In one of the first musical mini-games you play in Rhythm Heaven Fever, you’re on a romantic date and must kick away a series of footballs that are on a collision course with some nearby cartoon weasels. Fail to kick a ball away to the rhythm of the music and the furry critters get a pigskin to the face. Every person I showed this to almost died laughing at the way the weasels’ heads snap back with an alarming smack on impact.

This under-the-radar Nintendo series, each of which features a variety of challenging but hilarious rhythmic exercises, has heretofore only existed on portable platforms. Rhythm Heaven Fever, to be released for Wii on Feb. 13, is the first to be played on a television.

That’s a more significant improvement than you might think. One of the game’s major strengths is its hilarious visual comedy, and putting the action on the living-room TV allows a group of people to see just how much fun it is. Even if you’re not the one playing, the constant barrage of oddball antics are instantly inviting and attention grabbing.

It’s a good thing Rhythm Heaven Fever is so fun to just watch, because it can be seriously difficult to play. If you want to have the proper rhythm necessary to excel at the game, you need to either be a musician (not me) or spend hours every day listening to a wide variety of music (definitely me).

This isn’t Rock Band, where the entire series of notes that you need to play scrolls down on the screen in perfect lockstep timing. Here, there often are no graphical indicators of when to press buttons; your only guide is the beat of the music.

The game’s criteria for letting you progress from one game to the next can be frustratingly strict, too. I frequently had moments where I felt I performed almost perfectly, only to be told to try again. And again.

It’s doubly annoying when there’s no easy to way to restart when you know you’re doing particularly badly. Instead you have to pause, quit to the main menu, select your game and wait through the brief intro sequence that accompanies each one.

Fortunately, the game allows you to skip any mini-game that you’re stuck on, but only after hitting your head against the wall several times. At that point the brain damage has been done.

While Rhythm Heaven‘s games can be difficult, it’s never the fault of the control scheme.
Everything you do — whether you’re controlling a migrating group of flamingos or screwing the heads onto a conveyor belt line of robots — is performed by either pressing the A button on the Wiimote, or pressing A and B at the same time by pinching your fingers together. It’s a big improvement from the DS game, which implemented touch-screen controls that felt somewhat sloppy and imprecise.

There’s an addictive quality, too, thanks to the simple mechanics and the variety of the minigames. You’re bound to have quite a few favorites that you keep returning to long after mastering them, just so you can play them again and listen to the music.

Rhythm Heaven Fever boasts a staggeringly extensive soundtrack of catchy tunes covering an array of different genres, from head-pounding rock to way-too-sweet pop, everything with a distinct Japanese style. Kicking back and listening to the music is the single biggest stress reliever when you’re getting frustrated by the high difficulty.

And if that doesn’t help, you can always get your catharsis by sitting back and watch somebody else smack weasels in the face with footballs.

WIRED Crazy, funny graphics, excellent genre-spanning soundtrack, simple and precise controls, perfect for parties.

TIRED Those who lack rhythm may find themselves very frustrated.

Rating:

$30, Nintendo

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

If you check out our Product Reviews section today, you will see that I wrote a review of the Japanese PlayStation Vita. I even did the exciting video feature above. Expect a lot more as we get closer to the U.S. launch on February 22.

If you check out our Product Reviews section today, you will see that I wrote a review of the Japanese PlayStation Vita. I even did the exciting video feature above. Expect a lot more as we get closer to the U.S. launch on February 22.

The Razer Naga Hex, which is obviously from Razer, the same company that gave us the Razer Blade, has six weird honeycomb-style “mechanical thumb buttons to bind all the necessary spells, skills, and items to take down the competition and complete every quest victoriously.” This obviously reduces the clicks you have to make, making you far more efficient during battles and quests.

It is not the shortcut buttons that make this mouse stand out though. When it comes to tracking precision, you can say that it is as precise as you’d like it to be with its 5600dpi laser sensor designed specially for accuracy and precision. Hands-on reviews have also praised it for comfort, which anyone who has spent hours on end gripping a mouse know is just as important as any performance metric.

Aside from the buttons, precision tracking and comfort, anyone who takes a second to glance at the Razer Naga Hex will be immediately drawn to the alienish green mouse. So if you’re looking for the perfect mouse for the Razer Blade, this is it. You don’t have to wait much longer for it to come out either because its coming in stores next month.

Image via Razer

Serious Sam 3 is an unapologetically difficult shooter.
Image: Croteam

Serious Sam 3 is a classical first-person shooter, much like the first two games of the series, or even something like Painkiller. You are a man who can carry a large number of guns, and you are presented with a series of bad guys you need to kill with those guns. You’ll see many weapons return from the previous games in the series, along with a few new guns that are still familiar from other video games. There are no wheels being reinvented here; the developers at Croteam clearly want you to understand each weapon the second you see it in the game.

Things begin slowly, and the first level or two could even be described as boring. The level design is frustrating in places, and I found myself getting lost once or twice in the first few sections, which shouldn’t happen in a game this linear. I also bumped into a clipping issue or two, and the cut-scenes don’t look as good as we’re used to in modern PC gaming.

These are small nits I’m picking, however, as the experience comes to life when the enemies begin to fly at you in waves and you feel the relentless rhythm of the game. Serious Sam 3 is unique in the current market of action games; it’s willing to throw everything it has at you, all the while cackling madly. Don’t be afraid to kick the difficulty down or to take a break if you become frustrated, but also be aware that finishing each section will give you the same well-earned sense of satisfaction you may recognize from games like Dark Souls.

Serious Sam 3‘s design is reminiscent of 2-D shoot-em-ups. Each enemy moves and attacks in set ways, and the game sends them at you by the dozens—and sometimes by the hundreds. The waves of enemies will cause you to move and fire in certain ways to avoid damage, and when you begin to feel comfortable, the game will layer on another kind of enemy. You’ll run backward, circle-strafe, allow the bad guys to take each other out, and of course keep an ear out for the headless monstrosities that run screaming at you until they explode. You need to have a strong headset or speakers for this game, as it’s absolutely necessary for you to be able to hear where the enemies are in relation to your character. Stereo speakers are good, but surround sound is better. Trust me, the audio cues are important.

What’s clear is that everyone involved with the game spent a large amount of time working on the design of the levels. A lot of thought went into the enemies’ attacks—where they come from, in what order, and how many in each wave. The enemy placement and movement is conducted like instruments in a symphony. It’s a wonderful thing to play, even as you’re cursing the game’s difficulty. That’s why this is more like a shoot-em-up than a first-person shooter: the enemy placement and waves are what makes the game special, with each seemingly simple enemy being used to its maximum effect. Each type of bad guy is relatively easy to deal with and destroy, but when you’re forced to layer your strategies on top of each other as you fight multiple kinds of bad guys at the same time, and then more warp in, things become frantic. You’ll find yourself getting into a rhythm-game like zone, and that’s a wonderful feeling.

