New Dawn oscillates between wink-nod silliness and dead seriousness in a way that’s disorienting and even unsettling at times, and I came away feeling the same as I did last time: Ubisoft needs to choose. It either needs to go full Blood Dragon or full Far Cry 2 realism again, but this uncomfortable gray area between earnest and flippant is (at least for me) unsustainable.

Destiny 2 is mechanically a fantastic shooter, but a threadbare plot and some odd choices after the campaign wraps up make it more of a foundation to build on. Expect it to take a year for Bungie to polish this one up again.

Gears of War 4 struggles with pacing issues and a bland protagonist, but it works well as a passing-the-torch installment bridging the old and new trilogies.

Headlander's retrofuturist aesthetic is creative enough to make up for the fact its underlying mechanics are anything but.

If VR survives I don’t think Fallout 4 VR is a game we look back on in 10 years and herald as an essential breakthrough, as a game that added to our understanding of the medium. It’s not. Those experiments are happening along the periphery in studios and engines and games that are much more flexible than Bethesda and the Creation Engine and Fallout 4. But as something for existing owners to pad out their libraries with, and as a demonstration of how expansive our worlds can get, and lastly as an ambassador from the world of bigger-budget projects? Let’s just say I expect quite a few of you will have those “Oh damn, it’s already 4 A.M.?” moments.

Need for Speed: Heat is far from the tire-fire I expected though given its unceremonious release. I’m having a good time with it, in a mindless sort of way. I’ve disabled the far-too-limited soundtrack and gritted my teeth through the story moments, but the race layouts are solid and I’m enjoying throwing my usual ‘69 Charger around turns and barreling down rain-soaked highways. Forza Horizon continues to be the better series, but this is the closest Need for Speed has been to parity since probably 2012.

Tyranny is flawed, but more in the vein of a future cult classic than a failure. It's got great ideas, just not the depth to let them shine.

Anno 1800 will do for now. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, and it’s a bit rough around the edges, but Anno’s still the most fun you can have with a glorified spreadsheet. Just be sure to build lots of bakeries.

I’m having a surprising amount of fun with Wastelanders. This is precisely the pivot I hoped Bethesda would make—and one I feared they couldn’t (or wouldn’t).

Bugs aside, The Fractured But Whole is another successful translation of South Park to video games. Conceptually I still think Stick of Truth was stronger—it managed to mock fantasy video games as much as the fantasy genre itself. Fractured But Whole is undoubtedly a better experience though, with deeper combat, the same engaging exploration, and a more cogent story.

Event[0] isn't perfect by any means, but it might just be the most important indie game of 2016. It's certainly the most ambitious.

Song of the Deep is gorgeous and has some creative ideas, but lacks the polish to make it a must-play.

It's not the most ambitious Lego game ever made, but you can make dinosaurs fight other dinosaurs. And really that's all that matters.

Technobabylon's cyberpunk world isn't groundbreaking, but there's still plenty to love in this point-and-click adventure.

Surviving Mars has a lot of interface annoyances and other small issues, but its blend of optimism and dread makes a compelling foundation for a city/colony builder.

It’s really Car Mechanic Simulator Lite because I don’t think I could actually reassemble an engine from scratch, but I can certainly do so with the help of a nifty alternate-reality interface showing me where each part goes.

The simulator aspects are co-opted and somewhat compromised by a desire to simultaneously appeal to the arcade racer crowd—without actually being an arcade racer.

I am Bread is clever but ultimately shallow, relying on its gimmick more than anything else. But it's a pretty hilarious gimmick.

Old Blood is a good expansion to a great game. I wanted more Wolfenstein, and that’s exactly what I got here. Sure, it’s neither as inventive nor as heartfelt as New Order, but it’s a solid piece of content that’s still leagues better than most shooters. If you liked New Order, I’d recommend checking it out.

Dungeons 2 is neither a great RTS nor a great Dungeon Keeper game. It’s just “pretty good” at both.

This isn’t the step forward I expected, though. Here we are, the first Bethesda game on a new hardware generation, and I can’t help feeling like we’ve regressed—like Fallout 4 really is Oblivion-with-guns. A decade later, it certainly makes many of the same mistakes.

The end result: It’s rough, playing it today. Does that mean you should skip it? Absolutely not. It still packs some solid laughs, excellent music, and a setting that deserves to be revisited. It’s three hours well-spent, and those who played it in the past will find the same game they loved all those years ago...Just realize this remaster isn’t as smooth or seamless as what Double Fine’s done before. Nothing from that era could be.

