Metroid: Other M
For: Wii
From: Team Ninja/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, violence)

Nintendo took a risk with “Metroid” in 2002 by turning a sidescrolling, exploration-heavy platformer into a trilogy of first-person shooters, so it’s kind of funny that “Metroid: Other M” feels significantly riskier despite at least partially fulfilling what fans expected a 3D “Metroid” game to look like in the first place.

Generally speaking, “M” is a third-person action game that’s heavy on shooting but presented through a semi-fixed camera perspective typically reserved for “God of War” and other action games that lean on melee combat. The shooting is assisted to the point where it feels like an old “Metroid” game: Samus fires in whatever general direction she’s facing, and instead of testing players’ aiming proficiency, the game challenges by loading areas with enemies and forcing players to dash, jump, dodge and otherwise change direction quickly. It works, and in terms of combat intensity, it’s a huge leap forward.

In another nod to “Metroid’s” formative years, players control “M” solely with the Wii remote, holding it sideways and moving Samus with the D-pad instead of the more natural nunchuck joystick. It’s an odd fit given the game’s 3D disposition, but the controls are responsive enough to make it work when in third-person mode.

Where the nunchuck is missed is during “M’s” most clever trick, which lets players enter first-person shooter mode at any point by turning the remote and pointing it at the screen like a blaster. The additional viewpoint is an ingenious use of the Wii’s capabilities, and “M” capitalizes on it by giving players free reign to mix both viewpoints during exploration as well as combat. Problem is, the lack of joystick support means players are sitting ducks in first-person mode. Switching between the two perspectives is a bit jarring, and when you have to do so quickly and in the company of enemies whose movements are never restricted, cheap attacks are inevitable.

That occasional problem aside, though, the gutsy use of two disparate viewpoints and schemes makes “M” a special game instead of simply what everyone expected “Metroid” to become, and it doesn’t come at the expense of anything for which the series is known. “M’s” lush landscapes are rife with secret passageways, hidden upgrades and non-linear terrain that only becomes traversable once Samus finds some of those upgrades. Classic enemies accompany numerous new faces, and the boss fights that have long been the franchise’s hallmark are consistently inventive and, thanks to “M’s” new ideas, very intense. This is a wonderfully tough and intelligent game.

Perhaps “M’s” biggest risk of all is its outfitting of Samus with a full backstory, that she narrates, after 24 years of games in which she rarely uttered a single word. “M’s” stab at Samus’ origins is drippy and clumsy, and those who have enjoyed her silent stoicism might wish to avert their eyes and ears from her newfound ability to pour her feelings everywhere. But any attempt to color the past of an iconic Nintendo character is a valiant one, and even if “M” doesn’t take the history where some would like it to go, it still beats driving down the same tired avenues we already know by heart.

And if you absolutely hate the story? Sorry, you can’t skip the cutscenes. But they’re brief, and they don’t dictate the mood of the gameplay, which is as perfectly “Metroid” in this incarnation as in any other.

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Mafia II
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC, OnLive
From: 2K Czech/2K Games
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, intense violence, nudity, sexual content, strong language, use of drugs and alcohol)

Because “Grand Theft Auto” popularized it and because most other games have simply fallen in line, conventional wisdom suggests that any game with an open world must fill that world with umpteen pointless activities to justify its worth.

“Mafia II” doesn’t do this. Empire Bay, the fictionalized but very recognizable riff on 1940s New York City, is wide open for discovery, and players can steal cars and visit shops between missions until their thumbs are sore. But outside of some collectibles and a small smattering of elective activities, there really isn’t much of anything for players to accomplish off the storyline’s main roads.

But is that really a terrible thing when those main roads include a storyline that spans 12-15 hours and takes players from World War II, through prison and up the ladders of multiple families? “Mafia II” prioritizes its characters and the finer details of their world over obligatory busywork, and the choice pays off at little expense to the game’s value.

It certainly helps that 2K Czech gets the core mechanics right, even if the game falls into the open world mission design trap of having players repeatedly assume the role of virtual errand boy. Story dictation aside, the bulk of “Mafia II’s” missions consist of some combination of driving to a destination, shooting or brawling with enemies, and driving back.

But while the shooting is standard cover-based third-person fare — and is saddled with a radar system that occasionally misleads players about the proximity of enemies — the action is considerably more polished than the sloppy gunplay that was excused in the “Grand Theft Auto” and “Godfather” games as a byproduct of their open-world design. “Mafia II’s” hand-to-hand combat portions lose steam due to how easy it is to dodge punches, but the one-on-one nature of the fistfights far outclasses the meandering brawling found in those other games.

“Mafia II’s” driving controls, while no more exemplary than the norm, are similarly dependable, and the game strikes a nice chord by both increasing and decreasing the realism at the same time. Empire Bay’s cops try to pull players over for speeding and running red lights in addition to the usual violations, and cars flagged as wanted remain that way until they’re modified at a body shop. At the same time, the game doesn’t make it a hassle to lose the police — especially when a mission is in progress — unless the chase is part of the mission’s design.

Small considerations like those continually enhance the experience. Stealing cars means physically picking the lock instead of just tapping a button, and because it’s easier to just keep the car you already have, it’s also easier to form bonds with (and pay to upgrade) certain cars instead of steal any ride in sight. Hiding from cops while wanted is fun because the cover controls double as stealth controls, and while injuries heal themselves and cars always run, players who stop for food and gas will outperform those who don’t.

It’s also easy to develop a true sense of place when the game coats the streets with ice and plays Christmas music during one stretch and presents the same environments later on with the effects of changing seasons and passing years both accounted for. “Mafia II’s” storyline borrows liberally from the big box of Mafia movie tropes, but between the scope, the details and how good everything looks and sounds, the excessive reverence is easily forgiven.

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Shank
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network and Xbox 360 Live Arcade
From: Klei Entertainment/EA
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, sexual themes, strong language, violence)
Price: $15

Everything about “Shank” has been done before and will be done again, but maybe no game has put it all together and made it look this easy to do so. Like “Metal Slug,” “Shank” is a cartoony sidescroller that outfits players with some guns, a few grenades and a jump button. But “Shank” also borrows the melee combat of a “Devil May Cry” and, like that game, lets players mix the two styles on the ground, in the air and in whatever combination they please. A handful of hand-to-hand attacks — including the magnificent pounce ability last seen in the “Wolverine” game — further expands the arsenal, and the ability to scale ledges and run along walls lets players perform stunts normally reserved for the Prince of Persia. “Shank” is by no means an easy game, and some of the tougher enemies and bosses have some pretty cheap attacks in their bag. But the game’s rich arsenal of abilities is outclassed only by its ability to tuck everything into a dead-simple control scheme that turns even middling players into supermen, and a generous checkpoint system allows players to play dangerously without worrying excessively about the consequences. “Shank” sports a single-player storyline as well as a separate suite of co-op (local or online) missions, and it bakes both inside an outstanding graphic novel presentation that’s refreshingly minimalist, beautiful to look at and bursting with awesome character designs.

Ivy the Kiwi?
Reviewed for: Wii
Also available for: Nintendo DS
From: Prope/XSEED
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)

If you squint hard enough to see through the Wii’s forest of ill-devised motion control tech demos, half-baked mini-game collections and one-trick peripherals, you might be lucky enough to spot a game like “Ivy the Kiwi?,” a completely sublime example of a game that hones in on one thing the Wii does best and takes perfect advantage of it without any unnecessary fuss whatsoever.

“Ivy’s” premise is simple: Ivy, a freshly-hatched chick, is lost and looking for her mother, and players are tasked with making that reunion happen.

“Ivy” presents itself as a sidescrolling platformer, but players have no direct control over Ivy: Instead, they point the Wii remote at the screen and use it to create vines that Ivy can walk on, spring from and use as protection from traps and enemies en route to reaching a level’s goal. Like a lemming, Ivy never stops walking, so a quick, steady hand is needed to create vines quickly and put them to good use.

If you’ve played “Kirby Canvas Curse” on the Nintendo DS, you have a good idea how this works, and it’s no surprise “Ivy” is appearing on that platform as well.

But while creating vines is easier with a stylus, it’s considerably more fun with the remote. “Ivy” lets players “swing” the vines while creating them by swinging the remote in a circular motion, which in turn launches Ivy forward or upward. Players also can treat a created vine like a slingshot and launch Ivy toward enemies and destructible blocks. All of this is elementarily possible with a stylus, but the Wii controls are so natural and intuitive that the sensation of unfurling, swinging and slinging vines feels surprisingly like the real thing.

