There is, in other words, a lot more to this seemingly casual console RTS than meets the eye. Legions of Halo fans are likely to drive its initial popularity. They won’t have any trouble figuring out the basics and giving the Banished a good pounding. And a few months from now many of them may still be playing Blitz. But I won’t be surprised if Halo Wars 2 also develops a strong and faithful following of serious RTS fans who regularly wage epic multiplayer matches well into the wee hours.

The menus are still clunky and slow, players seem to run out of energy around the 60-minute mark of every game, and fancy animations are a poor substitute for basic functionality.

The second season and occasional special episodes haven’t managed to recapture the emotional peaks of the series’ devastatingly emotional first season, and I’ve yet to see anything to suggest that this season will be any more successful. But it’s still well written, expertly acted, and filled with tense moments dealing with both the zombies and the true monsters of Kirkman’s world, humans.

This is another app that will hound you to spend real money in order to buy things like better punching bags and balls to play with, but you can have a lot of fun with the basics and not spend a penny. So it’s worth a download, even if you never get serious about levelling up your blundering ninja.

Thanks to beautifully balanced combat, gorgeous and cleverly designed levels, and an almost ridiculous amount of depth and replayability – traits all noticeably absent in Alien Creeps TD – the high price tag is absolutely worth it.

The man behind interactive storytelling triumphs Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls has brought us what is perhaps his most fully formed and satisfying story yet, a work that examines the concept of machine intelligence with nearly as much insight and sympathy as Isaac Asimov's finest novels about robots and just as much style as Alex Garland's Ex Machina.

At its core, the game delivers. The gameplay — always the most important factor — is as good as it has ever been and the level of depth, customization and replayability makes this one a winner.

Co-op play isn’t as much fun as we might have hoped, and it’d be nice if the designers could find a way around Yoshi’s outmoded aiming mechanic, but the abundance of delightfully creative levels ought to sate casual Wii U gamers and the considerable challenge of tracking down every last collectible on each stage should appeal to Nintendo’s hardcore platformer fans.

This is exactly the sort of game we, as a society, need right now: authentic, inclusive, edifying, engaging, and, in the end, hopeful. Tell Me Why is one of the best and most memorable games of the year, and it helps lay a foundation for the growth of minority presence in games with wider audiences.

It’s not as moving as the first season finale, and it doesn’t tie things together in a satisfying narrative knot the way the preceding season did. But it’s still compelling, thanks largely to its unflinching and sometimes disturbing depiction of no-win situations. Telltale Games refuses to let Clem or the player off easy.

It’s not attractive or even very welcoming, but get past this deceptively off-putting veneer and you might just find a game of turn-based tactics worth getting lost in for a few days or a few weeks.

Ultimately, the real question of For Honor is if it will maintain a good community. The skill at the combat isn’t twitch based, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy and I could see people start to get scared away as the player base becomes more experienced and hardcore.

If you happen to have fond memories of mid-aught nights spent exploring green fields and fighting whimsical fantasy creatures – and you don’t mind learning to cope with a crappy camera and frustrating navigation – then by all means, spend away. There’s still a good, lengthy, old-school RPG buried under all the problems introduced by this iOS edition.

What does matter is that in Unravel Coldwood has succeeded in creating a beautiful, poignant, and compelling game interested in going beyond mere entertainment. It wants to make us think about the what and why of everything that happens.

The second season and occasional special episodes haven’t managed to recapture the emotional peaks of the series’ devastatingly emotional first season, and I’ve yet to see anything to suggest that this season will be any more successful. But it’s still well written, expertly acted, and filled with tense moments dealing with both the zombies and the true monsters of Kirkman’s world, humans.

It might lack the spit and polish seen in some other shooters, but Battlefield V delivers a visceral thrill unique to the series. Its adrenaline-filled, large-scale battles give rise to memorable moments simply not seen in other games, and these moments are augmented by the faithful Second World War setting. Those looking for an alternative to the twitch-driven combat of other popular shooters will find it here.

A little game like Mario and Donkey: Minis on the Move would make a perfect test title for the broader mobile market. I’d be shocked if it didn’t rocket to the top of app sales charts.

