Review // Saints Row: The Third

In Saints Row: The Third, there is a dedicated button to punch people in the groin. Your character's skin can be white, black, orange, green, pink, or metal. His or her voice can be male, female, plain, urban, Cockney, or zombie.

An early mission has you diving from a burning plane and having a shootout with dozens of enemies as you fall. A later mission has you diving from a burning plane in a tank and having a shootout with dozens of tanks as you fall.

The first melee weapon you're given is a giant, flopping dildo bat.

Saints Row: The Third is the dumbest game I have ever played, and I love it.

Like the rest of the world, I wrote off the Saints Row franchise years ago as nothing but a third-rate Grand Theft Auto ripoff, and felt pretty confident in that decision. But as stories began to trickle out of some of the insane things that happen in Saints Row: The Third—things that sounded like people must be making stuff up, frankly—I realized that I just couldn't ignore it any longer. I needed to see it for myself.

Take the screenshot above. In front of what appears to be a casino, a snarling woman with plaid, purple pants and a leather jacket is about to hit a luchadore in combat gear with a big purple dildo bat. But wait! There, on the left side, in the background, is another luchadore, who's clearly still reeling from a particularly righteous groin punch. If all that doesn't at least pique your interest, then I don't know what could.

And that's the appeal of Saints Row: The Third. It's an interactive tour through the deranged minds at Volition Incorporated, and it's more absurd than you can imagine. It's more absurd than I could imagine, either. Even by the end of the game, I still never felt prepared for just how unbelievably stupid things could get.

Let's take a step back.

Remember Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? At the time, it represented the pinnacle of Rockstar's genre-defining formula first introduced in Grand Theft Auto III. It was the perfect marriage of the silly and the serious, a game where you could still sympathize with the main character and feel for his plight—even when he was working with a conspiracy theorist hippie named "The Truth" to steal a jetpack from "Area 69"—because he was just as bewildered as you by all the crazy stuff happening to him.

Even by the end of the game, I still never felt prepared for just how unbelievably stupid things could get.

Even still, Rockstar had demonstrated clear ambitions of transitioning Grand Theft Auto from being fun and mindless with a dash of biting social satire into a mature and affecting crime drama with real weight behind it. And so, in Grand Theft Auto IV, you started from the very bottom, playing as a poor immigrant fleeing from a vicious cycle of crushing debt and senseless violence. With the darker tale came the Euphoria engine, adding a realistic tinge to your actions to match the shift in tone: your car skidded uncontrollably through turns if you took them too fast, police response was brutal and difficult to shake, and going on random tangents of violence now felt uncomfortably out of place.

It was definitely more engaging, but arguably less fun.

Saints Row: The Third feels like a direct response to that, going as far in the opposite direction as the law will allow. There's an experience system that rewards you for driving dangerously, shooting people in the head or crotch, or just murdering people in quick succession. You'll be thrown into a tank and told to cause as much mayhem as possible in a limited amount of time. You'll play a minigame called "Insurance Fraud" where you intentionally walk through traffic and get hit by cars to earn money.

For God's sake, the cooperative multiplayer is a riff on the Gears of War wave-based survival "Horde Mode," classily titled "Whored Mode" here. The first wave of enemies you fight are prostitutes with guns. It's so dumb, and so awesome.

None of that would matter if it not for the nearly flawless execution of those ideas, though. The game takes a simple premise—the Saints want to take over the city of Steelport—and goes wild with it, keeping the story fresh with ludicrous twists and insane missions the whole way through. It'd be easy to imagine a story filled with dildos, luchadores, and gimps to fall flat due to poor writing, but it's actually refreshingly sharp here.

Your character plays the straight man in a bizarre world, acting as both a good anchor for you to relate to and as the source of most of the jokes. It's not a dissimilar role from the protagonists of the last few Grand Theft Auto games, but the world and tone are so different that it never feels derivative.

It doesn't feel derivative mechanically, either. In fact, in a lot of ways, Saints Row: The Third made me question what I want out of Grand Theft Auto V.