The bigger screen also allows “Ivy’s” magnificent visual presentation — picture an animated watercolor drawing presented as a living storybook — to dazzle that much more. “Ivy” is a minimalist work in terms of art, sound and storytelling, but it’s a marvelous example of how to do a lot with a little. If little Ivy doesn’t charm you, little else can.

Like many of history’s best 2D platformers, “Ivy’s” adorability belies how challenging its 100-plus levels eventually become. The game is generous with extra lives and endless continues, but in return, it asks players to complete levels without making a single fatal mistake. Simply doing that is a hearty (but very fair) challenge by itself, and the truly bold can test themselves further by trying to collect the 10 feathers scattered around each level and still reach the goal before the clock hits zero. “Ivy” grades players’ performance on each level, and perfectionists can revisit completed levels at their leisure to improve their marks.

Beyond how well it accommodates both novice and skilled players, “Ivy’s” biggest surprise might be its multiplayer (2-4 players, local only).

A co-op mode allows two players to draw vines for a single Ivy, which turns “Ivy” into a terrific game parent and child can play together. Competitive multiplayer, meanwhile, pits four Ivys in a splitscreen race to reach the goal first, which sounds completely ordinary until players realize they can draw vines in other players’ quadrants and sabotage their progress. Instantly, a sweet story about a chick looking for her mama becomes one of the most cutthroat and hilariously fun multiplayer modes to grace the Wii this year.

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Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC, OnLive
From: IO Interactive/Eidos/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, drug reference, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language)

It’s almost reflex to criticize the storyline portion of “Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days” for being too short at around four hours long. But given how dishearteningly the story’s backward steps outnumber its forward steps, four hours might be plenty — especially if you find the more inspired multiplayer offerings more to your liking anyway.

On the positive front, “Days” is a more polished third-person shooter than its 2007 predecessor. Finding cover actually generally works this time, and while the automatic weapons remain frustratingly inaccurate, the pistols and absurdly powerful shotguns are sufficiently precise. In addition to smoothing out the framerate, a clever new visual style presents the action as though it’s being filmed on a handicam — video grain, compression artifacts, color separation, light streaking — and it effectively enhances the ugliness of the game’s violence. (The nauseating shaky cam effect can, mercifully, be disabled.)

But those filters color a storyline that drops players into much duller scenarios and offers exponentially less character insight than the first game did. Kane and Lynch weren’t exactly lovable in their debut, but “Days” renders them downright loathsome, and helping them reach the game’s laughably abrupt ending feels nearly as empty as getting them killed.

And while “Days” is a better shooter than its predecessor, it still sins too often for its own good. Enemies require far too many bullets to defeat — a problem compounded by the aforementioned inaccuracy — and it’s a slog to take them down when their psychic A.I. allows them to pelt away the second players pop out of cover. Occasionally, the cover doesn’t even work, forcing aggravated players to decide between being slowly decimated by endless gunfire or seeking new cover at the risk of being knocked down and cheaply ripped to shreds.

The failure to truly polish the shooting mechanics makes it harder to understand the complete removal of the squad mechanics that allowed players some control over their A.I. partner in the original. “Days” is best played with a friend controlling the second character via splitscreen/online co-op, but that’s little solace to players who have to fly solo and deal with an A.I. partner who isn’t terribly helpful. Between this, the uninspired level designs and the shoddy mechanics, “Days” doesn’t even need the entirety of its short lifespan to wear out its welcome.

Fortunately, while those mechanics carry over to “Days’” online multiplayer (8-12 players), the level playing field and terrific general premise make them significantly more tolerable.

The common thread connecting the multiplayer modes is trust, or lack thereof. Fragile Alliance pits players in a co-op heist against A.I. cops but lets players turn against the group in the name of greed. (The downside is, of course, getting killed by the group and respawning, penniless, as a cop.) Undercover Cop, meanwhile, designates one mystery player as a mole, tasking him with taking the alliance down from within before the other players can out him.

The pinch of paranoia transforms just another shooter into a mind game with guns, and the ability to parlay heist earnings into better weaponry provides “Days” some badly-needed replay value. Other multiplayer shooters do the shooting part better, but until they rip these ideas off, “Days” is just unique enough to merit a look.

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Monster Dash
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Halfbrick Studios
iTunes Store Rating: 9+ (infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor, infrequent/mild horror/fear themes, infrequent/mild cartoon or fantasy violence)
Price: $1

No one born before yesterday will give “Monster Dash” credit for being original: It’s another derivative of “Canabalt,” and outside of giving players a weapon and some monsters to shoot, it doesn’t mess with the formula. For those unfamiliar with “Canabalt,” the gist is simple: The game’s main character is constantly and furiously running from left to right, and players must hit the jump button at the right times so the character leaps from platform to platform without falling to his demise. The longer he runs, the better your score. “Dash” adds its own small twist to the niche by populating the platforms with monsters and giving players a default pistol (and some clever collectible weapons) with which to dispatch them, but that little touch becomes a big touch when it effectively doubles the number of tasks that “Canabalt” asked players to perform. That doesn’t magically transform “Dash” into a supremely deep experience, but between those mechanics, the multiple environments, the random generation of each environment for each play and the innately addictive nature of pursuing personal and online high scores, there’s plenty of enjoyment to justify the bargain-basement asking price. The appealing presentation — colorful cartoony graphics, a catchy soundtrack and a sense of humor in the menu screens — doesn’t hurt, either.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network
Coming soon for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Ubisoft
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, cartoon violence, language, mild suggestive themes)
Price: $10

Were “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” simply an awesome stab at capitalizing on a comic book and movie that itself lovingly rides the wave of 1980s video gaming nostalgia, it’d be a perfectly easy game to recommend.

But “Pilgrim” humbles simple nostalgia by taking those old games down avenues that either weren’t imagined or weren’t technologically possible back in their day. And it even does contemporary gaming a few better with a level of stylish abandon few games have the appetite to match.

This isn’t to suggest “Pilgrim” reinvents what it fundamentally is — a sidescrolling beat-em-up in the vein of “Double Dragon,” and especially “River City Ransom” — or that those who couldn’t get into those games 20 years ago will somehow get into this now. The objective remains the same, and while “Pilgrim” uses slightly more of the controller than its forebears could, it inevitably and regularly devolves into pounding the same couple of buttons when things get hairy.

But for those who still love the mindless reactionary action this genre provides, the contributions “Pilgrim” makes are wonderful. The game regularly crowds any given screen with enemies — as in up to a dozen or more — without slowing down even a trickle, and it’s just as generous with the variety and amount of items in the environment that players (and enemies) can use in lieu of fists and feet. A weird but enjoyably generous physics system allows quick-thinking players to use these objects in myriad creative ways — throwing a ball at an enemy, for instance, and then kicking the ball at another enemy after it bounces off the first guy’s face.

“Pilgrim’s” fighting controls are versatile and plenty responsive enough to offset the imposing imbalance of manpower, and a persistent leveling system adds new moves whenever players level up one of the game’s five playable characters. “Pilgrim” measures player and enemy attributes with a points system normally reserved for role-playing games, and acquired attributes carry over to new games, tempting completists to replay the game multiple times to fully max each character out. In a nice concession, acquired experience carries over even when players lose all lives and have to otherwise restart a level. Like its influences, “Pilgrim” is a tough game even on its default setting, but it’s savvy enough to give players some sense of progress even when all else fails.

While “Pilgrim” truly succeeds on the strength of its gameplay, it likely will be best remembered for its audiovisual style, which combines garishly pixelated graphics and high-definition polish to marvelous effect and slaps on a magnificent chiptunes soundtrack that would be iconic today if it had originally debuted 20 years ago. Thematically, “Pilgrim’s” levels run the gamut — a rock concert here, a dojo there — and it mines those themes while piling on numerous callbacks to gaming’s past for a presentation that is nothing short of blissful.

While “Pilgrim” supports four-player local co-op to frantically fun effect, the only place the game feels dated in all the wrong ways is in its failure to deliver an online equivalent. The sheer insanity of the action is miles more fun with three friends in the same room, but for those who lack that option, the omission of any kind of conciliatory prize is a major blemish in what otherwise is a work of art.

