Assassin’s Creed: Liberation is a nice game with good graphics, but doesn’t have the great overall-quality and the high production value of the other Assassin’s Creed-titles. It lacks in terms of story and new gameplay-elements. If you are a fan of the series because of its gameplay and haven’t played Liberation on PS Vita, you should consider to buy the game.

The game features good writing, interesting characters and a charming retro style. It's fine for a couple of hours, but don't expect a lot of depth or variety: For a roleplaying game, Shadowrun Returns is exceptionally linear. Most levels consist of confined rooms or streets with no exploration elements to speak of. Character interaction is limited and most quests don't offer any freedom of choice. We have high hopes for the future though: The game ships with a powerful editor and the passionate community is already at work.

While it lacks a gripping story and more tactical depth, Hard West's mix of XCOM-style missions, light RPG elements and Wild West mystery still comes as a pleasant surprise.

Nice open world approach for fans. Aged graphics, ugly cutscenes and an unprecise handling however make it hard to appreciate the good sound and music and the nice atmosphere.

A fantastic concept that is hindered by unbalanced randomization and monotonous combat.

Comprehensive sports game that lets you experience the Olympic Summer Games, but gets boring to soon.

Although enjoyable and graphically superb, Cities XL is a derivative, bug-flawed, expensive construction site of a game.

This clever finger exercise in storytelling satisfies our joy of searching through the lives of others. But its narrative is not strong enough to let us overlook the simple graphics or limited depth of gameplay. But it is an enjoyable experience – especially for gaming-crowd over 30.

Developed by a small indie-studio, Pandora: First Contact lives the spirit of classic 4x-games, namely Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. The gameplay is fluid, the mechanics well done. Though it’s not that epic and complex like Civilization, it’s fun to play. Overall it’s solid, but not a real long-time-challenging game, because there is a lack of variety concerning the six factions and the small tactical possibilities during the battles.

The new Holmes adventure looks better than ever and plays well, too. However, while the six self-contained stories are smartly written, they also lack suspense, drama and an overall feeling of progression. The modest difficulty is making it easy for newcomers to settle in - which is fine, as long as you are not expecting a deep detective experience.

While certainly lacking variety and neat ideas to compete with the likes of Rayman and Mario, Sega's new character Tembo more than holds its own.

Spore’s creatures look terrific and the editor is one of the finest tool in gaming history. But Maxis forgot to build a game around it: The mixture of simulation and strategy just isn’t deep enough to attract more than a few hours attention. Instead of experiencing enthralling missions or a more intimate relation to your creature, you get shooed through five draggy phases of evolution.

At first I liked Smoke and Sacrifice very much. […] But the more I played the more I recognized that I'm doing only one thing: farming.

A lighthearted and colorful strategy game that is determined to replicate the formula of Dungeon Keeper while adding some fresh ideas of its own. However, this led to some awkward design decisions, uneven pacing and an unreliable interface. Alas, it is not as good as it could have been - but at least it's a much better game than the first Dungeons released in 2011.

Once a mod now a game on its own, Killing Floor confronts the player with hordes of undead minions threatening his character’s life. While being independent enough of zombie-shooter-king Left 4 Dead with features like sealing doors, character perks and weapon stores, the game itself offers little variety and a flawed AI.

Short and sweet with precise controls and imaginative landscapes, Glare is a charming little indie platformer well worth its low asking price.

Superior graphics power as well great performance and customizing options elevate the PC version over its console brethren. Yet Mad Max still suffers severely from a lack of variety. It sports a giant, atmospheric world – but doesn’t give players enough meaningful tasks to complete in it.

While WRC definitely lacks the glamourous presentation and technical splendour of its main rival Dirt 2, it has something else to offer: Real rally gameplay. The classic rally-contests where you are racing alone on an empty route, just against the clock, are something that Dirt 2 cold-shouldered and WRC now picked up. And it even does a pretty good job there. We criticize the lack of variety (there is no rally-cross mode for example) and the antiquated engine, but traditional rally-fans won't find a more convincing simulation of their favourite sport at the moment.

Too bad for the German market that biathlon is not in the game, but in exchange you relive exciting disciplines like ski jumping or skeleton. Paired with good graphics and a nice rock music soundtrack you get one of the better Olympics-games of the past years. The downsides: a cheating AI and annoying, repetitive disciplines like ice skating.

Sniper Elite 3 provides good tactical gameplay with an open level design. It may not be the best game around, but still a vast improvement over its predecessor.

A decent game with an original premise, good graphics, varied missions and solid multiplayer - it's a complete package for a low price, despite its strategic limitations. The shallow story and poor voice acting really hurt the experience, though.

Deadlight makes good use of its premise, even though the whole zombie apocalypse thing has been done one too many times. And it's nice to see a game that bears resemblance to classics like Flashback or Another world. Sadly, the good atmosphere and beautiful visuals cannot fully compensate for some frustrating level design, short length and the occasional control issues.

Transference has an interesting approach to fill the gap between movie and game. Sadly, the content got lost in the process, even if the story about the Hayes family sounds quite catching. Especially the atmosphere and music make Transference a cool game, though the VR does not work very well on the PC.

The new engine and the new foresting gameplay elements fit well into the classic farming setting of the series. The farming features are tweaked a little, but overall it feels just the same like in Farming Simulator 13, but technically enhanced. The Day-One Patch fixed some bugs, but still existing physical-problems and gameplay issues in version 1.1, especially in multiplayer mode, have to be handled with forthcoming patches.

An ambitious debut title with lots of style and some promising, fancy ideas. The gameplay however falls short in too many ways: a shallow combat system, undemanding climbing sections and extremely linear level design hurt the experience quite a bit.

Slaps and Beans is not a perfect game. But that's no problem, the indie game doesn't have these kind of aspiration. Instead it's about reviving the slapstick brawling orgies of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill once again und paying tribute to these old heroes.

All of Kona’s survival-mechanics are implemented well enough, and the atmosphere of the game draws the player into its world. Sadly though, the most motivating factor in Kona – the story - falls apart towards the end of the game. Nearly any route you imagine the plot to go will be more thrilling and satisfying than the actual reveal. This is very unfortunate, because the story is the driving force for even continuing the game.

Within the first few hours of the game I was pretty sold on this more classical attempt on a stealth-game with a good jolt of dark humor. But after a while you start to realize that most of the stealth-mechanics aren’t even needed. The enemy AI is far too stupid to ever really force you into playing smartly and with a certain tactic in mind. Nor will you ever make much use of the crafting-system. On top of that, the dialogue often feels forcefully edgy and references pop-culture just for the sake of it. All whilst the overarching plot – if you can even call it that – remains plain and uninteresting. That being said, you definitely can have fun with Styx: Shards of Darkness. But given the fact, the developers had a chance to improve on their predecessor and didn’t utilize it, the mistakes of this game become hard to forgive.