I don’t want to disparage The Turing Test too much. It suffers by nature of comparisons with other similar games, but perhaps unfairly. With its lightweight puzzles and plot, The Turing Test is one of those “Great-For-An-Afternoon” games, the ones that scratch a specific itch and go down easy. In this case, it’s the “I need something like Portal, but I’ve already played Portal” itch.

Transformers: Devastation is a B-tier game that succeeds only by expertly capitalizing on its source material and your nostalgia.

Improvements to combat and a raft of new visual gags don’t make up for Shadow Warrior 2's flaccid story and aimless levels.

Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. On the contrary, Ubisoft's open-world template is perfect for churning out market-friendly games that tick all the boxes of "What People Want." Or, perhaps, "What You Want."...And honestly, Mad Max's formula is still to some extent "What I Want." Just not as much as a few years ago.

Victor Vran carves itself a healthy niche in the aRPG genre, making up for a silly story with excellent (and addictive) combat. "Click-and-watch-things-die" has never felt this good.

Titanfall's second outing has more to offer than the original, but the novelty's worn off a bit and the singleplayer campaign waffles between brilliant and boring.

Play Rogue if you want more Black Flag. Play Rogue if you want to learn about the complex relationship between the Assassins and Templars. Play Rogue if you hated Unity and want a better Assassin's Creed experience this year.

Layers of Fear masterfully toys with your sense of reality, when it's not throwing cheesy jump scares in your face.

EA Sports WRC is not for those who want an easy-to-digest rally race. But for anyone who wants a rally game that ranks realism and challenge a few notches higher than accessibility and flashy racing, EA Sports WRC is the best thing to happen to the genre since Dirt Rally 2.0.

Unfortunately Deus Ex: Mankind Divided falls apart at the end, and I don’t mean this in a “The ending is bad,” sort of way. It literally doesn’t have an ending, in the traditional sense.

Man of Medan doesn’t tell the most unique story, and indeed you’ll probably unravel it long before the characters do. It’s unique in the telling though, and often that’s what counts more.

Mortal Kombat 11 is excellent if you’re in it for the story, and a solid fighting game underneath as well, but the experience is marred by rough edges. Given the state of NetherRealm’s last few games on PC, I’m not sure we could’ve expected much more. If anything, this is an improvement.

It's just another Gears game, but a more charismatic protagonist and a few experimental mechanics at least give the series a more firm footing going forward.

I’d like to see more of what worked in the first Total Warhammer, though. Less world-spanning disaster, more localized enmities and backroom politicking. I don’t just want factions to play differently in pursuit of the same goal—I want them to be different. That’s undoubtedly a hard trick to pull off, especially when it comes to balancing strengths and weaknesses, but I think it made Total Warhammer a much stronger game than this more traditional sequel.

Assassin’s Creed: Origins grew on me. That’s worth noting up top, as I upgrade this review-in-progress to full review status—it grew on me, and it’s the first entry in the series to do so. Assassin’s Creed is mostly a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of series, and generally within a few hours you’ve seen it all. AC II, Brotherhood and Black Flag were good early on. AC III not so much. The rest somewhere in between. But Origins starts slow and finishes pretty strong. Not that I’ve radically changed my mind about the game. Much of my original review-in-progress remains as accurate 40 hours in as it did at 15. Side quests vary wildly in quality, the RPG systems need some work, the map is overlarge for the amount of content, and the combat system is better but still no real challenge. The good stuff remains true too though. It’s a technological marvel, especially on PC. The setting is incredible, spanning ancient tombs and somber Hellenic temples, verdant oases and arid deserts, thriving cities and abandoned villages, and everything in between.

There really is an element of nostalgia, launching blocks across the level and busting open doors, et cetera. And hey, at least this one has a story to pick up the pace when the puzzles drag. Sometimes literally.

Shardlight is pretty damned decent though. The story’s a bit more straightforward than some other Wadjet Eye games, it ends a bit too abruptly, and a few of the secondary characters needed fleshing out, but all-in-all it makes for an engaging six or seven hours in a world with some great ideas—a bit like Dead Synchronicity, except with an ending. Very grim. Very adult...I just wish Wadjet Eye’s tech matched its talents.

What remains is just your standard blockbuster fare, empty and ultimately forgettable. That’s a fine backdrop for traditional Far Cry shenanigans (and there are many) but it certainly doesn’t live up to its potential.

There's not much substance here, and certainly not enough for this game to stand on its own as a work of fiction. It's an episode, presented as not-an-episode. Judged on its own merits—not the plot lines it wraps up from the first game and not those it sets up for the last— The Banner Saga 2 is underwhelming.

The Forza Motorsport series finally makes a comeback, with completely new physics and graphics – a setup that is immediately noticeable with wonderful driving feel and control. Otherwise, the game feels, unexpectedly, content poor and unpolished. Forza Motorsport will get better and better over time, but here and now there is a lot to be desired.

