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.