Creeper Worlds are basically puzzle games. But with the new sense of scale that comes with 3D, with new visuals to show off the ocean as sullen pools and looming waves, it’s enough to make it feel like a new world and, therefore, a new game.

Even without the Aegean sparkle of Odyssey, this is an idyllic tapestry for Ubisoft’s artists. This sunlight streaming through the clouds, bathing rich greed fields and vine-covered ruins and burgeoning cathedrals in its golden benediction! Ubisoft’s artists are to open world games what Richard II is to words, and their talent shines throughout Valhalla’s England: this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. So what if it’s not as good as Odyssey? I’ll take it!

All the blood and gore and screaming and gnashing of teeth turn into an aggravating set of puzzles. The chaos grinds to a halt, waiting for you to parse some this-then-that-next puzzle logic. Do you even know where to go next? This tunnel looks like every other tunnel. There’s nothing left to eat. The roiling protoplasm is restless and impatient. It’s tempted to grow a foot just so it can tap it peevishly, but that would be too cheeky. It’s beneath a shoggoth’s dignity. So it waits while you lead it around and try to figure out how to open that door. Such an amazing monster, trapped in such a middling game.

In this situation, my diplomatic standing with a neighboring regime, the loyalty of some of my leaders, my regime’s profile, the units I can use in my army, the stratagem cards I’ll be able to draw, and global bonuses for diplomacy, food income, and combat are all connected. I hope it’s not a spoiler to tell you that a war with Tiefmark — an avoidable war — broke out a few turns later.

It can be tedious and exhausting. Its faux angst and exuberance and hellstory can be grating. It’s probably a level or two too long. But in the end, there’s something so lovable about Doom Eternal, so endearingly goofy about the gory glory kills, so affectionate in the way a monster looks at me cross-eyed as I shove a blade up through its chin and out of the top of its skull. The conventional wisdom is that the monsters in this rebooted Doom gameplay are resources, and what I call shortage is just the necessary harvesting of a monster crop. But more to the point, they’re my playmates in this hopped-up jungle gym with its trampolines and swing bars and tunnels. We’re all in this together to make a colorful over-the-top playground with blaring metal music and blazing quick movement and splatter gunplay and chainsawyering. It’s enough to win over even the coldest critical heart.

The premise is cyberpunk, the parameters are thoughtful, and the payoff is worth the bother.

This is state-of-the-art for action RPGs in Soldak’s fantasy worlds.

A spirited shooter with an admirable commitment to aesthetic, but without the game design chops to pull off the progression system it wants to offer.

Because it’s trying so hard to be a Metal Gear game, and falling so short, Metal Gear Survive is the wrong kind of off-kilter. Sometimes a Kojima game without Kojima just isn’t a Kojima game. Sometimes it’s just a snack to tide me over.

There is no gameplay incentive to push the number of enemies up and play this gloriously unfair exercise in managing swarms and randomness. When I can get past a level by playing the display settings instead of the actual game, 10tons hasn’t done their job. I love the game I thought Tesla vs Lovecraft was, but I don’t love how the graphics dictate the gameplay.

Oh, and my sweet Lord, this game does wonders in the space battles department. You’ll fly around Star Destroyers and through Death Star debris, zipping between laser blasts and missiles. Eventually, just as in Galactic Assault, in Starfighter Assault games, you’ll spawn in hero ships like the Millenium Falcon and Slave I. Or that one green ship that looks like a bathtub turned upside down. Is it Bossk’s ship? Regardless, you can fly in it, if the cool ships are taken.

Many of its elements never quite come together, so there’s no payoff. The clumsy human stories, the botched difficulty curve, the dangling gameplay threads, the pointless decisions, the cool 3D printer scavenging economy, the coral, the hunters, the various survivors who need saving. If I never had fewer than a dozen mana potions, what did it matter whether I did the quest to put mana healing into the water supply?

