees Forza Horizon 3's place as one of the all time great driving games.

This love letter to 'Banjo-Kazooie' feels rushed, despite nailing the wit and sharing talent with the original.

It's a game full of glimmers of the new, things that gesture toward what Final Fantasy XV might have become – had it not spent ten years battling its own history – only to let them drown, half-finished in a muddy stew of missteps and throwbacks, inexcusable omissions and baffling inclusions. Far from being for everyone, there are hours where you wonder if the game knows what it's become, let alone who it's for.

Such is the grand irony of the ludicrously-named Infinite Warfare – the only decisions that breathe fresh life into it are the same that have scared long-time fans of it away. To those devotees, rumors of CoD's radical reinvention have been greatly exaggerated. Not since the likes of 2002's Jason X has taking a well-known franchise into space produced so little tangible change; if anything, it's a testament to how it needs to be altered even further.

Every detail is almost perfect, and no detail is wasted in this triumph of worldbuilding and storytelling.

In the end, the world of Watch Dogs 2 isn't nightmarish at all. Rather than trying to present players with a twisted or overly satirized reflection of our world, Watch Dogs 2 shows us a world that is wild, bright, unpredictable, delighted with itself, and most importantly, alive.

The resulting mix is, on every level, a peculiar kind of balancing act – as frustrating as it is charming – and often both at once.

If Farpoint were a regular non-VR game it would be unremarkable at best. As a VR experience though, and as a demonstration of the effectiveness of a gun-shaped prop in virtual reality, it represents a ballsy, if embryonic, attempt to try and push things forward. It's experimental and – as something that tries to be a fully-fledged multi-hour "blockbuster" action game – is unusually daring for this period in VR. While we certainly won't ever look back on it as one of the great shooters of all time, we may come to look back at it as significant landmark in VR games.

Longtime Dawn of War fans will find much to their liking, and, with a little bit of patience, MOBA fans and RTS fans probably can, too. But the game also speaks to the difficulty of splicing two genres, hitching the living to the dead. With Dawn of War 3, Relic was hoping for a virile chimera, but it ended up with something more like Frankenstein: innovative, untamable, and unknowable – but not quite alive.

One of the Year's Best Games.

The second and final expansion for 'Dark Souls 3' blows out the embers with grace.

Nioh boasts what might be the most galling cast of bosses in the history of action gaming – including a saucy, murderous she-bat, a giant frog with a penchant for cigars, and a skeleton the size of the Eiffel Tower – all united by their unquenchable desire to peel you apart with a single blow and drop your bones into a stew. Those who expect to die early and often in the world of Nioh will find their pleas answered, again and again and again. For the rest of us mere mortals, however, this exquisite work is best admired from afar – it might be pearl-encrusted, but like every other bear trap, it’s made to maim.

Will a child notice or care about issues like dropped frames or screen tearing? Perhaps not. But they'll definitely let you know how they feel when the game decides to freeze and reboot itself in the middle of working on a half-constructed castle, skyscraper, or some other masterpiece. With that in mind, I'd humbly suggest that your time would be much better spent on an honest-to-goodness Lego set instead. You can thank me later.

The slasher genre's always fascinated me when it comes to the movies. Smart, self-conscious stories that subvert our expectations – films like Scream (1996), You're Next (2011), and Hush (2016) – serve as reminders of the essential purity, and limitations, of the slasher flick. By setting the stage and then forcing the actors to improvise, Gun's Friday the 13th feels like the next bold step in that evolution.

There's something deeply unsettling about how enjoyable this game is. It's a reminder of why, despite their timeless resonance and narrative potential, it can be hard to admit how much we love a good horror movie. However, Friday the 13th: The Game doesn't give you many chances to stop and dwell on the grotesqueries. Most of the time, you're simply having too much fun to care. The thrill of the chase, the primordial impulses of cat and mouse, the satisfaction as you land that last fatal blow – it's a genuine delight to experience in a group setting, with everyone wearing a headset and communicating, or taunting Jason, as you work together to round up a can of gasoline, car keys, and a spare battery to just get the hell out of there.

The Sexy Brutale is a smart, engrossing, novel romp – in short, the perfect way to spend a long, rainy night.

After years of stagnation, the stage was ripe for a revamp and revitalization, and on that front, Resident Evil 7 succeeds wildly. It wisely swaps its continent-crossing conspiracies for a provincial tour through a solitary dilapidated homestead in Louisiana. It cleaves away its bloated, lore-laden mythology for a brand new cast of characters who don't require hours of poring through fan wikis to decipher their motivations. And most significantly, Resident Evil 7 tosses aside the series' once revolutionary third-person camera perspective for a dreadfully immediate first-person view.

It’s a world stunningly and meticulously designed – with the most care and imagination lavished on the machines themselves.