For instance, as amazing as Grand Theft Auto IV was, staring at the little mini-map in the bottom-left corner of the screen to have any idea of where I'm supposed to be going was maybe not the most elegant solution. In Saints Row: The Third, arrows appear directly on the road itself like a racing game. Rockstar would never that in Grand Theft Auto IV—it would've felt like they were making a concession, breaking their painstakingly crafted sense of immersion by slapping arrows all over the world. It would've made a dark, self-serious game feel arcadey. You could almost hear a designer at Rockstar saying, "What's next? High-scores?"

Yeah, Saints Row: The Third has no such ambitions, instead actively embracing anything that makes the game more fun to play, "immersion" be damned. You can drive 100 mph and still turn on a dime, slam into oncoming traffic without worry, and level up enough to have infinite health and ammo.

So naturally, given that the missions in Grand Theft Auto IV were more grounded in reality than they'd been in the past, the missions in Saints Row are goddamn bananas, using the core mechanics of the game in some pretty amazing ways. It almost becomes a problem after a while, setting such a high bar of stimulus that at a certain point, I wasn't playing it to play it anymore; I was just burning through missions to get to the next bit of insanity.

By the end of the game, I'd only done a couple of side missions and didn't much care for them. Removed from the context of the main campaign, I just didn't find it as compelling. The game's mechanics are totally fine on their own—I spent a decent amount of time between missions just dicking around and blowing stuff up, crashing cars and starting gang wars—but it was still really just a mad dash to the next mission to get my next fix.

Once I'd played through both endings, I was left a little hollow. It had been an incredible journey up to that point, but it was over now. The thought of cleaning up all the random side missions I'd ignored just seemed lackluster. So I quit.

Well, I played a few rounds of Whored Mode, and then I quit.

And that seems to be pretty much what Whored Mode is for, like a last gasp before you shelve the game for good. It's decent enough fun with friends, but like the main game, it's really just about seeing what ludicrous thing they'll throw at you next, be it prostitutes with guns, angels with sniper rifles, or tiny zombies and massive hot dog men. It's totally amazing the first time you've seen it, but once you've seen it, there's not much appeal to go back.

Still, this is a game that everyone should play. Don't write it off as just another GTA clone, because it isn't. It's a game willing to do whatever it takes to put a big, dumb grin on your face. Logic never gets in the way of a good time in Saints Row: The Third, and it’s all the better for it.

Saints Row: The Third / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360, PC

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Review // Dark Souls

I was arrogant when I started Demon's Souls. I ignored the warnings of those who had come before me and pranced through the first level without dying once, laughing in the face of man and God alike.

But check the dates of my trophies and you'll see a pretty clear story being told: My arrogance lasted about a month and a half before I finally got stuck and quit until eight months later when an insomnia-driven decision at 4 a.m. got me back in. I overcame my roadblock, fell asleep, then woke up and burned through the rest the game in one ridiculous 11-hour stretch — impressive, but it still took me nine months to beat Demon's Souls.

It took me two weeks to beat Dark Souls.

It took me one week to beat Dark Souls a second time.

Instead of holding your hand and gently introducing you to their worlds, the Souls games prefer to spend their opening few hours breaking you down to see how much you can take. They kill you in their tutorials, pit you against impossible odds from the start, and happily display ominous messages left on the ground from other players that range from desperate pleas for help to crushing admittances of defeat, like "I can't take this..." Even the back of the Dark Souls box warns you in bold lettering, "Prepare to Die."

To new players already struggling to make sense of the cruel, violent world they've entered, it just seems sadistic. But veteran players know exactly why this suffering is necessary.

You need to die in the tutorial because it's the most valuable lesson you'll get: death is not failure here. You are trapped in a purgatory, sentenced to live and die and be reborn again and again until you have fulfilled your duty. Death is simply part of the experience.

They kill you in the tutorial because you have to learn to let go. In the opening few hours, you'll be scrounging for souls like a man in a desert scrounges for water. Souls are everything here: you'll buy items, repair equipment, and upgrade your character all with souls. They are your lifeblood. And when you die, you'll leave a bloodstain on the ground with all your souls in it; die on the way back to your bloodstain, however, and they'll be lost forever.

