Someday, maybe, the Mafia series will find its footing. It will stand tall, secure in its own skin. Until that day, Mafia III will sit at the back of the bus, waiting for something braver to defy convention.

Procedural generation is not an end. It is a means to an end. But there is no such end in No Man’s Sky. It’s endless randomness for the sake of endless randomness. It does what it does because it can, not because it should. I would describe it as procedural generation in search of a game, but it’s worse than that. It has found its game. And the game is hollow and awful.

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.

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

Enlist for active duty with Arma 3 Apex and be deployed to a brand new warzone. With its distinct geographical features, the South Pacific island archipelago of Tanoa introduces fresh opportunities for all types of combat operations.

But still, it’s a Lego game, and it is Star Wars. Mindless, cute, without any meaningful gameplay, crassly but effectively premised on the need to collect, that modern drive that makes merchandising a crucial part of a franchise. It’s counting on you to push forward for want of more, more, more, even if you don’t know who Ello Asty is. And now with paid DLC on the side!

Don't be fooled by the bobbled headed kart racers! Overfall is intricate, smart, and demanding. Maybe a bit too demanding.

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

An open-world waiting for you to conquer it, with varied types of areas offering varied types of gameplay. You don't even have to pay attention to the silly story! You just have to want to take over the map.

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

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.

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.

The tutorial is great, the matchmaking system works nicely, and the game even knows enough only to send you an email reminder about your turn when you are not logged in. It’s like Playdek thought of everything...It’s not so much about whether the game is any good. It’s whether it’s any good for you. It’s more than just good for me.

Imagine that your favorite history professor has written a sci-fi novel. You’re intrigued. You read it. It’s dry, bereft of imagination, and misses the point of sci-fi by light years. It’s even full of typos and some of the pages are blank. But you still read all 912 pages. It’s flat. It’s lifeless. It’s terrible. You’re crestfallen. That’s Stellaris.

A little Startopia, a little Bridge Commander, a little Don’t Starve, a lot of FTL. But it’s all so awkwardly strung together, so charmless, so spreadsheety, so plodding, so dry.

It is every bit as thrilling as something with constant explosions. It’s the sort of game you’ll be thinking about at work. It’s the sort of game you just might want to try online. It’s the sort of game with a campaign you can play and replay and replay some more. It’s the sort of game with so many settings and options and variables that you might never need another RTS.

So after that third attempt (my fifth attempt overall), I threw in the towel. Not because I don’t want to know what happens. I sort of do. It’s an intriguing story and for all its frivolity, the plot has at least a couple of exciting reveals. The simplistic characters are appealing enough and their forced conflicts are no worse than something you’d see in the average TV show. But I learned my lesson after six seasons of Lost. Sunken cost fallacy is a terrible reason to watch a TV show or play a game. I’ve learned that it’s okay to bail on a story once the storyteller has betrayed your trust. I’ve learned that uninstalling The Next World is the choice to make instead of playing it a sixth time.

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

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

A pretty good game about a malicious gremlin underworld.

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.

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.

Is it a good game? That’s the wrong question. The truest thing about Far Cry Primal is that above all else, and at the expense of all else, it’s an effective game.

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

In other words, not so much a game as a tool to drive traffic to someone’s YouTube channel. That’s not game development. It’s pandering.

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

Firewatch probably should have been a short movie. Or a short story. Or a radio play. It should have been something other than a minimally interactive multi-hour first-person perspective videogame. It’s too modest an undertaking, too divorced from any meaningful player involvement. It is not the stuff of videogames. It doesn’t work.

It’s a careful, intricate, and skillful creation that no one can accuse of being too short. But as a game that does nothing other than teach you how to play, it is perhaps the most meaningless game I’ve ever played. Considering the games I’ve played, that’s saying a lot.

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

It’s no surprise Treyarch also has no idea how to establish or develop a character. Which is an okay thing to have no idea how to do. Treyarch is making a shooter, not writing a Chekhov play. But Treyarch’s sin is not knowing this about themselves. Treyarch’s sin is shoving your face into a trough of narrative slop and holding your head down for minutes at a time. And furthermore thinking this is what you want. Long bouts of serious and seriously incoherent story. I have a suggestion for people who make games: if your storytelling skills aren’t up to par, if your game isn’t conducive to telling stories, don’t spend so much time on the story.

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

But without a sandbox mode, or challenge scenarios, or Anno 2070’s grindy but gratifying system of scientific advances, 2205 doesn’t have the infinite replayability you get in the best city builders. That’s probably a good thing. The last thing I need is a city builder this good with infinite replayability.