Far Cry Primal starts with a great premise and then falls into the same, increasingly-tedious groove as its predecessors.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare occasionally rubs elbows with the best moments of its predecessors, but too much tedium and half-baked multiplayer make this one hard to recommend.

But damn, when it’s all working it’s so good. This is a really frustrating review because there’s absolutely a diamond somewhere within this game. You catch a glimmer of it maybe once or twice an hour, when a match has that perfect moment and you’re down to a sliver of health, deflecting every blow, and then manage to throw your opponent off a bridge or something. That! That’s For Honor...It’s also microtransactions though, and “Recovering Network Connection,” and a hundred tiny annoyances that detract from the core conceit.The only honor here is on the battlefield itself.

Halo Wars 2 is just a perfectly average release in a genre suffused with perfectly average releases nowadays. I think every RTS fan is waiting for “That Game,” the one that’ll turn it all around and make us RTS believers again. I know I’m waiting for that moment. Halo Wars 2 isn’t it. It’s competent, it’s shiny, and it’s got the Halo universe to draw people in, but there’s nothing so “Oh wow it’s brilliant!” about this package to really get excited. The one aspect that should do that is Blitz Mode, and it’s hampered by the small PC multiplayer population and the nakedness of its Pay-To-Win-esque systems...On consoles, where the RTS genre is woefully underrepresented, I expect people will be a bit more impressed by Halo Wars 2. But on PC, it’s just another sign of a fading king.

At its core, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League does a lot of things right with finely tuned controls, great shooting and a stable online system. Add to that great cutscenes and charming protagonists. Unfortunately, a boring game world, strangely unimaginative missions and messy combat make it difficult for the game to stand out in a crowded genre.

Traverser looks beautiful, but it's not nearly as fun to play as it is to look at.

Firewatch is full of excellent dialogue, breathtaking moments, and stunning vistas, but ultimately amounts to nothing much at all.

Dead Synchronicity: Tomorrow Comes Today is the type of game to give you nightmares, and not just because of that mangled title. Though that's probably part of it.

For all that I'm down on Assassin's Creed as a whole, Syndicate is at least one of the better entries in the series. And there is admittedly a certain charm to familiarity—a ritualistic quality, as every year I load up the latest entry and proceed through its bevy of re-skinned content. “Hello, old friend. Nice to see you again. My, you haven't changed a bit."...But Assassin's Creed has long since been surpassed by its imitators, from Mad Max to Arkham City to Shadow of Mordor to Sunset Overdrive to Tomb Raider. What they lack in recreating a period of history, they make up for by offering something a modicum different.

Playing as Batman? Awesome. Playing as Batman through repetitive, empty missions? Less awesome. Playing as the Batmobile? Awful.

It’s unsatisfying, is all. Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as I said up top, isn’t a bad game—at least by traditional metrics. It’s just not a good game either. It falls in that weird gray area of okay, like Mad Max or a Shadow of War. There’s not much of substance here, certainly not on the story side and, after two predecessors that play almost exactly the same, not really on the moment-to-moment gameplay side either.

Dead Rising 4 is no classic, nor even a great Dead Rising game. The series sold out. But if you can get yourself past that hurdle, you might find (like me) that you’re pleasantly surprised, at least for a weekend. Sure, almost everything that made Dead Rising unique is gone, but if all you want is bubblegum pop and more time to experiment with the game’s over-the-top weapons? Frank West (or faux-Frank West if you can’t get past the voice actor change) is ready and waiting.

This is certainly the best Need for Speed PC port in years, but the game itself isn't that great. Come for the racing, stay for the dumb live-action scenes.

It’s a weird experiment—and, again, one I think will utterly baffle anyone who comes to it because they see it’s by “the Prison Architect Developers.” This is considerably less mainstream, more likely to appeal to those interested in what’s being done on the fringes of the medium. Even for a so-called “walking simulator,” Scanner Sombre is austere.

It’s got an interesting world, and a creative puzzle mechanic hook that could be very interesting if expanded upon. I should mention I never got tired of looking at it either. The Bradwell Foundation’s Brutalist and Bauhaus influences are a gorgeous low-poly complement to what we saw in Control earlier this year, and I love the effort that went into the various posters and props. But even those elements are mostly front-loaded. I rarely say “I wish this game were longer,” but in the case of The Bradwell Conspiracy I think it could’ve used probably twice as long to tell its story, and twice as many puzzles to take advantage of the SMP.