The psychological effect of this system is staggering. Carry a lot of souls and you'll tiptoe through the environment, terrified of anything that could pose the slightest threat—those souls aren't just your in-game currency; they are digital representations of your time. Lose them and you won't just be depriving your character of another upgrade point, but you'll have nullified hours of your life, too. The sheer anxiety of trying to make it back to your bloodstain without dying is often enough to get you to make a mistake and die. On the other hand, if you don't have any souls on you, you don't have anything to lose, either. Suddenly, dying is of no consequence. You can play recklessly, try to tackle bosses you'd normally be too scared to fight, or just push forward into the unknown.

That's why it's so important to learn to let go. Early on, every soul is precious, but later in the game and in subsequent playthroughs, when the cost of leveling up is so high that you'll only be able to upgrade after boss fights, you simply won't care about the absurd amount of souls you just lost. You'll be free.

The world of Dark Souls is organic and seamless, one area flowing into the next and wrapping back around again. It's easy to find yourself stuck in one area for hours, respawning in the same spot over and over every time you die, so whenever you finally break out just enough to unlock a shortcut between areas, it's enormously satisfying.

You're never given a map, but you also won't ever need one, either. If you've already been to an area, it won't be long until you've completely memorized every inch of it, and if you haven't, not knowing where you're going or what you'll find when you get there is half the fun.

That mentality extends to the basic mechanics of the game as well. The game will tell you what each button does, but that's about it. From that point on, you're on your own. Figuring out what, exactly, a "bonfire" does, or what "humanity" is used for, or what the benefits are to joining the different "covenants" is left entirely up to you. If it sounds like I'm skirting around describing these in detail, it's because I am. As far as I'm concerned, those are the real spoilers in Dark Souls.

You need to die in the tutorial because it's the most valuable lesson you'll get: death is not failure here.

And that's why community plays such an essential role. Messages left by other players can guide you along, warning of ambushes and pointing you in the right direction, or they can lead you into a trap. You can willingly summon other players into your game to help you out, but they can also forcibly invade your game to kill you for profit. If you're invaded, the game will lock you in an area until either you or the invader is dead. Normally, you'll get a notification warning you of the invasion, but sometimes, you'll just notice that you've been locked in before the game has had a chance to notify you, and a brief moment of confusion will turn into a grim realization.

I summoned friendly players into my game whenever I could; every single experience is memorable in some way. The game has intentionally limited communication options between players, which forces everyone to get creative. Even without text or voice chat, players still found ways to convey complex ideas to me like "keep your shield up in this area" or "oh, God, we're in way over our heads. Run!" Bonds are formed and broken in minutes—some of the strongest I've ever felt in a multiplayer game—and all with players I never directly spoke to or even knew the names of.

The odds you're stacked up against in Dark Souls often feel impossible, like the game's not playing fair, and that's the genius of it. It's a multiplayer game that never really feels like it was built for more than one person, so when you band together with other players, you feel like you're somehow subverting the game's harsh rules. You feel like you're cheating against an enemy that absolutely cheats against you every chance it gets. It's beyond cathartic.

The game also plays a Lucifer role, tempting the community to turn on each other by offering rewards for those who successfully invade and kill other players. When you meet one of these red phantom traitors, it's exhilarating and terrifying. You'll circle each other in a slow, charged dance, swords at the ready, each waiting for the other to blink. Since most players who invade have already beaten the game at least once and are at a pretty high level, your chances of surviving an encounter are going to be pretty slim for a long time. But the first time you successfully fend one off is an intoxicating moment.

An early objective is to ring a bell in a church tower. If you're in the area, whenever another player rings the bell in their game, you can hear it in yours; even when you're not directly interacting with other players, their presence is always felt, reminding you that you are all in this together. Their ghostly apparitions flicker in and out of your game. Their words of wisdom or deceit are scattered throughout the world. Their bloodstains litter the ground, recordings of the tragic last few moments of their life. Learn from them, and mourn the fallen.

It can feel impenetrable at times, but keep going; there's a moment in each of these games that every player who sticks with it long enough will experience, when everything clicks into place and they finally understand. When that actually happens, though, is different for everyone—it took me nine months to truly understand Demon's Souls.