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Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Coming soon for: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network, Windows PC
From: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, violence)
Price: $15

Given the lack of “Tomb Raider” in the name, to say nothing of the budget price and downloadable state of the game, one might mistakenly assume “Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light” is a lark for player and creator alike while everybody waits for the next proper “Raider” game to appear and get Lara back to doing what she does best.

But that isn’t necessarily so — and actually, it may be those who don’t normally take to “Raider” who might enjoy “Light” most of all.

Though “Light’s” storyline and environments very obviously exist in “Raider’s” universe, the actual game generally eschews the epic environmental platforming challenges that are the series’ typical centerpiece. Instead, “Light” takes place from an overheard isometric perspective, and like “Diablo” and other games that share that viewpoint, its primary ingredient is combat.

Lara has never excelled at combat from close range, but from high above, she’s a natural. “Light’s” controls — left stick to move, right stick to aim, trigger to fire — are a natural convergence of twin-stick and traditional third-person shooters, and outside of providing players a nice variety of weapons to discover and use, the game doesn’t muck with time-tested conventions. In a nice touch, “Light” scores players based on their ability to dispatch enemies and discover hidden treasure, and each level has optional score challenges on top of other bonus objectives that, upon completion, reward players with special weapons and upgrades.

The combat and scoring systems make no bones about “Light” being a more arcadey experience than traditional “Raider” games, so it’s all the more pleasantly surprising when it becomes apparent just how much the game still offers to those with a penchant for exploration. Platforming challenges are significantly less ambitious than in the proper games, but they’re here, and “Light’s” control scheme allows Lara to jump, climb, and swing around environments and puzzles that provide a satisfying challenge without overshadowing the combat.

Additionally, while “Light” doesn’t stop players from beelining through the primary objectives, the slew of optional challenges that lie off the beaten path — including self-contained challenge rooms that dangle additional rewards at the end of the puzzle — also provide many of the game’s most gratifying and fun challenges.

As the story explains, “Light” supports two-player co-op throughout the campaign, and a crop of bonus speed-run challenges are clearly designed with two players in mind. At the same time, dueling scores encourage players to get the kills and gems and one-up each other. “Light’s” execution of co-op play is as no-nonsense and functional as one expects it to be, and the loose treatment lets players be as ancillary or antagonizing as they wish.

Unfortunately, until late September, it’s also local only. Crystal Dynamics plans to patch online co-op into the Xbox Live version and include it out of the gate when “Light” comes to Windows and Playstation 3, and the patch will naturally be free. Still, if you’re downloading “Light” specifically for the online co-op experience, you still have six weeks of waiting to do.

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Quake Live
For: Various Web browsers (Windows PC/Macintosh/Linux)
From: id Software/Bethesda Softworks
ESRB Rating: Teen (language, suggestive themes, violence)
Price: Free for basic account, $24/year for premium account, $48/year for pro account

Stunning though today’s games are, there may be no better demonstration of gaming’s rapid technological growth than the ability to open up a browser window and play something that brought computers to their knees barely 10 years ago. But that’s what “Quake Live” does: It takes the underpinnings of “Quake III: Arena,” builds a persistent community and modern interface around it, and, at its base level, gives the thing away to anybody willing to set up an account and download the plug-in needed to make it run. The game looks predictably dated, but it hardly matters given how smoothly and quickly it runs, and the essence that drove “Arena” in 1999 — fast, trigger-happy action and lots of weapons, maps and customizable modes to keep players engaged — still burns bright today. “Live’s” out-of-game particulars all take place via a Web portal that makes it easy to manage friends, build clans, customize characters and keep track of leaderboards, achievements, rewards and character experience. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, though, is a suite of tutorials and practice arenas that allow nervous newbies to practice against A.I. opponents, making “Live” as inviting to try out as it is easy to set up. “Live’s” release from beta status keeps it free to play on its base level, but for those who plan on digging in, the premium (20 additional maps, one extra mode, additional awards and clan/stat-tracking support) and pro (self-hosted server support, limited premium content sharing with friends, yet more additional awards and clan/stat-tracking support) subscription plans are available as well.

Snoopy Flying Ace
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Smart Bomb Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (violence)
Price: $10

With respect to the procession of big-ticket downloadable games currently releasing during Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade event, the game that released just in front of that wave might be better than just about all of them.

Fans of the “Peanuts” comic strip should find nothing surprising about “Snoopy Flying Ace’s” single-player campaign, which finds Snoopy living out his dream as a World War I flying ace in pursuit of the devious Red Baron.

What might be surprising is just how deep that campaign goes. “Ace’s” compromise between arcade- and simulation-flavored controls feels perfectly right — not so loose as to make flying the planes a mindless cakewalk, but neither stiff nor needlessly complicated enough to keep casual dogfighting game fans from enjoying themselves just as much. The selection of weapons, both authentic and nowhere near, grows considerably as the campaign progresses, and the variety of mission types is remarkable. “Ace” rarely repeats itself in the mission objectives department, and some of the missions are spacious and ambitious enough that players can land their plane, commandeer a turret and take back to the sky as they please to finish things off. The game even supports local and online co-op (two players).

“Ace” flashes similarly remarkable skill with its capacity to blend “Peanuts” characters and imagery into a world that otherwise resembles ours. Nobody dies here — pilots always parachute to safety before their planes crash — and the allowance of cartoonish special weaponry means this won’t ever be confused with a “Battlefield” game. But the basic weaponry operates and sounds like the real thing, and when a plane crashes, it most certainly looks like the real thing. “Ace’s” presentation wants it both ways, and thanks to some careful compromise on both sides, it actually gets its wish.

The variety and ease of play translate nicely to the online multiplayer arena (16 players), which finds “Ace” boasting the most frantically fun competitive arcade dogfighting since “Crimson Skies” succeeded way back in 2002 by observing the same principles. “Ace’s” six modes cover the usual gamut — from individual/team deathmatch to more objective-based battles — and the aircraft and playable character options complement the weapon variety from the single-player campaign to provide players a generous array of options. “Ace” even includes the ability to play as your Xbox Live avatar.

All that gameplay adds up to perhaps the best console gaming value $10 can buy this summer, and as result, “Ace’s” online community remains deservedly lively a few weeks after it first released. Given how infrequently a game comes along to fill this niche, and given how well this one goes about doing it, “Ace’s” longevity might dwarf that of a typical game in this price range.

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Clash of the Titans
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Game Republic/Namco Bandai
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood and gore, mild suggestive themes, violence)

“Clash of the Titans’” dual multimedia failure began with Warner Bros.’s astounding ability to airball a dunk by failing, despite possessing all the technology money could buy, to remake a movie that actually made complete sense to remake.

With the video game, which fails to hold any candle whatsoever to the “God of War” games that took that original movie’s premise and lifted it wholesale, the failure is now complete.

In fairness to game, it doesn’t appear to have nearly the same budgetary freedom as the film. Most of “Titans’” storytelling takes place through the kind of static dialogue exchanges we expected from games 10 years ago, and most of those exchanges are bland even by those dated standards — more akin to receiving mission instructions in a “World of Warcraft” knockoff than playing out what’s supposed to be mimicking a sweeping epic that “God of War” started retelling five years ago to exponentially more dazzling effect.

But the cheap feel hurts far more during the act of actually playing the game. Dated graphics and absolutely pulseless environmental design team up with a patchy level structure that requires players to constantly backtrack into static hub towns to accept new missions that rarely show any more imagination than the dull lands that host them.

As should be expected from any game built around hack-and-slash swordplay, most of “Titans’” missions boil down to some form of killing lots of enemies.

Unfortunately, on top of everything else, the combat feels entirely insufficient for being the centerpiece of the experience.
“Titans” flashes some nice enemy design variety over the course of the game, but individual missions regularly toss out the same enemies en masse, and most of them sport absurdly simple attack patterns and intelligence. The controls are responsive enough, but there’s no tangible impact at all with even the strongest attacks, which makes hacking away at the same enemies ad nauseam completely unsatisfying. Enemies regularly require far too many hits to defeat, which might be fine if they put up an exciting fight. But they don’t, so it’s just a matter of mashing buttons for entirely too long just to get through battles that endear no gratification whatsoever.

