Rush Sykes is the prototypical fantasy hero, innocently sulky but totally devoted to his sweet sister Irina. When Irina is kidnapped, Rush hurries to liberate her, but unsurprisingly, it’s not the most straightforward of rescues. Rather, Rush finds himself caught in a political struggle centered around powerful magical artifacts called remnants. These objects are both the center of society as well as a great curiosity, heavily researched at the Academy by hosts of scientists, including Rush’s own parents. What starts as an upheaval between the pro- and anti-remnant factions explodes into an all-out war when a formidable hulk of a man calling himself the Conqueror appears, apparently able to control any remnant, no matter how large or potent. Political forces clash and hidden powers are unleashed, and though a tenuous peace is eventually achieved, it isn’t long before conflict reawakens. The story is epic, though Rush himself isn’t the most interesting leading man. Fortunately, his supporting cast is excellent; the noble David is a charmingly haughty presence, and David’s guard Emma makes a strong impression, thanks to some excellent, emphatic voice acting.

Whereas other RPGs tend to center on their protagonist, The Last Remnant eventually focuses on the Conqueror and his secrets. He’s a solemn, momentous presence who makes an impact each time he appears, and it’s easy to believe that this man may actually be capable of controlling the universe. But though it will take you a good 60 hours or more to unravel all of his secrets, the journey is entertaining, given that The Last Remnant’s distinctive fantasy world is so beautifully constructed. Each city you visit is different from the last, yet the overall vision is cohesive, so nothing feels out of place. Landmarks such as the towering, glowing remnant in Elysion are not soon forgotten, and numerous side quests will have you exploring scorching deserts, caves of bubbling lava, and even the land of the dead. Most of these locales are lovely and beautifully lit.

Those attractive environments were squandered on the Xbox 360, on which awful technical problems soiled the artistic beauty. On the PC, the frame rate remains smooth, which makes it easy to drink in the scenery and fully enjoy the bloody drama of The Last Remnant’s spectacular-looking battles. Texture pop-in, a telltale sign of the Unreal 3 Engine, is still present but less conspicuous, and the loading times have been markedly improved, which keeps the pace flowing nicely. However, a new problem has cropped up in the form of some occasional screen tearing, and the lack of an in-game v-sync option means that you’ll need to adjust the settings in your video-card software if it gets bothersome. Nevertheless, these issues are relatively minor, and though some low-resolution textures and simple geometry may occasionally distract PC enthusiasts with keen eyes, the game’s technical aspects ably support its art design.

Raptors taste like chicken, once you remove the crunchy shell.

The Last Remnant’s battle system is intriguing, though you will be several hours in before you can appreciate its intricacies. Rather than controlling party members during combat, you recruit leaders and soldiers, and group them together into unions. Although each unit has his or her own stats, equipment, and arts (the game’s versions of spells and combat skills), you issue union-wide, turn-based commands on the field. Whereas in most RPGs you choose very specific actions, such as casting a particular spell or using a particular item, in The Last Remnant you choose broader commands. These may include healing unions that need it; performing mystic arts (though you can see which arts the units will use, you can’t micromanage them on a unit-by-unit basis); or summoning Rush’s awe-inspiring, beautifully designed cyclops to assist in battle.

Early in the game, when you don’t have a whole lot of unions under your command, you may bemoan the lack of micromanagement that this system entails. The fundamentals are a little confusing too, given that there doesn’t always seem to be rhyme or reason to the process that decides which abilities are available to you and when. Later on, however, you’ll have a lot more units under your command, and you’ll discover how elaborate battles can become. As units use certain arts, they level up those arts and learn newer ones, all the while improving stats–though it’s unclear how some of those stats affect the outcome of your actions. (Units possess such attributes as gluttony; what does that do, anyway?) Thus, grouping units into sensible unions is crucial, as is grouping them into an appropriate formation. You can get through many standard battles without putting too much thought into these aspects, if you take a lot of side quests and grind your way to power. However, even with a bit of grinding, the biggest battles require care, both before and during combat. As you play, you’ll gain a better grasp of your enemies’ weaknesses, the pros and cons of each formation, and the best way to develop your individual units through battle commands.

