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.