For now, as a Mario game that continues the Switch's moves to blur the line between the portable and the home-based console, Super Mario Odyssey is a beautiful, rewarding example of what Nintendo has in store for the system.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the Year's Best Games.

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.

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

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]

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.

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

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.

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.

Though Gravity Rush 2's seemingly bottomless charm does much to make up for its pedestrian characters, it can't quite cover the game's considerable design issues. Most frustrating is how reluctant it is to fully embrace its intoxicating "fly anywhere" sensibility.

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]

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.

Excise the game's gossamer-thin attempts at world building, which isn't very hard to do given how forgettable it is, and you're left with a deep and elegant ruleset that owes more to the choreographic finesse of fighting games than any mindless hack and slash.

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

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.

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