An inventive game with plenty of potential and some truly original concepts that somehow failed materialize into something that can be fairly described as entertaining.

As a guy whose passion for golf games lies mostly in powering through single-player tours and developing a character’s skills and playing style, Mario Golf: World Tour left me a little unsatisfied.

Impressive as some aspects of the level design and interface might be, Guerrilla hasn’t quite delivered the whole package. This isn’t going to be a massive system seller with wide, mainstream appeal. Still, one can’t discount that Killzone: Mercenary may well be the most playable handheld first-person shooter yet made. That’s no small accomplishment.

While I’ve had plenty of fun with Fallout 4 and, to a slightly lesser extent, its DLC, I’m feeling pretty ready at this point to wait a few years for the fifth numbered entry in the series – a game that, hopefully, will receive a little more of a buffing than its predecessor.

With Call of Duty: Ghosts, Infinity Ward has done some of its best work yet, delivering thrill-a-minute escapades in the campaign, deep and surprisingly nuanced competitive multiplayer, and highly varied solo and co-operative play in Squads and Extinction modes.

Disney Infinity 3.0 could end up being a lot of fun for Star Wars fans willing and able to shell out for all the content and figures that will eventually be released over the next several months, but budget-conscious players – especially those who aren’t all that interested in diving into the Toy Box – would be wise to wait until the starter pack can be grabbed at a discount.

The great allure of The Walking Dead – beyond the game’s brilliant moral questions and compelling exploration of human nature – is that we simply don’t know how things will turn out.

This two-hour episode introduces players to a quintet of new characters, individual survivors who through random chance spend at least a little time in or around a lonely countryside gas station and diner during the first 400 days of the outbreak.

Despite its imaginative exterior, the game adheres to a surprisingly rigid design. After a while I felt as though I was just going through the motions, dispatching hundreds of zombies simply to get to the next waypoint on my map...But it takes a good while for the disillusionment to set in.

The focus on intense action comes at the expense of legitimate alarm, anxiety, and dread. That’s just not a trade-off I’m overly interested in.

Still, I was left with the feeling this episode simply fills the space between the first and third, moving our heroes from one important location to another without much of consequence happening along the way.

As much as the studio has plugged the cinematic nature of the game’s storytelling, I can’t help but feel the story devolves into some groan-worthy comic book tropes. But it’s not enough to diminish the overall enjoyment of the game...Injustice: Gods Among Us will appeal to both those who grew up reading Batman or playing Mortal Kombat.

I can only provide thoughts my own experience, and my experience with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was one of delight and wonder punctuated by many unfortunately long stretches of interface frustration.

As in past games within this series, I most often find myself competing not against AI or human opponents, but rather to improve upon my previous performance. Which is exactly why most people play golf in the real world. That Everybody’s Golf successfully simulates this experience in your living room is perhaps all that golf fans will need to know in order to decide whether to pick it up.

Will the lack of punishing difficulty turn away the genre’s more hard-core fans? I doubt it. The prestige they crave can be had via leaderboards. By the end I was scoring a D on pretty much every set of levels, with low marks for style, time, hits taken, and lives used. These are the sorts of things genre devotees can master and brag about and hold over the heads of we lesser shmuppers...More serious players might, however, take some issue with the overall simplicity of design.

Even if no one in your family gets into the Toy-Con Garage, the Nintendo Labo Toy-Con Variety Kit should still provide plenty of fun. My family was amazed while making these ingenious, multifaceted models and delighted as we watched them come to life with a little digital magic.

When a video game like Dead or Alive 5 throws around words like “sensual design” they’re really covering up for its appeal to the lowest common denominator of who they think are playing the games: Men who stare at boobs. Let’s be honest because the game’s producers certainly won’t be.

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom remains a flashy fun time for fighting game fans and pop culture junkies who love “who would win in a fight between X and Y” arguments.

There’s a great game in Street Fighter V, but only if you’re willing to learn the hard way. Capcom will need more than the few thousand competitors following the Capcom Pro Tour to make this game, and the series as a whole, sustainable for the future.

The story is interesting enough to drag you through the game’s lengthily campaign and it has some funny moments too, but in between the cutscenes is a whole lot of button pressing.

