I have a hard time understanding why Sleeping Dogs needed to be ported to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in what Square Enix is calling the game’s “Definitive Edition”...It collects all of the game’s considerable post-release content – including a trio of story-driven add-ons – in one convenient place, which is laudable. But core game hasn’t changed much. And it wasn’t perfect to begin with...The expression “warts and all” to leap to mind.

I give this game 8.5/10 for being one of details and for so frequently surprising me. Were I a little older and had I played the original, I would likely give this title an 11/10, quit my job, and go LARPing in the desert for as long as the cities remain standing, or until I realize that I’ve taken every modern comfort for granted; whichever would happen to come first.

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

You will be mauled and eviscerated. You will be blown to tiny bloody bits. You will watch as your head is severed from your body by big men with chainsaws. Or stomped on by nurses with glowing eyes...But, strangely, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s all part and parcel to the classic survival horror experience.

There’s just something about its robust creation modules that makes sense to me in a way most other game-making games don’t.

Racing fans will undoubtedly have fun with it for at least a little while.

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.

While [the] handheld game stands on its own and recreates the same fun, bombastic, brawling experience it does feel a little pared down.

It is an outrageously imbalanced and profoundly dissatisfying system.

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.

This carefully designed, constantly evolving, and weirdly dynamic army of Orcs – especially those strong enough to repeatedly defeat me (more on that in a bit) — is what made me keep playing Shadow of Mordor through to the end, even as I felt growing dissatisfaction with the game’s stillborn and often threadbare narrative.

The level of choice when it comes to Horizon’s 2‘s core circuits is surprising and ensures there’s something for everyone, regardless of your taste in cars.

We both thought it was an improvement on the original – not least because it demands fewer up-front purchases than its predecessor (you can now play co-operatively without buying additional characters) – but agreed that there’s still plenty of room for critical gamers like us to kvetch.

There just isn’t much else EA can do to make this a better game. So it made great, incremental improvements everywhere.

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.

EA was so focused on making the gameplay a superlative experience that the company forgot to include a lot of the things that make the series so special. If you’re buying your next-gen console just to play NHL, maybe wait a year. If you already have the console, well, hockey’s hockey, right?

The Sims 4 provides an intimate and varied experience; being as a god over sprites, to then adopt the perspective within creation, and to, with empathy, become another person, to observe a whole family, or any number of people, as frequent and as seriously as one chooses. For what it is, a simulation game of life, relationships and interior design, I give it an [80].

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen is an entertaining epic. Fifteen bucks might seem steep for a mobile game, but it’s a reasonable price to pay for a fantasy adventure that could end up keeping dedicated RPG fans occupied for weeks or months.

But the real treasure here is the story, which is written beautifully and flows smoothly, even as players alter its direction by making narrative choices every few sentences. If nothing else, 80 Days makes a strong argument for interactive storytelling.

Monument Valley is a strong contender for my mobile game of the year.

I even occasionally found myself skipping through the all-important court dialogue without reading, then using hint coins to solve the case just so I could get back to Layton’s puzzles.

Unrest is a bold, powerful, and interesting game. I’m just not sure how much fun it is.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no denying The Golf Club needs some sort of proper career or long-term competition to help retain players’ interest...But if there’s ever a sequel – and I hope there is – then perhaps HB Studios can add this one last missing piece of the puzzle to what has turned out to be an excellent golf simulation.

It’s not quite the brand new Oddworld game for which devout fans have been patiently waiting for nearly a decade, but it certainly whets one’s appetite.

Civilization Revolution 2 isn’t a terrible game by any stretch, but I’ve a feeling it will be long forgotten within minutes of sinking my teeth into a full-featured Civilization game set in space.

Despite falling into a genre and being released on the kind of gaming platform I typically ignore, I’ve found Feeding Time’s gameplay to be surprisingly compelling.

I’d say it’s a little bit better. It has the best graphics, you can hear your puppy talk, and you can go on a little adventure. There’s no buggie, in case I haven’t mentioned that, but it’s still pretty good.

Like other great puzzles franchises – Tetris, Bejeweled, and Picross leap to mind – Pushmo doesn’t seem to be changing much between releases. Intelligent Systems has stumbled onto a winning design and they’re sticking with it.

The game’s map is straight out of Super Mario Bros. 3. The villages you visit are right out of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. The game’s eight knight-themed bosses are a clear reference to Mega Man as are the various powers you accumulate along the way. The game’s magic system comes straight out of Castlevania 3.

We couldn’t ask for a better tribute from the world of games on the Great War’s centennial.

EA Sports UFC gives them solid bones to begin with, but the series is going to figure something out how to win over casual sports fans if it wants to be a Madden-like success.

