Gears of War: Judgement was met with an appropriate amount of skepticism when it was announced last year. With the Gears trilogy proper having just wrapped up the October before hand, was it really necessary to give us a prequel?

Epic Games’ subsidiary studio, People Can Fly, took this challenge on and brought their own twist to the Gears formula. Can a competitive scoring mode and gameplay-altering challenges help Gears of War: Judgement feel fresh?

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Hype. It has been the pitfall of many a game and it can appear at anytime from any number of sources. An amazing trailer, such as Dead Island. A genius auteur, like Hideo Kojima and his Metal Gear Solid series. A storied franchise, like Final Fantasy. All have been the focal point of an intense wave of hype and anticipation and all, at various points, have failed to live up to the near-unattainable level of quality that the gaming masses expected.

The almost-ravenous desire for Bioshock Infinite stems from all three of the sources mentioned above. At E3 in 2010, a clever trailer brought the world’s eye upon the game for the first time. Ken Levine, the man behind the first Bioshock, itself heralded as one of the greatest achievements in gaming, was back with a brand new game, set in a brand new world with promises to blow our minds as thoroughly as Andrew Ryan did in Rapture. Then the reviews started to come in, garnering some of the most lavish praise ever bestowed upon a video game. The hype was out of control. Surely there is no way a game can live up to this kind of fervor. Bioshock Infinite is going to disappoint us just like so many of the ones that came before.

It does not.

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In an era where ever game is so self-serious, it’s kind of refreshing to see a title that basks in whimsy. Level 5 and Studio Ghibli’s Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is such a game. It fairly oozes with clever environment design and goofy, pun-filled dialogue.

Traditionally, I don’t truck with JRPGs. Not because I actively dislike them, or anything, but they never really clicked with me. That said, Ni no Kuni is an experience that wrapped itself around me like a warm blanket and drew me in. Let’s get down to specifics, though, shall we?

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Tomb Raider’s 2013 reboot from Crystal Dynamics comes with a lot of expectations up front. Lara Croft and Tomb Raider have been a huge part of gaming and pop culture since the first game was released in 1996. The original series spans a total of nine(!) games including the Anniversary remake, all of which stick to a fairly standard formula: rich, buxom Croft runs around underdressed in ancient tombs, shooting things and solving puzzles.

That formula combined with total media saturation in the late 90s and early ‘aughts meant that Tomb Raider slowly but surely slid into the realm of disappointing sales and irrelevance. If any game franchise was due for a complete overhaul, Tomb Raider is it. Gritty reboots are fashionable these days, but does that mean you should give Tomb Raider the time of day?

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Anthony

My city, Trampa, started off well: I kept my industrial zones far away and downwind of my residential areas with a nice buffer of commercial zones between them. My city was low on natural resources, so I decided to focus on gambling and tourism. Being from Florida, it only made sense to apply my native expertise to Trampa. My first casino was moderately successful, but when I added some resort rooms and blackjack tables, it was pulling in over $15,000 a day. My second casino, located on the other side of town, was equally successful. My city was booming and I built an exo and held events, earning over $100,000 a night! Trampa was on the map and without building a monorail! Then, out of nowhere, things took a turn. My budget was in the red, citizens started leaving. My once robust casinos were losing twice what they used to make per day! Things fell apart and without any explanation.

Having perused the Internet, the now-known pathfinding bugs and traffic errors are what I think are the culprits. I built a bus station that was closer to the highway than the casino was, which is why all the tourists and shoppers stopped frequenting the casino. I did what I could to save my city, destroying the industrial sector altogether and making room for more homes and businesses, but nothing worked. Eddy’s city was having sewage problems, so I had to build my own sewage plants, causing ground pollution in the middle of a commercial zone. My airport was desolate and my expo was a ghost town. This was after about 5 hours of playtime, at Llama speed (cheetah speed has been disabled because it breaks stuff). No space in my city to expand, residents fleeing, budget is in the red. I turned off services, built some parks and shockingly, things turned around. I went from 37,000 citizens to 73,000, with barely any effort at all. It made no sense. I was being told to zone homes because workers were needed, but also that unemployment was high.

It made no sense. None of it did. My city is an illogical puzzle built on an infrastructure of lies. For about 4 hours, it was supremely addictive, almost intoxicating in the joy it gave me. Now I wish I had my $60 back so I could play Tomb Raider for 10 hours. SimCity is not a game I recognize anymore. I’ve bought bad games in the past, but I’ve never felt screwed before. EA and SimCity just popped that cherry. And all I can do is hug myself in shame, wondering what might have been.

