Polygon

Attack of the Friday Monsters: A Tokyo Tale is not nearly big enough to hold the amount of affection I harbor for it, which isn't the worst problem for a game to have. Its eight-dollar price tag is a welcome invitation to live, albeit briefly, in the world Millennium Kitchen has invented - but after the credits rolled, and after I polished off the last few quests in the post-game chapter, I was sorely disappointed that I couldn't pay a bit more to play a bit more.

Pikmin 3 isn't perfect. It's not as polished, responsive or tightly-designed as the average Nintendo game. But these issues are never bad enough to derail it entirely. Even in its third incarnation, Pikmin's sense of discovery outweighs any control annoyances it may have and provides a charming variety that the Wii U has sorely lacked. Being different counts for a lot.

Dragon's Crown makes a strong first impression. It's a fun mix of RPG tropes and dynamic brawler action. But I found its over-exaggerated art style alienating and gross in its depiction of women even as it shines in building a world of fantastic monsters and environments, and the forced grind through the same stages dulled my excitement. Dragon's Crown is a wild place to visit, but it doesn't quite hold up in the light of day.

Time and Eternity feels as empty and pointless as its shallow male protagonist's classless advances. It's a chore to play and a failure to its genre influences. I never felt like I had control over my characters, and I didn't really care, thanks to the focus on creepy sex talk. To put it simply, Time and Eternity is an embarrassment.

Hotline Miami admirably does its best to provide an answer. You'll find it buried deep beneath the game's surface — figuratively and literally. It has more to say about our fascination with violence in games than the lion's share of its competition. That the killing is fun made me feel all the worse. Which was the point. Hotline Miami is exceptional not because it's violent, but because it's violent for a reason.

Maybe I would have been better off if I had just quit. The plot never pulled me in or even resolved itself in a suitable manner. The AI never got any smarter. And Eric never felt like a kick-ass creature of the night with mastery of deadly arcane powers. Dark ends how it began: a flaccid non-event, sputtering out before any potential can be realized.

Company of Heroes 2 would be a singular kind of RTS, if the previous game didn’t exist. While Company of Heroes had its own host of practical issues that Company of Heroes 2 looks to fix — matchmaking and server stability among them — it’s difficult to see how the sequel makes enough forward progress. Company of Heroes 2 is a good game, and a great, unique multiplayer experience.

Shin Megami Tensei 4 sets a high bar for difficulty early on, but its learning curve is so approachable that it's hard to get discouraged. Not every element is working against you either; a death on the field doesn't mean the loss of all your progress. ...With the game's rapid resurrection system, a potentially devastating loss of progress became a brief nuisance to my wallet and nothing more.

It speaks to Civilization 5’s solid foundation that Brave New World’s wealth of new mechanics fit seamlessly and combine in occasionally unexpected (but never quite broken) ways. Firaxis could have played it safe and simply layered on more changes of clothes.

If this is a prologue, though, it's a brilliant way to introduce these characters, to give the player a little skin in the game before Season 2 is even on their hard drive. Either way, 400 Days is a wonderful little anthology and a heartening reminder that, even in a world that has been thoroughly mined across countless media, Telltale is still able to unearth new stories.