Domina is so indolent that some might describe as a bad game. I don’t necessarily disagree. You might as well watch Spartacus on Starz. The graphics are probably better. The thrills of occasional action are probably more elaborate. But when it comes to RPing a lazy Roman noble who can barely be arsed to lift his arm high enough to give the wrist enough play for a dismissive flick, there’s nothing better than lolling around in the shade with Domina.

The fundamental fact about Desync is a paradox. Its difficulty level is an obstacle and a draw. When I’m playing Desync, it takes me about thirty minutes to decide “this is too hard, f.ck it”. And when I’m not playing Desync, it takes me about a week to decide “hmm, I should give Desync another try”.

Ponder the lushly informative and sexily Sumerian visuals as you bake bread and make beer for a cooing fertility goddess who peers in from above like someone’s mom asking who’s winning. It’s going to be close.

Dynasty Feud is a game that demands local friends, who must furthermore be willing to learn how to play a set of characters with unique abilities. But if you’ve got any such friends — Dynasty Feud will support four players at a time for maximal intricate insanity — this is the Starcraft of people running around punching each other.

The unfortunate fact of Horizon is that most of what it does well, other games have done better, and they did it with a compelling who and where. This is the game you play after you’ve finished The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and Far Cry: Primal. It is the greatest hits compilation of open-world games. Yeah, sure, you might want to own it, but the real connoisseur has the original albums.

It’s mostly a numbers-heavy realtime party-based dungeon crawl combat extravaganza. Sci fi, to boot. You’d think the developers at Quadro Delta would come up with a more thematic title to distinguish it from their previous game, Pixel Piracy. That one wasn’t sci-fi. It was your garden variety Caribbean pirates, but in pixels.

for a throwaway tower defense game, Alien Shooter TD does what it needs to do: pass the time by slathering a map in alien gore.

Rearranging ingredients is a viable way to make a different meal. And the Last Roman campaign is an edifying alternative to all that tasty Warhammer junk food.

When it tries to be something beyond an aquarium, Abzu is as inscrutably intricate as a black light poster from your neighborhood head shop. That’s not necessarily a criticism. Besides, sharks really are misunderstood.

But Inside can’t resist padding its story with what passes for gameplay. Who knows whether it’s because Playdead didn’t have the confidence in their story or because videogamers need to push crates onto pressure plates in order to call something a videogame. Whatever the case, Inside is a provocatively outside-the-box story in a disappointingly inside the box game.

At least Far Harbor was better than fighting the robots of the Automatron DLC.

Battle it out in virtually any engagement on the Western/Eastern/Mediterranean Front using detailed American, German, Russian and British armies.

It's no Tomb Raider, but with the new expedition mode, maybe it doesn't really need to be.

Bethesda has laid solid and at times spectacular groundwork for an awesome game. I look forward to another developer building on it.

An occasionally horrific game with a memorable character and some fantastically grotesque artwork, it’s absolutely worth the journey.

Rocket science, orbital trajectories, and gravity wells are a terrible milieu for guesswork. It’s like a bunch of kids on a merry-go-round hucking rocks at each other, and then setting off fireworks at each other, and eventually shooting guns at each other. All the while the merry-go-round goes round. Did you miss?

As limber as Cities: Skylines is, it’s sorely lacking in replayability. Instead, it lets you get the most out of your favorite city by encouraging you to endlessly optimize and furthermore giving you the tools you need to do it. Come for the ant farm spectacle and spreadsheet detail. Stay for the endless cultivation of your favorite garden.

Right now what you’ve got with Driveclub is a grand single-player game with a set of demanding challenges on lovely tracks using distinct cars with uniquely appealing driving models. In other words, you’ve got the latest game from Evolution Studios, and a worthy successor to the games they’ve been making in the Motorstorm franchise, but one that has almost none of the online features that were intended to give it its indentity. What you don’t have is the game they intended to make or any meaningful ETA as to when that game will be ready.

For better and worse, Destiny is open-ended and nearly content-free gunplay for as long as you want it to last.