Eddy

Once I could finally play SimCity, I was excited. Having spent some time with the Beta a few months back, during the server fiasco I always like once people could play the game, they’d get over it and be happy with the amazing treat that was waiting for them. For the whole first week of SimCity, I couldn’t find my way into a game until 4 days after release, and even then my time was sparing. But even in those first couple of nights of play, I started to notice a few issues, namely with the way social interactions are handled.

For one, the game seems to require two people to be in the same server at the same time before you can even invite a friend to your region. This may not be the exact case, but who knows with how wonky the game’s network has been. But when I attempted to invite a friend, it was a 40 minute process while he logged onto the server (not always reliable) and then was forced to play through the tutorial again, since the server considered him a new player. On top of that, I had to log out of my own game in order to invite him – and couldn’t log back in when I was done since the server was busy. How these kinds of issues are even possible in 2013, I could never tell you. It reminds me of being back in Quake 2 or CS 1.3, writing down server IPs and sending instant messages or calling friends so we could try to meet up. Except worse.

But that’s not even getting to the game, which I noticed was behaving strangely after just a few hours of play. Utilities didn’t seem to work the way they were supposed to, with houses and businesses unable to receive water or electricity. Nobody seemed to shop at the casino on the other side of town, even though I had plenty of public transportation. The game always thought I needed more workers to fill jobs, more industrial zones even though I had zones without factories being built on them, more shops and then some, without any explanation or any results when I made changes. Come to find out, the game has some major traffic and population glitches that are virtually game breaking once your city starts to grow. This makes sense, seeing as how my first few hours with the game were bliss… and everything after that has been one giant bug jam.

I wanted to love this game, and I keep hoping for a patch. But right now, it’s one of the worst video game purchases I’ve ever made, and I’m deeply regretting the fact that I can’t get a refund for it.

Mitch

SimCity starts out with hope and promise, the tantalizing view of a city packed with skyscrapers barely visible from the shores of your town hinting at better days to come. Building you city from the ground up and watching it sprout its first highrises is the single shining spot on this shallow, deceptive, broken mess of a game.

I knew something was fishy when I had to meta-game my sewer outflow pipes to prevent them from overflowing while I waited for enough money to build a sewer treatment plant. Instead of dividing the task of pumping out crud between the two facilities, I was having to close one and open the other when the amount of sewage they were trying to handle was too much. Even when I built my treatment plant I kept one pipe open just in case, but the way that Glass Box handles “agents” meant that it would always try and go to the nearest applicable service, regardless of how ready and willing my shiny new plant was.

This is just one example of the dozens of ways SimCity’s facade broke while I was playing it. My Sims protested germs and crime at my City Hall while over-staffed police stations and hospitals and clinics sat unused. My biggest frustration came from upgrading roads to handle increased density. The game’s tutorial doesn’t tell you how to use the road upgrade tool, and even when I figured that out I still had to tear up most of my roads so I could build even bigger ones.

SimCity constantly tries to hold your hand, but given the way that nothing works the way it’s supposed to, your advisers yelling at you to zone for more high-wealth residential comes across as a slap in the face. Your city will scream at you for dwellings and services you have in spades that they just can’t get to because Glass Box can’t figure out what to do with itself. Even hours after I built a ferry terminal, Sim thought bubbles were popping up telling me how much they wanted one.

You can legitimately build a city consisting of nothing but amphitheaters and high-density housing with one single road. This isn’t a simulation game, it’s a battle against fundamentally broken mechanics.

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After six years and hundreds of over-taxed PCs, the Crysis series is coming to a head with its third installment. Running on a new version of the CryEngine, the latest entry in the franchise takes you back to New York to finally unravel the mystery of the Ceph and the nature of their connection to the main character, Prophet.

With a new weapon, better graphics and even more maximum powers, does Crysis 3 wrap everything up?

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Games with a twisted lineage seems to be Gearbox’s forte. After resurrecting the poorly received Duke Nukem Forever, the studio turned its sights back on Aliens: Colonial Marines, which had been continually delayed since its announcement six years ago.

