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.

Carmageddon: Max Damage is unique, hilarious, a little long in the tooth, and a comedy Charles B. Griffith would be proud to have inspired.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ironcast exists admirably outside the match-3ing.

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.

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.

Like Anno 1800, it gives you plenty of tools to watch and admire, but unlike Anno 1800, it’s got all the time in the world for watching and admiring. The scenery goes by, the tracks rattle, the whistle blows, the truck’s engine purrs, the boat drifts lazily downriver, the plane banks and dips toward the runway. No one is pushing me to get out and build new plantain farms. There is no opponent AI whose company might get in the way of whatever railroad route I build later. There is no multiplayer. It’s just me and a map of stuff that wants to get somewhere else, waiting patiently for me to build it a way.

This game is crazy Neapolitan through and through, with a sense of mad glee for how frequently and flagrantly it breaks the rules.

I'm guessing the average shmup fan is going to gladly part with the full four dollars.

When the puzzle elements fall away and you’ve established a rapport with the hardware, and perhaps even an affection for its idiosyncrasies, you’re sitting in Dan O’Bannon’s chair. Now you’re Pinback. Now that galloping finger jab — right-left-right-left — actually does something.

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

If your kids/wife/girlfriend/parents can grok a finicky numbers game, this will be right up their alley. But otherwise, this is a videoboardgame for hardcore strategy nerds. Who don't mind playing with Miis.

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

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.

The first hour or so are intentionally insufferable. Some of the best horror takes its time establishing what’s normal, because it has to show you what it’s going to break. Without normal, you wouldn’t know what’s weird. Without real, you wouldn’t know what’s surreal. Without victims, you wouldn’t know what’s monstrous. Without the anime dating sim, you wouldn’t know Doki Doki Literature Club.

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.

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.

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

A pretty good game about a malicious gremlin underworld.

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.

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.

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.

At last, the single-player Netrunner videogame I've been waiting for someone to make!