It even looks fantastic, with an emphasis on cel-shaded splatter horror. The Darkness II plays as if it were an homage to the EC Comics of the 40s and 50s. It has that same grimly colorful and colorfully grim vibe in its approach to crucifixion, torture, madness, hell, and a demon who pees on bodies and farts in their dead faces.

The overall takeaway I get while playing SSX: sometimes EA gets it exactly right. Sometimes their experience from a dozen misguided games, and a half dozen decent games, and two or three really good games is distilled into one perfect example of how some AAA titles are every bit as awesome as they're supposed to be.

There's a lot more to recommend Xenoblade Chronicles. The dialogue, the humor, the artwork, the prophecy system, the music, the variety of environments, the character progression, the crafting system, the crazy quest density, the quest quality, the memorable characters, the collectibles, the secrets, and so on. This is a landmark achievement in the genre. As of its release, you can no longer talk about great RPGs, or maybe even great games, without also talking about Xenoblade Chronicles.

Waking Mars is just about the coolest new thing I've seen someone do with a side-scrolling Castlevania/Metroid exploration game.

For gamers out there like myself who cut their teeth on R.B.I. Baseball rather than Strat-O-Matic, I highly recommend this as a supplemental experience to today's console baseball titles. It may just supplant them in your imagination, as it's a platform to weave believable baseball tales of any stripe, at whatever speed or level of control you desire.

This sequel either improves on or extends the original in every way.

Rebellion is nearly as revolutionary with its new subfactions, and it's easily as revolutionary with its new victory conditions.

This new presentation is particularly appropriate since the entire game is such an enthusiastic package. This isn't just a way to play Lost Cities matches. It's a whole silly metagame, with four different AI opponents, ingame emoticon chat, goals, and leveling up.

I can count on two hands the games I've loved as much as I now love Guild Wars 2. This isn't just a great example of the genre and arguably the Second Coming of MMOs. It isn't even just one of the best games I've ever played. This is what happens when a group of talented, smart, dedicated, imaginative, bold, consumer-friendly creators get together and spend years solving problems and making something wonderful.

I'm not terribly surprised that the studio that made the first Borderlands has created such a wildly good gunplay-based action RPG. But I'm surprised that the studio that stitched together Duke Nukem Forever and all those Brothers in Arms games has also made it such a joy to discover for reasons other than the awesome guns and gunplay. Bravo, Gearbox.

No multiplayer game so cannily captures a feeling of cat and mouse, and relies so completely on tension and suspense instead of yet more thrills. To call this multiplayer unique doesn't do it justice. If you care about new experiences in videogames, if you want to see how games can explore 3D spaces without resorting to shooting stuff or breaking things, you owe it to yourself to try Assassin's Creed multiplayer.

Rebuild is almost single-handedly the creation of indie developer Sarah Northway, who has iterated it from a web game to an iPhone game, enlisting some nifty comic book cutscene art and a darkly unsettling score from talented contributors. It still hangs frequently on my iPhone, but thanks to the autosave, I've never lost any progress. Like Pandemic, this is one of those games too good to stay a free web-based Flash game. And like Atom Zombie Smasher, this is an example of how zombie mythology has a lot more to offer videogaming than chainsaws and horde modes.

What ultimately makes Little Inferno special is the story that swirls out like tendrils of smoke.

It's simply a great game. You don't have to know anything special about tanks, or river crossings, or the Luftwaffe. Everything in the game is easily explained: these units move fast, these roads speed movement, these woods impede attackers.

Zen’s table lovingly captures the movie’s production design, a combination of timeless imagination and 80s sci-fi aesthetic. Of course the sound effects are there, snippet of familiar dialogue, and characters, usually without any of the silly dolls.

Brutal Legend is better than it’s ever been, both as a single-player open-world game unlike any you’ve ever played and as one of the best unique takes on real-time strategy since Sacrifice.

This is another rare game that’s far too good to be trapped on a Nintendo system.

Something as imaginatively conceived and cunningly executed as Song-froid needs a longer lifespan than its 20 calendar days. Games this good don’t come around often enough, and this one could probably only come from a group of independent and inexperienced developers who don’t know enough to know that what they’re doing is, well, kind of unprecedented.