With rumors of multiple studios involved and pre-release demos that couldn’t possibly represent the real game, is Aliens: Colonial Marines the “true sequel” we were promised, or is it worse than Aliens vs Predator: Requiem?

Editor’s note: Images contained within this review do not accurately represent Aliens: Colonial Marine’s actual graphical style. Look to our forthcoming video review to see what A:CM looks like in action.

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When Dead Space 3 was first announced at E3 last year, it was met with a chorus of skepticism. With the addition of co-op and a revamped combat system, this formerly slow-paced horror game looked more like a Gears of War knock-off. Although Visceral games has said repeatedly that Dead Space 3 will still adhere to the series’ roots, developers are known to embellish a little.

The final act of a trilogy carries a lot of expectations, especially when the people making them add a bunch of new features and try to rework tried and true conventions. How does Dead Space 3 fare under the microscope?

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You probably know all about Telltale’s adventurous take on The Walking Dead, which released in 5 episodic installments over the course of 2012. Taking a comic book series and a TV show known for its zombie scenarios and making it anything other than a first person shooter might have seemed like an odd move to some, but Telltale clearly saw past the horror and straight to the humanity of Walking Dead’s world — and that sometimes, humans are the scariest creatures of all.

In a departure from our normal reviews, all four of the GamerSushi writers have contributed to this piece. As you may know, Walking Dead was our number one game of 2012, so we wanted the review to reflect that high place that we’ve given it. To review the game, each of us have written about the one aspect that makes this game stand apart, and why we personally chose it as our game of the year. Enjoy!

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While the main Mario games may be getting a bit stale, the mustachioed plumber has a great stable of spin-off titles in other genres. Paper Mario wasn’t our hero’s first foray into RPGs, but the series became known more for its art style and humor as opposed to any stat-based hooks.

Armed with his trusty book of stickers and a new companion, can Paper Mario: Sticker Star bring the series’ trademark charm to the 3DS?

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We don’t get many thinking man’s games these days. It’s usually shoot first, ask questions never, and maybe occasionally press X to interact while the really cool stuff happens in QTEs or cut scenes. But XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a different kind of animal for a different kind of gamer. Of all things, XCOM is the most taxing on your brain — and sometimes your heart.

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If you’re captured by pirates on a tropical island halfway around the world, what do you do? According to Far Cry 3, you get some sick tribal tattoos and start stabbing. Far Cry 3 doesn’t waste much time before dropping you into an island paradise full of dangerous predators and even more dangerous pirates and mercenaries and allows you to go about your business as you see fit.

Want to be a master of stealth and roll around with a bow and a machete? Go for it. Want to trundle in with a flamethrower and a bunch of rocket-propelled grenades? Perhaps you’d like the local wildlife to do your killing for you. Far Cry 3 has so many ways to interact with the environment and your enemies that it’s almost insane. Oh, did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?

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New IPs are increasingly rare as this console cycle stretches on and on. It’s not something I fully understand, as more people than ever have 360s and PS3s, so one would think the risk of funding a game based on a new property would be much lower, but then again, what do I know?

Thankfully, Bethesda feels differently and thus has unleashed Dishonored upon the world. Developed by Arkane Studios, which features the talents of one of the original Deus Ex developers, it is a mix of Bioshock, Thief and Deus Ex, all rolled into one package. Onward to the review!

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When I first heard about Hotline Miami, I didn’t quite understand the attraction. My assumption was that it was just a gruesome beat-em-up with the old-fashioned pixellated visual style so common in indie games these days. I just wasn’t that interested in a game that appeared to involve nothing more than bashing in the heads of an endless number of goons. However, when I had a chance to pick it up on sale over the holidays for $2.50, I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Hotline Miami is stranger and far more challenging that I was originally expecting, and I knew within a few hours of gameplay that it was worthy of a place on my personal top ten games of the year.

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While Call of Duty moved into the realm of fictional wars with the first Modern Warfare game, the series has never strayed beyond modern technology; indeed, even jumping into today’s battlegrounds was deemed a huge leap for the series. Now that almost every era of modern war has been mined for inspiration (I’m still waiting for Trench Warfare), Call of Duty’s off-year team Treyarch decided to make a bold move and place their Black Ops follow up in the year 2025.

The whole game doesn’t take place in 2025, however, as there are several levels that occur in the 1980s that set up the origin of Raul Menendez, the antagonist of this particular outing. Switching back and forth between the shiny combat of 2025 and the shady battles of the 1980s, can Black Ops 2′s unique narrative break it out of the Call of Duty rut?

