It’s scale is unprecedented for a Zelda game, and it encourages you to move slowly. I want to honor that. And while I fear that the sheer breadth of the experience might ultimately push some players away, I’m relishing my time spent in this hushed, half-dead Hyrule. After thirty years of The Legend of Zelda, I’m delighted that the series has finally lost its way again.

From the war-torn home world of the lizardlike krogans to a planet so wracked by radiation that stepping out of the shade will eat away at your shields, the galaxy feels more lovely, lurid and dangerous this time around.

The game's greatest accomplishment is that it is a paradise of escapism, a lavish love letter to immersion. Diving into Skyrim's world feels both thrilling and comforting, like riding a rollercoaster or swimming in the ocean. There is very little padding. There are very few scripted quests that aren't worth experiencing.

Portal 2 is in the business of defying players' expectations. Valve never wants you to predict what's going to happen at any moment, and delights in subtly setting those pins up and knocking them down. Even more than the clever gameplay mechanics and sharply written story, the smiles and laughter that such a carefully crafted game can extract from you mean this one will stay with you for years to come.

Weighed down by bloat though it may be, Batman: Arkham City is still one of the year's finest games, filled with the capacity to surprise even players who've skulked through every inch of its predecessor.

WIRED One of the best games ever, remastered; looks fantastic in 3D; improved controls. / TIRED It's the same game you played 12 years ago and remember exactly how to beat.

The game's menus are clunky, which gets annoying since you're constantly going in there to tweak your button settings and check the list of special moves. A menu will often tell you to press the A button to confirm your selection, but pressing it does nothing.

The moments when Modern Warfare 2 isn’t good are few and far between. That’s about all you can ask from a hero.

The team at Kojima Productions has at the very least set a new high-water mark for cinematic presentation that I wager any other videogame will be lucky to reach, let alone exceed, for the next few years.

Brawl isn't perfect. The single-player mode isn't nearly as polished and fun as the multiplayer. The disc is crammed so full of content that the loading times can get annoying. But it's still without equal -- can you even think of another four-player fighting game?

Braid is so much more than just another XBLA release. What you're paying for is a groundbreaking title that offers several hours of pure game enjoyment. Buy this game now, and experience some of the best this medium has to offer.

Much like the original, it will be played for years to come. And that's why it lives up to all the anticipation.

And I fail to see how the all-important menu that lets you reassign the buttons on your controller could have been designed to be less intuitive. You'll be using that a lot, too, especially if you buy an arcade-style joystick — which I cannot recommend strongly enough, especially if you have an Xbox 360. The console's default controller is absolutely infuriatingly useless for this game.

It occupies that role of a wronged young person immaculately, giving you control of a group of teenagers who see the cruelties of adults around them with severe clarity. Then it opens a door to a supernatural world of magic and treasure, and it gives you the one thing none of us had at that age: the means to fight back.

Despite the clunky menu system and nearly useless real-time combat options, the biggest complaint I can level at Fallout 3 is that it isn't by the original developer, Interplay. But since we'll never see that game, Bethesda's take on the series is a very acceptable substitute.

The game delivers the same grizzled, gore-laden action we've come to expect, and it does it extremely well -- but it's as if the original Gears has gotten a face-lift, and been expanded upon, without much real change.

The most important change is that most everything feels new. The fights against giant boss creatures at the end of each dungeon don't rely on old ideas. The classic characters are replaced, for the most part, with novel ones. If you already know what's going to happen, is that really capturing the spirit of the original Legend of Zelda, in which we all went in blind? Skyward Sword shows that "a real Zelda game" is about more than certain items or certain gameplay rituals, which in the end is more meaningful than adding better sword controls.

The lighting, the detail, the mocap and animation of the characters, the delivery of the dialogue are all so near-flawless that I forgot I was watching computer people. It just felt like a movie. The transitions between cinematic scenes and gameplay are seamless. The load times are non-existent (unless you jump around from chapter to chapter or reset from a previous point).

Inside, like the studio’s freshman effort, is again a monochromatic, tense, haunting, side-scrolling puzzle game, but with six years of effort under its belt, Playdead now delivers a masterclass in its form.