This is the second time in a month that I’ve been completely bowled over by an indie project that I’d never even heard of, created by people whose games I’ve never played. I can think of no better indicators that no matter how bad SimCity turned out, no matter how disappointing the gameplay in Bioshock Infinite, no matter how familiar any Call of Duty, no matter whether the next Xbox is always online, it’s a perfect time to be into videogames.

If you were to take someone who’s played his share of shooters, someone who cares about the story between and around the shooting, someone who can appreciate games that offer new takes on familiar experiences, Crysis [3] will feel like a soulless blockbuster to the auteur’s art film of Metro: Last Light.

If your kids/wife/girlfriend/parents can grok a finicky numbers game, this will be right up their alley. But otherwise, this is a videoboardgame for hardcore strategy nerds. Who don't mind playing with Miis.

This is the sort of wheelsport the Need for Speed arcade racers should have been providing all along.

It all comes down to the fact that I would rather pay for a carefully tuned game than get a financially optimized one for free. But I guess if a developer's going to screw up the equation, they might as well do it with a game as good as Jetpack Joyride.

Kudos to the developers of Flip Ship for not succumbing to the obvious trend to micropayments. When you buy Flip Ship, you get a self-contained package where high scores are strictly and entirely a matter of how good, lucky, and persistent you are. Put away your nickels, because they aren't any help here. Flip Ship is all about the choices you make.

Assuming that you accept that Resident Evil isn't a game about running backwards and spewing ammo, you'll find here another wonderfully tense shooter.

Unstoppable Gorg's gloriously goofy, brash, and cheerful presentation is some of the most delicious 50s B-movie sci fi cheese since War of the Monsters on the Playstation 2.

This persistence is Epic Quest's most notable feature. Think of it as an experiment in building an ongoing leveling system onto a single table.

There is absolutely nothing casual about this game. But it's incredibly gratifying to finally nail a puzzle in the same way that it's gratifying to nail a song in DDR or a level in Patapon. Rhythm Heaven Fever, which seems to know full well how hard it's pushing you, is eventually as satisfying as it is infuriating.

This game is crazy Neapolitan through and through, with a sense of mad glee for how frequently and flagrantly it breaks the rules.

So it turns out that Wargame: European Escalation isn't just good. It's also unique.

There's no debate whether Mass Effect 3 is a good game. It has good combat, an effective atmosphere, satisfying resolution, and a few great characters. Co-op is surprisingly entertaining. Bioware has finally settled on a good balance of RPG elements, too. It's easy to dismiss most of the nitpicks. It's the best game in the series for all these reasons...Instead, I argue about whether Mass Effect 3 is a great game. I write about it because I deeply care about Bioware as a developer. I want Bioware to strengthen choice and consequence and master character writing so I can consider their games to be classics again. At the very least, I'm no longer left out of this series now that I appreciate the combat and the universe.

With the emphasis on fighting, the co-op survival mode is a great way for two players to jump right into the combat, defending piles of supplies from waves of attackers and earning money to buy power-ups. Since it's on a single screen, this is about as perfect a local co-op game as you could ask for.

I get the sense that Sine Mora was made by people who love the best of the older shmups and want to present what made them great to the merely curious like me who are never going to play old side-scrollers on the NeoGeo or Dreamcast or whatever. And one of the highest praises I can offer Sine Mora is that perhaps more than any other such game, it makes me want to get better at 2D sidescrolling shooters.

Kid Icarus knows enough to be more complicated and rewarding than any simple Rogue Squadron or light gun game. It knows enough to tap into the nearly universal appeal of loot chasing.

Pinball Arcade fails one crucial part of videogame pinball. It has no sense for the social elements that make Pinball FX 2 so effective, and that are therefore an integral part of videogame pinball.

The best thing Skullgirls, a moderately demanding fighting game, has going for a fighting game dilettante like me is the character design, which focuses its considerably creativity and love on a few characters.

It knows how to infect a gamer for the long run.

It's a real thumb in the eye to have to suffer through a launch that was exactly like any MMO launch. It's a sad reality that too many of us have accepted DRM with gritted teeth and open wallets, so this is likely the price of AAA gaming for the foreseeable future. Us sheep get what we deserve, which is a Diablo III, a fine game for playing solo, with all the pitfalls of an online game.

Jared is concerned that you're not guiding him through appropriately leveled encounters and bosses. Is he supposed to actually fight that dragon by the lake? What about the huge cyclops lumbering out of the forest? Shouldn't there be a word or a number in red? Shouldn't there be a sign?

