Gorgeous re-imagining of the original, lots of gaming for your buck.

inFamous suffers from a host of little problems, but all those minor missteps get smoothed over by the fact that you never want to stop playing the game. The makers of inFamous obeyed the cardinal rule of good game design: They kept everything fun.

Were it not for the Nintendo DS' low-res graphics, Peggle Dual Shot might well be considered a definitive version of the game. Packed with a great deal of content, it's a great time-killer that can make hour-long bus rides pass in the blink of an eye.

The fourth installment of Gears of War tells a lighter, more personal tale, but it always returns to the defiant thrill of survival. The silence of the music cutting out and the guns going quiet after the end of a terrible battle. The deep breath. It’s what the old character here is getting at, I think. In a place like Sera, where everything wants to kill you, the opportunity to fight—and win—is a blessing. I missed it, too.

Darkest Dungeon is a mean, capricious game. Success is a gambler’s thrill, addictive and illicit. It comes rarely.

In attempting to Sim everything, Spore tries to be all things to all people -- a strategy that never quite works out the way it's supposed to.

While Diabolical Box’s gameplay, animation and plot are quite a bit like its predecessor’s, slight improvements make this installment of the Professor Layton saga even more enjoyable than the last.

If you can master the foreign language of its combat, you’ll find Hyper Light Drifter screaming with life and unfamiliar menace, waiting for you to awaken its technological giants.

The game isn’t about slavish devotion to original recordings. It’s about the power of the DJ to transform.

Bulletstorm is the world's longest dick joke...Despite the fact that it boots you out to loading screens every time you finish a segment or die, it's a polished-enough piece of work. The point system incentivizes you to play the game using all the tools at your disposal...It's just a shame the developers couldn't stop thinking about reproductive anatomy.

You can beat the entire main story of Fallout: New Vegas in less than 20 hours, but that would be giving the game short shrift. It is really about savoring every little detail and side quest until you've seen everything there is to see.

Borderlands‘ story is paper-thin, a dollop of flavor draped over compelling gameplay.

All of Genshin Impact’s influences conspire to make the player feel very good, with or without microtransactions. Breath of the Waifu or a free, serotonin-packed RPG, Genshin Impact hits all the right buttons if you can get over the guilt. [Impressions]

Bulletstorm is the world's longest dick joke...Despite the fact that it boots you out to loading screens every time you finish a segment or die, it's a polished-enough piece of work. The point system incentivizes you to play the game using all the tools at your disposal...It's just a shame the developers couldn't stop thinking about reproductive anatomy.

Part of the appeal of the Ace Attorney series is the "Eureka!" moment, that feeling of brain satisfaction that can only come out of solving a particularly grueling puzzle using nothing but your wits. Ghost Trick has no eurekas, only "Oh … is that it?"

The game completely lacks scary moments; there is nothing going bump in the night. Actually, most all the levels take place in the daytime. They are very pretty levels, yes, although the RE5 team hasn't yet learned the tricks of the trade that other developers use to seamlessly blend them -- there are lots and lots of loading screens.

I truly believe that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided wants to be a political tentpole videogame. It just won’t let itself. It’s a metonym for big-budget gaming as a whole. These games, after all, are changing. In an increasingly broad and complex marketplace, they’re going to have to. And with those changes, there are going to be teams who want to use their platforms to tell authentically complex stories, to create games that aren’t afraid to believe things...Mankind Divided is a messy and ultimate broken step in that direction. But I sincerely doubt it’ll be the last.

The fact that Final Fantasy designers are so willing to experiment is a good thing, because it’ll keep the genre from dying off. But Final Fantasy XIII should be considered a failed experiment.

Electronic Symphony's best new feature is the ability to sort your favorite tunes into a specified order and play them straight through. Or you can have your favorite song run on an endless loop and relive that moment of pure ecstasy, where it's just you and the music.

That gripe aside, Splatoon 2 subtly refines its predecessor, glossing it with a fresh coat of ink and adapting it to the flexibility of the Switch.

A tumultuous blend of Prince of Persia-style jumping action and the "bullet hell" of insane shooters like Ikaruga. It's complex, difficult and a lot of fun.