Those thrills, ripped straight from summer blockbusters, tend to be both Uncharted 3's biggest strength and biggest flaw...Drake's Deception never lets up on the action, and it has an obsession with constantly one-upping itself. Before the end of the game, you will have escaped from a burning building, outran a massive wave of water aboard a sinking cruise ship and traversed a seemingly endless desert...These segments are thrilling, heart-racing stuff, but predictable.

But these perks are all secondary to Forza Motorsport 3’s main mission: to deliver a realistic racing experience with more than 400 licensed cars and 100 real-world tracks. Consider that a mission accomplished — or at the very least rewound and nailed again on the third go-round.

This should serve as a reminder that a strong license shouldn’t be a millstone around a game designer’s neck but a gold mine, a vast stockpile of prebuilt characters and relationships that, properly tweaked, can work just as well in a videogame as they do in a movie or comic book series.

Even though I often struggled to find meaning within the game's mysterious world, Journey doesn't need to be explained. It's still a fulfilling experience.

Rock Band 2 is a massive bullet-point list of new features, each of which makes playing the game a little bit more fun, a little bit less annoying. MTV has played it very safe: It has not broken anything, but neither has it taken any great risks to add any feature that is mind-blowingly new, the way it did when it added drumming and vocals to Guitar Hero in the first place.

Simply the most reliable gaming purchase you can make this holiday season. No other title will offer more content for the price.

By attempting to push the cynicism out of competitive gaming, Overwatch is working towards the seemingly impossible. Out of all the internet’s dark places, competitive shooters are among the worst. They’re the home of teabaggers and trolls, brimming with toxicity and vitriol. Blizzard is trying to make a place where people can enjoy themselves and relax without the fear that so often accompanies these types of games. I can’t say yet where it’ll succeed in the long run, but this is the first time I’ve had hope.

The first Assassin’s Creed had a bold, brilliant concept; the sequel delivers the execution.

Kratos' latest action-packed journey across the tales of Greek myth has lightning-fast pacing, designed to keep you addicted straight through to the end with tiny loading times in between. The problem is that you come upon the end of the game very quickly, way before you want it to be.

While Killzone 2 does walk on mostly well-trodden ground, it does so with a keen attention to style and detail, pushing beyond the gray-and-red color schemes that define its competition while encouraging gamers to put a little bit of thought behind every bullet they hurl.

Bungie tries. Kat, Noble 6's intelligence officer and estrogen-powered ass-kicker, is the most entertaining of your compatriots. But she and all the characters in Halo: Reach are one-note Johnnies, all swagger and no depth.

For all its undeniable polish and fun gameplay, Mario & Luigi is starting to feel less like a clever bridging of the gap and more like an indecisive straddle. It’s time to rethink the Mario RPG.

The multiplayer may be a miss, but Trials Evolution does nearly everything else right. Few superior motorcycle games have been produced this generation, and the game will only continue to get better as players contribute to the level-sharing service.

I don’t expect to ever beat Stephen’s Sausage Roll, but that won’t stop me from recommending it. Unlike The Witness, which muddled its message with pretentious framing and unfriendly design, Increpare’s latest is smart and welcoming. It’s a loving ode to puzzles and the people who love them. If you check it out, be sure to eat something first.

The truly stunning thing about Persona 4 is that it just doesn't have any glaring flaws. Even though it doesn't stand up to the graphics of the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, the clever art style makes up for that. Those who despise reading large blocks of text in games will be pleasantly surprised by the solid voice-over work applied to almost every conversation.

Mark of the Ninja is easily one of the best Xbox Live Arcade games of the year. In a time when no one thought they wanted another stealth game, Klei Entertainment surprised everyone with a truly wonderful one.

Considering Assassin's Creed Brotherhood as a total package, it's just barely worth full price. There's a decent quantity of content, but the amount that's recycled from the last game is stunning, a purely cynical ploy to squeeze out more money in lieu of preserving any semblance of artistic integrity.

Dead Space 2′s final chapters seem like an endless string of featureless rooms filled with monsters. Some wonderful moments emerge that make it a must-play, especially since the game wraps in less than 10 hours, but the last act seems rushed.