The game also provides a wealth of options that used to be common in PC games, but are now worth pointing out in reviews. You can change the behavior of weapon autoselect to “never,” “always,” “only if new,” or “only if stronger.” You can play in a third-person view if you prefer. You can turn the camera bob on or off. You can change the crosshair, and you have a wealth of fun options for blood and gore. You can even change the weapon autoselect behavior to be different in single- and multiplayer. You can adjust the field of view, show the frames-per-second, turn the HUD off… the list goes on. Nearly everything can be tweaked and adjusted, which is right and proper.

Of course, there is also a full suite of multiplayer options, including up to 16-player co-op through the campaign, a survival mode where the game simply throws enemies at you until you succumb, and modes such as the expected deathmatch and one-hit kill, where a single bullet takes you out. There are a number of ways to play online with friends or enemies, and some of them are pretty damn fun. A fair warning, however: some of the more obscure game modes seem to be empty, with little server support.

If you have a deep love of classical first-person shooters or enjoy games that deliver pure action, it doesn’t get much better than this, especially with the wealth of options offered for play. You can save at any time, and you’ll want to use that option if you’d like to get ahead. Some players are going to be turned off by the difficulty or the game’s simple design, but even more are going to fall in love with a developer’s mastery of this genre.

Welcome back, Sam. We missed you.

Verdict: Buy

$40, Croteam

You can catch sick air off massive jumps in Mario Kart 7 by using your automatically deployed hang glider attachment.
Image courtesy Nintendo

Here is the best thing about Mario Kart 7: This time, Nintendo didn’t screw it up.

When you think of Nintendo’s hit products, you don’t necessarily think of the Mario Kart racing games (specifically) as a dominant part of the 3DS maker’s business. But the series is colossal. Mario Kart Wii has outsold every other standalone game on the home system, moving a staggering 28 million copies. That’s one game for every three Wii consoles.

Any other publisher would put out one of these every year; Nintendo does one per console and then sells it for half a decade. So the development team generally plays it safe, as is the case with this 3DS installment, to be released on Dec. 4. Now, when Nintendo played it safe with the Wii version, it crafted something amenable to the console’s fan base: a madcap fun-for-all in which anyone including your triplegic maiden aunt Tillie had an equal chance of winning the race. (She and her 28 million friends say I was wrong to dislike it.)

But nowadays Tillie is too busy playing another round of Pissed-Off Parakeets on her iPhone 4S to bother buying a 3DS. So this time, “playing it safe” means embracing the early-adopter hard-core gamers. This has resulted in a Mario Kart more tuned to our sensibilities, which is just as well since Tillie can barely see the 3-D graphics, what with her glaucoma.

The Mario Kart series may appear at first blush to be racing games, but in fact they are a carefully crafted videogame version of Harrison Bergeron. You can’t simply outrace the pack of Mario characters through the 32 different cartoon courses. You have to use items to attack them and defend yourself. The Handicapper General distributes the items, giving lead racers the crappy items (a tiny banana peel that you can drop on the track in hopes that someone will at some point be dumb enough to drive over it) and the racers in the back get shitkicker death cannons.

Here is a typical scenario: You are in a tenuous first place, just barely holding off the guy in second, carefully considering your racing line and drifting corners to edge him out. Suddenly, the last place person accidentally drives into an item box and fires off a Blue Shell, which zooms out to the front of the pack and explodes on you for the crime of doing slightly better than the guy right behind you. You go out in a blaze of glory and second place zooms into first place. The guy who fired the shell? He’s still in last, of course, but he gets to hear you scream some unrepeatable words, and isn’t that fun for everyone? Except you, but who cares about you.

Mario Kart 7's idea of customizable racecars is slightly different than, say, Gran Turismo's.
Image courtesy Nintendo

Anyway, the basic formula is still in place in Mario Kart 7 but it’s been toned down considerably. It’s possible, both against the computer racers and against other humans, to get far enough ahead that you can maintain first place after a Blue Shell bombing, which is better than nothing. I’ve still lost a fair few races I should have won (and vice versa), but it all felt a lot more fair.

That’s good because Mario Kart 7‘s pure racing can stand on its own. The controls are tight. The gameplay looks simple but has a lot of depth: You can drag items behind you as shields, tap a button to get a burst of speed every time you catch air on the undulating race tracks, etc. Yes, it feels pretty much exactly like 2005′s Mario Kart DS with better graphics. But it’s still too good to put down.

Silent Friends

Mario Kart 7 has online multiplayer, Nintendo-style, which means you can neither speak with or send texts to the people you are racing for fear that you may say something unsanitary. Given the language that I have used in front of Nintendo employees at various game preview events, I am probably the reason for this rule and I do apologize. It still seems a bit like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

There are other ways to customize your experience. You can tweak your go-kart’s frame, wheels and glider (used to float down speedily off the courses’ bigger jumps). You can form a “community” of like-minded racers and adjust the game modes and the items that appear, although you can only pick from general categories (“Shells Only,” “No Items,” etc.) rather than individually turn items on and off.

After getting ruined in the Wii game, Battle Mode is mostly back in fighting form for Mario Kart 7. You still zip around a wide-open arena firing weapons at your friends. But while previous games gave each player three hit points and the winner was the last man standing, the Handicapper General has now decreed that everyone must always get to play for the entire match. So players now score points for hitting others, and lose them for taking too many hits. This is actually a good idea, but it would have been better had it been an additional option rather than the only one.

Another arena battle mode, Coin Runners, is also a good idea: The aim is to putter around the battlefield collecting up coins, which can then be extricated forcibly from other players by blowing them up real good. It’s not an original idea (I’m pretty sure I played something similar in Halo: Reach) but it’s a rare breath of fresh air.

Which Mario Kart sometimes seems to be gasping for. In the latest edition of Iwata Asks, the regular series in which Nintendo’s CEO quizzes his employees on the development cycles of their latest games, Mario Kart‘s team is clear that this was not an “it’s done when it’s done” vanity project: This game had to be out in 2011 as part of the company’s all-guns-blazing plan to kickstart the 3DS business. In other words, there was no time to dream too big even if they wanted to.

That said, if a Nintendo with its back to the wall produces games that are more tuned to core gamers’ sensibilities, I’ll take it.