If only the Disney Infinity game had been crafted with half as much care, love, and attention as the Disney Infinity sculptures.

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.

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.

It’s clever enough, I suppose. But is it worth 100 floors of bare-bones rogue-like? Hardly.

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.

I admire what League of Geeks has attempted because I’m their target audience. But it’s deeply frustrating to peer down through this smear of bad decisions at a design I really want to play. This should be a great fifteen-minute adventure. It has the necessary components: smart interlocking gameplay systems, snappy pacing, adorable artwork and animation, a truly imaginative setting. But it’s not a fifteen minute adventure. It’s an hour-long interface nightmare. Armello, which would be a great boardgame, is a terrible videogame.

For all the RTS experience Eugen brings this game, for all the carefully calculated resource management, for all the probably meticulous unit balance, for all the competent interface features, for all the map design and fiery explosions and destructible building and dynamic cratering, Act of Aggression feels like leftovers when it comes to action RTS thrills. An RTS without personality just isn’t an RTS worth playing.

The developers at Abbey Games (ah, no wonder the abbess was such a tough cookie!) have created a thoroughly charming encounter system that sets it apart from the usual tactical combat.

Here I am, essentially piecing together the cure for cancer on a cocktail napkin. For science? For prestige? For quality of life? Don’t be silly. It’s all for money. Call it evil, call it efficient, or call it American. But whatever you do, call it profitable and call it Big Pharma.

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

A creative new take on space-themed videogames that merges the deep, thoughtful gameplay of real-time strategies with the intuitive accessibility of physics-based games.

It all comes down to one burning question I have while I’m waiting for stuff to happen in Cosmonautica: why aren’t I just playing Space Colony?

The real problem is that your $30 gets you a shameful assortment of bugs, glitches, and control issues. You can’t control flying vehicles with a mouse. It doesn’t play well if you try to split control between a mouse and gamepad. The keybinds are listed incorrectly. Some of the graphics are clipped in half, as if they’re hiding behind an invisible wall.

It’s splashy and accessible, but intricate and skill-based. It’s alternately frantic and methodical. You can just plow through it mindlessly or you can optimize your character build and hone your favorite gear. You can tweak the difficulty as you go, keep it breezy, or crank it up to 11. Explore the wide-openness or follow the main quest marker to the end. But if you’re into action RPGs, whether you’re a Sacred 2 fanatic or Diablo III weekender or someone in between, Victor Vran is a name worth noting.

These new heroes are a joy to discover, but the game doesn’t give you any incentive to explore them. Without a new game plus mode or even difficulty options, Guild of Dungeoneering feels very once-and-done. This is a terrible way for a rogue-like to feel. Just as the lack of documentation and tuning is a terrible thing to do to such a clever, addicting, and charmingly presented concept like this. If there’s one thing worse than not telling me how to play your game, it’s revealing to me I no longer need to play it once I’ve figured it out. Sadly, that’s the case with Guild of Dungeoneering.

It’s a dry exercise in competitive mathing that happens to have pictures under the numbers.

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.

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.

A brilliant and subversive take on tactical RPGs, is for the rest of us. Bravo, Double Fine. It’s easy enough to make a good game a lot of people will like. It’s not so easy to make a great game only some people will love.

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

But part of what I love about any good RTS is figuring out ways to trump any given strategy. The Swords & Soldiers games have small tech trees, but that makes the choices all the more meaningful.

It's the latter-day high-octane car smashing ped mashing antidote to racing games.

For such a smart design, it’s got an appallingly bad implementation.

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?

Ironcast exists admirably outside the match-3ing.

It’s a wonderfully gratifying take on the idea of a collectible card game, on the concept of leveling up, on rewarding failure as well as success, on marking progress through defeat and victory.

Fantasy Flight went to all the hard work of porting Battlelore without giving us a meaningful way to enjoy it.

Since there’s no way to play the campaign multiplayer, you’re stuck beating up the sad confused AI players in space, while falling prey to its ruthless efficiency planetside.

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.

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.

For a wonderfully plucky exercise in territory control, chess-like simplicity, mana management, landscaping, and rampaging bears, A Druid Duel has dropped its gauntlet at your feet.

Cute stuff, this is definitely the B-side table of this pack.

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.

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.

Grey Goo is a dry and forgettable B-side RTS with no advantage over other RTSs save the fact that it was more recently released.

