For 20 years now, Pokémon games have presented fantasies where people live, battle, and grow alongside powerful monsters. In Pokémon Sun and Moon, that wistful reverie invites you take a holiday, leave your worries behind, and grab yourself a lei. As it happens with all good vacations, Pokémon found itself again.

For 20 years now, Pokémon games have presented fantasies where people live, battle, and grow alongside powerful monsters. In Pokémon Sun and Moon, that wistful reverie invites you take a holiday, leave your worries behind, and grab yourself a lei. As it happens with all good vacations, Pokémon found itself again.

I liked Watch Dogs 2, though perhaps not quite as much as it wanted me to like it. It is a significant improvement over its predecessor, filled with challenges that tested my problem-solving skills. It compensates for its technical shortcomings with a raft of interesting new ideas and a near-endless supply of things to do. Its motley crew of hackers won me over with their unflappable enthusiasm, and its loving recreation of San Francisco made me nostalgic for a city that I’m generally happy to have left behind. All that, and little flying robots, too.

The edges are rough but the core is solid. Dishonored 2 may not redefine the formula set by the its predecessor, but it is still one hell of a game. The game stumbles but always manages to recover. Like a bumbling assassin that somehow get the kill, Dishonored 2 manages to succeed in the face of almost unassailable odds.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is three very different games. It’s a character-driven military sci-fi action adventure with spaceship battles and a villain carved from the finest cedar. It’s a lighthearted co-op survival game with a bitchin’ period theme and some classic tunes. And it’s Black Ops III’s competitive multiplayer with a fresh coat of paint. I suppose it’s easier to push boundaries if you take them one at a time.

Hitman: Season One has it where it counts. Its ten missions consist of far more hits than misses, and its open-ended levels are able to sustain hours of obsessive repetition and mastery. The overarching narrative may be unimpressive, but each location is well-conceived and believable, full of fascinating details and hilarious overheard conversations.

House of the Dying Sun’s numerous achievements are all the more remarkable because it is largely the work of one man, an ex-AAA developer named Mike Tipul. In some ways, Dying Sun reminds me of Gunpoint, the terrific single-developer stealth game from 2013. While the games share little in common in terms of style or mechanics, both take a couple of good ideas and expand on them in smart ways without adding flabby padding. Both feel guided by a single vision, and both left me wanting more when the credits rolled.

Titanfall 2 is impressive. Its influence will ripple through video games in the same way that titles like Half Life or Halo managed in their time. Beautiful and bold, Titanfall 2 is the pinnacle of first person shooters.

Civ VI, which is already building upon what made Civ V so great anyway, forces you to adapt and play differently each time depending on your map and policies, so...yeah, we could be in for a long, fun ride with this one.

The fall’s most exciting Final Fantasy game.

A remarkable overachiever. Battlefield 1's creators could have taken the easy road. They could have omitted a campaign. They could have hastily assembled its multiplayer like the atrociously conceived Star Wars Battlefront. They didn’t. In this day and age, that makes all the difference in the world and it made all the difference here. Battlefield 1 could have been a disrespectful mess. Instead, it rises above to deliver an outstanding historical shooter.

The first episode of Hitman is a very strong start, and it’s a return to form for a series that some were worried had begun to wander.

Pokken Tournament might not quite be the Pokemon fighting game I’ve been dreaming of for years, but to be fair my dreams are ridiculously lofty. Despite its limited-by-reality scope, it’s the closest we’ve come to capturing the excitement of animated Pokemon battles in video game form.

As with all adventure games, solving puzzles in Day of the Tentacle sometimes feels like trying to get inside the designers’ heads and understand exactly what they want you to do. It’s there that the 23-year-old wrinkles sometimes show.

Given how effortlessly our imaginations float beyond the stern ramparts of Mr. Clancy’s literary world, it’s hard not to wish this finely honed contraption could be granted the lightness of spirit it needs to truly thrive. Given how expertly much of The Division has been assembled, it’s hard not to hope that such a wonder might still come to pass.

In the end, we’re left with a game that’s much like its setting: beautiful, but short on oxygen.

Despite how pedestrian some aspects of the game may be, I concluded Quantum Break feeling like something new had happened. Something special had happened that more than compensated for some of the flatness of the story and the mostly rote gunplay. A game simply never worked like this before, nor has a TV show. Because of that, what might have otherwise been ordinary feels extraordinary.

This is a game that can broaden an individual person’s horizons and that of the entire medium, as well. It’s definitely worth your time.

The sense of triumph after defeating a Dark Souls boss is unlike anything else I’ve felt in video games.

Stories feels like it’s trying something rewardingly different, to do more than just ape the linear style of a summer blockbuster movie. It’s embracing tried-and-true hallmarks of action game design and weaving them around interactive fiction elements. The result is both familiar and fresh.

About the only thing that bummed me out was that, despite the end of TBS1 falling flat, the last battle of TBS2 is somehow even worse, a weird little puzzle of a thing that’s too dependent on luck and scripting.

Realistically, after playing Danganronpa 2, it feels less like two games and more like two parts of the same game. Like when Kill Bill Vol 1 came out, then Vol 2 came out a little while later. But we’ll get to that a bit more later. For now... well, want to describe just what Danganronpa is?

It’s one of Nintendo’s most distinct games in years, one that makes great use of the Wii U for a fun, distinct solo or co-op experience.

Even if you can get used to the awkward controls, Star Fox Zero is merely mediocre. It’s as disappointing a major Nintendo console release as there’s been in some time.

OTC throws a lot of what you expect of a strategy game out the window. Instead of having time to make plans, you need to move fast. Instead of worrying about units you need to worry about market forces. Indeed, there’s little room for strategy at all; the circumstances of a game can change so often and so rapidly depending on the market that this is more a game about testing your reactions than any grand central plan.

Uncharted 4 may have problems at its edges, but its middle is phenomenal. It is a sufficiently wonderful finale for a studio that has made its own case that its next great step should be somewhere new.

For now, Stellaris is a game that reaches for the stars, only to fall just short.

Still having a good time, but it’s more about the company than the activities...At least now I know which one Battleborn is. It’s the one that needs to do better by Shayne & Aurox.