In a sea of shooters with pounding soundtracks and frenetic gameplay, Civilization V is one of the few games to challenge players' minds - to have them sit back and analyze situations methodically. If Halo: Reach is heaven on earth for twitch-gamers everywhere, then Civilization V is the thinking man's paradise.

3D Land is a grabby borrower of a game - enemies from Mario 3, music from 2006's New Super Mario Bros., gameplay from Galaxy. Eventually it starts borrowing from itself. It's an excellent game because all of these things work so well together; the only thing keeping it from perfection is that it cries out for more innovations to call its own.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is certainly not for everyone. For a certain type of player, it will undoubtedly feel like the most difficult game From Software has ever produced. But it's also enthrallingly atmospheric, its combat and setting contributing to a palpable, engaging sense of mood. It's a game of powerful imagery, of swords crossed in the morning mist. The challenge of Sekiro exists to create that mood and to answer a design problem in From's earlier games. That's not the point, exactly. But to enjoy Sekiro, you have to accept it anyway.

For whatever reason, Fable II consistently stutters and hangs while you're scrolling through the menus. What should be a simple matter of handing a gift to a potential mate becomes a slog into Menu Hell.

Considering Assassin's Creed Brotherhood as a total package, it's just barely worth full price. There's a decent quantity of content, but the amount that's recycled from the last game is stunning, a purely cynical ploy to squeeze out more money in lieu of preserving any semblance of artistic integrity.

If you enjoy playing first-person shooters with a team of friends or even complete strangers, Left 4 Dead offers an unparalleled social experience. It can be frustrating at times when the team's actions aren't synced, or strategies continually falter, but a bit of practice and, more importantly, communication will transform this zombie massacre into one of the most exciting and addictive gaming experiences ever.

Titanfall 2‘s campaign is fast, it’s responsive, and it lets you move like John Woo’s most violent dreams of the future. If you’ve played Mirror’s Edge and wished more games would learn from it, this is what you’ve been looking for.

Most games don’t try to break you, don’t ask you to band together and conquer something that seems impossible. Still, Miyazaki says, Dark Souls is made to beaten: “When [we] set the difficulty level… our objective was to make the game possible to accomplish.” It takes time, and it takes effort, but no matter who you are, or how you want to play, Dark Souls wants to see you succeed.

Much like Sony's Heavy Rain, L.A. Noire is a game you simply must play if you are interested in the development of storytelling in videogames. Also like Heavy Rain, the gameplay occasionally struggles to walk the tightrope between being robust enough to hold up the story but easy enough that the player doesn't give up halfway through.

Dead Space's atmosphere is brilliant, evoking nerve-wracking paranoia, but the gameplay is the same as many other previous games.

The game's audio is phenomenal. Throughout the game players are treated to a combination of Japanese-style blues, pop, techno and rock. Even those who have become tired of Japan's trademark stylistic alterations to American media will find the variety of tunes appealing.

Gorgeous, Beatles-themed graphics make the game more than just a list of songs, although the short track list (and some questionable song choices) keep it from being the perfect Fab Four experience.

What Remains of Edith Finch is, above all, sincere, trying through even its most fantastical and gimmicky moments to tell a story about home, grief, and growing up.

Dead Space's atmosphere is brilliant, evoking nerve-wracking paranoia, but the gameplay is the same as many other previous games.

BioShock 2 may be a clever spin on the are-you-good-or-evil convention, but it falls short of its predecessor by not breaking free of it.

Its best moments crackle with creativity and skill. It feels like a successor to some of the best games of its type, a game in the mold of Thief and Deus Ex in an era where even the people who make new Deus Ex games don’t make them like this anymore. This is a game that should be played, and all I want to do now is go back in. I know it’s waiting for me, to see what I try next.

The game is magical. As test of your ability to think strategically, Civilization VI is almost unparalleled.

That commitment to the time period and dedication to an earnest presentation of what war was really like can’t help but clash with the raucous fun we’re expected to have when we dip into the multiplayer modes with friends, however. Battlefield 1 uses the same language of play for both sections, and in so doing shows that this dichotomy can’t last. For a game to do war right, it’d have to be about the struggle to exist. It’d have to be about the starvation, the panic, and the agony of it all. Battlefield 1 comes tantalizingly close to this.

