Polygon

This is an exceptional piece of fantasy fiction, a metamorphosis machine, a toy, a game like no other. It’s a work of deep imagination, humor and thoughtfulness. Everything held me captive for many hours, and will continue to do so. It's brave, bizarre, compelling and beautiful.

There’s a lot of roughness throughout the game, and the technical issues, while not game-breaking, are often incredibly distracting. But it’s my time with the cast that I’m still thinking about, and the mysteries about the world that haven’t been answered that make me feel like I’m waiting once again for a new Mass Effect game. And if I’m judging a game by where it leaves me, Andromeda succeeds, even if it stumbled getting there.

Wildlands wants to be both an ultraviolent cartoon and a grounded, ripped-from-the-headlines thriller. It can't do both, and it's much better at being silly and absurd. The mechanical experience of it is as freewheeling a sandbox as I've ever seen, but the frame, the tone and the script weigh it down like an anchor.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is relentless in how it treats its characters and the Ninth World, but that’s what makes it so fascinating. Aside from some issues with encounter balance and my yearnings for more detail, it’s a beautiful, challenging game, content to be ambiguous, rich and confounding in ways that few other RPGs have ever pulled off.

If that’s my biggest problem with it after clearing each of the game’s five core endings, that should say everything. Nier: Automata is a game that’s more than willing to make players feel small, both physically and conceptually. It wants to swallow them whole, and it succeeds. Nier demands patience with its antics — not to mention its definition of "ending" — but it’s patience was rewarded.

The gamier aspects of Night in the Woods aren’t its strength, but it does make good use of being interactive. The fact that you can largely choose which characters you want to interact with -- and how frequently -- gives the connections you build a more personal feeling. Perhaps it’s the fact that you’ve searched them out, as opposed to having them forced on you.

I guess, in the end, it's not just that Breath of the Wild signals that Zelda has finally evolved and moved beyond the structure it's leaned on for so long. It's that the evolution in question has required Nintendo to finally treat its audience like intelligent people. That newfound respect has lead to something big, and different, and exciting. But in an open world full of big changes, Breath of the Wild also almost always feels like a Zelda game - establishes itself as the first current, vital-feeling Zelda in almost 20 years.

Players must ask themselves if they're willing to put in the work and practice to meet the talented competition in For Honor, which presents a deep and long-playing proposition in its multiplayer even if the single-player campaign is rote and not worth revisiting. It's easy to give up against such uncompromising and fast-paced combat, but those who stay with it are there to fight for something other than mere survival.

Horizon Zero Dawn discovers a stronger sense of its own personality in one game than Killzone ever managed across half a dozen. Guerrilla Games has long been developing some of the most buzzed-about games in the industry; with Horizon, it feels like it has finally found its own voice, one worthy of all that buzz.

With a winning combo of exciting, familiar gameplay and diverse content, Fire Emblem Heroes manages to do what none of its predecessors have succeeded at: It gets me invested in mobile gaming, to the point where I'm almost willing to indulge in the platform's most insidious capitalist tricks. Almost.