Dark Souls is most often defined by its relentless difficulty, but there's genuine meaning to it. The game itself plays the role of a grand antagonist, pushing you to fight harder and form a community to rise up against it. You'll need real patience and persistence if you want to succeed here, but if you can, it's one of the most rewarding experiences you'll ever have with a video game.

Dark Souls / $59.99 / PS3 [reviewed], 360

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Game of the Year 2011 // Batman: Arkham City

The "Game of the Year" award goes to the game that had me hooked harder than any other game last year. If I wasn't playing this game, I was thinking about it. It made other games look lazy and deserves to be recognized as the best game of the year.

I've beaten Batman: Arkham City twice. I've done all the side missions—twice—and perfected all the challenge maps. I've cleared out every rotten corner and dank alleyway of Arkham City, yet I'm still eager to get back in there and do it all over again. If you were to suggest that I'm as obsessed with Batman as Hugo Strange himself, well, you'd probably be right.

That shouldn't be too much of a surprise. After all, Batman: Arkham Asylum was my Game of the Year for 2009. It redefined the stealth genre, set a new standard for melee combat, and shattered expectations for what a licensed game can deliver.

And yet Arkham City is even better. Here's why:

You Can Counter Multiple Guys At Once

If I had to identify the single coolest thing about Arkham City, it'd be that Batman can now simultaneously counter up to three attacks. So let's say you're in a fight and you spot two guys about to hit you at the same time; just tap the counter button twice and Batman will brutally rebuff both of them in one swift, violent motion. It's simple, but so satisfying.

But countering multiple enemies at once is just one of many excellent refinements to the combat formula from Asylum. It feels like Batman has a dozen new moves in City, and all of them are awesome. Watching Batman completely dismantle an assault rifle in about one second flat, or punch a dude's face through the window of a car door he was using as a riot shield, or grabbing a guy's metal pipe and bending it in half in front of him is always ridiculously badass.

The melee combat in Arkham City is easily the best melee combat in any game, ever. Even Arkham Asylum.

Now Batman Can Fly

Open-world games often live and die by how fun it is to just mess around in their environments. Put simply: if all you want to do between missions is get to the next mission, there's a problem. Arkham City doesn't have that problem. I burned a disgusting number of hours perching on gargoyles and combing through alleyways, popping Joker balloons and beating up dudes, or doing nothing in particular really, just flying around aimlessly.

Chalk that up to the brilliant flight mechanics that feel like a hybrid of the cape power-up in Super Mario World and the parachute and grappling hook combination from Just Cause 2. Batman can glide, dive toward the ground, and use his grapnel gun to latch onto then boost past structures to maintain speed. It's exhilarating, the kind of mechanic that takes practice to master, but once you have, it becomes second-nature.

A lot of games last year had excellent traversal mechanics, but nothing compared to the raw thrill of hurtling toward the ground at breakneck speeds before pulling up at the last second and soaring away.

Interrogating Dudes, or "Swear To Me!"

The Riddler's a crafty guy. No doubt about that. But Batman is craftier: Riddler leaves diabolical puzzles all over the city; Batman solves them. Riddler plants informants in all the gangs; Batman systematically hunts them down and punches the information out of them. Such is the way of life in Arkham.

It didn't matter what I was already doing; I always stopped to interrogate a Riddler informant if I spotted one. It just satisfied some kind of raw, primal urge in me to dive bomb into a group of thugs, surgically take out everyone but the informant, then lunge and grab him by the throat to begin a friendly chat.

Same with the puzzles. There are an absurd amount of riddles to solve, and I happily completed every single one of them. They weren't just mindless collectables, either. Each represented a unique mental obstacle to overcome, another extremely personal challenge from the Riddler. Real care and craft was put into making the Riddler's influence felt in Arkham City, and it shows.

Batman Has The Coolest Villains

And I don't even think that's debatable, either. From the Riddler's insufferable arrogance to Mr. Freeze's calculated fury to the Joker's chaotic anarchy, Arkham City delivers the best roster of villains in any video game to date as far as I'm concerned.