One thing “Titans” attempts with some success is to give players the ability to steal and, unlike most games, actually permanently keep enemy weapons. The number of takable weapons is pretty high at more than 80, and “Titans” lets players upgrade any of them as they progress.

But all these weapons and upgrades have to play nice with all that unsatisfying combat, and all that variety isn’t nearly interesting enough to counter how dull the action overwhelmingly is. “Titans” is, at roughly 12-15 hours in length, at least twice as long as it should be even if it had better mechanics. Even the supremely polished “God of War” gets a bit old after eight hours or so, and “Titans” wears out its welcome roughly 10 times over by operating at such a low level by comparison.

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Fragger
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Miniclip SA
iTunes Store Rating: 9+ (infrequent/mild cartoon or fantasy violence)
Price: $1 (free lite version also available)

While “Fragger” doesn’t match up with the immensely popular “Angry Birds” in terms of depth and destructibility, it comes surprisingly close in terms of personality — no small feat, considering this is a game about throwing grenades at soldiers instead of launching deranged cartoon birds at mischievous pigs. “Fragger’s” gameplay operates on similar principles: Players have a limited amount of projectiles, and they must circumvent angles, obstacles, and the laws of physics to take out all enemy targets before ammo runs dry. The less ammo it takes, the higher the score, and the more medals players receive for their trouble. “Fragger’s” puzzles are a bit more clinical, often challenging players to trigger cause-and-effect puzzles instead of simply letting pure physics and destruction take over like they do in “Birds.” But the general premise is the same, and “Fragger” delivers both quality and quantity with 70 (and rising) levels that grow satisfyingly intricate as players advance. “Fragger” nullifies the obvious brutality of grenade warfare with an amusingly cartoony presentation that, in addition to looking really slick, makes the task considerably more charming than it otherwise would have been. The look and sound, combined with the brainy nature of the challenges, makes this a war game even people who hate war might have a great time playing.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor
For: Wii
From: Treasure/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Teen (fantasy violence)

The genius of “Sin and Punishment: Star Successor” is not simply how skillfully it creates order out of what initially looks like sheer insane nonsense, but how easy it continually makes that skill look during the five or so hours it takes to experience it for the first time.

Dismissively, “Successor” can be classified as an on-rails shooter, which has become a term synonymous for all the Wii lacks in terms of traditional control schemes. The tag technically applies, because outside of when it pauses to swarm players with enemies or a boss fight, “Successor” is constantly in some form of forward motion, and it’s the duty of players to clear enemies away and keep up with it. Think of “Successor” as an old-fashioned space shooter that moves forward in three dimensions instead of sideways in two, and you can start to picture what’s going on here.

Like most on-rails shooters on the Wii, “Successor” also employs a cursor-based control scheme for shooting purposes. Aim the Wii remote around the screen to pick targets, press B to fire. No surprises there.

But “Successor” enhances these core elements by mixing in more extensive character control than the genre traditionally allows. Isa Jo and Achi, the game’s playable protagonists, can freely run and jump on the ground as well as hover to any corner of the screen, and outside of the on-rails forward and backward movement, “Successor” leaves all character movements in players’ hands.

Even the cursor controls, which complement the often frantic pace by incorporating a perfect dose of aiming assistance that’s effective but so subtle as to potentially go unnoticed, puts most similar control schemes to surprising shame. (An optional control scheme, supporting both the Classic and Gamecube controllers, allows players to go all the way traditional and control the targeting with the right stick.)

All that freedom is crucial, because “Successor” inspires more thrills from mastering and avoiding enemy attack patterns than from putting on a good offensive show. Like a great sidescrolling shooter, “Successor” swarms players with such a high variety of frantic enemy attacks that at first, it looks nothing short of (a) completely random and (b) impossible to circumvent. But everything in the game has a pattern, and players who put in the time to figure “Successor” out will gradually start to see it in a completely different (and far more appreciative) light once those patterns start to emerge.

The quest to master the insane variety of patterns “Successor” devises gives the game considerably more value than initial impressions might imply. The game has a story, and it’s sufficient if you absolutely need some narrative purpose, but seeing how it ends is nowhere near as interesting as playing and replaying stretches of the game to push your high scores up the online leaderboards.

“Successor” scores players like a classic arcade shooter, rewarding the ability to stay alive while also dangling a score multiplier that’s continually in flux and dependent on players’ ability to shoot quickly and just a little recklessly. The system lends itself perfectly to score chasers and perfectionists, and “Successor’s” complete understanding of that art — along with hours of great game design to back it up — makes this a must-play for anyone who identifies with either demographic.

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The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice
For: Wii
From: Alpha Unit/Konami
ESRB Rating: Everyone

At no point does this review know whether “The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice” is a smart option for would-be baseball stars who, for all baseball science can tell us, might screw up their swing technique by swinging a Wii remote at a television instead of a real baseball bat at a real baseball. Considering the discrepancies in bat weight, among other obvious factors, it’s entirely likely this is more harmful than helpful for serious baseball players.

But taken simply as a video game simulation of a trip to the batting cages — and taking into account the limitations of the Wii even with the MotionPlus attachment in tow — “Cages” does a surprisingly good job at recreating this particular aspect of baseball practice.

With that said, first things first: Though “Cages” is playable without the MotionPlus attachment, the loss of precision that little attachment provides makes this a useless practice tool at best and completely unplayable at worst. If you’re at all serious about enjoying “Cages,” owning or purchasing a MotionPlus attachment should be viewed as mandatory in order for anything that follows to apply to your experience.

“Cages’” primary interface is as spartan as you might imagine: There’s a baseball field, a pitching machine, your bat (which, in the recommended first-person view, you barely even see) and very little else. The machine throws pitches, and players swing the Wii remote like a bat to try and hit the ball.

What makes it work, in addition to a refreshingly unforgiving demand on swing precision, are the options and interface touches the game lays atop the threadbare gameplay. Every pitch is followed by a skippable but very useful swing analyzer that shows players how early, late, high, low, inside or outside their swings are in relation to the ball’s trajectory. Players also can customize and save presets for the pitching machine, selecting what pitches it can throw and the range of speeds at which it can throw them. A stat-tracking feature logs your batting average and other numbers, and a calorie counter provides a morale boost for those days when your swing completely fails you.

“Cages” pads its value with a couple competitive multiplayer modes (one for two players, another for four), but nothing in the game’s feature set will satisfy players looking for anything resembling a game of organized baseball. The game, along its budget price tag, make no bones about its acute focus, and buyers who expect more from it will do so at their own peril.

What it does though — and taking into account the disclaimers from paragraphs one and three above — it does rather satisfactorily. By no stretch of any imagination is “Cages” a better experience than hitting real baseballs with a real bat, and its value as a training tool is pretty dubious. But for those who go to the cages purely for enjoyment’s sake but wouldn’t mind an alternative in a pinch when the time or means isn’t there, this isn’t a bad investment to make.

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DeathSpank
For: Playstation 3 via Playstation Network and Xbox 360 Live Arcade
From: Hothead Games/EA
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, cartoon violence, crude humor, mild language, mild sexual themes)
Price: $15

Considering the enduring popularity of the two things — “Diablo”-style dungeon crawling and comedy — “DeathSpank” attempts to merge as one, it’s rather amazing it’s taken this long for the two to come together as naturally as they have here. “DeathSpank” starts off a little slow, and there are a handful of things it does adequately but never expertly. The sensation of combat “Diablo” absolutely nails never feels quite so satisfying here, and between the simplicity of the quest designs and the modest ambitions of the game’s comedic writing and voice acting, this likely will be neither the best-playing dungeon crawler nor the funniest game you play this year. Fortunately, what “DeathSpank” doesn’t do amazingly well, it does more than well enough — so much so that the experience actually improves rather than degrades once the novelty of comedic dungeon crawling wears off. The quests, while not terribly ambitious in terms of variety or design, are at least numerous, as is the bounty of armor, weapons and items waiting to be discovered. The depth of the combat improves with the ability to cast new spells and even combine special attacks. And the world’s fleeting resemblance to an illustrated pop-up book (without the actual pop-up animation) works in tandem with the amusing overall tone to create a universe that, imperfections or not, is a whole lot of fun to explore.

Singularity
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: Raven Software/Activision
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, intense violence, strong language)

There’s something a little bittersweet about the moment “Singularity” transforms, very early on, from a scary fight between your humble pistol and some fierce monsters to a solid but considerably less tense first-person shooter with typical weapons and typical human enemies.

