In Call of Duty: Black Ops, you play an Australian actor named Sam Worthington doing a bad American accent while the serial killer from Saw forces him to yell stuff about the exposition, with occasional breaks to play through overloud overscripted overblown shooting galleries in which you get captured no fewer than three and a half times.

Storytelling aside (those are two words that this narrative-heavy game can't afford), Dead Space 2 is a serviceable two-trick pony. The main trick is the contrived dismemberment mode. Headshots are so passe. So the Dead Space approach is to encourage severing crab-like limbs, conveniently extended as if the monster was going to make a snow angel. They're loud, they writhe, they splorch out a lot of blood, and when you fail, they treat [sic] you to an elaborate animation of the lead...

Combat is still solid when it's one guy fighting a handful of enemies polite enough to hang back and wait their turns. But when Ubisoft tries larger encounters, which they do frequently in Revelations, Assassin's Creed combat looks suspiciously like Dynasty Warriors. That's not something to aspire to. When a riot breaks out, it looks unintentionally hilarious, with characters shuffling and bumping uncertainly. It looks more like a high school dance.

The campaign, which has no time limits and almost no fail states, is just a primer. The core of Anno 2070 is the continuous scenario, which you can set up to be as competitive, goal-oriented, and punishing as you want, or as peaceful, open-ended, and forgiving as you want. This is the epitome of the sandbox game. Just start it up and build your little heart out. And the longer it goes, the longer you'll want it to go.

This is when Skyrim will reward you most richly. Not when you're trying to win, or beat it, or get to the end, or level up, or earn the achievements. Not when you're playing it like a stat-based RPG, or a single-player MMO, or a challenge. Skyrim is putatively a game. More accurately, it's a narrative loom.

When the rocket launcher and shotgun appear later in the game, they appear for specific situations and not because your arsenal has been lacking up to this point. And from the early appearance of grunts on the Pillar of Autumn all the way to the grand reveal of the Flood and the Sentinels, Halo is a textbook example of how to gradually unfold enemies in a meaningful way. Are you prepared to fear a cloaked elite with an energy sword for the very first time, all over again?

It is immaculately paced because it loves you. Most games can be insensitive clods with occasional rough patches. You get stuck for a while, or it's slow to start, or you cruise through some filler, or certain design choices are clunky, or the characters are flat and you don't care about them, or you know exactly what's going to happen next and therefore when it happens you don't care. None of this happens in Saints Row 3, which is a textbook example of how to keep me into a game from beg...

More than any other graphics engine today, it's a complete package, featuring scale, scope, spectacle, on-foot detail and in-airplane elbow room, multiplayer, meaningful destruction, and absurdly good animation. Absurdly good. The animation is so good you probably won't even notice it. Of course the characters move this way because that's how real dudes move. What's the big deal? You almost have to go back to another game with the usual animation to appreciate what Battlefield 3 does...

Uncharted 3 is mostly filler without gameplay. It's the modern equivalent of those full motion video games folks made back in the 90s when new CD-ROMs afforded all that storage space. So developers shot video footage, grafted it onto various games (usually puzzle collections), and a genre was born. Who cares whether there was an actual game in there?

Has a virtual place ever been such a canny combination of story backdrop, richly atmospheric graphics, and thrilling playground as this walled off section of Gotham City converted into a prison? Arkham City is densely packed with things to see, things to hear, and things to do. Gliding over the rooftops can be as rewarding as strolling along the streets. Rocksteady's city is a spectacle through and through, even more beautiful than Ubisoft's Assassin's Creeds for how it's so true to its f...