Even if it were possible to get lost in Andromeda, I can't imagine wanting to; no matter how gorgeous the game's vistas may be, they exist largely to be exhausted and, as a result, give off a sense of emptiness, not possibility. This would be a disaster for any open world, but for a game in which you supposedly play a "Pathfinder," it's fatal. Andromeda is a game about exploration that gives you no space or reason to explore.

Both its gameplay and plot are a dazzling set of perspective shifts that don't so much answer any of its questions as make you feel progressively weirder – and often sadder – about the meaning of what you're being asked. And each ending is really a new beginning, inviting you back to spend a little longer dwelling in its remarkably humane apocalypse; no matter how long you explore, you'll never be led to something you expect to find.

If your temperament can bear the ceaseless cycle of death, Outlast 2 rewards you with one of the most twisted horror stories ever encountered in a game.

The mystery, the wonder, and the challenge that have made Souls a durable gaming institution all feel a bit abbreviated in Ashes.

That's the word for Civ VI: labyrinthine. By the time you've seen enough of it to determine whether or not you even enjoy it, the question is moot. You've digested its interlocking systems so thoroughly that, like it or not, they're part of you now. Such is its insidious nature: for all its soaring symphonic overtures and passionate rhetoric about the steady advance of humanity in the face of unimaginable adversity, Civ depicts all of human endeavor – from literature to sailing to knitting – as intractable conflict, a never-ending struggle to dominate your enemies that reduces every field imaginable to a rat race across a doomed planet.

With just a little bit of platforming, puzzles, and baseline cognitive engagement, Titanfall 2 feels so much more satisfying than the status quo. Respawn realized the pretty hallways aren't fun anymore, and I hope the rest of the industry catches up soon.

Never mind the staggeringly meta cynicism on display: has gaming ever delivered something so damningly precise?

It's a tacky but thoroughly pleasant reminder of what we remember as simpler times, back when a game could just be about cover-based shooting, when developers felt that dumping millions into baroque campaigns of love, loss, and headshots seemed to make some sort of sense.

For me, it has more soul, passion, humor, and panache packed into one percent of its 100-hour odyssey into thiefhood and triumph than any major release of the past year. Persona 4 brought my love of video games back from the dead. Persona 3 sustained it. And now, Persona 5 proves that it's a love still worth keeping, nearly a decade later.

I don’t think anyone wants games like this, really. It’s lovely to have games that can feel like entire worlds, but they take approximately ten billion times longer and require many more people to work their fingers to the bone, and then when they come out people say they aimed too high, stretched themselves too thin. I hope that, in the years to come, we get to see games that scale themselves back to focus on the filigree.

Letting artists loose in your project can be very inspiring, albeit a bit scary sometimes.

Horizon 3 wants to teach you how special cars are, not by proving to you how fast they can go or how well they corner, but by showing you the kinds of experiences they can bring you. In the real world, these adventures are locked away by money, time, and, your sense of self-preservation. In this playground, you’re free from all that. It's just you, the car, and the time you make together.

Everything is not a puzzle to be completed or a solution to be deciphered, but an invitation to think about and commune with the universe of things that has been piling up alongside you all along. What other video game would have dared to dream such a thought?

Turns out it's not quite the "Dishonored in space" experience we were expecting, although it does seem to borrow heavily from Bioshock and Half-Life as well as more systems-based survival games...I have a feeling it's a lot longer than we thought. [First Impressions]

The Nintendo mobile game feels like an Animal Crossing game and an extension of the franchise, but like my hometown, it’s changed—and that’s not always for the better.

I am, however, a Halo devotee going back to the Combat Evolved era, and can say with certainty that this is an accessible and worthy installment in that enduring saga. After a couple dozen hours spent playing, I'm already eager to revisit the campaign on a higher difficulty – and Blitz remains sheer, unabashed fun. Even 15 years later, Halo's still got tricks up its sleeve.

At turns juvenile, snarky, beautiful, and brilliant, this game is utterly essential.

In this modern age of objective-laden open worlds, convoluted skill trees and tiresome hand-holding, that sense of real adventure – that you might find something that no one else in the world has seen – is all too rare. And a Zelda game may have been the last place in the world you expected to find it.

To my delight, the story's at least as long as the classic Halo games I fell in love with so many years ago, and there's a whole world – four of them, in fact – to investigate with my fellow Guardians. In the depths of Nessus, Ghost has even heard tell of a planet-eating worldship and a pissed-off emperor named Calus, who might have an axe to grind with Ghaul. Sounds like we're in for a long wild ride. [Review-in-Progress]

Such is the strange appeal of Yakuza: beneath all the bizarre Japanisms and po-faced sentimentality lies an almost-bottomless reservoir of charm.