As with the original Darksiders, this sequel comes out swinging with a mythos that, unfortunately, isn't as strong as it could be. Of course the environments and characters are totally badass, and some excellent voice acting really sells those personalities; but the plot, with its convoluted, Diablo-style threads, isn't super-compelling. That being said, after the intro cinematic, Darksiders II lets up and allows you to just get on with the game. Which is pretty cool.

The character-building mechanics - both level-ups, with a skill tree, and weapon/armor equipment drops - really add to the game's sense of customization, without making said customization feel too laborious; there's only one skill point per level (plus you can buy re-specs if you need them), and it's easy to equip new items without going to a pause screen. Combat moves are initially simple, becoming more complex only as you buy new abilities, which really helps the process of learning the game's complicated controls. Quest markers on the map, fast travel, a horse from the very start; Darksiders II is full of design polish, removing many of the barriers between you and the fun parts -- which are, still, dungeons and fighting shit.

One thing I am worried about though, is the overworld. On my trip to the game's first dungeon, I had to travel through a considerable length of uneventful wilderness, sparsely populated with a handful of drone enemies and a couple of treasure chests. Kind of a let-down, especially after the first "town" area had NPCs, and shops, and side-quests. Hopefully there'll be more going on as I explore the world further.

Progress: Finished the Cauldron.

Grand Theft Auto V can't come soon enough.

Mafia II came in my bundle of BioShock Infinite freebies from 2K, and I was feeling a bit of a hankering for open-world mayhem, so, sure. But after about an hour, I've yet to find anything I could respectfully call "mayhem," nor for that matter much openness in the world. Granted, I still seem to be in the game's introductory phase, but I'm having trouble imagining myself having fun tooling around town when the police will chase you for speeding.

True to the game's period, the cars feel like boats and the guns are a pain to aim and reload. Melee combat is less polished than GTA4, and lockpicking is -- actually, it doesn't even feel like it's working right at all. Basically, Mafia II's mechanics aren't that fun - sometimes intentionally - so it makes sense that the game would try to emphasize its story and setting. To its credit, the voice acting is quite good, especially supporting character Joe, voiced by a prolific Italian/Brooklyn stereotype. But the character animations aren't convincing enough to support this talent, and even the first hour of the game has plenty of contrived and absurd story events. The story missions just aren't good enough to keep me interested.

And, protip, when your game has a prologue chapter, it's pretty stupid to have a minutes-long cutscene prologuing the prologue. And to have additional controls tutorials later in the game that are just redundant with the prologue's. Seriously, did the game's first chapter just make it in at the last minute?

For a game with collectible Playboy photographs, Mafia II has done a surprisingly poor job of convincing me to play it.

Progress: Gave up -- stole my first car.

This is... I just -- what? I mean ... what? I'm wary of getting too excited; after all, MercurySteam's previous outings let me down with mediocre gameplay mechanics. But I'll be damned if they can't make an impressive trailer.

I didn't know that Gunpoint even had a story until I saw this. Maybe it can scratch the itch Monaco left me with.

The reviews are in, and the news is ... not great. Despite the game's lofty ambitions, there's a consensus that Remember Me's most interesting parts - the memory remixing sequences, which look unique, if a bit undercooked - can't distract from the bland combat that makes up the majority of its playtime; that the customization element doesn't really matter, since the moves you can "customize" are themselves so rote. And that the Neo Paris backdrop is somewhere between silly and crazy. Which isn't a huge surprise. Still, a shame -- if the memory remixing was the core feature of a smaller, independently produced game, it probably could have gotten away without having a big dumb combat system chained to it.

As with so many other cross-platform titles, the first thing I had to do was change the default resolution from 720p, to fit nicely with my monitor. Somehow I ended up in a state where the settings menu stopped accepting input; I had to force-quit the game and restart. This misfortune, as it turned out, would come to represent the rest of my experience with The Walking Dead: flawed, disappointing, ultimately functional, but frustrating to the point of intolerability.

For all the praise The Walking Dead (the game) gets for its writing, this generally didn't impress me. To be more accurate, it wasn't necessarily the script, but the way the game put its lines together, often in ways that just didn't make sense. For the vast majority of cases, my interactions with NPCs felt more like Mad Libs than actual conversations. Yeah, this is the norm for games, but shouldn't it be getting better? All it takes is some actual story QA -- shouldn't a studio like Telltale care about this exact thing? And, at least to me, a lot of the voice acting also came across as poorly directed.

In said awkward conversations, The Walking Dead places a huge emphasis on the meaning of your dialog choices, and what consequences those choices may have later on. It's a great system in theory, and seeing indicators like "NPC will remember this" have a pretty heavy impact. But there's a core problem with this system, and it's the same one I hated in Mass Effect: often, your choices just suck. It's unbearably frustrating to want to say something, something you feel is obvious and understandable, but not have any option resembling it. Given that the whole theme of this zombie adventure is supposed to be real people in tough situations, this feeling - being unable to do what you think is right - can completely shatter the immersion. Oh, and to boot, sometimes the choices presented to you don't actually match up with what you'll end up saying

Then there's the game's technical infirmity. Although the graphical style makes the game appear nice in stills, character animations look janky and cheap, particularly since mouth movement rarely syncs up with the voice acting. The game can chug in scenes of heavy camera movement, although this doesn't happen often. And in addition to the settings hangup I mentioned before, I had the game crash on me during a particulary tense story moment.

