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.

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.

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.

What if there were a Dark Souls for people who want something to do instead of play the same boss fight over and over until I get lucky and don't die? Well, this is! And this is it!

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.

Hover isn’t just free-form faffing about. There’s a movement here and if you want to join it, well…I’ll let you discover that stuff. Even anarchists’ playgrounds can have structured activities.

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.

What’s most remarkable about Stars in Shadow is that it holds it own among arguably better games like Endless Space 2, Galactic Civilizations III, Star Ruler 2, and Stellaris. Those games all embrace the epic sweep of science fiction with detail and breadth. They must do everything and they must do it epicly. After all, if it’s out in space, it has to be as vast and formidable as space itself. But Stars in Shadow, by contrast, knows how to do something too few games do. It knows how to focus.

Tightly pieced together, efficient, muscular if not nimble.

For parents, this is a sure-fire hit. For Gamers, keep an open mind. There is something under the cuddly hood. For Gamer parents, don't pass this up.

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.

In this situation, my diplomatic standing with a neighboring regime, the loyalty of some of my leaders, my regime’s profile, the units I can use in my army, the stratagem cards I’ll be able to draw, and global bonuses for diplomacy, food income, and combat are all connected. I hope it’s not a spoiler to tell you that a war with Tiefmark — an avoidable war — broke out a few turns later.

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

Choose a lane, endure, upgrade, push, endure, upgrade, push, repeat. I forget, does familiarity breed contempt or content?

But I love that someone is still making - and putting onto the iTunes store - something so barely this side of the theoretical stages. Fertang has about as much dressing as it can bear before becoming something else.

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.

In Forza Horizon, racing is rubbing, wrecking, banging, and rewinding. Without a meaningful economy, there's no incentive to drive anything other than completely wrecklessly. The driving physics concur. This is one of those games that has no solution to the problem of videogames teaching kids that the best way to keep inside a turn is to bounce off the side of another car. Bounce off other cars, rear end the guy in front of you to slow down, and cut across corners with impunity.

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.

If you play shmups because you like to wrestle with cool scoring systems, there's not much here for you. But if you play shmups for the mindlessness of dodging bullets and watching things blow up, this is a viable choice: crisp, lively, loud, busy, obligingly World War II.

Amber Route is nothing if not educational.

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

A spirited shooter with an admirable commitment to aesthetic, but without the game design chops to pull off the progression system it wants to offer.

This is state-of-the-art for action RPGs in Soldak’s fantasy worlds.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is one of the worst games I've really liked in a long 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.

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’s mostly a numbers-heavy realtime party-based dungeon crawl combat extravaganza. Sci fi, to boot. You’d think the developers at Quadro Delta would come up with a more thematic title to distinguish it from their previous game, Pixel Piracy. That one wasn’t sci-fi. It was your garden variety Caribbean pirates, but in pixels.

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