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.

Gearbox is at their best when they’re engineering the act of shooting something. If their game would just shut up and let the gleeful gunplay speak for itself, Borderlands would go a lot further. Instead, the gunplay is clogged up with meaningless loot, smugly unfunny jokes, and lots of using the same ol’ gun while waiting for the parsimonious skill point drip to finally drop. Where’s the glee in all that?

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.

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.

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.

In the campaign, white phosphorus is a horrific set-piece accompanied by screams and whimpers. That’s some heavy shit. In multiplayer, white phosphorus is a reward for competent play that brings high-fives and fierce guitar licks. That’s some badass shit, Bro! You can have this cake and you can eat it, Modern Warfare assures us. In past installments, this dissonance would be funny, but here, it’s another reminder that these are really two separate games, and never shall the twain meet.

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.

This is the same disappointing strategy game it was a year and a half ago, except that it now has two finicky and mostly unimpressive systems shoehorned in.

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

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.

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.

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.

A middling open-world game can get by if it's well paced. The Saboteur and Prototype 2, for instance, weren't necessarily good, but they moved. Really moved. They pulled you forward, thanks in large part to great progression systems. There is no such sense of progression in Sleeping Dogs. You have a few tracks that gradually unlock moves you may never use.

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

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.

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

Valorant considers a standard match as best of thirteen rounds. Thirteen rounds! You don’t know which team is dominating in three rounds, Valorant? Because I sure do. It’s the team running rampant all over the map. Your Spike Rush mode is only slightly better at best of seven, but even that can drag. It’s all in service of the eSports focus. Anything quicker would be too fast for dramatic shows. Riot has made eSports their bread and butter, so it’s no surprise that Valorant is heavily skewed to that audience. Gone are the days of 1v1 arena fights in LAN tournaments with fullbright settings. One match. One result. One mistake and you were done. There were no upset wins or swings. You did a looping run from the railgun spawn and the keg of health and you didn’t dare deviate because it could all be over with one high-ping hit. Anyway, I’m old. Valorant has made me realize that I don’t recognize the landscape I grew up with. I’ll let the younger generation deal with Valorant’s sequel.

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

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

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 overall effect is like taking a broom or a flamethrower to the rules, completely undermining the game as designed. Which is something I couldn't be happier to see, because the game as designed is in dire need of undermining. If there's anything that can breathe life into Magic the Gathering, it's a shake-up like planechasing.