Sadly, Entwined never manages to deliver much beyond art and beauty.

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.

Much like Koru, The Last Tinker is made up of a little of this and a little of that, but it provides some good fun through variety and unique design.

Tomodachi Life might not have the lasting appeal of a title like Animal Crossing: New Leaf, but the game certainly offers up an interesting experience — one that will probably appeal for a longer period of time to a much younger audience.

Whether this is worth $15 is really moot: if you’re a Street Fighter devotee, this is a required update, end of discussion.

Airtight Games’ supernatural gumshoe adventure manages to deliver an interesting enough tale, but most of the systems meant to make it engaging on an interactive level fall flat. As a game it just doesn’t work.

Despite being a deep, generally entertaining, and visually luscious tower defence experience, Anomaly Defenders doesn’t quite rank among the best in its category.

It’s fascinating stuff.

While Mario Kart 8 wasn’t what I was exactly looking for in an MK game, it works well on its own terms, even if Battle Mode is the worst.

It’s not without quirks, but Watch Dogs can be fairly described as close to astonishing in both ambition and execution for the first game in a wholly new and original license.

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.

There’s a very human pleasure in the mysterious. It encourages thought and excites our imaginations. But people are smart. We can tell the difference between legitimate mystery and something that is left unexplained simply for the sake of being unexplained in a vain attempt to fabricate depth and hidden meaning...The initially promising Transistor is, unfortunately, a case of the latter.

It’s an unexpectedly satisfying feat of writing – with some fine voice performances, to boot – for a series that hasn’t received much in the way of accolades for its storytelling in the past.

I really wanted to like Daylight, and at a basic level it works; it’s just the execution that bogs it down. What the game sort of feels like is an early beta with a lot of small tweaks yet to be made to the gameplay, environments, UI and engine performance.

The game is good enough that I expect to see people throwing themselves against the crucible of a perfect STF run for years to come.

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.

With the storytelling of Mass Effect, the fighting system of the Witcher, and environments taken right from Dragon Age and the Elder Scrolls, Bound By Flame is perhaps the least original game ever made.

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.

Gorgeous hand drawn presentation makes its fantastical world and characters feel like paintings come to life, and will likely leave fans of dynamic game art drooling. Ditto for music lovers, who will go ga-ga for the game’s gentle, moving theme and rousing orchestral battle melodies.

I’m not much of a fan of the Hitman games for PC and consoles, but Hitman Go hits all the right notes for a mobile platform.

The company has made the game it promised when it when back and rebuilt FFXIV 1.0.

Trials Fusion, like its predecessors, is a super-charged, neck-breaking blast of a motorbike game, and solidifies the franchise’s status as the Excitebike of our time.

Each location along the way is filled with plenty of side-quests, clever puzzles, and secret locations waiting to be discovered. It adds a good dozen hours or more to the experience, making this fantasy world bursting with things to do almost seem like a much more whimsical kids’ version of an Elder Scrolls game.

I can say, though, is that it feels very similar to the Dynasty Warriors games I remember playing a decade or so ago. I don’t feel like I’ve missed a lot. I’m not blind to the fact that there is an outrageous amount of content here, including a huge array of playable characters, multiple campaigns to work through, and even a camp-building mode that gives some creative purpose to your killing. I suspect the right player could invest scores of hours in this game and still find more to do. But I’m pretty certain that player isn’t me.

Kinect Sports Rivals isn’t quite the revolution in motion-controlled sports gaming that we might have hoped for.

Think of it as a kind of rural Sim City with the difficulty ramped up and no nuclear power plants to lay down. It’s a game that tests your abilities as a pioneer to make it in a world where people need food to survive and if you don’t deliver they’ll die.

Does this game deserve a 10/10 because of its ingenuity, or should it be scored a 7/10 because it lacks modes and variation? Is it a 5/10 because it’s not really a game? Or is it a 0/10 because, really, who would pay good money just to run around as a digital goat? In the end, Coffee Stain Studios delivered what it promised, a ridiculous game featuring goats and explosions.

The good news is that players whose gaming palates DO lean toward slaying nightmarish minions with tongue-twisting weapons are finally getting the game they probably wished Diablo III was to begin with.

Contributing hugely to Towerfall’s pitch-perfect tactile experience is the game’s pixel art visual design – a look that fills your lucky peepers with a sense of wonder rarely felt since those heady SNES days.

Any kid who can play this has the chops to play a Mario game, and I’d be shocked if they ended up preferring this substandard adventure to just about any Mario platformer released on any recent Nintendo system.

Second Son is a blast to play and offers a remarkable open world for a next generation platform...Sucker Punch can save the serious innovation for next time.