Gameloft's complete incapacity for gameplay innovation and penchant for annoying players into spamming their own Facebook accounts drags Asphalt 7 down, but I'd be lying if I said it's not the best arcade racer available for iPhone and iPad.

Rhythm Heaven Fever boasts a staggeringly extensive soundtrack of catchy tunes covering an array of different genres, from head-pounding rock to way-too-sweet pop, everything with a distinct Japanese style. Kicking back and listening to the music is the single biggest stress reliever when you're getting frustrated by the high difficulty.

I wish I could recommend Sleeping Dogs with no reservations. The story is excellent, the gameplay has flashes of brilliance and the mission structuring makes it rather addictive. It's hard to ignore all the little problems that keep presenting themselves, but not one of them is troublesome enough to make you stop playing.

Rhythm Heaven is exactly the sort of novel, deep, challenging game that people accuse Nintendo of not creating anymore. Play it.

When presented with an infinite number of possible resolutions, any answer is going to feel arbitrary. Alan Wake starts strong but finishes weak; neither the gameplay nor the story deliver on their potential by the time the credits roll.

Brütal Legend does a lot of things wonderfully: It’s a technically adept, graphically beautiful game with a surprisingly good story and a great soundtrack. The hybrid gameplay just doesn’t meet these high standards.

The smartest design choice in Duskers is also the one most likely to put players off, initially: the command-line interface.

So I forget what happened. The important thing is, Resident Evil Revelations is a kickass action game. It follows in the footsteps of Resident Evil 5, ditching the plodding "survive against insurmountable odds" gameplay of the early games in the series and going straight to "make zombies explode into a pile of goo with a machine gun." This is the first game I've played on 3DS that really pushes the hardware - if you want a 3-D graphical showpiece for your new console, this will be the game you brag to your friends about.

Stands out among the throng of generic point-and-click adventure games. The atmosphere remains tense and dark throughout the entire game, and when you finally plow through the story's last couple of twists, you'll be glad you played the whole thing.

A final excursion into the world of Dark Souls—the developers have said that this will be the final game in the main series, at least for the foreseeable future—to try to understand its pleasures. I’ve loved all these games. But here, at the very end, I’m asking the same questions I asked at the very start: Is this journey worth taking? I want to see the Ringed City, uncover its secrets, and try to figure out what it’s doing here. I’m prepared to die; not because I want to die, but because it seems worth it. Sword and shield raised, I charge in.

I enjoyed Shooter 2 enough to recommend it, but I don't see myself replaying levels in order to find all the secrets, like I did for the first game. At least not without help.

On their own, the adventure and puzzle segments of Henry Hatsworth would not be especially interesting videogames. But this experiment succeeds because of how well the two genres play off one another. While certain level elements can feel monotonous, the core experience is sound, delivering controlled chaos into the palms of your achy, sweating hands.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot has plenty of creepy moments, but it favors action over atmosphere. To that end it performs very well, and even throws in some juicy plot twists and a cliffhanger ending. But I miss the tension of the original, just the same.

Brütal Legend does a lot of things wonderfully: It’s a technically adept, graphically beautiful game with a surprisingly good story and a great soundtrack. The hybrid gameplay just doesn’t meet these high standards.

Its blend of action, strategy and atmospheric tension perfectly complement the film series it's based on. Assault on Dark Athena sets a new standard for games based on films.

[Mario Kart Wii's Battle Mode] is no longer a last-man-standing contest: Matches now last three minutes each, and if your kart takes too much damage, don't worry! You'll just respawn. Even worse, all battles are now played in teams of two. So while you can still have four human players, they can't all face off against each other -- and what's the point of that?

The miracle of The Last Guardian is not that it escaped development hell, but that it did so with an unwavering vision as clear and uncompromised as it was on its first day. Not only is there a game available this week called The Last Guardian, that game is The Last Guardian.

Even without a story to speak of, Etrian Odyssey II does exactly what it was meant to do: It provides a ridiculous level of challenge coupled with weeks, if not months, of classic gameplay to an audience who still desires that sort of thing.