Fortunately, the bland latter scenario doesn’t last. And even the former scenario doesn’t hold a candle to what happens once “Singularity” lifts the veil and shows what it can really do.

Set both in the 1950s as well as 2010, “Singularity” tells the story of how technology in the wrong hands in the past led to a dramatically different global climate in the present. We’ve all heard that one before, but what “Singularity” lacks in originality, it redeems in thoroughness, combining environmental designs, supporting characters, audio recordings, journal entries and even filmstrips to tell one engrossing story.

Most importantly, following those two early segments, it allows players to harness that technology.

“Singularity’s” TMD device will draw comparisons to the plasmids in “Bioshock,” and some of its powers — telekinesis and a devastating force push, to name two — are straight out of “Bioshock’s” playbook.

But the TMD also gives players the power to age and revert objects in the environment. Technology that lies in ruin in 2010 can, for instance, be restored to its 1955 shape without traveling back to 1955. The trick also works in combat: Players can age enemies and quickly undo the aging to mutate them into enemies of their former allies.

Though it occasionally shifts players between time periods — a pretty cool trick when it offers insights into an environment’s past versus its present — “Singularity” mostly reserves the time control for combat and puzzle solving. You might, for instance, age a bridge to grab an unattainable object beneath it before placing the object atop the rubble, restoring the bridge and carrying the object across the bridge.

Unfortunately, the puzzles rarely require this much imagination, and the vast majority are too similar to be mentally taxing at all. Most involve using the same type of crate one of two ways, and after a while, the only head-scratcher comes from evaluating just how much potential has gone to waste as time passes.

The stunted puzzle growth is part of “Singularity’s” unfortunate campaign to undermine itself with brief but bizarre forays into bad design. An early mini-boss encounter drags too long without ever being remotely tense, while a few areas spawn enemies out of nowhere to deliver cheap, unavoidable attacks from behind. There’s a puzzle that’s tricky only because of the poor layout of a window, there’s a very boring swimming segment, and there’s the occasional frustration of not being able to hear dialogue because the music’s too loud and the game lacks optional subtitles.

With all that said, though, “Singularity” remains a perfectly fun shooter, combining excellent combat with a story that goes all out and delivers a great finish. The flaws are annoying and the unrealized potential of the TMD device is enormous, but too much of the game remains too rewarding for “Singularity” to be completely undermined by all it doesn’t do.

“Singularity’s” multiplayer (12 players), by contrast, is rather ordinary. But because it’s there to supplement the lengthy main course, and because the same solid mechanics still apply, it serves its purpose as a summertime diversion before the fall heavyweights appear. If nothing else, it gives players an opportunity to use the game’s unique weapons and technology to punish their friends instead of just the A.I.

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N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights
For: Xbox 360
From: Konami
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, partial nudity, violence)

Even bad games generally tend to have some redeeming quality — however faint or fleeting or even ironic — that makes the experience of playing them at least tolerable or understandable, if not fun.

Unfortunately for “N3II: Ninety-Nine Nights,” the only instance of this lies in a rather pretty title screen, which disappears after pressing the start button and gives way to a game that has nothing else going for it on any level.

Like the first “Ninety-Nine Nights” game — and like all those “Dynasty Warriors” games it mimics — “N3II” sounds like a can’t-miss on paper. The story is a dull mishmash of fantasy cliches, but the gist of the game has players singlehandedly taking on hundreds of enemy soldiers at a time and using weapons and spells to thoroughly decimate them at a rate of dozens at a time. Any given mission finds players racking up a kill count in the thousands, and with “N3II” unafraid to show its bloody side, this should add up to a walk through heaven for the truly bloodthirsty.

In actuality, it never comes close. “N3II’s” enemies almost all look the same, and most of them display no artificial intelligence whatsoever. That makes the fights mindlessly dull, and because the game’s battle animations completely fail to convey the impact of a sword swipe capable of knocking 20 soldiers over at once, it lacks any kind of satisfying look or feel even on the “dumb fun” level. You might as well be chopping down stalks of virtual corn instead of enemy armies.

“N3II” injects some challenge in similarly artless fashion by being absurdly stingy with health pickups and giving certain enemies the ability to knock players down repeatedly without giving them any chance to get up or even counter the attack. No one really fights intelligently, but a swarm of enemies and enough cheap hits can be fatal — which, thanks to a lousy checkpoint system, can mean repeating long stretches of the game that weren’t fun the first time.

Nor are they fun the second, fifth, or 300th time. But because “N3II” essentially repeats itself ad nauseam over 20-plus hours, that’s what lies in store. The story goes places — nowhere interesting, but it advances — and that advancement allows players to unlock four additional characters and carry out their concurrent campaigns. But while each character has his or her own weapons, attributes and fighting style, the act of controlling them is identical down the line, and the nature of the fights in hour one is indistinguishable from that of hour 20. “N3II’s” action feels tired before the very first mission is even a fraction of the way finished, and repeating that exercise for the entirety of the game is an exercise in tedium so torturously dull as to turn someone off video games for good.

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Limbo
For: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
From: Playdead
ESRB Rating: Teen (animated blood, mild violence)

With respect to the entirely welcome revival of point-and-click adventure games, none of them come close to realizing the awesome possibilities of merging adventuring and puzzle-solving the way “Limbo” does. Played like a sidescroller and presented via a monochrome visual style straight out of the silent films era, “Limbo” begins almost completely free of storytelling and instruction, and it’s up to players to figure out what to do next. Like most sidescrollers, it assumes players know that the joystick is for running and the A button for jumping. But unlike most games of any kind, “Limbo” also assumes players can rely solely on their own intuition to solve the succession of riddles that stand in the way of forward progress. And this is where “Limbo” absolutely beams: The puzzles are legitimately challenging, but because everything needed for the solution exists within the environment and in the general vicinity, the solution never lies out of reach no matter how elaborate the problem may be. “Limbo” achieves a perfect difficulty balance — not so difficult as to devolve into a guessing game, but rarely so easy that the solution immediately leaps out. And because it’s a sidescroller instead of a point-and-click game, it can challenge players to move quickly and jump precisely while also deciphering the puzzles that block the progress. The net result is one of the most intellectually gratifying games to surface this year, and players craving a true mental workout (that, as a bonus, looks absolutely magnificent) must check this one out.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
For: Nintendo DS
From: Square-Enix/Nintendo
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (alcohol reference, animated blood, comic mischief, fantasy violence, mild suggestive themes, mild language)

If you have a soft spot for the founding fathers of turn-based role-playing games but loathed everything “Final Fantasy XIII” stood for when it released in March, there could scarcely be a more different game than “Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies,” which takes a few superficially backward steps but cherishes the things that, in 2010 just as in 1986, ultimately matter most.

The contrasts are immediate. “FFXIII” is eye candy overload, but an arguably toxic appetite for storytelling overloads the game with cutscenes over which players have no effect. “Skies,” meanwhile, takes a visual dive from its predecessor by migrating from the Playstation 2 to the Nintendo DS, and beyond its introduction, the storyline heads down a path that’s practically boilerplate by genre standards.

But that open-ended sparseness allows “Skies” to give players more control from the start than “FFXIII” arguably provides in its lifetime.

“Skies” lets players not only name the characters in their party, but also design them using a surprisingly thorough character editor. The story that follows may be one that RPGs have been telling since their inception, but it stars whomever players want it to star. And while cutscenes that use the DS’ real-time 3D capabilities aren’t in the same league as “FFXIII’s” pre-rendered scenes, they’re innumerably more personalized and, by extension, far more rewarding over the game’s very long haul.

The customization bent also complements “Skies’s” most impressive innovation: co-op play. Up to four players can team up wirelessly (local only, and everyone needs a copy of the game), and the game is surprisingly liberal with regard to what happens from there. Players can adventure separately in the same world, summon one another for immediate help in battle, and basically treat the experience like a small-scale MMO. “Skies” allows players to join and part as they please, regardless of experience levels and in-game progress, and it doesn’t force anyone to choose between leaning on the feature or completely missing out on its benefits.