But the more you play, the more you try different game types, the more you experiment with different races and paths along the skill tree, the more you develop favorite combos and hated opponents, the more crushingly disappointing it is that it doesn’t know how to end. A game this good deserves a good finale. It deserves anything other than the long tedious slog to finish a game that was over 100 turns ago.

The bigger problem is that the framerate is godawful, which seems like a networking issue, since it’s much more pronounced during games with more players. I suspect I’m being dropped into servers with terrible pings. I’ve even joined game where I literally can’t move because the warping is so bad. Here’s me, connected to EA servers.

As a shooter, Loadout has a lot to recommend it. It’s fast, fluid, gratifying, varied, slick, and largely unsullied by its free-to-play business model. In other words, no, this isn’t Team Fortress. And, frankly, it doesn’t need to be.

If you don’t mind fighting over the same cluttered iraqi streets and desolate afghan hills that you’ve seen a hundred times before, Insurgency brings enough hardcore sensibility and competent execution to stand out from the other multiplayer shooters. The old-school gameplay combined with updated mechanics are a breath of fresh air in a genre crowded with games that don’t understand that failure can still be fun.

If you’ve sampled a wider range of platformers, and if you don’t have an inherent predilection for Mario worlds, Super Mario 3D World will proceed like a pleasant enough curiosity. It’s a bit like hearing oldies on a radio station. It’s familiar and safe. Then it’s over and out of your head entirely, leaving you room to discover new and better music.

Battlefield 4′s most spectacular failing is its lack of technical stability. I literally cannot play for more than two or three matches without something failing catastrophically and either locking up my computer or booting me from the server.

Dragon’s Crown’s unique beauty goes a long way. But it doesn’t go quite long enough.

The new flying pikmin are a nifty twist for how they break the level design.

Amber Route is nothing if not educational.

One failing of Shelter is that it takes a while to truly get underway, and it’s too simple a game to take so long to get less simple.

There is no risk of failure in a game like this. There is only the risk of having the play the same section yet again. In a survival game, that’s anathema. A survival game without meaningful death isn’t a survival game. It’s just a game.

Hypatia is already far more interesting than anyplace I’ve previously settled in Sins of a Solar Empire. And that’s even before finding any of the new artifacts Forbidden Worlds introduced.

Combat Hacking — I’m just going to pretend it’s not called PWN — is a nifty exercise in fingerwork and brain power. It looks like a puzzle game, but it’s not. It’s actually a head-to-head real time strategy game focusing on territory control, maneuvering, and the careful application of special powers, all lovingly cyberpunk themed.

Ascension isn’t as tactically gratifying as the latest Devil May Cry. The fighting has more of a splashy throwaway quality, often because it’s swallowed up by special effects or flailing character models or vast settings.

Bioshock Infinite attempts an Uncharted style relationship between two characters. It doesn’t work as well as it needs to. Booker DeWitt, ably if not unremarkably acted by Troy Baker, would be a fine figure in a novel or a movie. But in a game driven by his relationship with Elizabeth, Bioshock Infinite snags on the issue of a third-person protagonist in a first-person game. What does Booker look like? How does he feel? How is he reacting to what Elizabeth tells him? What does he do when I press X to “comfort Elizabeth”? Is there any subtext when he makes a choice? How do they look at each other? An actor’s face belongs here. There isn’t one.

These are mostly the same guns, monsters, and combat sandboxes you already played, just arranged differently. Same gameplay, new framework. But given that this is currently my preferred way to get my Gears on, I can’t complain too loudly when I’m so busy trying to three-star each of the levels.

The quick and easy multiplayer for up to four players is a real asset, particularly with friends taking advantage of the Vita's voice chat support. Suddenly a brainless two-gun game turns into a loadout challenge for players attempting difficulty levels a notch too high, deciding who's going to hang back with the sniper rifle and healing drone.