The problem is that in the few hours I spent online with the PlayStation 3 edition about a week after release the number of people playing at any one time seemed to hover around 700-800, with the bulk of them engaged in death matches rather than any of the more interesting, innovative game types (such as the new Hunter mode, which pits a minority of nanosuit-wearing, permanently cloaked hunters against plain old human troopers).

Perhaps the most interesting innovation of all is a multiplayer mode that allows one player to play as normal while an opponent takes on the more traditional role of tower defense, setting up alien robot turrets to stop the humans in their tracks.

The Long Dark‘s long-in-the-making story mode was worth the wait. And with an eventual total of five episodes each looking to last between seven and ten hours, it looks like it may well prove a truly epic survival experience.

Maybe it’s just because I lack the nostalgia necessary to make the plodding pace and trial-and-error puzzles click, but if I’m to be convinced to continue investing my time the next chapter will need to pick things up a little.

Encounters – generally set in bland open areas – tend to be pretty similar to each other. Jack uses his time shifting abilities – which evolve in terms of range and power, but not sophistication – in the same ways on a limited variety of enemies time and again while relying on an awkward automatic covering system as he reloads or waits for his abilities to recharge. Rinse and repeat. There’s simply not enough variety.

Part of the problem is that, outside of online rankings, there’s little in the way of long-term objectives. Players slowly earn currency while fighting that can eventually be used to unlock more arms for each of their fighters via a kind of lottery system, but it takes a long time to earn enough for even a single chance to unlock new arms. And there’s a chance you might earn arms you already have.

For the first time I could feel seething anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of most of our heroes, and it’s coming close to bursting through.

Rovio has done well with the hand they’ve had to work with.

Eldritch is a punishing difficult game that tests a player’s ability to survive in a Lovecraft-inspired world.

Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World on 3DS is a great way to play what might be the green dinosaur’s best adventure yet.

Half excellent adaptation of a classic game, half hamfisted promotional product, Magic 2014 is as notable as much for what it purposefully leaves on the table versus what it achieves.

It’s wonderfully accessible. The music library here has something for everyone, and the interface is so intuitive that players of all skill and experience levels can play without much worry of failure. It ought to prove a hit at family game nights and small social gatherings alike.

This is a sci-fi game for Call of Duty fans, not a Call of Duty game for sci-fi fans. Make your purchasing decision accordingly.

Strider is a great meaty throwback worth the $15 offer price.

Hitman feels like a typical big-budget game that’s been fragmented solely to more easily fund its middle and end bits. Whether this is in fact the case matters little. That’s the way it comes off. Even if the rest of the episodes deliver levels on par with the excellent Paris mansion mission, separating them by weeks or months dilutes the experience and diminishes the already spotty narrative.

As for me, my little family had a pretty good time playing a chapter each night over the course of a week. And while I doubt I’ll play again — I’m fine with how the story turned out for us — I’m pretty sure my mildly OCD daughter is already plotting to go back and fix all the things I made go wrong with my overrides. Who knows? Maybe she’ll find a way to get everyone through this chaotic criminal saga in one piece. But I doubt it.

I don’t expect many people will organize online Peggle 2 parties, and playing a puzzle game against strangers isn’t as much fun. Pity there’s no local splitscreen play.

This is a Mario platformer in which multiplayer – as in multiple characters on screen at the same time – isn’t much fun.

There’s still some engaging play, including a lengthy and well choreographed stealth action sequence starring Asher that makes good use of Telltale’s traditional point-and-click interface. If you can manage to pull off everything without any mistakes it plays out in deliciously cinematic fashion.

What Bravely Default II ends up giving us is a nicely polished traditional role-playing game that gently shifts a few of the genre’s defining bars a centimetre or two higher while safely ducking under others. Fans of the form will find it warm and comforting, but I don’t expect it will win over many converts.

This game has its hooks in me fiercely. And that’s why my review’s score is a 9.5. However, I very much could see a player being turned off by having to repeat missions, by overly-long boss fights and the very specific storytelling techniques or the fact that everything feels ripped out of a pulpy sci-fi novel that thinks it’s important.