WIRED Clever course design, tight racing control, easy to learn but has lots of depth, fixed Battle mode (mostly).

TIRED Nintendo’s bare-bones online, general play-it-safe design mentality.

EXPIRED Blue shells.

Rating:

$40, Nintendo

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

Note: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the “Coin Runners” mode was newly added to Mario Kart 7. In fact, it appeared in Mario Kart Wii. Wired.com regrets the error.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary shows how far we’ve come in a decade—and it’s not always a pretty picture. This release celebrates the 10th anniversary of the original Halo by bringing back the classic campaign with updated graphics and sound, along with a passable replication of the game’s multiplayer.

When you install it, the game also asks if you’d like to redeem the code to add the game’s classic maps to your copy of Reach as a map pack. It’s a nice way to add value, but just once I’d like to play a game without a series of updates and five minutes of inputting codes and unlocking features that “reward” me for buying the game new.

Have I scared you off my lawn yet? Do I sound like an old fogey? Maybe so, but the rest of the Anniversary package is more than worth the annoyances of setup and the almost useless Kinect features.

Very little has been added to the game itself; this is the Halo you remember. You can find hidden skulls that change how the game is played (my copy came with the “Grunt Funeral” skull that causes grunts to explode like plasma grenades). You’ll also find terminals that give you some background information on the world of Halo, and there may even be a few hints about what’s coming next. The new content is certainly fine, but the real thrill is being able to play the classic Halo with remastered graphics.

The graphical updates are extensive, and they make everything look like a contemporary game. You can hit the select button at any time to flip between the new graphics and the game’s original look, and the changes are startling; a lot of work has been done to make this look as good as it possibly can. The ability to switch between the two versions of the game at will also proves that the new textures and character models are all running on top of the original engine, so you don’t lose any of the of the game’s feel. Everything acts just how you remember it, and for fans of a series that has gone through so many changes, it’s great to go back to the original style that made Halo so popular.

The magnum is still incredibly overpowered at both close and long range, and it’s great to have it back. The Flood sections of the game are still annoying as hell. Cortana remains weirdly sexy. While there might have been some temptations to adjust the game here and there, the decision was made to keep everything as you remember, for good or bad. The updates are purely cosmetic, although the sound and music have also been completely redone. In fact, the changes to the game’s sound effects and music need more love than they’ve gotten in the press so far; the game sounds just as good as it looks.

Multiplayer is a mixed bag. You can play the entire game through in co-op with another person over Xbox Live, which is amazing, but the ability to play local four-player splitscreen is gone, which is madness. The game brings you into the Halo: Reach engine to play the six included classic multiplayer maps:

• Battle Canyon (Beaver Creak)
• High Noon (Hang ‘Em High)
• Penance (Damnation)
• Solitary (Prisoner)
• Ridgeline (Timberland)
• Breakneck (Headlong)

Each map can be played in a state close to its original design, or updated to fit in with the other Reach maps. You can also enjoy the classical loadouts and playlists to replicate the original experience. There’s also a brand new firefight mission and, if you don’t care about the single-player game, all this content can be purchased separately as a Reach map pack for 1,200 Microsoft Points ($15). New copies of the game come with a voucher that provides the map pack free of charge. (As a side-note, on Twitter I’ll be giving away all the codes that came with the game, so follow @BenKuchera if you want a chance for some free Halo content.)

To be absolutely clear: if you don’t like Halo, you will still not like it now that it’s prettier. For fans of the original, however, this is a great way to revisit a game that remains fun to play, and it adds some great new content to your multiplayer rotation. The visuals and sound are impressive without taking away from your fond memories, and the Kinect features are safely ignored. For $40, this isn’t a bad deal at all. See you online!

See Also:

• Halo Effects: Remastering Classic Games

Ezio is still hanging in there in Assassin's Creed Revelations.
Image: Ubisoft

Man, when I get old, I hope I age like Ezio Auditore. At all of 52 years young, he still climbs up buildings and knifes people in the face just like he used to back when he was 17. What’s this assassin’s secret to staying young? Well, his latest adventure Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, available Tuesday for Xbox 360 (reviewed) and PlayStation 3, uses the same game engine as his first outing in 2009. So it’s the exact same Ezio underneath the new grey hair texture. But like the man himself, Assassin’s Creed is growing old — and getting paunchy with age.

Ubisoft has not been shy about announcing its plan for the Assassin’s Creed series: It plans to release a new entry in the open-world action series every year. How do you make a huge videogame like this in just one year’s time, you ask? Revelations answers that question in the first 30 seconds. As you watch the introductory movie, the first things you see on screen are the names of six different development studios, located everywhere from France to Montreal to Singapore.

It’s not entirely coincidental, then, that Revelations feels very much like six distinct games all stitched together.

Game #1: Assassin’s Creed

Sneak through a city and stealthily cut the throats of your political enemies. The formula is still fun, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that I’ve done this same thing for the past three years — and the stakes have gotten lower, not higher. Avenging the deaths of Ezio’s family while slowly uncovering the mysteries of the Assassins and the Templars was intriguing all the way throughout Assassin’s Creed II, but at this point it’s getting harder and harder to get mad at the people I’m supposed to be assassinating. I feel like maybe they should just sit down and talk it out.

Revelations is set in Constantinople, not that you would really notice besides the fact that they swapped out the Colosseum for the Hagia Sophia. All the shops look the same as they did in Rome, the historically accurate magic tunnels that they used to travel from place to place all look the same, etc. Even all the bugs are the same: Oh, I fell through the ocean floor. Oh, the game locked up during a cutscene. Just like old times.

I do like this blend of stealth and parkour and killing, which is why I keep playing these games. They’re like nothing else on the market. The combination of the serene cities and enchanting soundtrack makes these games such fun to just wander around in. I’m into the story. But this series is slowly going to eat itself if it keeps copy-and-pasting all the fundamental elements of the last year’s game.

Game #2: Farmville

Certain elements modeled after the Facebook games that your mom plays were added in to last year’s game Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and they are back with a vengeance this time around. You can still renovate shops and landmarks around the city by buying them, which will increase the income you receive, which you can then spend on … buying more buildings, of course! You can also recruit more assassins into your guild, who you can then send on missions by way of a text-based menu. The game will tell you when those missions are over, and then you can … send your assassins on harder missions!

The silver lining is that almost all of this is totally skippable. I just got enough cash to buy new armor, then sailed straight through the main game without ever needing to worry about all the cowclicking busywork. Ditto the “bomb crafting” feature (never used ‘em). And after playing a few rounds of the “Den Defense” mini-game I realized it was more convenient to just let the Templars capture my dens in the first place, then go back and reclaim them.