It was one of the best cooperative experiences I've ever had in a video game, and I don't even know who those people were. I've made my concerns about the storytelling in this game clear, but maybe that's not as big of an issue. I came away from Diablo III with a great story to tell, one of my own making.

The game lives most brightly in its quiet moments of melancholy: in the silence after Mae’s shitty teen band lets the last chord fall silent; in the second when they reflect on how honest the music they just sang was; in the quiet conversations where they admit to themselves and each other that it’s not even a specific future that they want. They just want to die somewhere else. Somewhere theirs.

Witcher 2's technical and design glitches didn't stop me from thoroughly enjoying the game, however. It's one of the most realistic role-playing games I've ever tried - just like in real life, the decisions you make have wide-ranging effects, and you won't learn what those are until much later.

It's a challenging game, too. I've logged enough hours in strategy games to qualify as an officer in certain South American militaries, but the last few levels of Adventure mode and many of those Puzzle mode levels require intense concentration and genuine skill.

As a fighting game, it’s responsive, easy to learn with thick layers of complexity buried underneath. It’s a brilliant exercise in taking out your action figures and ramming them into each other until one of them breaks.

Frankly, I think I might hate The Witness. Even after hours of playtime, I don’t know enough to tell.

Pokémon is a series that never reinvents the wheel, but instead continues to polish the basic design until it sparkles.

It manages to keep the core gameplay of battling and trading magical monsters intact, while weaving in ideas that were vital to the television show and to the idea of Pokémon in general.

But If you're willing to put in the time to learn the game's nuances however, and don't mind losing days of your life to faux interstellar conquest, Sins of a Solar Empire is easily the finest game to hit PCs this year.

Like a window opened just a crack, a tiny aperture that occasionally allows vivid glimpses of the future of videogames. When Heavy Rain works its magic, it is powerful stuff; rarely have I felt so attached to game characters or so invested in a story. For those small moments, anyone who cares about videogames must play Heavy Rain.

The original Gold and Silver are getting a bit long in the tooth, but a decade of extra gameplay polish makes HeartGold and SoulSilver extremely appealing. The games are next-gen nostalgia done right.

No matter how much the games dresses things up, the endless battles get repetitive after a while. You're performing the exact same moves throughout the game.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is an excellent game with friends, and I had a great deal of challenging fun with the solo mode. But if you’re looking for a new Mario adventure that’s tailored to creating the maximum amount of fun for just one person, you’ll have to wait for next year’s Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Helping and being helped, working together, and loving everyone, regardless of where they’re coming from, is a lesson that we can all forget at times. And I’m overjoyed to know that children picking up these games today might just walk away better, more empathetic people even though at the end of the day they’re still teaching digital animals to tear each other apart.

Donkey Kong Country Returns is the best 2-D platform game I've played in ages. Its level design meets the gold standard set by the 2-D Mario games. Retro Studios can add another feather to its cap.

The Witness is a sterile, lifeless videogame. It revels in the idea of knowledge, fascinated by how it’s earned and what it signifies. But it seems uninterested in players and their accomplishments, and with that lack of interest comes a lack of the human touch necessary to make sense of the knowledge it offers...The Witness is like the island on which it takes place: a machine, to the core. Anything within it that seems lifelike is superficial.

The original Gold and Silver are getting a bit long in the tooth, but a decade of extra gameplay polish makes HeartGold and SoulSilver extremely appealing. The games are next-gen nostalgia done right.

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

Pokémon is a series that never reinvents the wheel, but instead continues to polish the basic design until it sparkles.

Above all, Sin & Punishment: Star Successor once again proves Treasure's mastery of making games in which lots of things explode. The action is fast and furious and the game's super-short length makes it perfect for several playthroughs. Even if it can be a bit too difficult for its own good.

Spelunky is designed to be played repeatedly, a randomly generated battle of human versus machine. Its goal is to challenge the player in a way that is seemingly impossible, but ultimately surmountable given the proper amount of training and skill. I can't recall another game that achieves that delicate balance as well as Spelunky. Its randomly generated nature and ecosystem of interactive elements challenges your decision-making abilities in a way that's nothing short of awe-inspiring.

