IGN

Psychonauts starts off with a bang. The first half of this game is easily one of the most enjoyable I've had in the past year. But as is the case with many humorous games, the laughs begin to fade in the home stretch and in the end Psychonauts started to wear on me. This is an inventive game that's a bit too easy and not quite as polished as it could have been.

While there are some good ideas at play in Stronghold 2, they just aren't implemented in a way that I can get behind. For every good point, there's something ugly overshadowing it. Even with the patch, the game isn't something I would want to recommend to my friends and therefore am not recommending it to my readers.

Empire Earth II is a deep and satisfying real-time strategy game. The campaigns are great, the multiplayer is super fun, and skirmish allows for tons of single player satisfaction thanks to some terrific AI that'll give you fits.

If you don't find the subject matter especially interesting, the mechanics certainly aren't going to win you over. The hardcore crowd will readily forgive these flaws for the sake of experiencing the world firsthand. Though the story rewards could potentially make it worth the effort, casual players aren't likely to stick around long enough to find out.

While RoE provides much more interesting and tactically useful environments, it still doesn't quite offer the challenges we've become accustomed to with shooters like Far Cry and Half-Life 2. And from what I've seen of Monolith's F.E.A.R., RoE's appeal will slip a notch futher, as the encounters in F.E.A.R. are consistently more satisfying and the supernatural element more effective, in my opinion.

SWAT 4 is a terrific game from a company that simply keeps gaining trust in my mind. Irrational has created a terrific addition to a series of games that has been much loved over the years. They've managed to make non-lethal tactics both important and fun with great sound bytes, exciting tactics, and a good selection of weapons.

Not surprisingly, the visuals in Chaos Theory have improved even further from Pandora Tomorrow. Creeping around in the dark has never looked as good as it does in this game. There are flickering candles, creeping shadows, and environmental effects that add to the atmosphere. When combined with the excellent animations, the game feels incredibly cinematic, and on a high-end graphics card the game is stunning.

A budget shooter for the indiscriminate casual gamer, Dredd vs. Death offers little to fans of the FPS genre, especially considering the quality of its competitors. For those starved action gamers in need of an immediately accessible fix, there is still some strange sense of joy to be found in pointlessly gunning down the minions of evil in colorful environments.

The campaign is fantastic and the overall presentation is a sim fan's dream. While most sims tend to focus on detail for detail's sake, Silent Hunter III puts the obscure procedures involved in running a U-boat into an instantly engaging context. Sure, there are down times and, sure, the work of running a U-boat is sometimes tedious but the overall excitement of stalking and sinking a target and then sneaking away is very clear here.

Brothers in Arms takes some of the best features of each and adds an entirely new tactical dimension. Offering up engaging, squad-based battles and presenting it all in an authentic yet undeniably cinematic setting, Brothers in Arms is a game that, to borrow a phrase from General Patton, "grabs you by the nose and kicks you in the ass."