Yes, of course they played Capture the Flag in Renaissance Italy.
Image: Ubisoft

Game #3: Linear Action

Ezio is in Istanbul to reclaim the keys to the library of Altaïr, hero of the first Assassin’s Creed game. Retrieval of these keys is generally centered around a linear action sequence that’s significantly more dramatic than the open-world gameplay. Explosions! Bridges that crumble under your feet! These do well to break up the action, but they’re so clearly separated from the rest of the game that it’s a little jarring.

Game #4: Altaïr

Speaking of which, in Revelations you get to play as that guy again. But not for very long. There are a handful of brief 10-minute segments where you go back in time and relive Altaïr’s memories of turn-of-the-century Jerusalem, finding out what happened to him after the events of the first game. I was looking forward to seeing how these segments played out, but unfortunately they’re barely above the level of interactive cut scenes — you’re not growing Altaïr as a character, just stepping into his shoes for a few minutes at a time.

Game #5: Desmond

The unique conceit of the Assassin’s Creed series is that the real main character is a guy living in modern-day Manhattan who’s been put into a machine that lets him relive the memories of his assassin ancestors.

Of all of the distinct slices of gameplay that make up Revelations, Desmond Miles’ are the absolute strangest: They’re first-person puzzle games, approximating something like a simpler version of Portal. You have to navigate a series of rooms with platforms that you can place in front of yourself. As you work through these rooms, Desmond (currently in a comatose state, stuck inside the ancestor-reading machine) relives his past and we find out more about him through a first-person narration. These are fun segments, not only because they introduce a novel gameplay mechanic but because they advance the meta-narrative. As the full game wraps up, we do get some of the storyline revelations promised in the game’s title, although the ending is another cliffhanger tease that does little but set up the next game.

Game #6: Multiplayer

If you’re tired of being the assassin and would rather be assassinated, you can play Revelations‘ multiplayer mode, an expanded version of the game introduced last year. There are many more play modes that aren’t just about killing each other, like a Capture the Chest game, which simply involves hiding near a treasure chest without being spotted long enough to grab it. Of course, you’ve got to put a lot of time into multiplayer if you want to be competitive, because you get superpowers as you level up, and you’ll be at a disadvantage otherwise.

It’s certainly an original spin on multiplayer gaming, although for me there’s always going to be something of a disconnect at play — the single-player game is fun because I get to be the awesomest, smartest killer in the world, but as soon as I go online, I’m a clumsy dead idiot.

See You Next Year

I would end this review, as I did last year, with an exhortation to Ubisoft to take a break and come up with an Assassin’s Creed game that feels new, rather than a sequel produced at breakneck speed and using as much of the previous games as possible. But the publisher has already announced that the next game in the series will be arriving in 12 months’ time.

The elements added to Assassin’s Creed: Revelations do make it feel like a more different and occasionally surprising experience compared to Brotherhood, which felt like an expansion pack. But at its core, we’re still playing the same game for the third time.

WIRED Music, art direction and gameplay are still sound, Desmond sections breathe much-needed new life into experience, major storyline moments.

TIRED Feature bloat, same old 2007 engine, same old 2009 gameplay.

Rating:

$60, Ubisoft

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

Link and Zelda share a peaceful moment before everything goes pear-shaped and he has to save the world in Zelda: Skyward Sword for Wii.
Image: Nintendo

Have you ever played a game that took forever to come out, only to find yourself wondering, “What the hell were they doing for all this time, anyway?”

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is not one of those games. It has taken Nintendo five years to release a game in this series developed exclusively for Wii, and it delivers in every way possible including some you wouldn’t necessarily expect. The visual design and music are gorgeous, the gameplay varied and well paced, the script humorous. And there’s a lot of it. As of this writing I’ve lost 30 hours to Skyward Sword and I still have more to do. (Wired.com writer John Mix Meyer has put in 40 hours and he’s just about finished, but not quite.)

To be fair, these sorts of superlatives might describe any Zelda game. What sets Skyward Sword apart is that its designers have truly rethought the Zelda framework, which has not changed much in the 25 years since the release of the first game. The Zelda series is one of the most oddly ritualized in all of gaming; there is a whole laundry list of things a Zelda game simply must have or else its fans would be utterly scandalized. There’s a certain comfort in knowing that every time Link opens a treasure chest, he’s going to hold the item above his head with a smile on his face while we all hum along to the familiar dah-dah-dah-DAH musical cue.

Skyward Sword is not the game to slaughter that particular sacred cow, as ridiculous as it sometimes seems when it’s dropped into an otherwise deeply serious moment in the story. But in creating the first game in the series designed around motion controls, the developers have taken the opportunity to ask themselves: What is truly necessary to make a game feel like Zelda, and what is just excess baggage left over from 25 years of clinging to tradition?

World In Motion

This isn’t the first Zelda to make use of motion controls. 2006′s Twilight Princess, which launched alongside Wii, was a GameCube game that had rudimentary motion controls grafted onto it in the final stages of development. Even as an afterthought, they worked well; the game was a solid proof of concept that showed how motion could be integrated into a richer game experience than the Wii Sports mini-games. But what Wii needed was a game that was designed from the outset to use motion controls. It took Nintendo all of the ensuing five years to finish it, and somewhere along the line it decided that Skyward Sword would require the MotionPlus add-on for more precise controls.

The most immediately obvious way that this affects the new game is in the swordplay. In Twilight Princess, waggling the controller any which way produced the same basic sword strike. In Skyward Sword, your onscreen sword mirrors the position and orientation of your hand, allowing you to slash any which direction or poke your sword forward when a thrust is called for. To power up your blade for a big strike, you hold your Wii Remote above your head. (Shouting “By the power of Grayskull!” when you do this is optional but encouraged.)

You don’t encounter as many enemies in Skyward Sword as in previous games, but each enemy fight is more meaningful since you can’t just hack and slash your way through them without getting your sword at the ready and making precise cuts.

If choices were dollars, your average videogame would be occupying Wall Street right now, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim would be the 1%.

In this open-world role-playing game, which Bethesda will release on Friday for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed), everything is a choice. Almost every aspect of the game can be altered and tailored based on your decisions, from the amount of dirt on your hero’s face to the outcome of the civil war that threatens to tear the land of Skyrim apart. You’ll feel the effects of your actions, too. Dead shopkeepers will stay dead. Generic guards will make idle comments about news they’ve heard about your adventures across the globe.