The sharp writing and outstanding performances from the whole cast play a big role in that. Hugo Strange, especially, is truly diabolical, with his calm, sinister voice demanding that Batman examine his own role in all the madness happening in Gotham: "Your presence creates these animals."

The best part is how Arkham City embraces just how different each villain is. Everyone is a unique threat that must be dealt with accordingly, and each villain challenges Batman in a new way, pushing him further toward the brink. The boss fights in Arkham Asylum were easily the worst parts of that game, but in Arkham City, they're some of the best.

It's Just So Goddamn Fun

And this is where Arkham City absolutely demolishes all competition. There were a lot of fantastic games last year, but none of them had me hooked as hard as this one did, and it all comes down to how unbelievably well-executed the entire experience is.

It didn't matter how many times I told myself that I'd only play for a little while, do a mission or two, then stop — I was always in for the long haul. I hungrily consumed whatever content the game could throw at me until there was simply nothing left to consume, so I started all over again. I blew off class, friends, and work in my relentless, obsessive pursuit to clean the streets of Arkham. I lost sleep and skipped meals. And you know what?

I regret nothing.

If you want to hear how I chose Batman: Arkham City, you can download my deliberation process, subscribe with iTunes, or listen to it below:

Runners-up: inFAMOUS 2, Dead Space 2

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Best Surprise 2011 // inFAMOUS 2

The "Best Surprise" award goes to the game that didn't have a lot of hype behind it but turned out more awesome than anyone could've imagined. It went from being off my radar to taking up all my time.

I loved the first inFAMOUS.

Even after I'd beaten the storyline, I spent hours collecting the last of the scattered Blast Shards and finishing up any leftover side missions. Sometimes I'd just glide around, doing nothing in particular. Maybe I'd blow up a car or three. Maybe I'd do a Thunder Drop off the tallest building I could find. It didn't matter what I was doing, really; I just liked inhabiting Empire City and playing as Cole. Even so, I couldn't bring myself to feel anything more than dread for inFAMOUS 2.

Blame that on the first major reveal for inFAMOUS 2, which showed off a newly revised Cole, swapping out the bald, bland superhero with a gravelly voice for a trendy, tattoo-laden playboy with a cocksure swagger and a seemingly endless supply of clever one-liners, now fighting against the Reapers from Blade 2 with giant lobster claws for arms.

Uh, what?

It only got worse from there. The second major reveal detailed the characters who'd be surrounding Cole on his latest adventure. Even as the developers recognized that Cole's buddy, Zeke, had been one of the worst parts of the first game, they promised that he would still be a major character in the sequel. As well, they showed off the two new ladies in Cole's life, Nix and Kuo, who would represent the newly revamped moral choice system. You see, Nix, a sultry African-American character who wears revealing red leather, keeps her hair in dreadlocks, and has fire powers, would represent "evil," while Kuo, an Asian-American character who wears a business casual suit, is a government agent, and has ice powers, would represent "good."

What's that called, children? Say it with me now: subtlety. Very good!

It honestly felt like the developers at Sucker Punch Studios were trying to burn their own franchise to the ground. It was the only explanation. Then—suddenly!—as if the clouds parted to allow God himself to intervene, Sucker Punch came to its senses. Cole was turned back into that beautiful, bald man we all grew to love (or at least tolerate) in inFAMOUS. Nix and Kuo ended up having much more depth than we could've anticipated. Zeke got a true character overhaul that not only made him bearable, but likable. Even those dumb lobster zombies turned out all right.

But that's not all. inFAMOUS 2 represents a true distillation of everything great about the first game while still layering on smart changes of its own. Take Cole's new Ice Launch power. When he uses it, ice rises from the ground, thrusting him forward higher than he could ever jump normally. It's a satisfying move that removes one more obstacle in the player's exploration of the city. But the true brilliance of the Ice Launch comes with the new electrical wires placed above the street just out of jumping distance, but at the exact height of an Ice Launch. Rather than having to climb up a power line to start Cole's electric grinding, the Ice Launch allows players to simply tap a button and speed away.

