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.

Dropsy isn't an amazing point-and-click, but it's clever and it's weird and it stands out—both artistically and thematically. I'm impressed with the game and doubly impressed with the amount of weird mysteries hidden below the surface. Expect to spend four or five hours actually playing and then another hour reading weird theories afterward.

SOMA is not the horror game I expected out of Frictional, but I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. This is an excellent work of science fiction, not necessarily unique but uniquely told through its skillful use of video game conceits. It’s System Shock 2 for a modern sensibility, BioShock freed of its AAA chains. It’s damn good and, for my money, the most cohesive and ambitious game Frictional’s made so far.

80 Days is a modern take on the choose-your-own adventure novel, with a branching story that spans the entire globe. It's a game that practically demands you play it more than once.

Prison Architect's genius is in translating a real-world debate into video game terms, forcing players to make tough choices with no good solutions.

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

Life is Strange is flawed, but this paranormal coming-of-age story is nevertheless refreshing proof that small stakes can still feel important, given strong characters.

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

Anno 2205 is polished, clever, and Tages-free, but falls prey to the same repetitive, micromanagement-heavy end-game grind that's always plagued the series.

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.

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.

Just Cause 3 is a monument to excess. It’s Hot Shots. It’s Charlie Chaplin in The Dictator, if Charlie Chaplin had rocket-powered C4 in his boots. It’s that scene in Dr. Strangelove where Slim Pickens rides the nuke into Russia, except...well, no, it’s pretty much exactly that scene on repeat for 25-30 hours.

It’s not that anything Siege does is particularly new—tactical play (Counter-Strike, Arma, et cetera) mixed with a bit of destruction physics (Battlefield, Red Faction). But by taking these two aspects and expanding them to a scope supported by current hardware, Ubisoft has created a compelling game that feels unique.