Eventually, you’ll experience some large, impressive-looking battles. They can also be really challenging, so don’t expect to rush to a victory, particularly when dozens of unions are involved. On the PC, limits on the number of leaders you can employ on the battlefield have been removed, but financial restrictions and more resilient enemies prevent battles from getting too easy. Individual turns can take a while to complete, but by repairing the frame rate issues that plagued the Xbox 360 version, developer Square Enix has also accelerated the pace of battle. The game will also throw quick-time events called critical triggers at you that require a rapid button or key press; performing it correctly may initiate a counterattack, or will improve your units’ position in the turn order. These events, like most of the game, are best experienced with a gamepad in hand. We were able to play successfully with several different gamepads, including an Xbox 360 pad. The keyboard is supported, of course, and that scheme is perfectly functional, if less natural than the alternative. Thankfully, if you aren’t a fan of quick-time events, there is an option to have critical triggers resolved automatically.

RPG heroes earn fame in direct proportion to how hard it is to make a cosplay version of their outfit.

The colossal battles are the highlight of the game, not just because they are impressively dramatic, but also because you can see the effects of your union makeup, formations, and in-battle decisions more clearly than in the smaller ones. A morale bar across the top of the screen adjusts during the constant tug of war, based on whether you are attacking an enemy’s flank or rear, which status effects are active, and a number of other factors. Location on the battlefield, attack range, and potency of healing items and arts are among the many other dynamics that you’ll need to consider as you plan out your turn. This thoughtful preparation makes it all the more heartbreaking when you lose a long, well-planned battle. A significant number of late-game skirmishes take a long time to complete, often stringing several tough encounters together. Considering that formations and union setup can require a bit of trial and error, you might lose a bit of progress the first few times you attempt these colossal battles. Thankfully, the combat is fun and addictive, and a high-speed battle option new to the PC version also alleviates the frustration. But given the length of these lengthy clashes, it’s vexing that you are not allowed to save between turns. Otherwise, you can save almost anywhere, and the ability to skip cutscenes should you need to replay a section is also a welcome convenience.

Outside of combat, a little scavenger named Mr. Diggs will excavate various raw materials that you encounter in dungeons. Along with the monster parts that you forage, these items can be used to upgrade your equipment or create new weapons and accessories. There’s not much to the process, and you can customize only Rush’s equipment; other units take care of things on their own, using the items you let them keep in the postbattle screen to upgrade their stuff, or asking if you’ll take them hunting for a particular resource. Considering that characters develop based on the attacks they perform, there is a lot of flexibility–and intangibility–to party progression. As a result, there is a certain amount of replay value here, if only to see how differently battles can play out if you decide to make Rush concentrate solely on mystic arts, or see what happens when the four-armed Torgal focuses on combat skills.

Swords are nice, but sometimes, fists are the best way to get the job done.

The Last Remnant sounds mostly spectacular. The voice acting isn’t always excellent, though it’s hard to fault the actors when they’re forced to deliver some of the game’s awkward dialogue and odd bits of slang. Everything else is of top quality, particularly the fantastic symphonic soundtrack. Even after hundreds and hundreds of encounters, the battle music is always rousing, and the triumphant fanfare after every conflict rivals the best of the genre. Every town has its own theme music, and the melodies are terrific in their own right and flawlessly match the city’s unique visual design as well.

By fixing the frame rate and other technical issues that encumbered the Xbox 360 version, Square Enix has improved the entire experience, allowing the great story and fun gameplay to sparkle on their own terms. Granted, The Last Remnant could have been tightened up even more, but even with its occasional visual and gameplay foibles, it’s a delight from beginning to end.

Hybridization in PC games has rarely been as ambitious and as well executed as in BattleForge, which expertly merges real-time strategy play with a collectible card game, thereby spawning its own genre, the RTS card game. The result is an innovative RTS game that rewards thinking on your feet, and a card game that puts thousands of opponents at your fingertips and brings your fantastic minions to life. Despite a few imperfections, BattleForge has the potential to captivate fans of both of its component genres.

Who needs a barracks? Summon reinforcements wherever you have ground forces.