It's that kind of brilliant design that led me to call inFAMOUS 2 "one of the most perfect games I have ever played" in my review. Once again, I found myself playing for hours with no real objectives. I'd see how long I could skate along power lines across the city without falling, then test whether or not I could throw a car and tether to it while it's still in the air.

Based on those initial reveals, I thought Sucker Punch had completely lost sight of what made the first game so special. I thought I was going to hate inFAMOUS 2. Instead, it absolutely blew me away and became one of my favorite games of the year. I'm sorry I ever doubted it.

If you want to hear how I chose inFAMOUS 2, you can download my deliberation process, subscribe with iTunes, or listen to it below:

Runners-up: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Catherine

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Most Disappointing 2011 // Mortal Kombat

The "Most Disappointing" award goes to the game that seemed like it was going to be absolutely incredible, but for whatever reason, it just didn't live up to the hype. I was expecting to love this game and instead was completely underwhelmed.

It's really weird to be giving Mortal Kombat, a game I once called "the most fun fighting game ever made," the Most Disappointing award for 2011, but here we are. I guess that's just what happens when you ship a game with broken online play and don't fix it for six months.

When it comes to fighting games, I'm an enthusiastic tourist. I love hearing about all the crazy strategies, watching the pros duke it out in tournaments and sharing the inevitable YouTube clips later on, but unless it has "Street Fighter" in the title, I'm probably not going to be "hardcore" about it.

I got hardcore into Mortal Kombat.

For a while, that's all we played in my apartment. We'd crowd together on the couch, laughing and trash talking and setting up ridiculous matches where we wouldn't know who we'd be playing as or against, or even if our characters would have arms. It became the new go-to party game.

Pretty soon, I found myself on Mortal Kombat strategy forums, figuring out the best combos for my favorite characters, then practicing them for hours in the Practice mode with all the damage percentile and location displays turned on.

Then summer rolled around and I was home again, now without quick access to friends and roommates who wanted to play. I'd been clamoring for a real challenge though, so I was excited to move the fight online. I wasn't excited for very long.

"The online multiplayer experience is one of the worst I've ever had," I wrote in my review. "If you're lucky enough to connect to a match, prepare for an unplayable, unresponsive mess. Lag pervades every aspect of the experience, even the character select screen. The developers keep promising some magical patch to fix everything, but it's already over two months too late for me. As far as I'm concerned, Mortal Kombat doesn't even have online play."

I had reached rock bottom, now finding myself on Mortal Kombat tech support forums, poring over angry posts from other frustrated players all looking for a solution. For me, that solution never came. By the time NetherRealm Studios had finally patched its game up to a working standard, I'd already moved on.

I've heard that the game works online just fine now, but I haven't checked — I haven't touched Mortal Kombat in months. I'm out of practice and I just don't care anymore. If I want to play a fighting game online now, there are much better alternatives, like, say, Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition, which plays beautifully online.

[Update 1/13: A friend convinced me to try the online play again. "Just one match," he said. "See if it's changed." So I tried it. I won the match, but the character select screen lagged, the match itself lagged, and even the Fatality animation at the end lagged. And that's while running the latest patch, 1.05. So yeah. Turns out that it's still messed up.]

Offline, Mortal Kombat has no equal. It's the best fighting game in years, hands-down. But that's precisely what made its downright atrocious online play sting so much. There were worse games in 2011, but nothing disappointed me more than trying to play Mortal Kombat online.

If you want to hear how I chose Mortal Kombat, you can download my deliberation process, subscribe with iTunes, or listen to it below:

Runners-up: Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Killzone 3

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Most Potential 2011 // L.A. Noire

The "Most Potential" award goes to the game that sounded awesome on paper and had real flashes of brilliance, but could still be so much more. Hopefully this game will get a sequel that can deliver on its promise.

I did not finish L.A. Noire. I made it about halfway through the Arson Desk, which means I'm maybe an hour or two away from finishing the game. But I can tell you right now: I'm never going to finish it.