And oh, what a globe it is. Unlike its 2006 predecessor The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which at times felt like a carbon copy of Generic Fantasy Map #40192, the world of Skyrim is a Viking-inspired treasure trove of flavor and charm. Every city has its own personality. Many have their own cultures, each fraught with racial conflicts and frightening adversaries. Gone are Oblivion’s bland medieval cities and repetitive demonic gates.

Speaking with Skyrim director Todd Howard earlier this week, I asked him if there was any one element of the game he thought the team had really knocked out of the park. His answer was quick and to the point: “The world.”

I have to agree. Plenty of games have set out to create open, lively worlds that feel just as human as the one we inhabit. Perhaps none has come as close as Skyrim.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to pin down exactly what makes this world feel so truly alive. Maybe it’s the way a court wizard will hire mercenaries to hunt you down for stealing his potions. Maybe it’s the endless platters of food (and boy is there a lot of food).

To list all of the things you can do in Skyrim would take longer than a Neal Stephenson novel. You can attune observatories in ancient dwarven ruins. You can play hide-and-seek with ghosts. You can get married in an anti-climactic ceremony that may or may not be a cynical commentary on the realities of actual marriage.

You can climb frost-covered mountains and fight off frost-breathing dragons. You can discover the terrible secret behind an eccentric museum. You can enter a drinking contest, black out and attempt to retrace your drunken steps in what must be a tribute to The Hangover. You can join the Dark Brotherhood, a group of assassins who made me yell “holy shit” more times than I’d like to admit (thanks to a beefy quest line packed with death contracts, cold-blooded betrayal and all sorts of gory surprises).

Or you can just steal a horse and gallop across the map, killing everyone and everything in your way.

This sheer amount of content may seem overwhelming to many gamers, particularly in light of the fact that the game has an infinite number of procedurally generated quests. If you’re worried about losing sleep, you should be. I have spent 62 hours with Skyrim over the past two weeks and I still can’t stop thinking about all the things I have left to do.

The game’s greatest accomplishment is that it is a paradise of escapism, a lavish love letter to immersion. Diving into Skyrim’s world feels both thrilling and comforting, like riding a rollercoaster or swimming in the ocean. There is very little padding. There are very few scripted quests that aren’t worth experiencing.

Bethesda has developed something of a reputation for releasing buggy games, and Skyrim is no exception. My game locked up five or six times, though I didn’t lose any progress thanks to the game’s frequent automatic saves. I also experienced a handful of weird animation glitches and conversation errors — nothing major or game-breaking, but worth noting. Bethesda has promised a day-one patch that will hopefully fix some of these issues.

In a recent blog post, LucasArts designer Clint Hocking wrote that the real beauty of a videogame is determined by its player, not its creator.

“I don’t want to be your hero,” he wrote. “I want you to be your hero.”

Perhaps this is why Skyrim’s world is such a triumphant accomplishment. It gives you a large blank canvas and tells you to do what you’d like with it. You guide your own narrative, control your own fate, choose your own adventure. You are your hero.

Longtime gamers may remember the era in which every game’s credits ended with a note saying “SPECIAL THANKS: YOU.” Skyrim doesn’t need to say it; it’s thanking you every step of the way.

WIRED Meticulous attention to detail, fantastic world to explore and experience.

TIRED Occasional bugs and glitches; will suck up your entire life for at least a month.

Rating:

$60, Bethesda

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

For all its eye-popping 3-D graphics, playing Super Mario 3D Land sometimes makes me feel like it’s 1990 and I’m holding an old black-and-white Game Boy.

What I mean is, back in the day most portable games were downscaled versions of the games you loved most on your home console, the mechanics and playfields borrowed from the “real” version and shaved down to fit on the tiny monochrome screen. It wasn’t quite as good, but you could take it with you in the car.

Now, some of these games overcame these limitations and kicked a whole lot of ass. That’s Super Mario 3D Land, to be released for Nintendo 3DS on Sunday. It’s one of the best games of the year. Other videogames cry themselves to sleep at night wishing they were this awesome.

But every now and then, that nagging realization creeps in, telling you that this is more like a bite-sized version of the Super Mario Galaxy Wii games rather than a truly original spin on the series.

Spoiler alert: Some Super Mario 3D Land spoilers follow.

3D Land is the killer app that 3DS has sorely needed, a surprising, engaging, challenging action game fit for newbies and veterans alike. The levels are designed not only to look good with the system’s glasses-free 3-D display (goals are often placed in the background away from the camera, giving a sense of depth) but to encourage players to mess around with the system’s 3-D slider, seeing how the environments change as you flip between dimensions.

While Mario’s goal is always to run to the end of the level and jump on the ever-present flagpole, there’s plenty of time for detours along the way. Pairs of sightseeing binoculars are installed in certain places, letting you view the rest of the level and view the location of hidden secrets. Each level has three Star Coins hidden in out-of-the-way places, which you’ve got to grab if you want to keep opening up more worlds to play in. There’s a careful balance of linearity and exploration.

There’s another reason it gives off 1990 vibes: The gameplay design liberally borrows elements from the 21-year-old Super Mario Bros. 3. This was the game that truly established the design sense of the Mario series, a cartoon world where every shape is rounded off, even the spikes, and where everything is painted in primary colors and has a face, even the clouds and bushes.

More than that, it introduced the Tanooki Suit, a power-up that let Mario fly. In this game, the fuzzy fur suit with its big ears and bushy tail (besides doubling as fashionable evening wear in several San Francisco nightclubs) lets Mario float in the sky, making tricky jumping sections significantly easier to navigate. Not to mention you can take out enemies by swinging your tail at them instead of having to carefully jump on their heads.

If that’s not easy enough for you, there’s even more help: If you die enough times on a level, the game will offer you a super-powered invincible Tanooki getup that will let you plow through the whole thing unimpeded. (And since there doesn’t seem to be a penalty for using it, it’s extremely tempting.)

For the first few hours, you’ll zip right through the game. As the great castle of the Koopa King (where the princess has once again gotten herself stuck) looms ever closer, you’ll think to yourself, “Is this it? Is it this short, this easy?”

Then comes the biggest surprise in a game full of them: Once you finally send Bowser packing, you find you’re only half done, and that eight more worlds of remixed challenges await. These are all based on levels you’ve already played, although many of them are so dramatically altered as to be wholly new experiences.

Quite a few rely on speed-running: You’ll start the game with only a tiny bit of time on the clock, and have to book it through a level grabbing more time while avoiding death — oh, and you have to get those Star Coins while you’re at it. There are no invincible fursuits to help you. These are real nail-biters. More often than not I’d hit the flagpole after finally doing a perfect run and find myself taking a colossal intake of breath, having held it all the way through the last part of the level.