The campaign mode is a fun, lengthy, well-polished experience. But the reason most people pick up a strategy game in the first place is to meet new and interesting people and crush them mercilessly.

While Halo Wars won't be relieving strategy fans of their mice and keyboards, Ensemble Studios has crafted a genuinely fun experience. There are drawbacks, but those new to the genre likely won't even notice them, and Halo fans won't care. Most importantly, console fans finally have a genuinely good real-time strategy experience on their gaming platform of choice.

The final sequence of events is likely to eke some tears out of even the most cynical gamer.

It retains what fans love about the series and refuses to make any drastic changes. Long time fans will be absolutely ecstatic at this news, but for those of you who never got the appeal of Hot Shots in the first place, you certainly won't find it here.

The fighting stays fast-paced and engaging because you must constantly issue new orders.

Like its subjects, Blendo Games’ new PC puzzler Quadrilateral Cowboy is unafraid to be messy. It’s a puzzle game that doesn’t feel like one, a narrative game without a single speaking role. Taking place in a William Gibson-esque dreamscape, it puts you in the role of a slick hacker armed with clunky tech.

Unravel isn’t a bad videogame. It has some mild charm, and it’s one of the most visually stunning things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just unremarkable. Which is a pity, because with the clear passion that went into its development, it’s easy to picture it being so much more.

It's another three or four hours of solid entertainment.

Firewatch may leave you before you’re ready to be done with it; like Gone Home, Oxenfree et cetera it’s a six-hour experience that you can easily start after lunch and finish before bed. But it’s an emotional gut-punch all the way through, for many reasons, and largely a pleasure to explore and find yourself lost in—mentally, if not geographically. This is your next must-play story, another voyage to a place games don’t often take us.

EA Sports Active has its issues, but it’s a major step in the right direction.

Ultimately, the gameplay is a vast improvement over its predecessor, but the game is in most other respects dwarfed by more recent innovations in the genre.

You may find that you race through PinOut! real fast, especially if you put up for those sweet, sweet two-buck continues. But if you’re like me, you’ll look back on your neon-soaked journey with fondness.

In essence, if you're willing to suffer through some early balance issues, have a good guild to join and desire an MMO experience where you can kill other people to your heart's content, Age of Conan is the game for you.

It's tough to make the distinction between where Square Enix was deliberately preserving the game's nostalgic appeal, and where it was just cutting costs.

The elements added to Assassin's Creed: Revelations do make it feel like a more different and occasionally surprising experience compared to Brotherhood, which felt like an expansion pack. But at its core, we're still playing the same game for the third time.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot has plenty of creepy moments, but it favors action over atmosphere. To that end it performs very well, and even throws in some juicy plot twists and a cliffhanger ending. But I miss the tension of the original, just the same.

If Wii Sports was the Pong of our day, Wii Sports Resort is the Super Pong machine with color graphics and handball and hockey modes: Some of it is superfluous, but it’s worth the upgrade.

Besides its unique approach to game storyline delivery, which I think will be studied and copied in the future, Oxenfree shows some smart thinking about the relationship between games and players. It’s a unique mix that should make Night School’s future productions ones to watch, and this an auspicious debut.

Doesn't take gamers anywhere as exotic or over-the-top. And that's its charm. The realistic setting and complex control scheme make for an engaging single-player experience, but it's the wide range of online multiplayer options that make Skate gleam the cube.

I've never played anything quite like Red Steel 2, which lets you use swords and guns simultaneously, switching back and forth between wild swinging and precise aiming.

1979 Revolution forges something gripping and personal in the fires of a murky history...Khonsari hopes it does something even more powerful: Define a new genre of games, one his studio will lead.

After spending a few hours with Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, one thing I can say with certainty is that it has a powerful sense of drama. For a game based largely around shooting bad guys online with friends, it has a remarkable sense of pacing and mood. It’s dynamic, in the musical sense: loud, tense gunfights, separated by periods of exploring a ruined New York City in overwhelming silence.

Wii Fit feels very much like a version 1.0 trial run that's going to be made obsolete by a better sequel in six months. For now, it's absolutely worth giving it a try if you have a Wii, $90, and some extra pounds to lose.