It just never hooked me. I’m not sure why Pyre feels padded while so many other games can use a similar structure and get away with it. Maybe—to add to the litany of reasons I mentioned earlier—maybe it’s the curse of being avant garde. Maybe we’re conditioned to accept the monotony of shooting hordes of faceless enemies, of swinging our sword at the same ten creatures for days on end. Maybe familiarity breeds contempt, but over-familiarity breeds acceptance.

This is the most frustrated I’ve been with a shoddy port in years. There have been other high-profile trainwrecks in the recent past, like Batman: Arkham Knight and Assassin’s Creed: Unity. But I didn’t LIKE those games, aside from their obvious PC woes...I love Quantum Break.

Dishonored 2 understands level design. That’s the takeaway here. Not much has been changed, especially if you’re playing Corvo. It’s just a bigger, bolder version of Dishonored, one mastercrafted stealth gauntlet after another paired with some excellent gimmicks. Oh, or it’s a shooter, if you want. But yeah, it’s mostly a fantastic stealth game that deserves better than its generic plot and terrible voice work...It’s a shame the game runs so poorly for so many people, as I just cannot justify giving the game an excellent score when seemingly half the audience (or more) is having issues.

The horror genre is one of slim pickings, and few horror games are done on the level of Outlast 2. Fog-filled streets, moonlit nights, and the shreds of the apocalypse—there’s some amount of fun to be had here maybe, and genre die-hards may find themselves playing through it regardless. But Outlast 2 isn’t the solution to the genre’s issues.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair is one of those games that’s uniquely difficult to score. Is it bad? No. But did I enjoy it? Not really, and I don’t feel any draw to return.The Impossible Lair isn’t actually impossible, but it’s impossible for me, at this stage in my life. It could take a hundred more tries. It could take one. It doesn’t matter, because I’m just not feeling any draw to complete it. Maybe it’s just not my style of game. I definitely have more nostalgia for Banjo-Kazooie than I do Donkey Kong Country, and nostalgia’s seemingly what drives this series. Perhaps they’ll doYooka-Laylee-cross-GoldenEye next. Or Yooka-Laylee-cross-Myst. Then I’ll be right back on-board. But not this time.

I don’t think it’s very good, especially if you’ve a mind to play by yourself. It’s certainly addictive, and it certainly has plenty of stuff for you to do. That goes doubly for people who plan to roll with a squad of friends. As in Borderlands, the general tedium of loot-grinding is more fun when you’ve got people to chat with. If you’re looking for a mindless way to kill a few days/weeks, The Division exists...But don’t expect to remember much of it when it’s over.

It’s not so much that Call of Cthulhu is irredeemable as much as it feels flawed. Less than the sum of its parts, I’d say. Any one aspect of Call of Cthulhu sounds intriguing in isolation, but put them all together and it’s a mess of disparate elements, all fighting for control.

It’s just a shame so many of these worlds are about as meaningful as virtual bubble wrap. Wildlands is Far Cry, but with a weaker story and more repetition. It is Just Cause, without all the stupid explode-y bits and the potential for pure mayhem. It’s an unsatisfying, repetitive jumble, brilliant to behold and yet so numbingly empty.

ReCore features adorable robot companions and snappy platforming, but a chore of an end-game, bugs, and terrible load times make it a hard sell.

All I can do is review the game I was given though, and the game I was given is mediocre. Functional? Sure. Flashy? Absolutely. But it’s a puddle disguised as a lake, a universe with so much potential that makes good on almost none of it. To make matters worse, I don’t think the core loop is interesting enough to keep me playing. The tougher end-game enemies are so damn spongy, and the shooting isn’t nearly as tight or as punchy as Destiny, a game that kept me playing long past the point I’d exhausted its similarly dreadful story.

A confusing end to a confusing era for Microsoft. We can hope, at least.

Broken Age's first act was mediocre but had potential. Potential that its conclusion squanders.

Unravel looks beautiful, but it's ultra-slick sheen with nothing much to say. Faux-emotional, if you will.

The Westport Independent has important lessons about ethics in journalism, but the game's tendency towards caricature leaves it feeling like it just barely grazed the truth of the matter.

Virginia's extensive use of jump and match cuts makes it the meeting point of games and film, though it's not the most successful of experiments.

It’s mediocre, not awful. This review slants negative because I find the writing mostly bad, but my experience with Andromeda is almost worse in some ways: For much of my 55 hours with it, I felt nothing at all. It just exists, content to let you run from fetch quest to fetch quest, chasing the appearance of importance while saying nothing at all. It’d be easier to just condemn the whole endeavor and write it off, but that’s not entirely fair. I’m mostly ambivalent, or “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” as my parents might’ve said—and ouch, that always stung much worse.