If you’ve never played Final Fantasy X before, this is a perfect opportunity. You can see the charms of the old-school JRPG in a modern game package and see why so many people cared so much in the first place.

Indeed, Dark Souls II is pretty much exactly the sort of game it wants to be.

A deeply unnerving yet marvelously moving interactive entertainment.

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.

Titanfall is perhaps the most accessible competitive multiplayer shooter ever, while still maintaining a fun competitive reward system for skilled players.

Just as I’m reaching the meat of the game, I’ve discovered that the promise of endlessly varied player-made castles isn’t being realized, and that the grind is far more intense than I’d like...I just don’t see myself sticking around.

As immersive and engaging as the second episode is, it still feels a bit like its setting the table for what’s to come in the remaining three episodes of this season...But it’s doing so in tantalizing fashion.

NaissancE is a beautiful game, but without much direction it can feel like a never ending mire of running, jumping, and falling. That being said, is the game worth spending $20 on? Certainly.

The best compliment I can offer the multiplayer of TowerFall is that it makes me wish it had been around when I was 22 and still living with three roommates who would often spend an afternoon delving into hour-long matches of Super Smash Bros. Melee or Mario Kart 64/Double Dash. TowerFall would have made an excellent addition to that rotation.

This game isn’t for the uninitiated. It’s clearly created for fans who think the idea of a pot bellied pig named Fluffy is funny, who can’t look at Barbara Streisand and not think about Mecha-Streisand, and who randomly yell “BEEEEFCAKE!” to their friends every now and then for no reason.

The Azran Legacy really just feels like more of the same.

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

It’s an early, serious, and unexpected contender for my list of the top 10 games of 2014.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is a finely tuned and well crafted trial of reflexes that rewards tenacity and endurance with the satisfaction of having achieved something far from easy...Just don’t expect the kids to stick around and enjoy it with you.

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

Despite being won over by its personality – a catchy minimalist electronic score and simple but endearing aesthetic give it a feel all its own – I just never found my groove in Dustforce.

Bravely Default‘s combat system sits comfortably among some of Square Enix’s best including those within games like Chrono Trigger, earlier Final Fantasy games, and Dragon Quest VIII. It’s that good.

Speaking as a fellow who’s spent far too much money on plastic bricks for his kid – and more time than he cares to admit building and disassembling them with her – I haven’t been as enthralled with or enchanted by a Lego game since the original Lego Star Wars.

Worth keeping in mind for series n00bs: I’ve found Joe Danger games play a bit better on an iPhone or even an iPad Mini than an iPad.

Push these qualms aside and Bardbarian is just about everything I want in an iOS game: quirky, quick, cheap, fun, and habit-forming.

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.

It’s a nice twist on traditional defense-style games. The strategy is surprisingly thoughtful, and the wacky traps rarely failed to bring a smile to my face.

The Banner Saga is an example of a successfully Kickstarted video game that gives its backers everything they wanted, including a story that’s rich in character and detail.

Double Fine has produced a high-quality game of decent length with terrific audio and visual production and an engaging, twist-filled and idea-laden story read by an outstanding cast. Look no further for evidence of its compelling nature than the strength of your yearning for the concluding act to be delivered as quickly as possible.

If you’ve never played it, or if you want something that really shows off the horsepower your new system, this game does it. If, however, you’ve already bought the game, it’s kind of hard to recommend getting it again at full price.

Ultimately, Liberation features a fantastic premise with an evocative heroine that sadly doesn’t measure up to any of the games in the main series. If you are an Assassin’s Creed nut who really wants to see the fictional universe from another perspective, give Liberation a whirl. If you are just looking for some more Assassin’s Creed action, the other six games are better than this one.

This high-priced Dr. Mario clone is still loads of fun – especially in groups – and serves as an effective prescription for anyone suffering a deficiency in accessible, competitive puzzle play.

Despite its finely crafted and quite enjoyable drawing and physics puzzles, I found Max: The Curse of Brotherhood to be more frustrating than fun.

Lego Friends may not be the sort of game you steal away to play yourself after your daughter goes to sleep. And it’s not one you can play together with her for a shared and meaningful family gaming experience...But if you want to buy her a game that’s clearly meant just for her, a game that, as a parent, you can feel okay about having her play on her own or in the back seat of the car, not worrying that it will tarnish her developing brain with mindless violence or make her obsess over her appearance, Lego Friends is worth consideration.

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.

Serious golf fans looking for a game capable of scratching their itch to hit the links through Canada’s long, cold winters aren’t going to find it here.

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

The controls are too tricky, the action too dull, and the time spent preparing and waiting to actually play is too long.