Imagine an arthouse movie with summer blockbuster production values, as if Terrence Malick had been given a Star Wars movie. Imagine if Ubisoft had made Gone Home. Like Arthur Morgan himself, Red Dead Redemption 2 is meditative, laconic, a slow burn, drawn out and unhurried, sometimes even morose, more concerned with characters than spectacle. Let us go then, it suggests.

With this latest version, Rockstar’s latest game is no longer just a masterpiece. It’s now a state-of-the-art technical marvel. On many levels, you haven’t seen what videogames can accomplish until you’ve played this version Grand Theft Auto V.

It raises the bar on story and personality so much higher than its been for RPGs. After spending some time as Geralt, it’s tough to shake the sense that being Commander Shepard, The Dragonborn, or even a Jedi Knight is so much less exciting than simply being a monster-hunter in fantasy Poland. Saving the universe is nothing compared to the look you’ll get when you confirm someone’s worst fears.

Phantom Pain is a celebration of R-rated power fantasies and even a light sprinkling of grindhouse sex and violence, not the least bit inappropriate for a game with an M-rating. Here’s the only litmus test you need: if it’s good enough for movies, it’s good enough for videogames.

Hades success is very much indebted to its pacing. Game pacing is difficult in the best of circumstances; it’s impossible without extensive testing, consideration, and willingness to change things for the sake of player experience. This is all easy for people like me to say, with our monocles and berets and copies of the Chicago Manual of Style, plus maybe some Foucault if really pressed. “It’s all about the player experience.” “Design is law.” You can talk all day. But when the player starts getting frustrated at the lack of progress, or insufficient game cues, you might find yourself in a tough spot as a designer. How you get out of it, or if you even do, says a lot about your skill with design and production.

There's a lot more to recommend Xenoblade Chronicles. The dialogue, the humor, the artwork, the prophecy system, the music, the variety of environments, the character progression, the crafting system, the crazy quest density, the quest quality, the memorable characters, the collectibles, the secrets, and so on. This is a landmark achievement in the genre. As of its release, you can no longer talk about great RPGs, or maybe even great games, without also talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.

A fitting finale to CD Projekt Red's masterpiece trilogy.

For the sake of the freedom of these 700 teensies; for all the content; for the sheer amount of joy and enthusiasm and butt poking; for the sea and sky and swamps and castles; for how well these worlds and their levels are imagined, adorned, and realized, this may very well be the last platformer you ever need.

New rewards for killstreaks, gifts to send along to your friends list, a nasty nemesis that dogs you and your friends just to remind you all that, hey, you’re each still playing Diablo III even though it came out two years ago and this is probably your fiftieth time killing the skeleton king. That’s the real magic of effective entertainment, executed so carefully, so precisely by the folks at Blizzard: familiarity that isn’t stale.

It all comes down to the fact that I would rather pay for a carefully tuned game than get a financially optimized one for free. But I guess if a developer's going to screw up the equation, they might as well do it with a game as good as Jetpack Joyride.

I can count on two hands the games I've loved as much as I now love Guild Wars 2. This isn't just a great example of the genre and arguably the Second Coming of MMOs. It isn't even just one of the best games I've ever played. This is what happens when a group of talented, smart, dedicated, imaginative, bold, consumer-friendly creators get together and spend years solving problems and making something wonderful.

I'm not terribly surprised that the studio that made the first Borderlands has created such a wildly good gunplay-based action RPG. But I'm surprised that the studio that stitched together Duke Nukem Forever and all those Brothers in Arms games has also made it such a joy to discover for reasons other than the awesome guns and gunplay. Bravo, Gearbox.

Thankfully Majora’s Mask 3D has more going for it than simple strangeness, delivering a poignant mix of big heroics and touching humanity on top of the solid Zelda formula.

At this point, I have learned to stop worrying and love the plastic.

OOTP offers unparalleled flexibility in creating your own baseball world and guiding your favorite baseball franchise to glory.

It knows. It understands. But not blindly, not slavishly. More than a fan of X-Com, this game is a fan of the tenets of modern game design. It's doing exactly the right thing, in exactly the right ways, at exactly the right time.

There's no debate whether Mass Effect 3 is a good game. It has good combat, an effective atmosphere, satisfying resolution, and a few great characters. Co-op is surprisingly entertaining. Bioware has finally settled on a good balance of RPG elements, too. It's easy to dismiss most of the nitpicks. It's the best game in the series for all these reasons...Instead, I argue about whether Mass Effect 3 is a great game. I write about it because I deeply care about Bioware as a developer. I want Bioware to strengthen choice and consequence and master character writing so I can consider their games to be classics again. At the very least, I'm no longer left out of this series now that I appreciate the combat and the universe.