Plague Inc even has a sense for the importance of meta-game progression. Pandemic has special traits you unlock for later games, but Plague Inc gives you entirely new "classes" to unlock and play, starting with a hearty bacteria and progressing all the way up to manufactured bioweapons.

The reality-bending and dimension hopping are nicely realized, and the whole idea of having to find gems for a magic glove lends itself well to a pinball table. Here's a great example of how to do obscure lore in a pinball table.

The overall effect is like taking a broom or a flamethrower to the rules, completely undermining the game as designed. Which is something I couldn't be happier to see, because the game as designed is in dire need of undermining. If there's anything that can breathe life into Magic the Gathering, it's a shake-up like planechasing.

If I want to break stuff and collect things, there no way quite so mindlessly obliging as Lego Batman 2.

Tightly pieced together, efficient, muscular if not nimble.

Torchlight II's willingness to play tough is only one of its selling points, but it's arguably what sets it apart from the other good latest-gen action RPGs you could be playing right now (Diablo III, Borderlands 2, Darksiders II, and Guild Wars 2 come to mind).

It knows. It understands. But not blindly, not slavishly. More than a fan of X-Com, this game is a fan of the tenets of modern game design. It's doing exactly the right thing, in exactly the right ways, at exactly the right time.

I have no recollection of how the original game progressed - I mainly just remember the moment-to-moment glee of splattering pedestrians - but this iOS version is a series of unlockable levels, a collection of unlockable cars, a garage full of car upgrades, and variable goals for each level. If that's not enough, leaderboards, achievements, and challenges are all supported on Gamecenter. In other words, a whole lot of incentive to drive, smash, and splatter.

Eufloria is as unique, languidly haunting, and eminently playable as any of Introversion's brilliant Darwinia games. And now it's also a perfect fit for the iPad.

For parents, this is a sure-fire hit. For Gamers, keep an open mind. There is something under the cuddly hood. For Gamer parents, don't pass this up.

This dumb, loud, fast, silly, sexy car porn is eminently gratifying. Well done, Criterion. This is the game I've been waiting for you to make since Burnout.

Minor objections about design decisions aside, Black Ops II is another great shooter in a year of great shooters. It's a competent, confident, generous package, true to its core values, but with enough new to carve out its own identity, enough variety to appeal to a wide range of players, and enough content to belong on your shelf for more than just a quick playthrough. This is the way to do a yearly installment without just phoning it in.

Zombie U is the single most promising, enthralling, and unique game on the Wii U and I would definitely say this is the best multiplayer game of the year.

Even though the visuals suffer in their tininess, none of the basic Assassin's Creeding is compromised. This is a full-blown counterpart to Assassin's Creed 3, with its own setting, style, character, and location. Bravo, Ubisoft.

Because of its smooth strategic flow, Planets under Attack is one of the best couch strategy games since Risk Factions. But since Planets under Attack is always and only real-time, it's arguably an even better couch game.

This is one of a few boardgames that I've bought for the tabletop after being introduced to it on the iPad. And unlike the other two (Dominant Species and Small World), this is a game still worth having on the iOS.

DMC Devil May Cry is a best-case scenario for what happens when you take an established series and hand it over to a new developer to let them have a turn.

Pixel Defenders Puzzle can get crazily detailed - in a good way - as you take into account your units' various abilities, the monsters' various abilities, the powerful support monsters that show up, and the complexity of the grid filling up.

It’s a minor miracle that Arcen Games could revise Valley Without Wind 1 so completely without simply upgrading it, that they have instead made a completely separate game that plays so differently and creates a unique type of experience based on getting your ass kicked.

I suppose the gamepad is a valuable way to look at the map without calling up a fullscreen map view. But mostly, it’s a sadly missed opportunity in an otherwise great racing game.

Injustice’s traditional one-on-one structure, coupled with its thorough ingame documentation, is a casual player’s dream. We want to play fighting games, too. It’s nice to see a developer recognize that.

Like any great action RPG, the game is about tuning a character build, and shepherding it through increasingly difficult variations of the same things you’ve been doing all along, with friends, strangers, or an AI along for the ride. But unlike many such games, it’s got one hell of a story, insidiously barbed gameplay hooks, and the sort of infinite lifespan that makes your Vita worth the money you spent.