Dragon Quest Heroes 2 adds a substantial amount of traditional JRPG-ing to the Musou formula, Overworld-like areas allow you to explore more freely than the in-story battle missions. Equipment and skills customization rival anything seen in a mainline DQ game. It’s a passable, mostly mindless foray into the DQ universe, which is never a bad place to visit thanks to the colourful, buoyant art and character design from Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama. But more than anything, its best features made me want to play a regular Dragon Quest game instead.

Tacoma might not quite manage to live up to the unrealistically lofty expectations left behind by Fullbright’s full game, but it’s still neat proof that the American studio knows how to tell a good story, and that the medium of games is far from exhausted when it comes to new ideas about how to weave an interesting interactive tale.

I suspect the next time we see a $90 Assassin’s Creed it will be something significantly larger in breadth of world and play. Until then, Assassin’s Creed Mirage serves as an excellent stopgap, a historical adventure that proves entertaining and edifying in equal measure while leaving time to enjoy some of the other great games releasing this fall.

PGA Tour 2K21 delivers an excellent simulation of my favourite physical pastime, and I expect I’ll continue to come back to it whenever I’m blocked from the real thing by weather, winter, or a pandemic. However, I’m also anxious for this new series to blossom into a more polished and full-featured golf experience. And, given HB Studios’ provenance, I can’t help but hope one day to see a Canadian course or two (perhaps Inverness’ famed Cabot Cliffs?) make the official course roster.

Just be aware that it can also be a bit intense.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is a fun game skillfully made. But families on a budget (just about all of us these days) would be better served spending their gaming dollars on something a little more substantial.

It feels like the developers at Techland did a little soul searching on this new game trying to come up with ways to creatively tell players are story, not cover up a poor narrative with swearing and racial stereotypes.

Despite it’s narrative strength, Freedom Cry somehow lacks the polish and teleological glue of the game upon which it builds.

Rave in the Redwoods is only the best part of an all-around solid bit of DLC. If Infinity Ward can keep it up for three more instalments it ought to have no trouble retaining fans’ attention all the way through to the next Call of Duty this fall.

It may not be what everyone wanted, but it happens to be almost exactly the sort of Assassin’s Creed game for which I’ve been pining now for a few years.

as it turns out, Yo-Kai Watch is pretty fun. Weird. But also fun.

The modes and minigames are quite good, but I think the need to use Joy-Cons rather than traditional controllers could prove a little frustrating for people who only have two Joy-Cons and prefer using a bigger gamepad.

Don’t even bother registering your Amiibo. That way you won’t be tempted to use them. And you’ll be able to play the game the way it was meant to be played for people who have to muddle through without any Amiibo. Do that, and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam has potential to prove as satisfying as just about every other game in this great series.

If you’ve ever wanted to play an RPG/RISK/Real-time-strategy/third-person-shooting hybrid, Divinity: Dragon Commander is your best choice. It’s also your only choice. And despite how unwieldy that sounds, it actually kind of works.

I’ve been a die-hard Star Wars guy for decades, so I’m always happy to get a new movie, book, or game. I just wish this one turned out a tad better.

I don’t know where the series goes from here – perhaps a lone astronaut crashing on an inhospitable planet filled with alien animals who think he looks pretty tasty? – but after Primal I’m suddenly excited again to see what Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry team comes up with.

This seeming brevity will undoubtedly miff some customers. The question you’ll need to ask yourself before making the spend is this: What do I want from a Mario game? If it’s simply to jam through courses, Super Mario Run‘s value proposition probably won’t make sense. You’d be better off with the virtually limitless array of courses available in a Super Mario Maker game, even though it costs five times as much. But if you’re looking to play the way kids did back in the day – repeating courses again and again until thoroughly mastered, every secret found and every trick jump carved into your grey matter like grooves on a record – then Super Mario Run becomes infinitely more appealing....It is, in fact, designed to make players want to play this way.

Thanks to this brisk pace of play, a constant stream of skill points used to unlock new abilities, and a steady deluge of new equipment and armour that you can use, sell, or disassemble for crafting resources, the sense of progression is both real and satisfying. Once I was on the train, I didn’t want to get off. Still, it does feel like a game with unrealized potential. Players have been spoiled for choice over the last year when it comes to visually breathtaking, narratively rich games with huge and interesting open worlds. Rise of the Ronin is on the outskirts of that conversation rather than in the middle of it. Worth considering, especially for fans of historical epics and solid action, but the competition is stiff.

