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.