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.

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.

What really kills Banished for me is the overwhelming sense of pointlessness. There are no goals, no scenarios, no unlockables, no longterm luxury goods or endgame wonders or upper level populations or advanced buildings. There is no finale. There is, instead, a world without end.

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.

The reason to play Our Darker Purpose is for a hopeful sense of what it might eventually become if the developers at Avidly Wild Games can make it less ponderous. Because it looks and sounds great, with scads of insidious Victorian style where Binding of Isaac has only its weird coarseness.

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.

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.

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

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.

There’s no game like State of Decay for dropping you into a zombie apocalypse, and now there’s no survival game quite like Breakdown’s score-based challenge with its inevitable failure bearing down on you. it’s all futile, but what a grim drama you’ll unfold on the way to your demise.

Perhaps most disappointing of all is the actual world. The map consists of long wending noodles of road draped over Frostbite landscapes. It’s built for you to drive fast and bang into cars, so it minimizes the concept of mastering a route or reacting to the road. It’s all long, thin, shallow. This means there’s little sense of place. There is minimal traffic. There are too few opportunities to actually turn onto another road or take a shortcut. The world even feels small. You’ll be chasing someone, or running from someone, and suddenly you’re back where you were just a little while ago. It all feels so constrained.

A mess. This is no surprise given Egosoft’s penchant for releasing messes and then tidying them up after the fact. But the problem with X Rebirth is that it’s a different kind of mess than the previous games, in new and terribly wrong ways that are beyond tidying up. X Rebirth doesn’t seem to understand what people liked about the previous games. It is a game based on misguided assumptions.

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.

I really can’t figure out why this game exists other than the desire to cash in on the work done by Rocksteady. The combat isn’t as good, the story is weak and meaningless, all tension drained from it because we know that nothing bad happens to anyone as they’re all around in Arkham Asylum, and the gadgets are either exactly the same or have the barest of cosmetic differences to distinguish them from previous games’ gadgets.

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.

Unlike Spelunky, most players will see the end before their hundredth death. Onwards! There are cute monsters to kill.

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.

And so that’s the sum total of Call of Duty: Ghosts. The disappointing single-player, the usual multiplayer, the slightly confused squad bot matches, and a nifty co-op Infestation mode that could use more maps.

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.

Its strength is that it’s the polar opposite of so many strategy games that push inevitability in another direction. Thanks partly to dumb AI and your superior resources, you will prevail no matter what, or you will reload or start over until you prevail.

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.

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!

But Beyond: Two Souls is far worse than convenient, facile, and ridiculous. It’s overall tone is low-key and morose, without energy or enthusiasm. Scenes drag out, with long pauses. Glances shift awkwardly. Character models fidget. This is about an eight hour game, but I’d estimate two or three of those hours are pregnant pauses.

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

The primary accomplishment in Grand Theft Auto V isn’t gameplay. It’s character. Grand Theft Auto V believes so strongly in its characters that everything else — even gameplay — is secondary.

Not that they don’t deserve a tip. Am I railing against this game in particular or the financial ecosystem in which it exists? Who can tell anymore? But rest assured that Dead Man’s Draw is a fantastic game only slightly tainted by the lure of filthy microlucre.

When it clicks, the game is second-to-none which is why I’ll continue to play despite its many issues. With no campaign, spotty multiplayer, and poor canned scenarios, Arma III just isn’t a complete product at this time.

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.

I am astonished at the state of this game. Did they think that I wouldn’t notice the clumsy interface, the wretched documentation, the absolutely untenable naval combat, the weird bugs, the lock-ups, the game-killing glitches? Did they think I wouldn’t notice the AI? Did they really think this was an acceptable AI for a single-player game? A single player game with disappointing multiplayer compared to the clever multiplayer in their last release?

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

The bottom line is that I’m complaining because the action, the gunplay, the visuals, the demanding teamwork, the ultimate sense of gratification from leveling up and mastering the levels are all pretty much unparalleled, even if they could have been situated into a better gameplay structure. Payday 2 is a wonderful shooter that stands alone in a genre full of me-toos, wanna-bes, and coulda-beens.

Race the Sun is far too gorgeously hypnotic to be an endless runner.

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.

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.

Without a solid foundation — namely, a better RTS at the bottom of everything — Dragon Commander is a frail novelty that will fall apart shortly after you’ve handled it.

Legendary Heroes makes Fallen Enchantress the game it’s wanted to be all along.

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

Without a more effective delivery system than a single checkpoint overwriting all your other progress, the Faction Pack is a frustrating example of death by linearity.

A terrible iOS port.

Amber Route is nothing if not educational.

So the prominent new feature in Magic 2014 is the ability to pay Wizards of the Coast extra money each time you play it. What a horribly crass presentation of a wonderful feature. It sits like a stinking hole in the middle of an otherwise presentable game and therefore completely undermines any reason to play this when you could instead be enjoying last year’s planechases.

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.

It peppers the game with busywork where you’d normally be hitting “next turn” over and over, waiting to administer a beating to the game’s brain dead military. Now you’re playing on turf where the AI is stronger, managing the strategy level of the game, finessing the economy, wrangling trade routes, expanding out into the map. It helps the pacing in a not very good game where pacing was one of the significant problems. So if I’m going to play Civilization V, the best thing I can say about Brave New World is that this is the preferred way to do it.

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.

Company of Heroes 2 might be the steepest tumble from game design genius to crassly missing the point that I’ve ever seen.

