Polygon

This is a damned fine game. Murder-mystery books and TV shows can sometimes feel like a bit of a chore, rolling through familiar procedures as they wend their way toward the whodunit. It’s a sign of the times that a point-and-click dialogue tree narrative adventure gives flight to a genre that’s been so thoroughly tilled in other media. I’m looking forward to playing more games like A Case of Distrust.

Descenders takes a valiant stab at integrating the fast-paced, stunt-focused gameplay of downhill sports with the procedural generation of modern games. Unfortunately, this combination robs the genre of one of its strongest attributes: handcrafted level design that players can dive into and learn from. This is balanced by tight controls and a slick presentation that keeps you from ever getting too angry at it — just make sure to not wipe out too hard.

I enjoy military campaigns in Civ games, but I’m convinced that developer Firaxis has made a good choice in Rise and Fall. This expansion is a recognition that the magic of this series is in giving players lots of choices — sometimes difficult choices — as we all strive to stamp our own personalities on what is, effectively, a simulation of personal political leadership.

Dragon Ball as a series has always forefronted epic battles. In each episode of the cartoon, godlike warriors transformed the landscape in fantastic one-on-one fights with ease. In FighterZ, anyone can feel like that in any fight. I’ve been waiting for a Dragon Ball game like this ever since I first saw the cartoon in grade school, and I’m so happy this day has come.

Thanks to its late release, Historia on DS has been largely overlooked or forgotten. Chronology seems likely to suffer a similar fate, arriving at the presumed tail end of the 3DS’ life. It deserves better. Does it seem counterintuitive that this RPG works better when played as a different genre altogether? Perhaps ... but somehow, that seems perfectly fitting for this strange, convoluted, time-traveling tale.

If you had asked me just two weeks ago to name the biggest storytelling sin a game could commit, I would have told you it was making players ask questions without giving them a reason to care about the answers. Ask me today and I’ll tell you something different. Lost Sphear buried me under convoluted logic and explanations, lore and jargon, only to cast it aside with a shrug whenever the details were inconvenient to the action. It answered my questions, but in ways so fundamentally disconnected and absurd that I regretted even caring in the first place.

UFC 3 is a lot like real fighting in the sense that the player must be intimately familiar with their strengths and weaknesses, and introduce new techniques by focusing on them one at a time, fight to fight. It requires a lot of losing to git gud. The demands may be tough, realistic and even admirable, but they effectively restrict the player to a single fighter or mode they know best, if they want to have any success or feel like a winner.

What better evidence of this than the fact that, five years later, Sony’s big PlayStation exclusive of the season is this recreation of a PS2 classic. As wonderful a game as this is, the lesson mustn’t be that we need more games that look like this Colossus — rather, that we need games that feel like it: a decade later, pushing against what we expect from games, warts and all.

Monster Hunter: World is still complex. It still won’t hold your hand through parts and may require a few friends for optimal enjoyment. It isn’t for everybody, but if you give it a little time and work, it’s a world worth visiting.

We’ve already seen Battlegrounds’ first “cousin” in the form of Fortnite: Battle Royale, which beat the game to market on console. Expect to see more in the coming years, as every AAA publisher finds ways to put its brands, talent and money into exploiting the language of the battle royale genre. I have no doubt a few of these games will be great. One or two may be superior to Battlegrounds.