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.