Of course, the thing about speedruns is that there’s no time to stop and smell the fire flowers. All of the innovation, laugh-out-loud surprises and clever 3-D optical illusions are front-loaded into the first half of the game, and the back half is about going as fast as possible through increasingly more familiar territory.

3D Land is a grabby borrower of a game — enemies from Mario 3, music from 2006’s New Super Mario Bros., gameplay from Galaxy. Eventually it starts borrowing from itself. It’s an excellent game because all of these things work so well together; the only thing keeping it from perfection is that it cries out for more innovations to call its own.

WIRED Clever 3-D graphic design, tight play controls, new spins on classic music, challenging (eventually).

TIRED Borrows more than it invents, runs out of creative steam in the back half.

Rating:

$40, Nintendo

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

The walls of this castle are crumbling down around me. The flames engulfing it are making their way ever higher. Desperate, I leap out of a miraculously convenient open window onto a roof.

“I bet the roof will start collapsing and I’ll have to run towards the camera,” I think to myself just before Nathan Drake starts doing exactly that.

Afterwards, I feel like the whole event would have been more exciting if it hadn’t been so utterly predictable.

Collapsing Castle on Fire is but one of the many action-packed scenes in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, to be released Tuesday for PlayStation 3. The latest chronicle of the adventures of so-called “everyman” Nathan Drake ups the ante on everything that made the previous game great, including its Hollywood-inspired bombast.

Those thrills, ripped straight from summer blockbusters, tend to be both Uncharted 3’s biggest strength and biggest flaw.

Drake’s Deception never lets up on the action, and it has an obsession with constantly one-upping itself. Before the end of the game, you will have escaped from a burning building, outran a massive wave of water aboard a sinking cruise ship and traversed a seemingly endless desert.

These segments are thrilling, heart-racing stuff, but predictable. You could make a drinking game out of how many times Nathan Drake jumps to a ledge and grabs it by the tips of his fingers only for it to collapse, landing him in an even more precarious situation. Do another shot when it’s followed by a sardonic one-liner.

I felt much more engaged with Uncharted 3 when it wasn’t trying to ape a popcorn flick and just let me climb and shoot on my own.

Uncharted 3 packs plenty of wide, open areas with tons of enemies to fight off. Your position relative to the enemy is often more important than your aim. The environments give you plenty of room to maneuver around your opponents, whether it’s flanking them from behind or getting the drop on them from above.

These gunfights are more thrilling than the thrill ride, mostly because they have more room for error. Being close to death, with enemies surrounding me and bullets flying past my head as I run for cover is one of the most heart-pounding gaming experiences I’ve ever had.

Uncharted’s characters are at their best in this installment. We hear more of their backstories, making them more lovable. The dialogue deftly alternates between witty and dramatic. It’s no L.A. Noire, but the animations add a level of human subtlety: You can tell how a character feels by a twitch of the lips, a drooping of the eyelids.

The climbing and platforming segments can be just as compelling. The camera angles are more cinematic, sometimes looking downwards to Drake’s head as he scales a building or zooming far out, allowing you to see the entirety of an area. When the camera pulls back dramatically at one point to show you that you’ve just traversed the entire outer side of a gigantic boat, with more to come, it is much more suspenseful than the movie-like moments.

But as the spectacles get grander, the player’s interaction with them lessens. For example, there’s a visually astounding scene where you’re trapped on a sinking cruise ship. Rooms around you become flooded almost as soon as you enter them. But as long as you press forward and jump occasionally, you’ll make it through without a scratch.

Then there’s the desert. Playing this scene, I was convinced that Uncharted 3 had the most technically adept graphics of any game on any platform. This desert was seriously huge — endless, it seemed. And beautiful: The sand itself was sharp and richly detailed, bits of it dropping from Nathan Drake’s shoes as he walked. All I wanted to do was explore this vast wasteland.

But I couldn’t. The desert was just for show. If you moved any direction but forward, it just looped endlessly. There was nothing out there to find. So I trudged in a straight line and watched the cutscenes, and then I was out of the desert.

WIRED Gripping story, lovable characters, superlative graphics, thrilling gunfights and platform segments, jaw-dropping setpieces.

TIRED Little room for experimentation during the game’s biggest moments, predictable tropes.

Rating:

$60, Sony

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

The gameplay is nothing new with nothing to distinguish it from Cityville, Farmville, Sims Social, or any of the other (beginning to be) countless social games you can play on Facebook (and Google+), except that everything looks and is named differently, from items and buildings to tasks. That does not mean though that Mafia Wars 2 is any less engaging than the above mentioned games. On the contrary, I’m sure Mafia Wars fans will end up inviting lots of friends to help them finish tasks and get more energy in the next few weeks as they build up their turfs and engage in fights.

What I did like about Mafia Wars 2 is that the artwork is truly cool; in fact I think I spent more time just looking at the task/tutorial notifications appreciating the coloring and effects than playing the game itself. The boss wars and the multi-player arena also adds another dimension to the game, especially since you can ask your friends during the fight to help you beat up a stronger character.

All in all though, this game will appeal to the same crowd its predecessor drew, and won’t grab the interest of those who’d rather not have the social aspect of gaming. Of course, you can always pay Zynga to get more energy and required items without waiting or adding friends.

In the middle of dishing out several fistfuls of punishment to a street thug’s increasingly battered face, Batman is snuck up on by two more overeager criminals. Without breaking his stride, he steps behind the pair, effortlessly grabbing their craniums and smashing them together. He leaps a few feet over the war-torn blacktop to dropkick a final foe, and the camera slows down and zooms in to capture the perfect Kodak moment of impact. Instantly, he throws his grappling hook, latches onto a nearby building and is off without a sound, gliding fast over the rooftops of Arkham City.

I’ll never get tired of doing this, I think.

Batman: Arkham City, to be released on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 18, rewards you for playing it well. Not amazingly well, just regular well. If you mash on the attack button, Batman will just stand there punching criminals. But if you follow the rhythm of battle, timing your strikes and using counterattacks at the right moment, it’ll look like a graceful ballet of destruction as the legendary comic-book avenger seamlessly strings together a series of animated attacks.

Arkham City is what every lesser open-world videogame wishes it could be, a few important pieces of core gameplay that have been polished to perfection, set in a wide-open city filled to the brim with things to do. And it does all this with narrative panache, spinning a story worthy of one of the world’s most famous superheroes.

Spoiler alert: Some light Arkham City spoilers follow.