At its core, BattleForge is a real-time strategy game with a seamlessly integrated card game mechanic. You control an army of fantasy creatures, ranging in size from tiny to gargantuan, and undertake missions, which are resolved through real-time battles with standard point-and-click controls and an excellent drag-and-drop control group interface. Instead of building structures to produce units, you summon your forces directly onto the battlefield by playing cards from your onscreen deck. Likewise, you can summon defensive towers and cast healing, damage, and crowd-control spells in the same manner. Each card has a power cost, so you need to seize resource buildings called power wells to fund your war, as well as monuments, at which you build orbs that allow you to use increasingly powerful cards. For instance, you start each match with one orb and can play only level 1 cards, but when you build your second orb, you’ll be able to play level 1 and 2 cards. This makes capturing and defending monuments and power wells central to your strategy. As for tactics, one important technique is matching the attack type of your units to the armor class of enemy units. Another tactical consideration is deciding between summoning your forces anywhere you have a ground unit or tower, causing the new troops to suffer a temporary health and ability loss, or summoning them at one of your power wells or monuments for instant full effectiveness.

Playing RTS matches in BattleForge is a blast, but you can also derive hours of enjoyment outside the battlefield by planning, designing, and tweaking your virtual decks. There’s no limit to the number of different decks you can make, so there’s no limit to the number of classes or “specs” you can play with the same character. Each deck can have up to 20 cards, and each card belongs to one of four schools of magic–fire, frost, nature, or shadow–and is color-coded red, blue, green, or purple, respectively. Similarly, the crucial orbs you control on the battlefield are color-coded, and you need to decide what color orb to build when you capture a monument. To play a shadow card, for instance, you must have a purple orb, and so on. Figuring out how many orbs and what colors you need may sound complicated, but it’s executed with a simple and intuitive dot system.

Like in certain physical card games, your decks will be most effective when they stick to either one or two colors, but the game doesn’t restrict your design freedom in any way. You start the game with four premade decks and 3,000 BattleForge points, the game’s main currency, which you can spend to buy cards from other players or directly from the game, in the form of boosters (eight mystery cards for 250 BF points) or tomes (six boosters for 1,250). Each booster contains one rare or ultra-rare card, which you can often sell to other players for enough points to buy a whole new booster. In short, the game starts you off with plenty of cards and points to keep you entertained for a long time, but if you want more, you can buy points at the rate of $6.62 for 500 or $26.56 for 2,250. While you won’t get free cards for beating missions, you will receive upgrades to improve the cards you already own, which will make your decks more powerful.

Building a Better Werebeast: You can upgrade your cards to improve their attributes.

In contrast to the idyllic synergy among BattleForge’s various gameplay elements is the dysfunctional relationship between gameplay and storyline. You’ll find only the barest details of a story and minimal character development within the missions themselves, and in all likelihood you’ll feel closer to your decks than to any of the game’s non-player characters. Although the game has a thorough and lengthy story to explain why you’re hovering over the battlefield throwing lightning bolts at giant purple crustaceans, it is primarily told through a virtual book, which you can either read or skip. Frustratingly, the book doesn’t save your place between viewings, so you have to click through dozens of pages to get to sections that you haven’t read yet. Here’s the basic story: Many years ago, the gods made you a Skylord for your valiant contribution to their war against the giants. In the intervening years, you spent your time using the Forge of Creation to summon up fantastic creatures (and apparently playing cards with other Skylords), but now you must use your powers to help humankind, because the gods have disappeared in their hour of need. However, you can simply choose to ignore humankind and challenge other Skylords to competitive matches until the end of time, if that’s what makes you happy.

Of course, tackling the story-driven campaign means that you must show mercy and help the humans, even though they can be rather incompetent allies and do annoying things like send out convoys before you are ready to escort them. The campaign consists of 19 unique missions, requiring varying numbers of players, from 1 to 12. Finding enough players for the big missions is usually pretty painless, but a few other aspects of the campaign can be troublesome, like dealing with teammates who take more than their share of the resources and racing the clock to complete timed objectives. The biggest problem with the campaign in BattleForge, though, is simply that it’s over too quickly. And though you can lengthen the experience by playing most of the missions on standard, advanced, and expert difficulties, this option is a poor replacement for more content.

Unsatisfied with the monstrosities in your deck? Buy new ones at the auction house.

Competitive multiplayer is a staple of RTS and card games, and BattleForge nails it. On 12 bare-bones maps designed for either one-vs.-one or two-vs.-two combat, you’ll face opponents matched to your PVP experience level. While powerful cards can swing the advantage, these battles are essentially tests of skill, first in designing effective decks, second in tailoring your offensive strategy to fit your opponent, and third in choosing quick and effective counters for your enemy’s attacks. Even though there is no fog of war and you can see everything on the battlefield, you’ll never know exactly what your opponent is going to throw at you, since he can summon units anywhere he has a ground presence, including the middle of your base. As a result, it’s important to always keep enough power on hand to summon an effective counter and, likewise, you should try to estimate when your opponent is low on power so you can ensure that his weak spot will stay weak. These are just a few of the tactical options that result from instant unit-summoning, which makes multiplayer battles exciting, fast-paced, and constantly evolving.