O’Reilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an “organism that keeps going.” Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrate to your own whims. Strangely, this might be the most remarkable showcase of Everything‘s power: watching the perspective tumble through O’Reilly’s pocket dimension like a sort of high-tech nature documentary, moving from thing to thing until you discover something you’ve never seen, an object whose life you need to learn more about, and you’re moved to pick up the controller all over again and take it for a spin.

100 Rogues is the most user-friendly roguelike game - a type of RPG where dungeons are randomized, death is often permanent and movement is turn-based - I've ever played.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order looks and often feels like a generic Star Wars adventure, but Respawn elevates it nearly every step of the way. One doesn't necessarily expect a story about space wizards and evil empires to feel resonant, but this does, and it does so in a way that not many pieces of big-budget media do. Fallen Order is a game about confronting your past and fighting for the future when you don't know if that future is ever going to get better. That feels timely, and wrapped around that idea, the rest of the game just sings. If Fallen Order was connected to the Force, it would radiate power.

Most notably, the game design is innovative and daring, straddling a precarious line between 2-D and 3-D gameplay to make a game that feels contemporary while retaining the classic Metroid appeal.

Banjo is what you get when you put a lavish coat of polish on nothing: A beautiful, funny game with a clever concept that is utterly lacking in fundamentals.

How much you enjoy this sequel will depend almost entirely on your feelings for the first Under the Knife. If it left you wanting nothing more than another set of operations to tackle, you'll be in heaven. If you were hoping for a vastly improved scenario, you're out of luck.

Prey doesn’t understand itself, and it obliviously gets in its own way. It’s ultimately too broad and too undefined to achieve its own grand ambitions. Instead of proudly stating its own identity, Prey feels adrift, the way I was during that one sublime moment in space. Unmoored of itself, it asks questions that are worth pondering but doesn’t have any answers. Absent of those rejoinders, it loses its own shape, getting stuck in patterns it can’t break out of, drifting further and further away from land until the credits roll.

Fighting games excel at rewarding player investment, and if you're willing to put in the time and give Ultimate Match a chance, you will not be disappointed.

Case Zero does a fine job of illustrating the tension between the pure fun of offing the undead and the time-sensitive tasks that Chuck must accomplish to get his daughter her medicine.

There hasn't been a funnier, more singularly creative videogame since Brütal Legend. And where Double Fine disappointed some with odd game design choices, DeathSpank does nothing but please.

Unlike The World Ends With You, the under-appreciated Square Enix RPG for the Nintendo DS, Dissidia: Final Fantasy is unsuccessful in its attempt to fuse action and role-playing experimentation in a meaningful way. The pieces are all there, but the glue is too thin.

Despite some regrettable drawbacks and frustrations, Mirror's Edge is a singular and incredibly compelling experience. If you're looking to try something that's genuinely new and not just a refinement or tweak of some existing genre or play mechanic, you really owe it to yourself to play this.

The obscure names and redundant dialog can reach levels of absurdity, and sometimes you'll want to yell at your characters to just shut up and get on with the adventuring, but the puzzles and presentation make the complex plot worth slogging through.

There hasn't been a funnier, more singularly creative videogame since Brütal Legend. And where Double Fine disappointed some with odd game design choices, DeathSpank does nothing but please.

Bioware has stripped away the veil of grandiose adventure, and what's behind the curtain is a truly uninspired RPG.

The process moves at a snail's pace, with too much time spent in between the gem-matching fights.

A contemporary classic — but not necessarily in a good way. Yes, slightly antiquated design elements like health and armor packs give it a familiar feel. And quite a few genuinely scary moments are guaranteed to make you feel a little silly for being so freaked out. But the game tries to be too many things at once, and the transparent, jarring transitions from horror to next-gen action sequences break the otherwise carefully executed atmosphere.

Starseed is all over pretty quickly, maybe a couple of hours at best. And I don’t think it’s going to age very well, truth be told—we’re going to expect more complexity out of our VR sojourns, soon enough. But right now, at this moment, if you’re looking for something cool to show you what it’s going to be like to go adventuring in VR, this is a great place to start.