That’s about the only way it can work, because for most, the 25 (main quest) to 100-plus (everything) hours needed to turn “Skies” inside out would be almost impossible to invest under inflexible conditions. In this respect, the decision to take the game down the portable route looks like genius. A considerable time investment is needed before everything the game offers is freely available, but “Skies’” world opens up relatively quickly, and it’s exponentially more freely explorable than “FFXIII’s” depressing straight line. Being able to continually chip away at it, regardless of time investment or other conditions, more than compensates for whatever fidelity the graphics would have gained on flashier hardware.

With that said, if you don’t love “Dragon Quest” already, “Skies” won’t be the gust of wind that turns that boat around. Impressively large and intelligently innovative though it may be, this ultimately is the same general pattern of turned-based battling gameplay and storytelling that has subsisted for nearly 25 years. Like its predecessors, “Skies” excels at doing those things by balancing challenge, elegance and depth in ways few turned-based RPGs can, but not so much that it changes the game for anyone who doesn’t love it already.

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Naughty Bear
For: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Artificial Mind & Movement/505 Games
ESRB Rating: Teen (violence)

Every year, a few games surface that belie the prerequisite that a game must be good in order to be any fun.

This year, the leader of that pack has to be “Naughty Bear,” a thoroughly bizarre, poorly-coded and very arguably reprehensible game that might, because of how easy it is to exploit as well as how strange it is in the first place, be something you might wish to see anyway.

“Bear” stars players as the titular Naughty Bear, who, after getting ostracized by the other bears in his village, decides to turn his hurt feelings into a murderous rampage. The bears look and sound like your prototypical stuffed bears, and the village in which they live is similarly saccharine. The only difference is that players can use a range of weaponry and nearby objects — from toilets to grills — to turn the village into a crime scene. The truly skilled can even traumatize the other bears into turning on themselves.

If it sounds kind of terrible, it’s because it is. Killing isn’t exactly a foreign concept in games, but you’ll need some kind of stone heart to wreak havoc on a sweet-sounding stuffed bear and emerge feeling terrible or at least somewhat disturbed. This, obviously, is what “Bear” is going after by blending cuteness and murder to this degree, but it might be a little too good at it to make this playable beyond the morbid curiosity stage.

What “Bear” isn’t good at is most everything else. The game’s missions are variations of the same few things over and over, and the chapters continually take place in the same tiny environments. The camera is jerky to a motion sickness-inducing degree, the animation and controls lack polish, and the lack of mid-mission checkpoints — even though every mission is divided into very clear parts — makes some of the levels with stricter objectives a needless pain (especially when the camera causes a mission failure).

Last but not least, the game crashes in myriad ways — sometimes hanging on a load screen, sometimes freezing completely, and occasionally just suspending all character animation while parts of the game keep chugging away in some bizarre fashion or another.

On the other hand, some of “Bear’s” shortcomings — chiefly, its sorry excuse for A.I. and stealth — accidentally make the game more fun than it might otherwise have been.

For whatever reason, hiding in shallow patches of grass and bushes makes Naughty Bear completely invisible to the other bears. It doesn’t matter if he’s three inches away from two bears and hidden by a single leaf. It doesn’t matter if he just hit a bear in the face, took one step sideways and is screaming “boo” from the bushes. They can’t see him, and players are free to exploit this absurd reality to terrorize the other bears in ways a competent game wouldn’t allow. It basically allows players who are awful at stealth games to see why players who are good at them love them so much.

But once these novelties wear off, nothing remains but an empty game that plays poorly and makes players feel worse. That makes “Bear” a great rental, if only to satisfy any lingering curiosity about one of the year’s strangest games before realizing that any investment beyond a few bucks and a few hours is money and time poorly spent.

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Blacklight: Tango Down
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade
Also available for: Windows PC, Playstation 3 via Playstation Network (later this summer)
From: Zombie Studios/Ignition Entertainment
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, violence)
Price: $15

Were “Blacklight: Tango Down” a full-priced first-person shooter, its combination of generic atmosphere and tacked-on single-player offerings would make it almost superlatively insignificant. At $15, though, it’s another story. “Blacklight” takes place in environments that look like areas you’ve seen before, and it’s populated by soldiers engaging in battle for reasons that aren’t necessarily important. The single-player (or, with three friends, online co-op) component explains little, but it’s for the best, because the entirely unrefined A.I. — enemies mindlessly spray bullets like walking turrets — makes it entirely skippable anyway. “Blacklight’s” real purpose is as a multiplayer shooter (16 players), and like last summer’s “Battlefield 1943,” it provides a healthy return on investment without reinventing anything. All the usual multiplayer modes are here, the map count is surprisingly high at 12, and “Blacklight” looks, controls and sounds like a $60 game in a $15 game’s body. Better still, it provides a reason to keep coming back, flaunting an experience system that rewards players a massive unlockable cache of weapons, accessories and character improvements. The climb to the top of the rewards pile is steep, and an unimpressive matchmaking system makes it tough on new players who have to overcome experienced players with better gear, but the stream of perks is so constant that it’s easy to find the motivation to beat those odds. (For those who’d rather just play with friends, no worries: Private match support also is available.)

Crackdown 2
For: Xbox 360
From: Ruffian Games/Microsoft
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, strong language, violence)

Conventional wisdom would suggest that while “Crackdown’s” combination of open-world freedom and superhuman powers made it a deserving cult sensation in 2007, enough has happened since for more of the same to not be enough. “Infamous” and “Prototype” trotted out similar ideas with deeper storylines, “Assassin’s Creed” sped up rooftop bounding with its parkour controls, “Just Cause 2″ blew the roof off the limits of verticality, and “Red Faction: Guerrilla” raised the environmental destruction bar considerably.

But in all that time, and with respect to all those games, none of them really went head-on with the little things that made “Crackdown” so uniquely awesome. “Crackdown 2″ is more of the same with sprinkles on top, but it so perfectly nails everything the first game — and only that game — did right.

It’d better, too, because a lot of it might as well be the first game. “Crackdown’s” nearly non-existent storyline has been upgraded to threadbare here, but the objective — kill the evildoers — is identical. The last game’s ending carries over, and the mutants that began populating Pacific City in “Crackdown” are now overflowing the geographically-altered city during “Crackdown 2′s” nighttime hours. A single, monstrous gang patrols the streets during the day, and players once again take orders from a bloodthirsty and completely hilarious narrator at The Agency. (Yes, it’s called The Agency. Threadbare, see.)

Just as they did last time, players gradually increase their abilities — from jumping distance to ammo expertise to driving acumen — by utilizing those abilities in the game, and players who max out those abilities will outrun cars, jump (or, new to the sequel, glide via a wingsuit) clean over buildings, equip grenades capable of detonating block-wide chain reactions and gain access to some amazing modes of transportation.

In other words, everything practically is as it was three years ago. The enemy A.I. hasn’t evolved, with the gangs still fighting like meatheads and the freaks just plowing forward in extreme numbers. The upgrade system feels mostly the same. The optional pursuit of collectable orbs (500 perched atop structures, 300 hidden away, and a few that actually run away or only activate during co-op sessions) feels mostly the same. Even the highly imperfect targeting system from “Crackdown” returns with no significant improvements made.

But while the amazing level of disinterest Ruffian Games shows in evolving the “Crackdown” formula almost certainly should reflect poorly on “Crackdown 2,” a typical game session often delivers more than enough arguments in favor of not breaking what no other game since has outdone. “Crackdown 2′s” control schemes for running, jumping and driving feel magnificently responsive, and while the weapon targeting definitely could be better, the system in place offers enough upside to justify its presence. The game offers tremendous freedom almost from the start, and the sum total of all the firepower, horsepower, geography and Agency-given talent adds up to an experience that’s shallow but explosively, tremendously fun.

Like its predecessor, “Crackdown 2″ allows players to carry on with or without other players in their world, and the customizable four-player dynamic co-op emphatically improves on “Crackdown’s” barebones two-player support. “Crackdown 2″ also offers 16-player competitive multiplayer for maximum chaos, but while it’s fun in small does, the element of open-world teamwork and anything-goes ingenuity falls away when everyone’s sole focus is on killing everyone else.

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Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
Reviewed for: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii
Also available for: Sony PSP, Nintendo DS and Windows PC
From: TT Games/Warner Bros. Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (cartoon violence, crude humor)

Anyone who was charmed by 2005′s “Lego Star Wars” and gradually less impressed with the franchise’s takes on Indiana Jones and Batman will likely be downright annoyed to discover “Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4″ continues the Lego games’ unfortunate tradition of not evolving in ways they really, really should.

