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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.