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.