It completely broke for me after the Homicide Desk, about halfway through the game. I realized how utterly formulaic the game was: You get a case, examine the body, collect evidence that leads to new locations with more clues to find or people to interrogate, and once you've exhausted those, solve the case. Rinse and repeat. Nothing I did felt like it mattered anymore, so eventually, I just stopped.

But until that point, L.A. Noire had been absolutely blowing my goddamn mind. I'd never played anything like it. I was being challenged to think like a real detective, learning how to interpret evidence and use it to either corroborate people's stories or catch them in their lies. I couldn't play it absentmindedly, either, since a sharp eye was always needed to read people's faces during interrogations.

Oh man, those faces.

L.A. Noire broke every other game for me. I simply can't look at other games anymore without thinking about how awful and fake the characters look. The MotionScan technology at work here is astounding, easily single the most impressive thing I saw in a game all year. It uses 32 high-definition cameras to capture every little detail about an actor's face as he performs his part, and the results are stunning. The characters in L.A. Noire actually emote. They look like real people, and that's because they are.

I want that technology in every game I play from now on. In L.A. Noire, it was an essential part of the game since you needed to study people's faces to determine whether or not you should trust them. While most games don't really require this level of detail, they could all benefit from having characters that look and act like real people. It's a huge leap forward in the art of telling immersive stories in games, and I know this term gets thrown around a lot, but I really believe that L.A. Noire represents a watershed moment for games.

L.A. Noire reminds me of Heavy Rain. Both are deeply flawed games, but they're also incredibly ambitious in the way they attempt to push the medium forward. I don't know that I would necessarily want an L.A. Noire 2, but I definitely do want more games like it.

If you want to hear how I chose L.A. Noire, you can download my deliberation process, subscribe with iTunes, or listen to it below:

Runners-up: Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, Red Faction: Armageddon

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Review // Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Without a doubt, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception is the most lavishly produced, highly polished game I've played all year. It's also one of the least fun.

That's coming from a guy who beat Uncharted 2: Among Thieves in one ten-hour sitting because it was just that good. Sure, it totally fell apart at the end, pitting Drake against ridiculous blue monsters for no good reason before flagrantly ripping off the final boss fight of GUN, but the nine hours before that were sheer brilliance, so all was forgiven.

But Uncharted 3 is a mess from start to finish, opening with a bar fight that plays like a poor man's Batman: Arkham City and closing with a shameless retread of Uncharted 2's final moments. As the credits mercifully closed the curtain on Drake's Deception, I was left totally speechless, wondering how Naughty Dog could've dropped the ball so badly.

Let me take this opportunity to reiterate just how outstanding the production values of this game are: It's beyond gorgeous, filled with the kind of crispness and bright colors that made Uncharted 2 pop off the screen. The set pieces are technical marvels, pushing the PlayStation 3 harder than we ever thought possible and making for exhilarating showpieces. There are no cut corners here, and it shows.

That said, looking pretty just isn't enough when the rest of the game is so lackluster.

Uncharted 3 stumbles right out of the gate, opening with an awkward bar brawl and a blatant disregard for the events of Uncharted 2. It never feels inspired, like that game did; it feels like "just another adventure," which I'm sure most people will be totally fine with, but wasn't really what I was looking for. Abandoning the last game's conclusion in favor of yet another trip around the world to find yet another fabled lost city with only the barest of explanations just feels lazy.

Chloe is still in the mix, though no longer as a love interest nor as feisty (and therefore, is much less interesting), now joined by a cheeky Brit named Cutter, both of whom get inexplicably cut from the story about halfway through. Really, the one character that Uncharted 3 does any justice to is Sully, whose past with Drake is explained in a long scene that culminates with a chase that would have been awesome if it didn't result in instant failure the moment you make a wrong turn.

Ultimately, the story here hits most of the same beats that Uncharted 2 did, right down to a late "reveal" of Elena, who's been off doing her own thing between games, and ends on the exact same note, too. It lacks the passion of earlier games, and more than ever, just feels like an excuse to string set pieces together.

No more is this evident than the sinking cruise liner that Naughty Dog proudly trotted out at its big E3 2011 reveal. It's stunning, for sure, but it also has shit-all to do with the rest of the game. It's a two-hour tangent in the middle of the story that goes nowhere and serves only as an impressive set piece. It's window dressing, and nothing more.

