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.

Despite minor quibbles about its online modes, Order of Ecclesia is a simply stunning handheld game. It ranks as easily the best portable game of the year and could very well qualify as the best Castlevania ever.

Yes, it's true that at no time while playing Prince of Persia did I feel any of the frustration that I felt on a regular basis in "Mirror's Edge". But neither did I ever feel the joy of doing something right, of stringing together a perfect series of vaults and wall-runs and feeling like it was based on my own skill.

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.