The balance of combat, stealth, scavenging, and environmental interactivity is perfect.

This glee is where Marvel Heroes has enough pull to make up for its various shortcomings. It might take time.

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.

Only the great RTSs do it with this much flavor. And none do it with modern warfare, give or take thirty years, as well as AirLand Battle.

If only the game mechanics were as clearly laid out as the business model.

Van Helsing starts out slow and takes a while to get not terrible.

Does it sound complicated? It eventually is. It takes a while to get here, and there are plenty of lower level achievements to chase. Once you get to the harder challenges, Reus can be a little bit brutal.

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.

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.

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

Like any great action RPG, the game is about tuning a character build, and shepherding it through increasingly difficult variations of the same things you’ve been doing all along, with friends, strangers, or an AI along for the ride. But unlike many such games, it’s got one hell of a story, insidiously barbed gameplay hooks, and the sort of infinite lifespan that makes your Vita worth the money you spent.

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.

These canned side quests are a pretty poor substitute for whatever entertainment you and your friends might normally wring from a real-world copy of Talisman.

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.

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.

Defiance is mostly lacking meaningful connective tissue. It fails at the fundamental task of feeling like a thoughtfully designed and polished game. It fails at feeling like a world. It fails at giving you much to look forward to once you’ve realized you’ve seen most of what it’s ever going to do. You can only get so far with “it’s fun to shoot stuff”. About Defiance far.

Something as imaginatively conceived and cunningly executed as Song-froid needs a longer lifespan than its 20 calendar days. Games this good don’t come around often enough, and this one could probably only come from a group of independent and inexperienced developers who don’t know enough to know that what they’re doing is, well, kind of unprecedented.

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.

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.

Totems is also the perilous guesswork of calculating who has how many of what left, with some brinksmanship about who will hold out with the last monkey or wolf. It’s not over until it’s over, and in the context of its clean simple gameplay and evocatively primeval artwork, there will many reversals of fortune along the way.

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.

This is another rare game that’s far too good to be trapped on a Nintendo system.

The campaign is poorly written, poorly acted, erratically paced, full of pointless upgrades and meaningless choices, crammed full of overproduced cutscenes that fail to relate to the gameplay, and without a shred of creative insight into how to use a real time strategy game to tell a story, much less how to get me to click "next mission" without heaving a tired sigh. For all their incomparable game design smarts, Blizzard remains one of the worst storytellers in the business, partly for how hard they try and mostly for how spectacularly they fail.

If Electronic Arts is going to make a game with the basic premise being that no city is an island, if they're going to stress the interaction among cities, if they're going to make playing alongside other people a cornerstone of the design, if they're going to force my creations into tiny boxes that cannot exist past a certain point without the help of other tiny boxes, they're going to have to do the hard work of making it actually work. And ideally, that hard work should be done before they sell people the game, not after they've been caught flat-footed for botching it so completely.

Brutal Legend is better than it’s ever been, both as a single-player open-world game unlike any you’ve ever played and as one of the best unique takes on real-time strategy since Sacrifice.

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.

It’s a minor miracle that Arcen Games could revise Valley Without Wind 1 so completely without simply upgrading it, that they have instead made a completely separate game that plays so differently and creates a unique type of experience based on getting your ass kicked.

A solid idea that needs a bit more work to be a good game. Right now, it’s as merely clerical as the name implies.

Utterly flubs the fine art of shooting cool guns at freaky things in space dungeons. And it has a terrible weapon progression system and cut-rate production values, to boot. Plus, there are no predators, which is apparently what it takes to make an aliens game that isn’t awful.

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.

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.

Campus Life clearly wants you to come back more often so you sit through more full-screen ads.

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.

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.

After the utter genius of Bug Princess, and the inspired lunacy of Deathsmiles, and the sleek clean action of Espgaluda, I can give Cave a pass for the generic robotery of their other Dodonpachi, subtitled Resurrection. But whatever's going on in Dodonpachi Maximum, a sprawl of sterile color and rote action without character, is perhaps the first Cave game I can easily do without.

Because of its smooth strategic flow, Planets under Attack is one of the best couch strategy games since Risk Factions. But since Planets under Attack is always and only real-time, it's arguably an even better couch game.

Speaking of shameless, Guardians of Middle Earth is unabashedly grind-based. As you play, you earn ingame currency you spend on new characters, on slottable character improvements, and on potions that you can use once. Potions that drain your resources so you have to keep playing to stay competitive. Weak potions are cheap. Powerful potions aren't. Spend to win.

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.

What ultimately makes Little Inferno special is the story that swirls out like tendrils of smoke.

The constant parallels to Super Smash Bros. eventually undermine Playstation All-Stars, which has nowhere near the generosity, enthusiasm, or longevity of a Super Smash Bros.

Even though the visuals suffer in their tininess, none of the basic Assassin's Creeding is compromised. This is a full-blown counterpart to Assassin's Creed 3, with its own setting, style, character, and location. Bravo, Ubisoft.

Zombie U is the single most promising, enthralling, and unique game on the Wii U and I would definitely say this is the best multiplayer game of the year.

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?

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.

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.

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.

In a game where experience points and stress levels are role-playing elements, not visually presenting your earned experience or a level up screen is a serious omission.

You can't take up the slack for the miserable AI by playing multiplayer, because there is no online multiplayer support, asynchronous or otherwise.

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.