What a horrible thing to do to pinball to make it relevant, compelling, and gratifying.

The reality-bending and dimension hopping are nicely realized, and the whole idea of having to find gems for a magic glove lends itself well to a pinball table. Here's a great example of how to do obscure lore in a pinball table.

Mario Kart 8 embodies what Nintendo does so well. They take something that works well and they eventually make it smooth and great and absolutely irresistible.

A playthrough of 80 Days will probably take two hours. You could have spent those two hours reading Beryl Markham’s memoir, catching up on episodes of Fargo, or finally watching Under the Skin. When a game is this good, this well written, with observations this relevant, memorable, and poignant, there are no wrong choices.

Starfighter Assault is all about the iconic sights and sounds of Star Wars space combat, translated into a very good pinball table. If this is how Zen Studios is going to milk a franchise, milk away!

Torchlight II's willingness to play tough is only one of its selling points, but it's arguably what sets it apart from the other good latest-gen action RPGs you could be playing right now (Diablo III, Borderlands 2, Darksiders II, and Guild Wars 2 come to mind).

The best thing I can say about Pokemon Y is that the various design tweaks and visual upgrades brings out the joy of this world to match that first time you caught a Pokemon or beat a gym leader.

Close combat, ragdoll explosions, mud, poison gas, and the violence of one of the bloodiest conflicts in history mix with pigeon babysitting. War Pigeons is a good summary of Battlefield 1 in general.

It's a real thumb in the eye to have to suffer through a launch that was exactly like any MMO launch. It's a sad reality that too many of us have accepted DRM with gritted teeth and open wallets, so this is likely the price of AAA gaming for the foreseeable future. Us sheep get what we deserve, which is a Diablo III, a fine game for playing solo, with all the pitfalls of an online game.

It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. Utter havoc. It’s what makes Diablo 3 the preeminent action RPG, even if there are newer and arguably better designs out there. I still grin, shake my head, and marvel at Blizzard’s ability to fuse charm, character, and technical prowess. They are the masters of swirling cartoonish videogame power fantasies, they belong on the Switch, and they’re here at last.

Arkham Knight’s take on the hero/villain relationship is unique. You can hail it as clever as Fight Club or dismiss it as stupid as midichlorians — you’re at least a little right on either count — but you cannot deny that it’s a compelling variation on the theme, and it works wonders to sustain the story with unique dialogue and narrative opportunities.

Tearaway is one of those rare games that gets exponentially better with its ending.

Here we all are, in a game without end, a game exponentially better than it was when it came out a few years ago. It’s almost like Blizzard called this thing Reaper of Souls as a joke about the game itself instead of just a reference to whoever that guy was in the boss battle at the end of Act V that I’ll never have to play again.

The most creative turn-based combat seen in an RPG, combined with a dash of humor, has resulted in a fine stew of gaming.

Zen’s table lovingly captures the movie’s production design, a combination of timeless imagination and 80s sci-fi aesthetic. Of course the sound effects are there, snippet of familiar dialogue, and characters, usually without any of the silly dolls.

Is the PC version of Diablo III better? In some very important ways, yes. But as a console game, Diablo III is outstanding. There is no comparable experience on console systems... There is nothing with Diablo III’s breadth, accessibility, and richness.

Failbetter finally balances smart gameplay and ingenious prose in this poignant saga of mortality, writ large.

Gone Home achieves an unexpected and effective range of emotions. Although it’s a mostly sad eerie poignant story, it has flashes of anger and frustration, and the way it manages to fold music into these emotions, as well as the choice of music, is every bit as good as what Bioshock Infinite did with its music.

The consistent thrill of Saints Row IV is how it constantly, eagerly, happily, accommodatingly asks you “Hey, how do you want to break the game now?” And for a game so colossal, so occasionally dumb, so often colossally sharks-with-laser-beams-on-their-heads-that-can-also-breathe-fire-and-fly-and-turn-invisible-and-you-can-even-ride-them dumb, what an incredibly smart thing to do with an open world, a franchise, and a story.

I suppose the gamepad is a valuable way to look at the map without calling up a fullscreen map view. But mostly, it’s a sadly missed opportunity in an otherwise great racing game.