2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum single-handedly upended the notion that videogames based on comic books could hope to strive for mediocrity, at best. An original, creepy, surprise-filled adventure through the demented dens of the criminally insane Batman villains, it garnered universal critical acclaim that year. With anticipation for Arkham City at a fever pitch, the thing that the sequel was most in danger of doing wrong was sticking too close to the formula, casting a been-there-done-that pall over the whole thing.

In fact, it avoids the curse of sequelitis by making a major change to the formula — instead of a Metroid-esque series of interconnected rooms, it’s an open-world city that you can fly across, going from point to point in a matter of seconds. You can play only the missions that are required to advance the storyline, but you’re also constantly tempted with a wide variety of side missions, collectibles and challenges scattered everywhere. It doesn’t feel anything like Metroid anymore, but it sure feels a lot like Crackdown.

One of the first side missions you can undertake turns out to be key to flying freely throughout the city. Soon after the game begins you can try some “augmented reality” missions in which you’re challenged to glide through a challenging series of green rings overlaid on the city. Finish the first four of these and you get the Grapnel Boost add-on for Batman’s grappling hook. Alone, the hook lets you immediately zip up to the tops of buildings. With the boost, you can zip past the buildings. Using this effectively means that you can fly over Arkham at top speed, another example of the game rewarding skillful play with a feeling of power.

With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Arkham City isn’t a real city; it’s a section of Batman’s native Gotham that’s been corralled off as a giant makeshift prison for the inmates of the now-closed asylum. While you might think that taking a whole bunch of lunatics and giving them the run of an entire borough is a super-smart idea, as it turns out it does not go so well, and millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne decides to get himself arrested so he can go in there and figure out what’s going on. As it turns out, his old pal Joker is up to something, although he’s looking pretty sickly following his failed dalliance with super-drugs in the previous game.

You won’t just be going up against Joker, though; a whole rogue’s gallery of Batman’s famous nemeses is on the loose in Arkham and trying to ensnare the Dark Knight in their various traps and schemes. These are the stories that drive the side quests — working through the Riddler’s ingenious puzzles, tracing the path of bullets fired by Deadshot, flying through the city at breakneck speed to chase after Zsasz, et cetera. They’re not just busywork. Everything has a setup, a story, a good reason for being there.

Everything you do nets you experience points, which allow you to intermittently upgrade Batman’s beltful of wonderful toys. These constantly flowing rewards coupled with the polished gameplay and fast-paced story make Arkham City one of those games, the kind where you are surprised to find that you have stayed up until 4 a.m. playing it, then go to bed and get up at the crack of noon to keep playing.

What drags Arkham City down a bit is feature bloat. Batman starts off the game with most of the gadgets that he spent the entirety of Asylum adding piecemeal to his arsenal, then adds even more at breakneck speed. The game requires you to use each of these gadgets and gewgaws at certain key moments, including during several boss fights. But it’s difficult to remember how to use them under pressure, since it seems like every button on the Xbox controller has about 11 different functions depending on the situation. Heck, it’s difficult to remember what you even have in your arsenal.

Arkham City’s thoughtful but ultimately inelegant solution is to display a strip of reminder text literally every time you have to do something out of the ordinary, constantly covering the screen in white text to let you know which buttons to push and when. A much better way to keep players from getting confused would have been to not have so many damn items in the first place.

Weighed down by bloat though it may be, Batman: Arkham City is still one of the year’s finest games, filled with the capacity to surprise even players who’ve skulked through every inch of its predecessor.

WIRED Free-flowing action feels great, open world packed with rich story-based missions, fantastic graphics and audio.

TIRED Feature creep.

$60, Warner Bros.

Rating:

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

Image: Codemasters

There is no context given to any of your actions in Bodycount.

There is absolutely no cohesion to this Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game, released on Tuesday. None of the ideas come together to create an experience that feels unique or distinct from other, better games already available or coming soon. Every moment I spent with Bodycount felt like an obligation.

When you die, and the game’s inability to accurately convey how much damage you’re taking means you’ll die often, the screen says “ASSET EXPIRED.” Your character is completely faceless. You have nothing invested in the fights you’re in, and the ugly, repetitive environments and unsatisfying gunfights don’t give you a single reason to want to continue. I did not make it far in this game, because one day I will die, and I refuse to go out thinking I spent one second more than I had to playing Bodycount.

The enemies work for an organization called Target. They are bad. Therefore you must kill them in interesting ways and get combos that mean absolutely nothing. It’s like someone tried to copy Bulletstorm, got drunk, and then gave up. Many aspects of the game look like they were created using placeholder graphics that were meant to be replaced, until the executive decision was made not to hire artists.

You can hold the trigger button in an attempt to use iron sights, but the gun is off-center on the screen, making the aiming no easier than the normal running and gunning outside of the zoom effect. Also, you can’t move in this mode, you can only lean. If you hold the trigger button half down you can move, but since it’s easy to push too hard and the leaning mode is useless, you have to wonder why these control decisions were made. None of the controls can be re-mapped or adjusted.

I know I’m being harsh; the game had a troubled development cycle and it couldn’t have had much of a budget. Or, should I say, if there was money spent, you don’t see any evidence on the screen. Still, they’re selling this game for $60, and that’s almost criminal. It’s barely competent, and would be hard to like as a budget title, but as it stands it was pushed out the door in this condition and sold at the same price as a triple-A title. That is hard to forgive.

It’s depressing when a game completely fails to make the case for its own existence. There is no fun to be had here, no hook to grab players, and no justification for the premium pricing. This is a situation where the press needs to act as a rolled-up newspaper, smacking everyone involved with this game on the nose and yelling “NO!”

Image: Square Enix

The original Deus Ex remains a beloved PC game, so the fact that sequel Invisible War was hobbled by console-based development became one of the real tragedies of gaming. The third entry, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, has been developed by an all-new team, which saw its publisher merged into Square Enix and then had its game delayed. Fans had little reason for hope.

All the effort paid off. Not only is the game an amazing return to form for Deus Ex, but the PC version does nearly everything right.

Welcome to Detroit

The human augmentations being sold by Sarif Industries can save a life, or at least improve one dramatically. Soldiers can get mechanical replacements for limbs lost in war; neural enhancements can save people from degenerative diseases. You play as Adam Jensen, who knows enough about second chances. After being a part of a police action that went wrong, he’s now head of security for Sarif Industries, reporting to David Sarif himself. Still, Jensen isn’t sure about the technology he works to protect. If so much good can come from this work, why do so many of the augmentations have military applications?