The revised naval combat turns battles into more than just bags of hitpoints slamming into each other at sea. At a time when naval power was so important, the added detail is welcome. And that’s pretty much what Heart of Darkness does for Victoria II: a new level of detail to encourage you to get out and see a bit more of the world.

I'd say that literally more than half of the game's systems are entirely unexplained, if not completely hidden from anyone who doesn't accidentally stumble onto them. All downloadable games have a "How to Play" section, but few are as devoid of useful information at Fusion: Genesis'.

It feels disappointingly slight, partly for the writing, partly for all the repetition, partly for the weirdly useless local multiplayer, and mostly for the smallness of it, hemmed in as it is by doors for the inevitable DLC. Suddenly it's over and you're left to grind if you're so inclined.

Triple Town is yet another clever game hobbled by yet another mercenary business decision.

It's a bit like a fighting game that offers distinct player characters, but no information about what the characters can do, or how you should play them, or their relative strengths and weaknesses. That's all for you to figure out because, apparently, the developers were too busy making the game to teach you anything. You have to take the initiative and set up solo games against the AI bots.

But there's something mildly sadistic about Crusader Kings II's complexity and reach. Maybe even passively aggressively sadistic. I'm not saying it's not accessible, becuase it is, to an extent.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is one of the worst games I've really liked in a long time.

And that's about all Prototype 2 has to offer in terms of storytelling: insultingly obvious, overintentionally gritty, childish, churlish. Just shut up, already, Prototype 2. You're not impressing anyone. I have never skipped so many cutscenes so quickly and so willingly.

Choose a lane, endure, upgrade, push, endure, upgrade, push, repeat. I forget, does familiarity breed contempt or content?

Tuning issues aside, Warlock is a fantasy strategy game that's more than just Civilization with dragons and elves because it's not Civilization at all. Far too many strategy games rely on Sid Meiers' classic formula, often bogging down in the process. It's nice to see a developer getting back to the basics and down in the trenches with goblins, werewolves, skeletons, dragons, clerics and the odd angry fireball.

The biggest problem with Starhawk - and unfortunately, it's a doozy - is a crushing lack of identity.

These tables aren't a very good fit for the 3DS. Instead, they're a good fit for sales. Paranormal Activity, Mars, Secrets of the Deep, and Epic Quest? What? Who? What movies were they in? But Iron Man and Captain America? Who can blame Zen Studios for making the most out of their licensing deals?

A nice, boring, middle-of-the-road review score just to ensure no one will ever read this.

The gear in Darksiders II is only as important as the combat, and the combat simply isn't that important. If there's one place the mostly satisfying and smartly designed Darksiders II needed more streamlining, it was the monty haul and the corresponding hack-and-slash.

A central fact about San Juan is that you're playing against the shuffle more than you're playing against the other players. If you're willing to draw out a ten-minute solitaire game into however long your asynchronous matches take, San Juan has multiplayer support. And even if you're not into multiplayer, it has a nifty take on leaderboards.

In Forza Horizon, racing is rubbing, wrecking, banging, and rewinding. Without a meaningful economy, there's no incentive to drive anything other than completely wrecklessly. The driving physics concur. This is one of those games that has no solution to the problem of videogames teaching kids that the best way to keep inside a turn is to bounce off the side of another car. Bounce off other cars, rear end the guy in front of you to slow down, and cut across corners with impunity.

It can be prohibitively tedious on the harder levels, or when you want to optimize your score. Furthermore, if you play too much, you can exhaust your stock of undos. Oh, look, QatQi will sell you more thanks to the miracle of Apple's in-app purchasing feature. Et tu, QatQi?

Far Cry 3, a pretty good open-world shooter, is a terrible sequel to Far Cry 2. One of the hallmarks of Far Cry 2 was that you never left the game world, even to check your map. But like many good games, Far Cry 3 is brimming with gamey stuff that takes you out of the world and into the gaminess.

There are plenty of these "bounce ever upward" games where you try to reach a new height before . I suppose it's a vertical variation on the endless runner. But what I like about Paper Galaxy is how it litters the screen with planets that have character.

The quick and easy multiplayer for up to four players is a real asset, particularly with friends taking advantage of the Vita's voice chat support. Suddenly a brainless two-gun game turns into a loadout challenge for players attempting difficulty levels a notch too high, deciding who's going to hang back with the sniper rifle and healing drone.