Even with all the distractions surrounding its release, like Microsoft’s cloud power, platform exclusivity, always-online servers, and the drama of Respawn’s split with Activision, Titanfall has managed to deliver. It may not be the next-gen benchmark that marketing execs would have you believe, but it’s something better: a tight and engrossing multiplayer shooter that offers fresh experiences in an increasingly tired genre. Press E to embark.

Several times over the last week or so, I’ve considered whether to sit down with Nier, Horizon, Torment, or Gravity Rush 2. It’s a tough decision. They’re worlds you fall into. Each of them is the sort of game you play for several hours at a time. You don’t boot them up lightly. Which one have I chosen? Well, before I commit, how about running a character real quick in Monster Slayers? Oops, I’ve just fallen into a world. A deck-building utopia.

DMC Devil May Cry is a best-case scenario for what happens when you take an established series and hand it over to a new developer to let them have a turn.

Never has a game delivered on the promise of living the life of a pirate with as well as Black Flag with its awesome production values, refined game design, and lively oceangoing hijinx.

It’s got what it needs: a keen appreciation for how to smooth the tedium out of stealth games, adroitly presented by its rakish cast on a picante Western stage.

This is one of a few boardgames that I've bought for the tabletop after being introduced to it on the iPad. And unlike the other two (Dominant Species and Small World), this is a game still worth having on the iOS.

If I’m going to play a MOBA, it’s going to be this one.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, but not in an overwhelming way but in a fantastic, three in the morning, I can’t stop playing this game kind of way. When it all comes together and you destroy a boss that gave you troubles just a few job levels ago, it feels great.

For gamers out there like myself who cut their teeth on R.B.I. Baseball rather than Strat-O-Matic, I highly recommend this as a supplemental experience to today's console baseball titles. It may just supplant them in your imagination, as it's a platform to weave believable baseball tales of any stripe, at whatever speed or level of control you desire.

If there’s such a thing as “too small to fail”, it applies to this wonderful gem.

It's simply a great game. You don't have to know anything special about tanks, or river crossings, or the Luftwaffe. Everything in the game is easily explained: these units move fast, these roads speed movement, these woods impede attackers.

This new presentation is particularly appropriate since the entire game is such an enthusiastic package. This isn't just a way to play Lost Cities matches. It's a whole silly metagame, with four different AI opponents, ingame emoticon chat, goals, and leveling up.

This clearly defined gameplay pattern sustains Doom’s breakneck pace. If I was just zipping through monsters holding down the fire button, it would get pretty tedious pretty quickly. But because I’m constantly positioning myself in that ammo-health-ammo-health sequence, I’m staying engaged. I’m surfing some pretty smart moment-to-moment gunplay. Doom grooves.

Suffice to say if you’re going to virtually pinball on the PC, this is the way to do it.

Pixel Defenders Puzzle can get crazily detailed - in a good way - as you take into account your units' various abilities, the monsters' various abilities, the powerful support monsters that show up, and the complexity of the grid filling up.

No multiplayer game so cannily captures a feeling of cat and mouse, and relies so completely on tension and suspense instead of yet more thrills. To call this multiplayer unique doesn't do it justice. If you care about new experiences in videogames, if you want to see how games can explore 3D spaces without resorting to shooting stuff or breaking things, you owe it to yourself to try Assassin's Creed multiplayer.

This dumb, loud, fast, silly, sexy car porn is eminently gratifying. Well done, Criterion. This is the game I've been waiting for you to make since Burnout.

As with any thoughtful storytelling, Soma works on multiple levels.

Waking Mars is just about the coolest new thing I've seen someone do with a side-scrolling Castlevania/Metroid exploration game.

This persistence is Epic Quest's most notable feature. Think of it as an experiment in building an ongoing leveling system onto a single table.

Remember Titan Quest? Yeah, that one was pretty good. Well, this is the modern version of that. And then some.

Kid Icarus knows enough to be more complicated and rewarding than any simple Rogue Squadron or light gun game. It knows enough to tap into the nearly universal appeal of loot chasing.

As a single-player game, the AI acquits itself admirably (one of my favorite things about ports of Euro games like this is that purer math lends itself to artificial intelligence). I’m less enamoured of Agricola as a multiplayer game. It works fine, and developer Playdek knows better than to leave you high, dry, and solitaire only. But heck if I can remember what I was going to do when my turn finally rolls around again. This isn’t a knock against the Agricola port so much as a fact of its gameplay.