But what I actually have the biggest problem with, is what The Walking Dead inherits from Telltale's adventure game pedigree: item hunting. Twice in the two hours I spent with the game, I wandered aimlessly for a signicant time, because I simply wasn't clicking on the right thing. It's an unpleasant reminder of hunting for pixels in old 2D adventure games, and comes across as totally inappropriate when you're in a desperate survival situation. And, since the game is in 3D, there's also the added fun of whole swaths of the level being hidden to you if you haven't looked in the right direction.

The Walking Dead does some things right: there's a good amount of content, more than I'd expected for a single episode; the writing, at times, does succeed brilliantly at tugging heartstrings; and the action sequences, a hybrid of quick-time event and aiming, are genuinely entertaining. But the good bits make up a minor fraction of the game overall (at least what I played of it), and so that amount of content really becomes a weakness. The Walking Dead fails in so many ways, and particularly badly in some, that I just can't see it through.

Better than: Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People Episode 1: Homestar Ruiner
Not as good as: The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
I mean, really: I don't understand this at all. I can name AAA action games with better storytelling than this guy (and not just BioShock, either).

Progress: Gave up -- Finished Episode 1.

In short, I was wrong. Single-player mode may reduce the frustration of difficult-to-discern detail - though not remove it, since it's still tough to distinguish some obstacles and decor - but it also discards some massive benefits of multi-player that I was taking for granted. No one to distract enemies while you infiltrate a guarded area. No one to accomplish tasks in parallel. No one to revive you if you die. Monaco doesn't scale its difficulty by the number of players, which means that by yourself, it's just hard.

I'm sure I'll revisit this as a party game every now and then, but I really don't have the patience for this by myself. Which is a shame, because not only did I fail to get far enough to unlock the Hacker, but -- now that I'm actually bothering to read it, the pre-mission story is kind of fascinating. Slightly reminiscent of The Usual Suspects.

Yeah, maybe I'll just watch the movie instead.

Progress: Gave up -- Locksmith's story, Hospital.

When I say that Quantum Conundrum lacks personality, that isn't to mean that it has none. As before: there are some distinct signs of life in the setting and theme, but it really, just, isn't that much. The Professor's bad jokes, and the samey architecture of the manor, do little to offset the tedium of the game's puzzles. And, really, that's the core problem with Quantum Conundrum -- the puzzles become tedious.

Portal, and even its lengthier sequel, excelled at the "skirt" principle of level design: long enough to cover the subject, short enough to keep things interesting. But Quantum Conundrum tends to simply be too long for its own good. Puzzles too-often have you repeating tasks you've already done in previous solutions; not to combine them with new ideas in inventive ways, but simply to pass time. Entire puzzles can feel like filler. And the manor has, uh... around 50 discrete puzzle stages, some of which include more than one room.

It's not often I can critize a game for having too many levels, but that's definitely the feeling here: the dimension-shifting puzzle mechanics are simply spread too thin over this length of game. And as a result, the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn't change rapidly enough to keep things interesting.

Better than: Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem!
Not as good as: Portal 2, Q.U.B.E.
One cool design note: portraits on the manor's walls will change based on the dimension, e.g. a portrait of an old lady, when time is slowed, shows the shadow of Death standing behind her. That's a genuinely awesome touch.

Progress: Gave up -- midway through the Yellow Wing.

Yeah, the "cinematics" could have been cut a bit more, as the end-game montage and villain-gloating went on several minutes longer than they needed to. But for all the brevity that I wish the story scenes embraced, there's plenty of narrative humor sprinkled elsewhere throughout Blood Dragon -- in the irradiated and cyborg-ized wildlife, in Omega Force's voice-modified chatter, and in the game's pause-menu encyclopedia, which gives frat-boy explanations of weapons and lore.

Not having played Far Cry 3 yet, I can't say how much of Blood Dragon is original implementation, and how much is re-skin. But - with the exception of being tackled by wildlife, which is all kinds of irritating - it all comes across as a seamlessly-integrated, faux-future experience. Blood Dragon also - and here may be another area conveniently inherited from FC3 - really sells the character arc, with excellent pacing of level-ups and weapon upgrades: though you start as an obsolete cyber commando in a hostile nuclear wasteland, you rapidly ascend the game's food chain, becoming predator to Omega Force's prey. With a final level that consists of just blowing the fuck out of stuff while riding an armored laser dragon, the empowerment fantasy is one trope that Blood Dragon embellishes beautifully.

Blood Dragon isn't a perfect video game, nor is a perfect satire of video games; but it does enough right, in both categories, to more than justify itself. It's fun, it's funny, and it should be squarely in the crosshairs of anyone who loves making fun of, and playing, games in equal measure.

Better than: Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
And congratulations, Power Glove: for selling me on (parts of) this totally badical soundtrack.

Progress: Finished campaign, all Adventures, level 30.

StarCraft 2's "spawning" system forms a convenient analogy to Heart of the Swarm's zerg theme: a single player with the expansion can infect his party members with it, spreading the new units and unit modifictions to them (at least, for the duration of the party). Of course, this infection is highly beneficial to players who haven't purchased HotS, so, maybe the analogy isn't perfect.

It's a classy move, although it's hard for me to see it as generosity -- surely this is a sign that the expansion's uptake hasn't met Blizzard's expectations. But in that regard, it definitely is an effective form of in-game marketing, showing Wings of Liberty players what they're missing first-hand. And it's definitely better than the previous system, which forced players down to the lowest-common-denominator expansion level of their group (meaning HotS owners wouldn't actually get to play with the expansion content).