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When Halo: Reach launched, the future of the Halo games became rather uncertain. Sure, we knew that Microsoft had formed 343 Industries to shepherd the series now that Bungie was moving on from the games that made them famous, but there were still doubts as to whether 343i had the chops to take over. Their first video game effort didn’t come until 2011 with the re-release of Halo: Combat Evolved. While it was a nice update to this classic game, it was still just standing on the shoulders of giants.

Leading up to Halo 4 you could kind of sense the uncertainty surrounding it. An unproven studio with Microsoft’s most valuable franchise making a game that promised to uphold everything Halo stood for? 343i was in a tricky position, because if they played it too close to Bungie’s territory they’d be looked down on and if their Halo was wildly different, the backlash would have been immense. They needed to strike a balance between making a Halo game while at the same time moving it in an entirely new direction. Now that the game is finally out, have they become the Reclaimers to Bungie’s Forerunners?

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When a game originally starts its life as part of the True Crime series and gets dropped by its publisher in advance of its release, it doesn’t bode that well. Such was the case for Sleeping Dogs, until Square Enix swopped in and scooped up the rights to bring the game to the public, saving United Front’s Hong Kong-based open world game from development hell.

Starring the enigmatic Wei Shen as an undercover police officer infiltrating a local Triad gang, Sleeping Dogs takes the melee combat style popularized by the Batman: Arkham titles and mixes it with some familiar open-world tropes and in a brazen move, refuses to give the player a gun for the first few hours. Sleeping Dogs takes a lot of risks for what should be a safe bet in the video game world. Does the game succeed or is its cover blown?

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We primarily review games here on GamerSushi, but every now and then, a movie comes out that appeals to the gamer zeitgeist enough that it deserves a review of its own. While Wreck-It Ralph, the new animated feature from Disney isn’t based on a video game, it has more than enough video game references that it practically screams for attention from the gamer community. Which we are granting with this review.

Wreck-It Ralph is the story of Ralph, voiced by John C. Reilly who is the villain in a Donkey Kong-like arcade game called Fix-It Felix. Ralph’s job in his game is to smash the windows of a tall building and then climb to the top, throwing bricks at Felix as he tries to fix the windows and reach the top, saving the residents of the building from Ralph’s destructive rage. Once Felix has done so, Ralph is summarily tossed off the building into the muddy ground below while Felix is awarded a medal. After 30 years of this, Ralph is fed up with his lot in life. He is ostracized by Felix and the residents, resigned to living in a nearby dump (literally) with nothing but bricks as his bed. He longs to be a hero, but as his support group of video game villains tells him, that’s just not possible.

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The most appealing aspect of the Assassin’s Creed series is the ability to experience different periods of human history through a sci-fi wrapper. Thanks to the prolonged presence of Renaissance Italy’s Ezio Auditore, the need to travel to a different era was reaching a high. Thankfully for Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft moved the clock up a few hundred years, dropping you in Revolutionary America in the moccasins of Connor Kenway (real name Ratonhnhaké:ton) a half-Mohawk, half-British assassin.

With a new setting, a new engine and the possibility of wrapping up the modern day storyline of Desmond Miles, Assassin’s Creed 3 seemed poised to make the same sort of leap that the series did with Assassin’s Creed 2 back in 2009. Did Ubisoft manage to pull it off, and can Connor replace the venerable Ezio?

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War games are a dime a dozen in the video game industry, but rarely do they make you think about the decisions you’re making as a virtual soldier. Go here, do that; it’s all very clean-cut and morally upright. But as anyone who’s read a post-war memoir or has watched a good film, or talked to a real solider might know, war isn’t so neat. It’s messy, brutal and even if you somehow managed not to get physically injured, there’s a whole host of psychological scars.

The other trope of video game wars is that you’re usually a low-ranked grunt, a Private or at most a Sergeant, someone who’s important on the field of battle but isn’t calling the shots. Spec Ops: The Line puts you in the boots of Captain Martin Walker, a Delta Force operator leading a small three-man fire team into the ruins of a sandstorm ravaged Dubai. You’re hot on the heels of one Colonel Konrad, the commander of the Damned 33rd and the person who was supposed to be evacuating the citizens of Dubai. Can Spec Ops: The Line make it through this hot washup?

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