Minor objections about design decisions aside, Black Ops II is another great shooter in a year of great shooters. It's a competent, confident, generous package, true to its core values, but with enough new to carve out its own identity, enough variety to appeal to a wide range of players, and enough content to belong on your shelf for more than just a quick playthrough. This is the way to do a yearly installment without just phoning it in.

I get the sense that Sine Mora was made by people who love the best of the older shmups and want to present what made them great to the merely curious like me who are never going to play old side-scrollers on the NeoGeo or Dreamcast or whatever. And one of the highest praises I can offer Sine Mora is that perhaps more than any other such game, it makes me want to get better at 2D sidescrolling shooters.

There’s never been a fighting game like this (One Finger Death Punch 1 excepted) and you’ll never be as Jackie Chan or John Wick as you are here.

This is the second time in a month that I’ve been completely bowled over by an indie project that I’d never even heard of, created by people whose games I’ve never played. I can think of no better indicators that no matter how bad SimCity turned out, no matter how disappointing the gameplay in Bioshock Infinite, no matter how familiar any Call of Duty, no matter whether the next Xbox is always online, it’s a perfect time to be into videogames.

Playing will probably mean thinking about issues that you probably didn’t think about. This is something that should be valued in a videogame. I’m as content as the next guy to mindlessly shoot a hundred dudes in a Call of Duty. But I also value games that make me think about something I wasn’t thinking about yesterday. Games that make me feel a way I don’t usually feel. Games that aren’t afraid to present complex subjects in all their complexity, wrangling gameplay into a thought-provoking exercise that is both entertainment and edification. Games like Prison Architect.

Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire don’t have the same groundbreaking feel as X and Y, but the solid combination of new systems with a familiar region shows that sometimes you can go Hoenn again.

There is absolutely nothing casual about this game. But it's incredibly gratifying to finally nail a puzzle in the same way that it's gratifying to nail a song in DDR or a level in Patapon. Rhythm Heaven Fever, which seems to know full well how hard it's pushing you, is eventually as satisfying as it is infuriating.

What most surprises me about Skylanders is the effectiveness of these little toys. I mean, dolls. I mean, uh, action figures. Whatever you call them, I can’t deny that picking up pieces and moving them onto the base is a surprisingly effective hook.

Snowrunner is what happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force. As long as the irresistible force has a winch, the immovable object will lose.

Assuming that you accept that Resident Evil isn't a game about running backwards and spewing ammo, you'll find here another wonderfully tense shooter.

Think of it as the videogame equivalent of a brilliant short film. Wasn’t that great, and wouldn’t you be excited to see it developed into something feature length? Stranger things have happened.

Tightly pieced together, efficient, muscular if not nimble.

Pinball Arcade fails one crucial part of videogame pinball. It has no sense for the social elements that make Pinball FX 2 so effective, and that are therefore an integral part of videogame pinball.

Rebellion is nearly as revolutionary with its new subfactions, and it's easily as revolutionary with its new victory conditions.

But what the elevator pitch and basic description don’t convey is Children of Morta’s unique charm.

I don’t want to use the word masterpiece lightly, but what else do you call the combination of gleefully chaotic gameplay with earnest storytelling in a setting as refreshingly unique as Bioshock? What else do you call a combat system that goes so far beyond the simple act of shooting a gun without drilling down into a set of intricate menus and complicated controls? What else do you call darkly malevolent horror that doesn’t feel like it was cribbed from someplace else? What else do you call the crowning achievement of a studio with a unique voice, an uneven track record, and 25 years of experience? If there’s a better word to describe what Remedy has achieved with Control, I can’t think of it.

Remember when you thought this was a frivolous roguelike and not a seriously meaty strategy game that you’ll be playing for literally days? How silly of you.

As far as I’m concerned, playing Age of Wonders III without Seals of Power is like watching a movie without the ending. Golden Realms, which provides Age of Wonders III with its ending, fulfills admirably the promise of a promising game.

The overall takeaway I get while playing SSX: sometimes EA gets it exactly right. Sometimes their experience from a dozen misguided games, and a half dozen decent games, and two or three really good games is distilled into one perfect example of how some AAA titles are every bit as awesome as they're supposed to be.

Bring the Van Morrison with your shotgun and you should be fine.

If you were to take someone who’s played his share of shooters, someone who cares about the story between and around the shooting, someone who can appreciate games that offer new takes on familiar experiences, Crysis [3] will feel like a soulless blockbuster to the auteur’s art film of Metro: Last Light.