There’s something uniquely thriling about all the crazy futuristic touches in Trials Fusion, with sliding platforms and hoverships and weird purple alloys and force fields. I say that I couldn’t care less about all the customizable constume bits, but I still find myself playing dress up with my motorcyclist. I mean, I paid to unlock those costume bits, so I might as well use them.

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.

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.

All the decisions I’ve made have snowballed into a massive unwieldy clockwork of inconsequence, lumbering towards an inevitable conclusion like a giant Katamari ball consisting of all those little decisions, none of them steering it in any meaningful way, but each of them lending the monstrosity a tiny bit of mass. Then the ball reaches the requisite mass and a screen tells me I’ve won and I’m back at the main menu. No recap, no score breakdown, no map to admire, no ranking. Poof.

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.

It’s a bad sign that the weakest parts of Alien: Isolation are the parts with the alien. You’d think getting that right would be a priority. Instead, the best parts of the game involve running around space corridors and turning space handles and flipping space switches and pressing space buttons and getting through space doors and turning on space generators. But then an alien comes along and forces you to play something else entirely.

The most disappointing thing about Forza Horizon 2 is how little it’s improved since the first Horizon. There is still no meaningful career progression or economy. The career is quite literally running a circle around six chunks of Europe, over and over and over again, in the pursuit of colored bracelets with, as far as I can tell, no significance. Canned bucket list challenges and barn scavenger hunts supposedly break up the action if you feel like heading off in that direction.

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

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 lack of variety is just another bad call in a series of bad calls. With only a single faction, with nothing resembling a tech tree or upgrades, with maps having only a single shape (a sphere inside a sphere) that negates terrain, Planetary Annihilation misses many of the elements that make a good RTS a good RTS. It instead is so in love with its concept, which isn’t very good in the first place, that it never gets around to the vital business of being a good game.

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.

The draw of the Cold War setting, the visual aesthetic, and the soundtrack only last so long. And all too quickly, Counterspy gets left out in the cold.

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.

The question isn’t “why would you play a game about that?” The question is “why wouldn’t you play a game about that?” If only those people on that bus knew what they were missing.

It’s not survival horror with trucks. It’s survival horror for trucks. You as a driver, as a person, as a foot on a gas pedal and a pair of hands, don’t exist. Whether it’s because Oovee didn’t want to fuss with character models or because it’s an intentional effort to focus on the element of machines vs nature without mere humanity in the middle to muck it all up, the world of Spintires is like Maximum Overdrive, that dopey horror movie where trucks come alive and drive themselves around. Not for the cheese factor, of course.

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

Wildstar, which has very little sense of identity, which has very little pull, which feels like a collection of features, which has a subscription fee, was a relic as soon as it was released. And I’m afraid one of the most trenchant facts about it is one of the worst things you could say about any MMO: it’s going to be easy to stop playing.

Get ready for a new generation of zombie-slaying thrills where there's only minimal gameplay to get in the way of the thrills!

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.

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

Tropico 5 just doesn’t do anything with its new mechanics to advance the franchise. It’s an old man, wearing a shabby uniform, drunkenly partying in the palace. Sometimes it has moments of brilliance, but it’s mostly just waiting for the next revolution.

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.

I recall Bastion feeling far more open ended, offering me a scoring challenge and plenty of incentive to boost the difficulty level. But Transistor commits the cardinal sin of not making me want to keep going. It feels as if it’s ended before it’s over. The new game plus should be the opportunity to flex everything I’ve unlocked and yet here I am using the same tools, with no reason to raise the difficulty because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all it has to offer.

Sir You Are Being Hunted has revealed all it has — much of which is tedious or repetitive — after a few hours.

Ships that trip over each other and bumble around islands and pivot in the water and soak up an indeterminate amount of damage and, worst of all, relate poorly to the rest of the game. This is not the naval counterpart to Eugen’s smart implementation of air power. Why couldn’t they come up with a similarly graceful way to head out to sea? Why is Wargame: Red Dragon yet another RTS added to the wet heap of naval systems worth ignoring?

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.

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.

Second Son looks fantastic and from a technical perspective, it’s a pretty impressive feat especially given that the game is out less than six months from the release of the Playstation 4. Unfortunately the gameplay isn’t up to par with the light show. Like the neon that Delsin channels, it’s all light and no heat.

Infested Planet is all about the flow of this dynamic give-and-take, back-and-forth, thrust-and-parry, feint-and-regroup, upgrade and counter upgrade. Other real time strategy games are battle lines smashing into each other, often won by sheer force or snowballing advantages, messy, fraught with loss. Infested Planet is a dance.

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.