Something to note is how much that sequence changed between the E3 demo and the final game. In the demo, combat smartly took a backseat to the spectacle of everything going on around you, and the whole scene played out quite smoothly as a result. The final game, however, foolishly throws dozens of enemies at you, breaking the flow of another "would have been awesome" scene. Instead of concentrating on finding a way out of the ship, I was busy dodging bullets, grenades and fists, and not having much fun at all.

It's a game that has a few good tricks, but uses them all too often. If you liked the end of that E3 demo, when Drake runs toward the camera, then I hope you'll still like it the fifth or sixth time you do it in the full game. You'll run toward the camera from water. You'll run toward the camera from fire. You'll run toward the camera from a nonsensical swarm of spiders. You'll run toward the camera from another nonsensical swarm of spiders, and then once more, just in case you weren't tired of it yet.

You'll also fight some very nasty brutes, seven-foot-tall beasts of men that come at the most inopportune times and usually require that you take them out with your fists because, really, guns are so passé. You'll fight one every time Naughty Dog seemingly didn't feel confident that a combat scenario would be memorable enough, which proved to be pretty often: You'll fight one in a bar, a burning chateau, a citadel, a plane, a truck, and just when you thought you couldn't possibly fight another one, you'll fight another one. Despite the location changes, these fights play out exactly the same way every time and would've been much better reserved for one or two instances throughout the entire game.

But the biggest downfall of the Uncharted series has always been the gunplay. Whether the enemies take too many bullets, the combat scenarios aren't well-designed, or the aiming is busted, something is always wrong. Well, that hasn't changed.

Looking pretty
just isn't enough
when the rest of the game is so lackluster.

Uncharted 3 has all of those problems, but it's the poorly designed combat scenarios that I found the most frustrating. Probably the worst of these had me fighting dozens of pirates in a ship graveyard. They were spread out across several boats, and I had very little cover to work with. The enemies were extremely aggressive in this section, constantly flanking and forcing me to risk getting shot while I moved to new cover. Sometimes, I'd be in the flow of things, handling it well, feeling good, when an armored guy with a shotgun would come running at me from the side. If I couldn't take him out quickly enough, I'd die from his shotgun, a wayward grenade, or the never-ending gunfire from other enemies.

After about seven retries, I did what I always do at some point in every Uncharted game: I dropped the difficulty down to Very Easy and moved on with my life.

There were also times when I'd be fighting alongside AI partners who were more content to watch me die than pitch in. For instance, there's a point in the game where Cutter gets injured and Sully needs to help him walk, so Drake and Chloe are charged with covering them. You're assaulted by waves of enemies, eventually culminating in guys with riot shields and an armored brute. I didn't have any grenades to deal with the riot shield guys, but since the enemies only ever focus on Drake, I figured I'd use that to lure them away from Chloe, exposing their backs to her. Dangerous for me, but easy kills for her, right? Apparently, too easy — Chloe refused to shoot at them, and eventually I was forced to abandon what should've been a winning strategy.

Not everything in the game is bad, though. There are occasionally some truly exceptional moments in Uncharted 3; they're just undercut by all the bullshit. Drake wandering helpless for days through miles of desert, for example, is truly exceptional. The way Drake just happens to stumble onto what he was looking for in the middle of that desert, however, is bullshit. Drake being totally fine to run around and fight dozens of guys after days in that desert with no food or water is also bullshit.

I'd like to tell you that the multiplayer saves Uncharted 3, but I can't. Granted, since I only rented it, I couldn't actually play the multiplayer in the final game, but you can read my coverage of the multiplayer beta to understand why Uncharted's multiplayer isn't really for me. I also tried out the Subway promotion that was supposed to offer the full multiplayer ahead of the game's release, and it seemed largely unchanged from the beta, so I'm going to assume the multiplayer's still not for me.

I'm completely aware that I'm the odd man out here. I get that. But for as good as Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception looks, and as intricate as its set pieces are, I simply didn't have fun playing it.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception / $59.99 / PS3

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