It is the anti-Forza. It luxuriates in the dents on a day-to-day sedan instead of the aerodynamic swoop of something Italian and impossibly expensive. It’s too serious for Electronic Arts, but too wild for Papyrus. It’s not interested in car culture or faux social media or sexy street racing. It hasn’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies. It loves tough cars, not sleek cars. It knows dents add character. You don’t need to drive these beasts around in the desert to make them look like they’ve been scavenging the wasteland. They come that way.

Injustice’s traditional one-on-one structure, coupled with its thorough ingame documentation, is a casual player’s dream. We want to play fighting games, too. It’s nice to see a developer recognize that.

The latest from the creator of Gravity Bone and Atom Zombie Smasher is a weird and heartfelt espionage adventure you won't soon forget.

Online and locally, alone or with strangers, with one friend or with a group of friends, there is no shooter as accommodating as Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2. This is my game. It does not belong to someone else’s conception of fair play, of narrow restrictive grinding, of recognizing skill or merit or enforcing something so ridiculous as fairness among people who want different things from their games. Here is a great shooter you can play the way you want, enjoying all its benefits in full alongside everyone else. Now that Electronic Arts has arrived here, it’s time for everyone else to catch up.

If you want a thrill ride, there’s always Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. But if you want an incredibly well written adventure across something approximating a sea, there is no game like Sunless Sea.

The revised naval combat turns battles into more than just bags of hitpoints slamming into each other at sea. At a time when naval power was so important, the added detail is welcome. And that’s pretty much what Heart of Darkness does for Victoria II: a new level of detail to encourage you to get out and see a bit more of the world.

Kudos to the developers of Flip Ship for not succumbing to the obvious trend to micropayments. When you buy Flip Ship, you get a self-contained package where high scores are strictly and entirely a matter of how good, lucky, and persistent you are. Put away your nickels, because they aren't any help here. Flip Ship is all about the choices you make.

I expected it to be a facile mishmash of Vietnam myths and shallow gameplay, and instead I got a coherent, original game system that reflects a certain understanding of the Vietnam War with mechanics that fit together as a whole yet are evocative in their own right. It’s far more than I expected, but more importantly, it’s an excellent treatment of something I’ve actually never seen. That doesn’t happen a lot for me these days.

And like a detective in a noir yarn, you can’t help but become part of the central mystery, effecting an outcome you might not have intended. Age of Decadence might run away from you.

Rebuild is almost single-handedly the creation of indie developer Sarah Northway, who has iterated it from a web game to an iPhone game, enlisting some nifty comic book cutscene art and a darkly unsettling score from talented contributors. It still hangs frequently on my iPhone, but thanks to the autosave, I've never lost any progress. Like Pandemic, this is one of those games too good to stay a free web-based Flash game. And like Atom Zombie Smasher, this is an example of how zombie mythology has a lot more to offer videogaming than chainsaws and horde modes.

So it turns out that Wargame: European Escalation isn't just good. It's also unique.

Of course, this mix-and-match approach will only be as good as the imagination that goes into its parts. Paradox tried something similar with Stellaris, using a set of opposing attributes. But that game’s spreadsheet-dry sci-fi doesn’t have room for the kind of glee, personality, and interactivity that drives Planetfall. Stellaris is the rasp of pages turning in a ledger. Run your index finger across the paper, along the row and then down the column, find a number that supposedly suggests the high-concept sci-fi in one of those dull classics you felt obligated to read and even more obligated to pretend to like. But Planetfall is a shelf of old sci-fi dime store novels in the back of a tiny bookstore inexplicably still in business. Pick the lurid title that calls out to you best. Pull it out and delight at the splash of imaginative cover art. This is your story for today.

The thrill of the unpredictable was the driving force behind this charming and spirited rogue-like heister.

It is an elaborate trifle, a AAA time fritterer, a playground with skyhigh production values mired in a bog, a dessert tray without an accompanying meal. It is mostly hollow, almost entirely meaningless, and only accidentally relevant. And I’m having a grand time with it.

This is the sort of wheelsport the Need for Speed arcade racers should have been providing all along.

Oxenfree is well written, immaculately acted, and superbly paced. And the most important thing is a conversation system that brings to life lived-in characters actually talking to each other instead of struggling to emerge from a turn-based dialogue game. Oxenfree is the Robert Altman of videogames.

It even looks fantastic, with an emphasis on cel-shaded splatter horror. The Darkness II plays as if it were an homage to the EC Comics of the 40s and 50s. It has that same grimly colorful and colorfully grim vibe in its approach to crucifixion, torture, madness, hell, and a demon who pees on bodies and farts in their dead faces.