BattleForge’s community interaction is functional but unrefined. One example is the auction house, where you can buy and sell cards for BattleForge points. Although it’s convenient to search for cards by color, orb level (1, 2, 3, or 4), rarity, and type (unit, spell, or tower), you can’t sort the search results by price or time remaining. As well, searches return only the first 50 results and display only five results at a time. Another feature that could be improved is the chat. Adding the ability to link cards into trade chat would not only make life easier for potential buyers and sellers, but would also help bridge the gap between BattleForge’s American and European players by enabling easy trade communication among different language speakers.

The environments in BattleForge at first bear a striking resemblance to the RTS classic Warcraft III, but the game quickly differentiates itself with a menagerie of creatures great and small. Werewolves, insects, skeletons, dragons, giant worms, and bulbous monstrosities represent only a few of the creatures at your disposal, and they give the game a larger-than-life aesthetic. Additionally, you’ll notice fun visual flourishes, like how the flying frost battleship shoots confetti when you summon reinforcements and how the Fathom Lord does a shuffling lobster-man dance when inactive. The graphics and sound aren’t groundbreaking, but the visual effects don’t disappoint, the unit voice-acting is solid, and the score is beautifully orchestrated and dynamic.

After beating this boss, the players still have some gigantic units on hand. Attack on Toyko, anyone?

BattleForge is remarkable not only because its component genres are integrated together so well, or because it’s unique, playable, and fun, but also because it can make an RTS fan enjoy a collectible card game. You’d do well to check it out if you’re even remotely interested in either genre, and provided the player community sticks around there’s no reason why you shouldn’t still be enjoying BattleForge many months from now.

With the proud elven race precipitously close to annihilation, elf leader Lady Teya has charged you with a sensitive mission that will send you into foreign lands to determine the destiny of the remnants of your people. You play as Lord Sagittel, a walking diplomatic incident whose idea of negotiating with foreigners is to barge into their lands and skewer anyone who questions his credentials. You’ll quickly earn the ire of your neighbors as you turn Sagittel’s initially humble force into a battle-hardened army and cut a swath of devastation through the countryside. When he’s not committing atrocities against the peasantry of neighboring duchies, Lord Sagittel shows his sensitive and literate side by keeping a journal, excerpts of which are recounted at the beginning of each mission. Along with the in-game dialogue, Sagittel’s journal reveals both the storyline and his warped yet endearing psychology, which together provide ample justification for your increasingly brutal adventures.

However, before you can start pillaging peaceful townships and leaving mountains of orc skulls in your wake, you’ll need to learn how to play, and unfortunately, the tutorial is a disaster. First, the voice-over switches schizophrenically between English and Russian, and the Russian sections are preferable, since they are stable and include English subtitles. The buggy English-language track, which is delivered in an absurd gravelly voice, on the other hand, skips over large chunks of the instructions, undermining the whole point of a tutorial. To top things off, the game dependably crashes to desktop at a certain point in the tutorial. When coupled with the opening cinematic, which has problems with skipping dialogue, the tutorial doesn’t give you a great first impression. Thankfully, you won’t have trouble learning the game without it, and the major stability issues end there.

While the awful tutorial feels like a bad dream, the gameplay is engaging and satisfying, with an appropriately challenging difficulty curve as you progress through the single-player campaign. Elven Legacy is a wargame, but like with Panzer General, you can jump in and enjoy it even if you’ve never seen a hex grid before. Your army consists of melee units, archers, cavalry, siege weapons, and more-fantastic troops like mages and dragons. Each unit gets one action (attacking, casting a spell, or using an item) plus one movement per turn, and this simple formula adds up to lots of different tactics to consider. For instance, will you move your archers into an exposed position so that they can attack an injured foe, or will you use them to attack a closer enemy so that they’ll be able to retreat afterwards?

Ever have one of those days?

