Polygon

Dishonored succeeds, despite its late narrative missteps. With everything against it, Arkane has created a game with a unifying vision and design that stands apart from its contemporaries as something different. But more importantly, Dishonored succeeds as an ambitious game not content to take one thing and do it well. It demands more than most games ever will of its player, and gives more to players than most other games will ever manage.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown brings the memorable turn-based alien invasion classic gracefully into to the modern age, but comes just short of fully reinventing the genre. While tactical, squad-based combat has never felt so effortless and rewarding, the strategy component takes just enough away to make the game as a whole feel like two slightly disjointed halves. One of those halves just so happens to be one of the best and most artfully-designed strategy games in recent memory.

But time often proves to be unkind to games pushing the edge of their respective genres, or to those bold experiments that circumvent genre altogether. Nights is an interesting piece of history from Sega’s most polarizing period as a first party, of the attempt to find a new mascot in the long-term absence of Sonic. It’s just not a very good game.

Fire Pro Wrestling is for my dad and other people who love seeing their Miis and avatars doing wacky things. They don't mind dropping a few dollars for the opportunity to pit their friends against each other in a neighborhood royal rumble.

If this sounds familiar to Torchlight fans, that's because it is. It's more. An absurd amount more. More multiplayer and difficulty levels, more places to go and things to see. It's new, in the sense that it wasn't in Torchlight, but it's hardly different. What you're playing, beneath all the polish, is essentially the same. Torchlight 2 is clicky nirvana. But Torchlight 2 isn't is a step beyond the familiar. The game feels like the cumulative work of perfectionists intent on making the action role-playing game of their dreams.

The Angry Birds phenomenon developed over years like a snowball rolling down a mountain, expanding with each update. Bad Piggies is a promising start. Like the jury-rigged craft, how far it goes will depend on what its creators choose to add.

His sense of humor was as active and fun as ever — he just backed it up with a personality that I could stand being around. Good intentions are resting somewhere deep down at the heart of Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit. I don't think that Hell Yeah! needs to get rid of its armory of punchlines; it just needs a lot more build-up to make them worthwhile.

FTL is a vital, surprising game where death never feels like the end...Most playthroughs of FTL end the same way, but this pulse-poundingly vital, consistently surprising game manages to make death feel like merely the beginning of another great adventure.

Co-op and excellent writing make Borderlands 2 worth checking out, but it can't escape occasional bouts of fatigue and repetition. It creaks somewhat under the pressure of needing to be more without the lightning-in-a-bottle newness that propped Borderlands up. The shooting still lags behind other first-person frontrunners, and combat too often feels like an afterthought in Borderlands 2's enormous world. It's often mired in the design problems of the genres it borrows from.

Gloomy near-future setting aside, Tokyo Jungle isn't terribly concerned with telling an epic tale of the destruction of mankind. It centers on the narratives that emerge from nature's struggle for food, for safety, for family. Through its constantly shifting challenges, Tokyo Jungle shepherds you to the best of its content without forcing your way.