If you’re willing to step away from the idea of goal-oriented achievement, Vignettes achieves something almost transcendent. Like its name implies, it feels like a series of short stories about objects, meditations on the secret lives of stuff. What do you really know about a lamp, anyway? Have you ever really looked at it? Isn’t it weird, how pear-shaped they usually are? Hey, who first came up with the lamp shade?

While it gives players that quintessential amped-up FPS experience, it isn't doing anything especially innovative or new. The firefights are intense, the pacing will keep you on the edge of your seat and quite a few scenes prove absolutely breathtaking, but the game's chief strength is the story that binds it all together, and the multiplayer modes that should keep us amused for quite some time.

The one major qualm I have with the game is in its voice acting.

A challenging and fun experience, bolstered by a potentially limitless supply of user-generated content to keep the game fresh.

My first session with the game lasted roughly half an hour longer than I meant it to. While there are puzzle packs available for in-app purchase, Typeshift is free, with a large bevy of puzzles to play immediately and a free daily puzzle. You can also shell out for hints if you get really stumped. By the time you get through the initial offering, two bucks for another set of puzzles will probably be a no-brainer if you’re still enjoying yourself. And you probably will be. Typeshift is more than a smart, fun word puzzler. It’s just good game design.

Patapon is a clever spin on the rhythm genre, and the tiny characters are simply adorable. Leveling up your warriors can be quite trying, but the game's charm and refreshing adaptation of established mechanics make such transgressions forgivable.

It’s just a solid, addictive, finely polished game that’s easy enough for newbies and challenging enough for those who remember. Sometimes, they do make ‘em like they used to.

Bastion's fantasy world doesn't feel derivative. Its world and characters are all its own, and the narrator's verbal descriptions of abandoned quarries, forsaken gods and terrifying fortresses breathe life into them.

That's all Max Payne 3 is – a beautiful, playable action movie.

Endless depth, gorgeous graphics, excellent polish for a new MMO.

From its opening unhinged riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the more traditional bulk of its gameplay, it’s an eerie, consistently entertaining puzzle box drenched in Southern gothic dread. And the videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.

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

Everybody—Nintendo, players—knows that this is a stopgap in a barren release schedule, but if you’re going to have a stopgap, you might as well give an excellent game the graphical overhaul it lost when Nintendo decided to skip over high-definition.

With Radiant Historia, Atlus has created the perfect blend of innovation and tradition.

Tiny Heroes draws its charm from all the chaos. There's always something to do; you'll constantly be throwing down new traps and replacing old ones at a frenetic pace. It's challenging and fun.

The original Doom transcended videogame to become cultural icon, the inspiration for a hundred imitations, ports on virtually every digital medium imaginable including airplanes, and even a terrible movie starring The Rock. The new Doom succeeds by taking that legacy seriously, rendering it as a religion of sorts: the cult of Doom Guy writ through generations. To play is to enact a mass-media ritual, to go where a million other players have gone before you and will go again...The legions of hell should be quaking in their boots: Doom has been reborn.

But I was pleased to discover at least one genre of music that fits in surprisingly well with all the limitations of the system: classic videogame music.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 can get complex, but it ramps you up with a smooth learning curve. I could feel my skills improving as I discovered more of the game's intricacies.

If you resent games walling the player off or insisting on where they go next, you will hate Yakuza 0. But it uses its distinctly un-Western sense of constraint and mise–en–scène to tell a story more intelligent and subtle than anything you’d find in its foreign counterparts.

Yes, it feels pretty much exactly like 2005′s Mario Kart DS with better graphics. But it's still too good to put down.

Boom Blox does what so many Wii titles wish they could, by splitting the difference between casual players and lifelong gamers. You can pass the Wiimote to your grandma or a 5-year-old and they'll have a ball with its clever mix of brainy puzzles and satisfying explosions. But hard-core players like me will find a surprising amount of depth to the gameplay and a satisfying, addictive challenge.

That’s not to say that Ratchet and Clank is a lifeless cash-in. It’s replete with care and vitality, and it feels like an honest return to a world the creators love. But as a utilization of its own past, it’s dull and safe. A game that so directly recreates a relic of gaming’s past needs to justify its own existence—to use the past in an interesting way, to imbue it with creative vitality. 2016’s Ratchet and Clank doesn’t. Nothing here surprises. Nothing here transforms.