There are plenty of these "bounce ever upward" games where you try to reach a new height before . I suppose it's a vertical variation on the endless runner. But what I like about Paper Galaxy is how it litters the screen with planets that have character.

Far Cry 3, a pretty good open-world shooter, is a terrible sequel to Far Cry 2. One of the hallmarks of Far Cry 2 was that you never left the game world, even to check your map. But like many good games, Far Cry 3 is brimming with gamey stuff that takes you out of the world and into the gaminess.

It can be prohibitively tedious on the harder levels, or when you want to optimize your score. Furthermore, if you play too much, you can exhaust your stock of undos. Oh, look, QatQi will sell you more thanks to the miracle of Apple's in-app purchasing feature. Et tu, QatQi?

In Forza Horizon, racing is rubbing, wrecking, banging, and rewinding. Without a meaningful economy, there's no incentive to drive anything other than completely wrecklessly. The driving physics concur. This is one of those games that has no solution to the problem of videogames teaching kids that the best way to keep inside a turn is to bounce off the side of another car. Bounce off other cars, rear end the guy in front of you to slow down, and cut across corners with impunity.

A central fact about San Juan is that you're playing against the shuffle more than you're playing against the other players. If you're willing to draw out a ten-minute solitaire game into however long your asynchronous matches take, San Juan has multiplayer support. And even if you're not into multiplayer, it has a nifty take on leaderboards.

The gear in Darksiders II is only as important as the combat, and the combat simply isn't that important. If there's one place the mostly satisfying and smartly designed Darksiders II needed more streamlining, it was the monty haul and the corresponding hack-and-slash.

If you play shmups because you like to wrestle with cool scoring systems, there's not much here for you. But if you play shmups for the mindlessness of dodging bullets and watching things blow up, this is a viable choice: crisp, lively, loud, busy, obligingly World War II.

A nice, boring, middle-of-the-road review score just to ensure no one will ever read this.

These tables aren't a very good fit for the 3DS. Instead, they're a good fit for sales. Paranormal Activity, Mars, Secrets of the Deep, and Epic Quest? What? Who? What movies were they in? But Iron Man and Captain America? Who can blame Zen Studios for making the most out of their licensing deals?

The biggest problem with Starhawk - and unfortunately, it's a doozy - is a crushing lack of identity.

Tuning issues aside, Warlock is a fantasy strategy game that's more than just Civilization with dragons and elves because it's not Civilization at all. Far too many strategy games rely on Sid Meiers' classic formula, often bogging down in the process. It's nice to see a developer getting back to the basics and down in the trenches with goblins, werewolves, skeletons, dragons, clerics and the odd angry fireball.

But I love that someone is still making - and putting onto the iTunes store - something so barely this side of the theoretical stages. Fertang has about as much dressing as it can bear before becoming something else.

Choose a lane, endure, upgrade, push, endure, upgrade, push, repeat. I forget, does familiarity breed contempt or content?

And that's about all Prototype 2 has to offer in terms of storytelling: insultingly obvious, overintentionally gritty, childish, churlish. Just shut up, already, Prototype 2. You're not impressing anyone. I have never skipped so many cutscenes so quickly and so willingly.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is one of the worst games I've really liked in a long time.

But there's something mildly sadistic about Crusader Kings II's complexity and reach. Maybe even passively aggressively sadistic. I'm not saying it's not accessible, becuase it is, to an extent.

It's a bit like a fighting game that offers distinct player characters, but no information about what the characters can do, or how you should play them, or their relative strengths and weaknesses. That's all for you to figure out because, apparently, the developers were too busy making the game to teach you anything. You have to take the initiative and set up solo games against the AI bots.

Triple Town is yet another clever game hobbled by yet another mercenary business decision.

It feels disappointingly slight, partly for the writing, partly for all the repetition, partly for the weirdly useless local multiplayer, and mostly for the smallness of it, hemmed in as it is by doors for the inevitable DLC. Suddenly it's over and you're left to grind if you're so inclined.