With every journey to the surface, the Moscow skyline is presented as something awe-inspiring yet imposing, and yet it is only ever seen through the cracked visor of a gas mask – a visor that you must frequently, manually wipe clean of dirt and blood. Should you get too absorbed, the clock on your filter quite literally reminds you that your time spent up here is limited – that for as dank and gloomy as Moscow's subway system is, that's where humanity belongs now.

Whoops! Did you forget to upgrade your interceptors? Because now there's a UFO over Russia that you're not equipped to take down, and transferring or manufacturing more jets will take more time than you have. Oh, and the craft is going to shoot down your satellite. Oh, and Russia will pull its funding if that happens.

The game spooked me on a couple of occasions and frequently almost has enough atmosphere to make its many shortcomings worth overlooking, but then you come across a walker staring at a wall, getting stuck to an object or running in circles due to pathfinding confusion and all immersion is shattered.

I'm used to BioShock games tucking their most important characters away in other rooms, so seeing Irrational put so much effort into someone who's at the very forefront from the get-go works wonders to make me feel more connected to the story's happenings. Booker may be the hero, and he's no slacker in the character development field himself, but Infinite is Elizabeth's show.

Judgment is uneventful. It is a succession of disconnected rooms in which unremarkable firefights take place. We rarely even see our team moving from one area to the next; when a mission ends, we push a button, look over our scorecard, push another button, sit through a load screen, and find ourselves in the next area.

CELL agents are the orcs to your Legolas.

I'll say this about Colonial Marines: had it been released a decade ago, it would have looked passable. The blocky modeling, muddy textures and embarrassing particle effects are all GameCube-quality, and the characters' complete lack of facial expressions would be acceptable in a world in which Half-Life 2 didn't come out over eight years ago.

I don't mind that Dead Space 3 is an action game; I mind that it's a clumsy, uninspired one.

DmC retains the combat that made the series popular but, in stark contrast to the previous release, embellishes it with confidence, audacity and newfound visual majesty. The series creator moved on ages ago to reach greater heights; maybe it was time the series itself did, too.

Even a low-budget, small-scale follow-up to MadWorld is still more of a follow-up than we ever expected. Anarchy Reigns takes the style, audacity, humor and helicopter-throwing lunacy out of its predecessor, then demonstrates that even without those things, it was still a pretty solid beat-'em-up.

This is how you write characters. This is how you match tragedy with humor, dread with hope, terror with lightheartedness. This is how you make audiences emotionally exhausted.

There was a time when every shooter on the market wanted to be Halo. Now they all want to be Call of Duty, and Halo is off in another room doing its own thing, and it's all the better for it.

While it aggravated me in ways I'd anticipated, it captivated me in ways I hadn't. Ubisoft should be embarrassed that they haven't sorted out some of the series' biggest issues yet, but as long as they continue finding reasons for me to keep coming back, I will.

It's not the shooting or the sneaking or the cutting of throats that makes Dishonored fun. So many games are all about figuring out precisely what the developers intended for you to do. In Dishonored, you'll frequently do things that the developers didn't intend, but it'll work anyway, and it'll be awesome.

And as the mission continuously goes awry and takes an increasing toll on Walker's physical and mental stamina, what was once black-and-white starts to look suspiciously grey. You've personally been walking over hundreds of corpses all day, and making hundreds more. What's one more dead body?

We play games primarily for enjoyment; we play games ideally for the full package, in which interactive and non-interactive elements are married seamlessly, and Quantum Conundrum suffers from a clear divide in quality that prevents it from ever truly resonating. That certainly doesn't stop it from being worth the money, but it's been a while since such a unique game felt so formulaic.

Playing it won't ruin your weekend.

Not only did Ubisoft delibrately implement design choices that are detrimental to the game, but they occasionally defy logic to do so. Future Soldier often forces action on you as if the game isn't meant to be played any other way. Which would be fine if the shooting were more graceful, or if there weren't infinitely more interesting elements at play.

With so many of Diablo III's core functions being handled on Blizzard's end, the game's performance is directly tied to how well their servers are running. When you buy Diablo III, half of the game is still in another part of the country, and millions of people are trying to access it all at once.

While Prototype 2 is a definite improvement, it’s not like fixing the first game’s flaws unearths some hidden masterpiece here. It’s not a great sequel so much as the game we should’ve gotten in the first place, and now it arrives several years too late to the party.