It has a lot to say about women, sexual violence, the power dynamics of sex between genders, and how society often views gay sex through the lens of straight men. Rather than coding its ideology in metaphor or subtext, it’s danced right in front of you. Agony knows exactly what it’s saying. Fortunately, you don’t have to listen.

If Yoku’s Island Express is not only a terrific Metroid-inspired pinball game but also a game about biting moral choices—shit, man. I didn't need another reason to keep playing, but there you go.

The real issue in State of Decay 2 is how little investment it manages to earn. In its function, it feels like a world founded on the idea that if you can just imbue it with enough randomness, enough player-independent activity and interaction, enough probabilistic cogs and gears to let random characters and random story beats to fit together, we can imbue that world with life as well. But rather than a world, we get an infinite nothing. And State of Decay 2 ends up feeling a lot like the zombies the populate it: All movement and raw appetite, with not even the faintest heartbeat to be heard.

It’s best moments are familiar because they are part of that sturdy, underlying Total War formula, but even here they quickly become repetitive. Yet when it attempts to do something new and to be something new, Thrones of Britannia seems to lack any kind of compelling original vision for what a Total War game can be.

A weight of expectation and obligation detracts from an otherwise great narrative adventure about colonialism and its politics.

The more I play BattleTech, the more violent it gets, and the more violent it gets, the more I love it.

Somehow, in a game about gods fighting other gods, God of War feels grounded. And because of some of the new directions it moves the series in, it has the room to explore this mythological family drama. By giving God of War small stake tension, the whole thing benefits.

New changes to the structure are welcomed, but 'Far Cry 5' has no confidence and no heart.

Again and again, Far Cry 5 served up its opposite: Moments that were incredibly loud, but increasingly timid. And because of that, Far Cry 5 itself will always be more of a curiosity than a destination.

It's a marginal improvement, but it's got one thing the original no longer does: lots of people playing it.

I survived Mars. My reward was a self-sustaining economic engine serving no end greater than its own perpetuation. It was dozens of millions of miles from Earth, and I felt like I’d gone nowhere.

Just as FTL got to the heart of space opera—the experimental ship, the camaraderie of a ragtag crew, the spiraling of crises—Subset Games has found the core of the mech fantasy with Into the Breach.

Moss is a terrific example of what happens when VR, as a medium, begins to find its own language of expression, both in art and design. It’s a game that, when asked for words to describe it, magic comes to mind.

Rise and Fall is aware that there is far more about the history of human civilization that a game of the same name could and perhaps should attempt to capture. But we already have a clean, simple story. Everything else can exist at the edges, included, but not so important that you can’t ignore it.

The narrative decision to limit A.R.I.D. isn’t the problem, it’s the repetitive framing.

But here’s the biggest goan-worthy element: along with all that 80s nostalgia is an unfortunate helping of stereotypes that seem like they're more about people than the tropes of retro pop-culture.

Any game that makes me want to face off against hours of challenging fights is something special.

Watching the creatures of Monster Hunter: World leap, and climb, and lunge isn’t like watching an enemy in a video game. It’s like being a kid and seeing a plane lift off the runway for the first time, or an elephant picking up speed, ears flapping, or a cruise ship coming too-quickly into harbor. This is the sort of scale where disaster seems imminent, always...In its very best moments, Monster Hunter World captures that feeling, and shifts it only a little, by testing whether you or the monster will be the disaster.

The new game from the creators of 'Gods Will Be Watching" has bold, refreshing ideas about future sex—but also a pitfall into transphobia.

Unfortunately, its good ideas are never given enough room to breathe.

Top to bottom, Sonic Forces didn’t click for me, and even now, I stand by that. I’ve never been convinced by Sega’s meandering attempts to convert Sonic into 3D, believing the Mario-esque Sonic Adventure to be the most successful attempt. Sonic Forces only underscored my original issues. Sure, some have been better than others— Lost World, Generations—but for a franchise about speed, it’s never been able to meaningfully capture that feeling for more than a few moments.

The combat isn't especially deep, but successfully getting through a challenging encounter is rewarding. The game's story has been hit-or-miss, but some of the hits have been dead on—I especially enjoy how they're playing out the ethnic and political divides among Greek, Egyptian, and Roman characters. And hey, I say this with some degree of trepidation, but so far the loot has been pretty fun to get. But my fear is that no one will see that Origins is actually a competent and enjoyable action RPG and instead bounce off of the aimless intro.

272 moons later, I've "beaten" Super Mario Odyssey, but it feels like I've only scratched the surface of Mario's latest, a breathlessly creative adventure equal parts surprising and bewildering—in a good way.

The series, rather than making large structural changes from game to game or adding many additional systems, finds more nuance and complexity in the encounter and level design that was created to hold a great deal of depth, and Etrian Odyssey V—which released this week—is particularly, even for the series, stripped to what it's always been and what it's always been good at.

The Evil Within was more tense than scary, dropping players into claustrophobic spaces where survival lived on a razor's edge, ammunition always at a minimum. The Evil Within 2 is exactly the opposite, with open spaces and an emphasis on exploration, experimentation, and ample time to hide, scheme, ambush. It's shockingly good.

The Evil Within 2 ultimately feels a lot like Friday the 13th Part 2. The original Friday the 13th might get all the credit for being the origin of a famous series (and having a fantastic cliffhanger), but it's just an okay movie. Part 2 is where the series found its footing, moving beyond an empty clone of a popular horror subgenre. The pieces were all there, but the deck needed to be reshuffled to made it click. The Evil Within 2 clicks.

I still want to explore that world, and maybe as I do more Adventures and Lost Sectors I'll be able to do so, but in its main campaign Destiny 2 is stubbornly, resolutely avoidant of its own themes and contradictions. It stirs from its complacency just a bit at the start, only to rock itself back to sleep listening to the percussive rhythms of combat.

Playing Absolver scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. It's similar enough to the things it takes inspiration from to make me comfortable, but different enough to keep me playing. Above all, it got me excited about the fighting game genre in a way I haven't been since the first time I played Super Smash Bros. or read about Thrill Kill. That alone is worth the price of admission.