But this wouldn’t really be a problem if “Potter” didn’t continue the series’ other tradition of continually turning out surprises within the constraints of its formula. It does — perhaps to a greater degree than any game since that “Star Wars” game — and so we’re faced yet again with taking the bad in order to take the good as well.

As the name implies, “Potter” covers the first four years of Harry’s seven-year saga, and you either don’t want the plot details spoiled for you or already know them like you know your own last name. As per series tradition, the game reenacts each year’s biggest moments using pantomiming Lego characters and recreating the scenes with a mix of authenticity and genuinely amusing creative license.

But “Potter” also covers a surprising number of lesser moments in each chapter, and the game allows players to take control of practically everyone — Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Dobby, even Scabbers the rat, among more than 150 others — in addition to Harry, Ron and Hermione. The amount of learnable spells is impressively high, and by using two cavernous hub levels (Diagon Alley/Hogsmeade and Hogwarts) instead of one, there’s a ton of fan service to discover off the stories’ main roads.

Per usual, passing a story level opens it up to free play, allowing players even more freedom in terms of the “Potter” characters they wish to control. Between all the possibilities that allows and the aforementioned main and optional content, “Potter” is a massive playground that offers 20-plus hours’ worth of stuff to do.

Unfortunately, those hours are also chock full of the same annoyances that have persisted since “Star Wars.” For a game that features fixed camera angles and lots of running and jumping, the jumping controls are still too squirrelly. Ditto for the targeting system, which occasionally makes casting certain spells with precision a case of trial and error if too many possible targets are clustered together.

The control imperfections are harder to understand because, for the most part and regardless of story scenario or characters used, “Potter” generally plays the same way. Some nice broom controls and the occasional vehicular objective are both welcome, but neither makes enough of an impact to give the game a strong sense of variety. Similarly, while “Potter” is loaded with cause-and-effect puzzles, most of them are too straightforward to count as puzzles so much as steps to take in order to make X happen and clear the path to get to Y.

Finally, while “Potter” supports two-player local co-op play, TT Games inexplicably continues to omit online co-op play. Sharing a couch with the other player is the best way to play, yes, but how hard can it be at this point to throw a bone to players who may not have the luxury of a willing second player nearby?

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Puzzle Quest 2
Reviewed for: Xbox 360 Live Arcade
Also available for: Nintendo DS
From: Infinite Interactive/D3Publisher of America
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (mild fantasy violence, mild language, mild suggestive themes)
Price: $15

After 2007′s “Puzzle Quest” surprised just about everybody by taking “Bejeweled” and using it as a means of battle in a story-driven role-playing game, a handful of weird offshoots tried and mostly failed to take the idea to new avenues. So it’s no surprise to finally see “Puzzle Quest 2,” which brings the idea back to its roots and simply gets to tweaking from there. The net worth of those tweaks will certainly vary to players of different disciplines. The story is thin to the point of being boilerplate, and instead of capturing cities and managing armies, players rarely do more than move from fight to fight. But while “PQ2′s” outer shell feels dumbed down, the battles themselves are improved. Standard fights feel considerably more balanced than “PQ1′s” fights, which frequently approached untenably difficult levels, and the new item system aids an increase in gem types to let players win with skilled, creative play instead of waiting for the same old gems to appear. “PQ2″ mixes in the occasional mini-game for variety’s sake, but the fight system evolves enough to carry the surprisingly lengthy single-player campaign. Naturally, players who want some human competition can find it via the game’s two-player local and online (360 only) multiplayer, which function exactly as one hopes and expects they would.

Transformers: War for Cybertron
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Windows PC
From: High Moon Studios/Activision
ESRB Rating: Teen (violence)

Yes, “Transformers: War for Cybertron” is a tangibly better game than the two rushed-to-retail games that accompanied the two godawful “Transformers” movies released in the last three years. And yes, by having nothing to do with the movies, “Cybertron” is free to base its storyline, visual presentation and gameplay on the cartoon, which is all “Transformers” fans have wanted all along.

But “Cybertron” improves on those games like a football team improves to 8-8 a year after it finished 1-15. It’s a leap in the right direction, but one still flawed in ways fan service alone can’t obscure.

First, the good stuff. The storyline not only takes place within the cartoon’s timeline, but is a bona fide prequel instead of some trivial side story. The playable characters — among numerous others, Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee, Starscream and Jetfire — are colorful instead of drably indistinguishable like they were in the movies, and humans have no presence whatsoever.

As with previous “Transformers” games, players can play from the perspectives of both the Autobots and the Decepticons, but in a welcome evolution, “Cybertron” merges both campaigns into a single storyline. Previous games had players repeating the same events from both perspectives and effectively canceling out the two different endings that resulted, but “Cybertron” reaches a single, satisfying conclusion that nicely sets the table for the cartoon.

In terms of fundamentals, the news remains good. “Cybertron” looks great — colorful, but also just a little grimy — and it finds the sweet spot between making the Transformers both agile and impressively weighty. The controls are more conducive to transforming than they were in the movie games, and both the third-person shooting and vehicular controls are pleasantly responsive. “Cybertron’s” environments are tighter than the movie games’ wide-open levels, but they offer enough room for players to switch between forms as they please.

The problem comes when “Cybertron” tries to do anything ambitious with those mechanics… because outside of a couple of missions that incorporate air combat, it never really does. Regardless of storyline condition, practically every mission consists of killing X number of grunt enemies, moving to point Y and repeating ad nauseam until the boss fight, which usually consists of more mindless shooting with the occasional extra condition based on each boss character’s attack pattern.

The moment-to-moment action is good enough to make “Cybertron” mindless fun anyway, but fighting the same grunt enemies and completing the same objectives so many times gets old long before the credits get to rolling. “Cybertron’s” support for three-player online co-op livens things up somewhat, but repetition with friends is only so much better than repetition alone. (A bonus horde mode, which removes the storyline pretense and just floods the screen with enemies until you can’t take it anymore, is a better, no-nonsense use the co-op function.)

For some, “Cybertron’s” competitive online multiplayer (10 players) will be the star of the show, if only because it dangles a carrot in the form of attainable experience points and unlockable abilities for players who level their four classes (leader, scout, scientist, soldier) up the 100-level scale. But the actual gameplay relies on the same old game variants and feels simplistic and dated compared to more tactical shooters with similar leveling systems, and it might be too simple for persistent leveling alone to keep the community bustling.

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Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
For: Playstation Portable
From: Kojima Productions/Konami
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, drug reference, language, suggestive themes, use of tobacco, violence)

From the optional-but-recommended pre-game data installation to the offering of three imposing control schemes to the tutorial and eventually the game itself, “Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker” stakes its claim as perhaps the most demanding game in the PSP’s five-year-old library.

But if you’re part the intended crowd, and if you have company, the good news is that Kojima’s latest wholeheartedly justifies that demand with an experience that’s as filling as any of the big-screen “Metal Gear Solid” games.

Out of necessity, “Walker” — which sets itself 10 years after the events of “MGS3″ — also plays like a cross between that game and “MGS4.” The lack of a second analog stick and extra set of triggers, and the control freedom those afforded, makes it hard to run and gun to the extent “MGS4″ allowed on the PS3. “Walker” makes generous concessions to counter the button gymnastics needed to accommodate the PSP’s limitations, but it also encourages players to just stay out of trouble by avoiding enemies and using close-quarters combat the way older “MGS” games practically mandated. There’s an unquantifiable but noticeable easing up of enemy A.I. and the damage their weapons cause, but Kojima tunes it just right, accounting for the system’s deficiencies without dumbing the game down, stripping players of weapon/gadget depth or making the journey a cakewalk.

“Walker” plays like it should, tells another winding story that covers yet more ground in the bizarre “MGS” timeline, and it manages once again to stretch itself over 25-plus hours of playtime without being dog tired by the time the credits roll.

As usual with this series, though, that’s not all — and this is where it might get confusing.

“Walker” complements its primary gameplay with a surprisingly deep tool for managing Snake’s base of operations. Snake can make allies out of enemies he non-lethally neutralizes in the field, and the tool lets players put them to work researching intelligence, developing technology and even assisting in battle. “Walker” packages the tool inside a byzantine interface it doesn’t explain terribly well, but players who figure it out will find a strangely engrossing management game that regularly improves the action in the field.