What’s here is cleverly crafted, well-balanced, and capable of generating moments of authentic mirth.

Longtime fans of Harvest Moon or those looking to reconnect with the series, Story of Seasons takes it back to the basics.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War does very more-of-the-same in places — it’s the franchise’s 17th instalment, after all — but when a formula has been so fine-tuned, it’s hard to expect the developers to monkey around with it too much.

Evolve remains an ambitious, daringly original, and largely successful undertaking in four-versus-one play. It’s certainly worth a look for fans of cooperative, class-based games. And if you don’t mind its limiting quirks it could well become your go-to team play.

Everything about it oozes with callbacks and fanservice that Zelda fans will be overjoyed with, but unable to contain the potent mix of Nintendo nostalgia and ludicrous action without tearing at the seams.

Even with lacklustre combat, Paper Mario Color Splash’s gorgeous art style, lush music, and great writing make it a pretty easy recommendation, at least for fans of family-friendly single-player adventures.

Ultimately, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was designed as a game for people who liked the first two Borderlands and want more of that.

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is, in other words, an entertaining toy that can spark the imaginations of Mario fans young and old, but it’s not necessarily a great game. Proceed accordingly.

If Mario Tennis Aces is a herald of what’s to come in sports games for Nintendo Switch, then fans of golf, baseball, soccer, and other sports have reason to get excited.

However, if you skipped Saints Row IV when it originally landed there’s no reason not to dive in now. Saints Row IV: Re-Elected is an easy recommendation for adventurous players with a taste for the bizarre – especially at the bargain price of just $30.

What really would have brought the game over the top would have been a Robert A. Heinlein-style narrative carrying you through the campaign. Sure, there’s some hints of political corruption within the upper ranks, but like many games it feels throwaway compared to everything else.

But once I had the sense that there were specific things to be done in order to achieve goals, that became my focus, and the magic of the experience suffered for it. The sense of wonder I had with each new discovery was tempered by the logical part of my brain, which began looking for problems to solve and working out plans.

Solid, despotic fun. Tropico 5 isn’t revolutionary in any of its changes. But with deeper gameplay and some smart tweaks to the formula, it is deserving of at least another term in office.

Narratively, Life is Strange is kind of a mashup of My So Called Life and Donnie Darko (with a few elements of Alan Wake and Gone Home thrown in for good measure).

There are some nice new touches, including the objective of protecting survivors – which I found helped bring everyone back together again – as well as a crazy powerful mech-armoured Goliath zombie. If you thought exo zombies were evil, this guy is basically Satan.

Last Voyage may be less than an hour long, but that time is enjoyable and thought provoking. And paying a dollar for something like this seems a small price to avoid the sort of bland, carbon-copied free-to-play junk currently clogging most app stores.

The main reason to consider grabbing Reckoning, of course, is to see the finale of the Exo Zombies story that began with the co-op mode’s introduction in the first DLC and which has seen new chapters in each succeeding content drop.

It’s a member of a relatively rare breed of games the primary appeal of which is comedy. And in an industry slowly drowning in its own tropes and rehashed ideas, a fresh concept and some authentic laughs make for a nice change of pace.

If you’re not afraid of the repetition that naturally comes with slowly wading through literally tens of thousands of monsters (I suggest pacing yourself over a few weeks or a month) there’s plenty to like in Victor Vran.

The Night of the Rabbit will make players wish that magic was real. The game’s charming world builds Jerry’s final adventure in his summer as something memorable and magical.

I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed a Star Trek game this much. Star Trek: Bridge Crew‘s target audience may not be as broad as those of most games, but it exploits just about everything the medium of virtual reality does well in its current state. I’d happily take a sequel.

Much like the original Resident Evil: Revelations for Nintendo 3DS, this sequel – weird episodic format notwithstanding – is a deferential nod toward Resident Evil’s origins. It’s both a step backwards and a step forwards; proof that that sometimes the best way to correct a franchise’s mislaid course is to double back a couple paces and start on a different path.