Others share his misgivings about a future that might be more machine than human, but they have more violent ways of expressing their thoughts. During an attack on Sarif Industries, people he cares about are lost. Despite an impressive aptitude for both hand-to-hand fighting and firearms, Jensen is broken and left for dead. Sarif isn’t done with him, though, and has a brutal solution to his host of physical problems: keep Jensen alive by pouring every available augmentation into his body. When he wakes up, he’s something new—and vastly ahead of the curve. He also has a strong motivation to find the people who attacked his boss, his loved ones, and in a very real way took his life. Jensen begins to travel the world with Sarif’s support in order to put things right.

Fans can take a deep breath: they will get what they want from a Deus Ex game in this release. The story is dense, complete with twists, interesting characters, and far-flung locations. Large hub sections allow you to talk with people, pick up side quests, and search for hidden surprises and goodies. You’ll gain experience for everything you do, from finding new locations to taking down enemies. The game has no traditional leveling system; it simply gives you a point to upgrade your augmentations when you reach 5,000 experience points, then takes your experience level back down to zero.

Depending on how you upgrade augmentations, you can be an armored tank, a stealthy assassin, or something in between. You’ll never be told how to complete a mission, you’ll merely be asked to accomplish a goal and then set loose on it. My personal advice: Beef up your hacking skill early, as it’s the easiest way to unlock many opportunities in the game’s opening sections. It doesn’t hurt that the real-time hacking mini-game is genuinely enjoyable and can provide some tense moments when you need to break into an area quickly.

The weapon system is likewise refreshing. You have limited slots in your inventory for weapons, items, and ammunition, and the only way to upgrade weapons is to install a series of kits that give you bigger clips, silencers, and laser sights. This makes juggling inventory space interesting: if you need to drop your assault rifle to make room for something else and then you move to the next area, that gun you’ve upgraded is gone. I loaded my handgun with upgrades and turned it into a silenced, laser-sighted killing machine. I kept it with me throughout the entire game, and it began to feel like my personal sidearm instead of a generic weapon or throwaway upgrade. You’ll also find or recover everything from stun guns to sniper rifles, along with some increasingly exotic weapons.

And oh, the gunplay. By holding the right mouse button, you switch to a third-person mode to use cover, and you can slink along walls or duck behind barriers, blind-firing to clear the way or popping up for a moment to take down an enemy with a clean shot to the head. While your health does regenerate, it hardly matters given the brutality of the gun battles; bad positions usually have few ways out. You’ll die often, and before you beef up your character with augmentations, death takes only a shot or two.

The gunfights in Human Revolution aren’t quite chess, but they’re a long way from checkers—especially when you learn to move silently and take down two enemies at the same time, by hand. The third-person cover system wasn’t shoe-horned into the game, either, and it makes sense in a deep way. Depending on play style, Human Revolution feels like a great action game or a slower-paced role-playing game.

The game's environments often have a lived-in, sci-fi-by-way-of-noir feel.
Image: Square Enix

When a Game Moves Past “Good” and Becomes Something Special

The game doesn’t just grab you during its opening hours, it staples you to your seat. The first few scenes are marvels of effective, economical storytelling. We are introduced to characters and concepts, and then we begin to question things we thought we knew. It helps that every game mechanic, including gunplay, stealth, hacking and social interactions, is handled with confidence and grace. I played this game in five-hour chunks and it never became dull. I packed it in for the night because it was three in the morning, not because I was ready to stop.

While you can choose to do good things for the people you meet, the game offers no morality system; you will just as often be rewarded for doing violent things as you will for doing the “right” things. A bleak sense of dread settles over your actions like a heavy fog. Just when you think you see the fingers of your enemies, you realize the hands are already wrapped around your throat.

Despite the sense of alienation and calculated determination in everything these characters do, the game isn’t all dystopian chill. A series of optional side quests provide a great deal of context for who Jensen is and where he comes from, and the story ends with a conversation that I found hard to follow due to the dampness in my eyes (I’m going to blame a dust mote). If you rush through the game, or even mess up one of the interrogation-style conversations, you could miss this entire aspect of the character. In fact, after playing through these sections and sharing the information with another writer who didn’t take that path, I began to wonder what I had missed. This game doesn’t just reward multiple play-throughs, it all but demands them.

In fact, that’s one of the strongest aspects of this game. When I had finished the game I sat down to compare story notes with another writer, and we were both pleasantly surprised by how differently the game reacted to our decisions. Neither one of us felt slighted, as both versions of the game seemed like the “right” one, but different approaches to the game’s many set pieces shone light on different facets of the densely packed story.

The game’s uncanny ability to give you multiple ways out of situations is carried right through to the final encounter, and the game even ends with an important decision. Every option you’re given before the credits roll is attractive in its own way, though at the same time, none of the choices truly provide comfort. Human Revolution can be oppressively bleak at times, but it earns its tone.

Although the game world has plenty of room for more stories told by future titles, this story comes to a very definitive end. That’s something rare in big-budget games today, especially when they take place in an established franchise. But a real conclusion just confirms why this game deserves so much praise: by the end of the game’s impressively long run time, you’re left satisfied by the story and the characters within it.

This is the Deus Ex game we’ve been waiting for.

The Good

• A Deus Ex game, and a very good one at that
• Wonderful use of both first- and third-person views
• E-mails and news reports do a great job of building the world, and are often funny.
• Many side quests, and choices that matter as the game progresses
• Varied weapons
• Augmentation system means all players can play in their own style.
• Multiple ways to complete each mission
• The hacking minigame remains fun through the entirety of the game.
• Impossible to see everything the first time you play
• A lengthy single-player experience: I put in around 25 hours and can’t wait to play again.
• Standard branching conversations are enhanced with higher-stakes conversations that change how the story plays out.
• Adam Jensen is a mirror for the other characters in the game: Some see a monster, others see the future.

The Bad

• The transitions between the game and its cutscenes can be jarring.
• Lack of support for NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology (3D fans can only use AMD’s HD3D)
• The voice acting can be spotty in places.
• The conspiracy can get a little thick at times, and a lot is thrown at you near the end of the game.
• I experienced a few crashes while playing on the PC, causing me to save more often than I would have otherwise.

The Ugly

• The game has a quick-save ability, and I admit to using it every now and again, but abusing saves to see the “right” way through conversations will harm your enjoyment of the game. The “Ugly” tag is for people too cowardly to live by their own in-game decisions. And I mean that in a nice way.
• An early mission in a police station can be exceedingly tedious if you tackle it at the wrong time, which is a design flaw in a game of this type.

Verdict: Buy