Polygon

It doesn't take much digging to see the many areas in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate still begging for refinement. I wish a quarter of my time hadn't been spent wading through such a poorly thought out introduction.

BioShock Infinite's big thoughts and complicated narrative don't obscure the brilliant action game that carries those messages through. It's hard to know if Infinite will prove to be another major point of artistic discussion and development of the medium the way that BioShock was. But in every way, BioShock Infinite lives up to the promise of its legacy, and it looks poised to establish a new one.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon has lost a bit of the soul of its predecessor â?? the ghosts have lost their motivations and personalities, such as they were. They're just monsters now. But by nearly every mechanical design metric, Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon is a better game than its predecessor.

Playing Survival Instinct is like listening to a roomful of barely competent musicians, each of whom is playing a completely different song. And every once in a while one kicks you in the groin. Also, you have a sunburn. The tide has begun to turn for licensed games thanks to great efforts like those from Telltale, Rocksteady's Batman franchise and others.

Anodyne is a brilliantly designed adventure that translates well-worn mechanics into a package that feels genuinely new and exciting. While an over-reliance on frustrating jumping puzzles keeps it from greatness, it's a remarkable achievement for its tiny team – a freaky, fascinating exploration of the darker side of gamer psychology.

As a side-experiment with class-based multiplayer and more aggressively arcade-influenced shooting, Gears of War: Judgment doesn't feel essential in the same way its predecessors did. If three games in five years left you with your fill of Gears of War, Judgment may not be enough to change your mind. But as a well-executed supplement to its parent series, Gears of War: Judgment is easy to recommend. People Can Fly have added enough cool new bits to make the game feel fresh, even if they're not re-inventing the series.

MLB 13 The Show is the new apex of a perennially terrific sports series. It doesn't matter that nothing here is a staggering innovation; Sony San Diego has built the MLB The Show franchise into a paragon of annual refinement. MLB 13 is remarkable in that it is almost uniformly excellent. Annual sports games consist of numerous discrete pieces, but they rarely come together as well as they do here.

Maintaining interest and consistency over the course of a massive, sprawling game like Lego City Undercover would be a challenge no matter what the target audience was. Considering it has to avoid the salacious scenes and hyper-violence used to spice its genre brethren, Lego City Undercover is pretty darned impressive.

There's something almost clever about how rigidly Mirror of Fate sticks to its name. It's a reflection: reversed repetition of the same tricks and plot twists employed to greater effect in 2010's Lords of Shadow; a muddied misunderstanding of the structure and design of Castlevanias past. Mirror of Fate fails to build an identity of its own, but more damningly it fails to create a believable likeness of its lineage.

God of War: Ascension is a pair of halves that don’t add up to a cohesive whole. The multiplayer succeeds at making God of War work as a cooperative and competitive experience, but doesn’t have the depth to exist on its own. The campaign feels derivative and lacking the forceful confidence that made the series a showpiece for cinematic character-driven action games.