These are mostly the same guns, monsters, and combat sandboxes you already played, just arranged differently. Same gameplay, new framework. But given that this is currently my preferred way to get my Gears on, I can’t complain too loudly when I’m so busy trying to three-star each of the levels.

Bioshock Infinite attempts an Uncharted style relationship between two characters. It doesn’t work as well as it needs to. Booker DeWitt, ably if not unremarkably acted by Troy Baker, would be a fine figure in a novel or a movie. But in a game driven by his relationship with Elizabeth, Bioshock Infinite snags on the issue of a third-person protagonist in a first-person game. What does Booker look like? How does he feel? How is he reacting to what Elizabeth tells him? What does he do when I press X to “comfort Elizabeth”? Is there any subtext when he makes a choice? How do they look at each other? An actor’s face belongs here. There isn’t one.

Ascension isn’t as tactically gratifying as the latest Devil May Cry. The fighting has more of a splashy throwaway quality, often because it’s swallowed up by special effects or flailing character models or vast settings.

Combat Hacking — I’m just going to pretend it’s not called PWN — is a nifty exercise in fingerwork and brain power. It looks like a puzzle game, but it’s not. It’s actually a head-to-head real time strategy game focusing on territory control, maneuvering, and the careful application of special powers, all lovingly cyberpunk themed.

Features writing so sophomoric, so unfunny, so stale, so trite, and so unskippable that it all but kills the game underneath.

The problem with Orcs Must Die isn't necessarily Orcs Must Die. The problem is Toy Solders: Cold War, Plants vs. Zombies, Defender Chronicles, and Dungeon Defenders. Because a good tower defense game is just the first step to a good full-featured tower defense game.

Hero Academy is simple, simplistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. You might as well find a friend and take turns punching each other in the arm to see who gives up first.

For the most part, this is a game about running around for five minutes and then a long grind of the winner winning until he wins while the loser loses. Press "F" to watch.

The new character customization is either much better or much worse, depending on what you're looking for in character customization. If you want to put stickers on your cape or make a short Asteroth, Soulcalibur V is the game for you. But if you want Soulcalibur IV's indepth unlockable stat-based equipment RPG, well, Soulcalibur IV is the game for you. Because Soulcalibur V has none of that. What a disappointing step backwards.

If there's no payoff - or, as is the case here, if the payoff is hidden behind such a clot of unavoidable tedium that it ultimately overwhelms how much I care about reaching that payoff - then hasn't the game failed? The balancing act for any game designer is to make me care in proportion to the challenge level you throw at me. And given how close I must be to the end, and how little I care to push on, Final Fantasy XIII-2 ultimately fails.

What it all comes down to is this question: Is Caylus a good candidate for porting to the iPhone? Given the length of games, given the poor multiplayer support, given that the elegance of the boardgame is lost entirely, I suspect the answer might be "no". Which is a real shame after Big Daddy Creations so successfully ported Neuroshima Hex to the iPhone.

Red Wasp Design seems to prefer detail to elegance, and that's exactly the wrong call to make on the iPhone. It's also a damn shame in a game with such an obvious affection for its own characters and the Lovecraft mythos.

It mostly reminded me of some of the dull and barely interactive bits of Uncharted 3. I think the lesson here is that deserts are often poorly suited to games without dune buggies...There's no challenge and no real gameplay, which isn't necessarily a criticism. It's sort of like Shadow of the Colossus without any colossi, or Ico without the little girl.

The scripted sterility of a Ridge Racer and the destructibility of a FlatOut go togther like peanut butter and fish oil. This arcade racer deserves credit for elevating the Ridge Racer name above the level of a punchline. But it doesn't manage to crucial task of giving you a reason to play it instead of the current standards of arcade racing likeSplit Second, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, or Driver.

So as far as a tabletop game, Nightfall is just weird enough to be worthwhile. But as an iPhone port, Nightfall is a disappointing mess. That I'm no longer playing.

The shootporn is satisfying enough, if you're into that sort of thing. I know I am. Which is why I have so little patience for how often the awful story and grim prattle get in the way.

This is the same disappointing strategy game it was a year and a half ago, except that it now has two finicky and mostly unimpressive systems shoehorned in.