Even with the presence of that tool taken into consideration, though, “Walker’s” biggest surprise has to be its co-op support for up to six players via local wireless play. The availability of co-op and the number of players allowed varies by mission, a nice consideration that shows Kojima values the story’s integrity over shoving six soldiers into every mission.

Unfortunately, some of the missions that do support co-op — in particular, fights against boss characters that take an army’s worth of bullets to defeat — practically require it for all but the most skilled “MGS” players. Given the series’ traditionally single-player leanings, this little surprise is bound to frustrate some, especially because players have to seek out other players who also have PSPs and copies of the game instead of just look online for willing partners. (Players with a Playstation 3 can use the free “Ad Hoc Party” app to jerry-rig an online session, but the number of players doing so is bound to be smaller than if the game supported online play on its own.)

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Guess the News
For: iPhone/iPod Touch
From: Finger Arts
iTunes Store Rating: 12+ (infrequent/mild mature/suggestive themes, infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor, infrequent/mild sexual content or nudity, infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco, or drug use or references)
Price: $3

There’s nothing wrong with a game being just a game, but sometimes it’s nice to accomplish something with that entertainment. Enter “Guess the News,” which combines “Wheel of Fortune”-style phrase guessing and whatever’s in the news to create a word game that’s as enlightening as it is fun. “News” grabs fresh headlines from various news sources and presents them as incomplete phrases, scattering the missing letters among a sea of letter tiles below. Tap and/or drag the titles to their proper spots — and do it quickly to maximize score combos and avoid timing out — and the game hits back with increasingly obscure headlines that have more letters to fill in. “News” complements its concept with an exquisite interface that allows players to customize their experience according to difficulty and genre of news (top stories, sports, entertainment and so on). The game also makes it easy to dig deeper into those headlines, even mid-game: An in-app Web browser takes players to the stories behind the headlines they help complete, and if your continued research takes you out of the app entirely, “News” saves your progress for easy resumption later. OpenFeint integration — leaderboards, achievements and so on — rounds out the package.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11
Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360
Also available for: Wii
From: EA Sports
ESRB Rating: Everyone (comic mischief)

It takes a special kind of thread to maneuver a needle as well-established (and, because it’s a professional golfing simulation, creatively handcuffed) as “Tiger Woods PGA Tour,” and it’s doubly difficult to please everybody in doing so. But in making changes that separately benefit those who want a more accessible golf experience and those who want a game that makes that first group cry, that’s precisely what “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11″ does.

On the accessibility front, “TW11″ introduces a slightly fantastical currency, called focus, that players can accrue by playing well and spend as they choose to add power to a shot, increase accuracy or (among other things) use a putt preview mechanic to help fine-tune a shot on the green. The focus interface’s subtle design respects the integrity of the simulation, and because it’s rewarded to players through skillful play and hands out benefits with entirely believable results, it’s satisfyingly authentic despite being an inarguably contrived video game mechanic.

The focus currency headlines a number of more subtle changes that let unseasoned players cater “TW11″ to best address their shortcomings. The career mode once again distributes skill improvements as players advance their created golfers through the PGA Tour calendar, but now players can allot experience points to the areas — putting, driving, fading and so on — that most need the help. The optional tutorial lessons do a much better job of preaching the value of draws, lofts and shot types, and the analog stick controls (and meters for reading their accuracy) are responsive without, as they sometimes have in previous games, resorting to excess sensitivity.

On the complete other side of things is the new True Aim mode, which takes away all of “TW11′s” gamey assists and presents the entirety of the action, even post-shot, from the golfer’s point of view. Outside of a GPS device that helps players read the terrain and know the distance to the hole, the True Aim filter is akin to playing golf the way real golfers play it. It’s little more than a new camera angle and a disabling of certain viewing functions, but it arguably is “TW11′s” best addition for players who crave authenticity and want a new kind of challenge from the series.

Though the aforementioned tweaks might be the best thing about “TW11,” the addition of team play is the most prominent. The Ryder Cup, complete with captain duties and team management, joins the roster of playable championships, and “TW11′s” online team play supports up to six teams of four players each.

Traditional solo play (up to four players locally or online) returns, but now all players can shoot at their own pace online without watching everyone else take their turn. That welcome change heads the usual list of tiny enhancements, including some tweaks to the graphics and ball physics, more realistic green layouts, dynamic wind patterns that are prone to gusts, and a livelier GamerNet Challenges system, which allows players to challenge community shot records and accrue bonus experience points without ever leaving whatever mode they’re already playing.

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Toy Story 3
Reviewed for: Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Wii
Also available for: Windows PC, PSP and Nintendo DS
From: Avalanche Software/Disney Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+ (comic mischief)

“Toy story 3″ is what happens when inspired ideas fight a battle to the end with uninspired ideas while good and subpar execution duel similarly in the background.

Fortunately, if not easily, the good guys win more battles than they lose, and the game is significantly better than its five-car collision of ingredients would imply.

The struggle is apparent immediately, with “TS3″ pushing players into the story’s first level — an on-horse Wild West chase level starring Woody as the playable character — before the main menu even pops up. The level is simple, straightforward fun, but it’s also hampered by an unpolished control responsiveness (in this case, some imprecise horse jumping controls) that infects other control schemes throughout the game. A very generous checkpoint system makes it easy to forgive the setbacks the controls cause, but not so much that they aren’t still annoying when they pop up in bunches.

Immediately following that first level, “TS3″ drops players into an entirely different mode — the Toy Box — and it does so without adequately clarifying that players who wish to continue the story can do so without doing a single thing in this mode. But the confusion might be for the best, because it’s probably the most foolproof way to demonstrate to players that it’s this mode — and not the storyline, which feels more like a collection of self-contained vignettes than a coherent storyline — that really makes “TS3″ better than just another kids’ movie game.

Toy Box is “TS3′s” answer to sandbox gameplay — a fully open world, teeming with citizens, “Toy Story” characters and a horde of missions to complete and virtual toys (characters, vehicles and full-blown playsets) to unlock.

The missions aren’t exactly ingenious, with most of them being either fetch quests or simple facsimiles of side quests found in other open-world games. But “TS3″ designs them to be either quick or open-ended, making it easy for players to take on multiple objectives at a time while collecting more as they check some off the list. The variety of quests does plenty to compensate the lack of original mission design, and it only increases as players compile rewards and use them to purchase new toys — a horse here, a stunt car track there — that come with new mission types.

Those occasionally dodgy controls rear their head here as well — particularly with regard to the toy car controls, which are among the worst driving controls to be found anywhere in 2010. But “TS3′s” mission structure is so dense that when one quest is giving fits, there’s probably another one right behind it for players to work on before they go back and give the first one a shot. It’s a busybody’s paradise, it uses the “Toy Story” license very well, and it offers ambitious players a ton to do if they wish to turn the game inside out.

The story missions, by comparison, are less impressive, in part because there aren’t too many of them and they don’t tell much of a story. What they can do, though, is experiment with level designs the Toy Box’s open-world structure couldn’t properly accommodate. Not every experiment is a success, but enough of the missions do enough things right to make this a welcome addition to the game’s surprise main attraction.

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Wake up the Box!
For: iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (universal app)
From: Wandake
iTunes Store Rating: 4+

“Wake up the Box!” is an imperfect game in some pretty significant ways, but developer Wandake appears to have partially acknowledged that by rewarding those who get in on the ground floor. Like a handful of other physics-based puzzle games, “Box” gives players a set amount of pieces in each level and tasks them with arranging them to influence the laws physics and successfully complete the level. But unlike most of these games, the object in “Box” is to create a chain reaction that leads to havoc — specifically, waking the napping Mr. Box — instead of prevent it. Though “Box” gets the physics and piece controls perfectly right, it does a poor job of explaining this objective, and a lack of instruction means you’ll have to decipher the game’s methods, interface and scoring system yourself. “Box’s” level count — 15 total, 10 of which are pretty easy to solve — is similarly lacking. But Wandake has promised lots of updates to come as “Box” evolves, and because the game is free for the time being, questions of value cease to exist for those who download it before the price increases. So get it now, get comfortable with it and get ready: Once “Box” reaches the 11th level, it assumes players have the basics down and are ready for some seriously tricky challenges, and future level additions are likely to tax the brain similarly once Wandake pushes them out the door.