If you’re looking for novel virtual reality experiences, I do think you should check out Eagle Flight to get a sense of how much fun it can be to soar in VR. After playing it, though, I feel like I’d really enjoy a game with these precise mechanics, but without constraints: a more free-form, less demanding play style that would accentuate the freedom of flight—not detract from it.

If you can bear the frustration of that early grind, there’s a reward waiting for you. The thrill of pushing your thrusters to full burn, looping around the asteroids near Karahdor Outpost, the Prince Ol in your sights, his fighter dancing in evasion. Vulcan cannons blazing. The stars watching, an entire universe built for for one exhilarating fight after another.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Batman: Arkham VR is quite a short game. You step into the Batsuit for just a little over an hour. In that span of time, it can be quite a frightening experience. But it’s definitely worth playing if you’re an early adopter of PlayStation VR.

Amidst these odd, singular moments lies a nexus of something fascinating and powerful, a new almost dadaist landscape emerging from the confluence of bad aesthetic decisions and largely pointless gameplay conceits. I could imagine another game that takes advantage of the distinctive strangeness the developers have created here, that harbors it and shores it up into something worth spending time with. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that. We got The Tomorrow Children instead.

Obduction succeeds as a follow-up to Myst not because it invokes nostalgia for 1993, but because it builds realities like Myst did. A new world, one that feels true, one that breathes.

Yes, it is quite a bit more fun to run down Federation Force‘s hallways and headshot its Space Pirates when you have a group. But a lot of that, it seems to me, is because the game is designed to be much easier when you have a team and very challenging, even inhospitable, to a solo player.

It’s a paranoid nightmare vision of my own cell phone, and I can’t look away.

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.

For all this, for all of its pretentiousness, for all of its own flaws, No Man’s Sky rightly deserves a place in a modern art museum. Like a home with doors that may never open, begging us to ponder what lies beyond, No Man’s Sky is an unanswerable question, but one I’m glad I asked.

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.

Gameplay and narrative are inextricably intertwined, and ought to reinforce and point toward one another. In Song of the Deep, they feel at odds in a way that’s made even more grating by the loving, attentive eye Insomniac casts on the world it created. These people care about Merryn and her journey, and they do so much to make you care, too. Now they just need to get out of her way.

If you enjoy Hell’s Kitchen or Master Chef, having Ramsay’s constant banter in the game really does enhance the experience.

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.

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.

While Mirror’s Edge Catalyst opens up the city rather than confining you to discrete levels, its design woes feel precisely like the original. The odds of me clearing a mission on the first try were approximately zero. Not because my reflexes weren’t up to snuff—I swear it!—but simply because the missions are so tightly timed, the positioning so precise, that there really isn’t any time to figure out what the plan’s going to be: you simply have to do. And while that may (I can only assume) genuinely recreate the sorts of fast decisions you’d have to make if you were really trying to outrun the cops on foot, it doesn’t make for a game experience that feels fair.

It feels like I stepped through a time warp and am reviewing the original Mirror’s Edge again. It recreates the original game’s strengths—and, more importantly, its fundamental errors—as if no time had passed.

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

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

The difference with Star Fox Guard is that, for me at least, it clicked automatically, and I was having a blast from the first moment.