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.