Broken Sword is an excellent proof of concept. Yes, classic point-and-click adventures work very well on DS. It is also a funny, engaging game with a wide variety of puzzles, locations and characters. But it also spotlights the gameplay elements that adventure games of the 1990s could get wrong.

To get the most out of a game like Tumbleseed, as with the brutal puzzle-platformers that inform it, you must do more than play. You must be willing to wrestle with it and, if not master it, at least develop some degree of proficiency. You must also accept that, despite your best efforts, you might not be able to. If you’re willing to devote some of your leisure energy into Tumbleseed, I imagine you’ll be rewarded. But I can’t guarantee it. I might just be the world’s worst Tumbleseed player.

Playing Pocket Planes is like driving a car that steers itself. All I want is a wheel, NimbleBit. Give me just one tool that can be wielded in interesting ways to make an impact on the outcome of my play. I want the ability to play your game well, or play it badly. As it currently stands, the only choice you give me is to play Pocket Planes or not play it at all, and I'm going to take option B.

A giant leap forward for Sega's mascot. It represents the first time in more than a decade that I have enjoyed a Sonic game.

It's better than almost anything else on the platform. But it's also a game produced by a Nintendo with its back against the wall, which seemed to want to get a side-scrolling Mario on shelves to sell 3DS hardware before the time was quite right.

Clever deduction sequences, likable characters, some of the best writing in videogames.

If you or your kid loves to play open-ended games like Minecraft or create inspired Lego creations without instructions, the Variety Kit is a great way to go.

What saves this radical concept from total disaster is the fact that the live-action segments are well-acted and tightly paced. They look and feel exactly like… well, like a mid-season replacement on the USA Network, if we’re being honest. But the action is just intriguing enough that you won’t mind being asked to watch a 20-minute cut scene before beginning the next level...Once you get over the novelty, Quantum Break shakes out as a mediocre shooter with a lavish budget. It will be remembered for blending game and live-action in a formula that actually kinda worked, not for its gameplay, which feels unambitious, half-baked.

Canabalt is my most-played iPad game by far. Its simple, fun concept distills platforming down to its bare essence of running and jumping.

$20 might seem like a bit much for a little over five hours of gameplay, although there's a lot of content packed into this first installment: Four largish 3-D environments, a dozen or so main characters, and reams of funny dialogue.

The translations are occasionally botched. In two instances, the cheat codes were incorrect. This, plus the fact that some of the challenges send you back over territory you've already covered, keeps the game from achieving true retro perfection. It's still awesome, and a must-play for fans of the NES era.

A novel and original concept, executed cleanly and with style - in short, the ideal to which videogames should aspire.

Infinite Warfare is not a bad Call of Duty. I’ve played nearly every game in the series, and as someone who sees the merits of the systems that make up the moment-to-moment experience of playing a shooter like it, I enjoyed myself, sometimes a good deal. But Infinite Warfare stalls out in the terrestrial shadow of itself and the political context it’s trying to run from. It wants to be a lot of things, but ultimately it’s a lesson: We can go as far into the cosmos as we want, but we can’t go alone. Our problems are stowed away in the cargo hold, and they’re coming with us.

To be clear, I’m not advocating real-life violence here. But I do suspect that games like this, tied up in gore and cruelty though they are, serve a social purpose. In creating an outlet to resist fascism in its most archetypal form, Sniper Elite 4—and the legacy of World War II media that informs it—reminds us that fascism is real, and needs to be resisted. The game’s power isn’t intelligence or insight, it’s the refusal to forget: By allowing players to fight and win against the ghosts of villains, it offers a quiet reminder that their villainy is real.

Well-balanced, fun turn-based strategy gameplay perfectly suited to mobile devices.

Coordination between teammates seems to be pretty important, but otherwise I felt like each match hinged on whether or not teams could get momentum early and shut buy upgrades quicker.

I wouldn't unhesitatingly recommend Ring of Fates to anyone who's not already a genre fan, but if you're like me, you need to play this one.

3D Dot Game Heroes might be a blatant rip-off of Zelda, but in cribbing from one of the most enduring games of the 8-bit era - and allowing us to populate a faux Hyrule in a new, tactile way - the game more than earns the right to swipe.