Another important factor to consider is terrain. Troops in castles and villages get a big defense bonus, hills provide a small bonus to defense but can slow movement, forests increase the attack power of certain archers, and any unit caught crossing a river is incredibly vulnerable to attack. As a result, your position at the end of your turn is just as important as the damage you inflict during it–you want your army in a defensively effective formation, on the right terrain, and at a distance from the enemy army that prevents enemies from seizing the upper hand. In addition, when a unit is badly damaged, its willpower will break, sending it fleeing into a nearby hex and ruining its effectiveness. Breaking enemy units is a joy, but the artificial intelligence excels at playing “whack-a-mole” with your broken units as well, forcing you to watch with horror as your troops retreat from one hex to the next with each enemy assault (No! Not the river!).

All units, from heroes to conscripts, gain experience and level up like in a role-playing game. With each level you get to choose one of three perks for the unit, which may be a straightforward upgrade, like additional movement points; a specialization option, like adding attack power at the expense of defense; or a new ability. Mounted units can learn to charge an incoming attacker before they strike, dragons can learn to use their massive wingspan to blot out the sun and damage the morale of nearby enemies, and mages can learn magic spells, culminating in the elven equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Such offensive spells, due to their unlimited range, can be incredibly powerful and effective against well-guarded enemies that might otherwise be tough to reach, and support spells let you heal or buff friendly units from across the map. Furthermore, any unit can carry one magical item, which often gives it a spell to cast, just like a mage. Instead of using mana pools, your magic users can cast each of their spells only a certain number of times during each mission. For instance, you can use the elf nuke only once, but lesser spells can be used multiple times.

There are 18 campaign missions, including bonus missions, but you won’t get to play all of them in a single campaign because you have to choose your route to the final objective, and naturally, the desire to play the levels you missed may spur you to play through the campaign a second time. The bonus missions, which you can unlock by beating regular missions within a given turn limit, let you play with other factions, like the dwarves or the humans, and will sometimes reveal background to the main story. Also, within each campaign level there are secrets to discover and side quests to take, which will reward your exploration with experience, new units, spells, and items, so you’ll still have something to celebrate if you don’t win the “gold victory” needed to unlock a bonus stage. In addition to the campaign, the game offers seven stand-alone missions, which help make the single-player experience a long and satisfying one.

Some multiplayer maps start the players next to each other, ensuring that combat will break out in the first turn.

While the AI is impressive and will quickly take advantage of your mistakes, nothing compares to fighting against another human. Although we never had any luck finding a game on the Internet, there are others ways to find a multiplayer match. You can arrange a game on the official forum and connect by IP address, or you can play either hotseat or LAN games, which include the added bonus of hearing your friends’ lamentations as you tear their armies apart. These multiplayer games are often pitched battles, where each player sits on the brink of destruction and prays that his opponent will be the first to show weakness, and the tension often starts from the first turn, since many of the 17 multiplayer maps put you right next to the enemy. Other maps are large and provide a stream of additional gold each turn, allowing for truly epic battles that can last for hours. Thankfully, multiplayer games can be saved and loaded later, if your previous commitments force an early armistice. The biggest problem with the multiplayer is that you have nothing to do during your opponents’ turns, but you can minimize this by setting a time limit for turns, which is almost a necessity for four-player maps.

Elven Legacy’s controls and interface don’t break any new ground, but they get the job done. The one annoying control issue we had–accidentally moving one unit when intending to select another–can be avoided by doing all unit selection through the army panel at the bottom of the screen. Moreover, you can undo unwanted movements, provided the offending unit didn’t discover any enemies or make an attack. Aside from controlling the camera, the right mouse button displays information about a spell, item, or unit in a pop-up window, which works just fine but makes you wonder whether some of this data, like attack range or melee damage, could have been displayed in the unit selection panel, where there is plenty of extra space. One thing the selection panel is invaluable for is identifying which units can act, with each unit sporting red and green orbs next to its portrait that indicate the ability to attack and move, respectively. As well, some other interface features that make gameplay easier include highlighting all the hexes that a selected unit can move to and displaying tooltips that reveal how well your unit might do if he attacked a given target.

You can spend gold to buy reinforcements and equip magical items, if it pleases Lord Sagittel.

Visuals aren’t the selling point for wargames, and people who enjoy moving simple counters across a hex grid will find no reason to complain about Elven Legacy’s graphics. It looks great for its genre, with distinct three-dimensional units and environments, good unit animations, and charming spell effects. On the other hand, non-grognards will be unimpressed, especially considering that the game specifically warns you against turning on the antialiasing. True to the warning, the game did crash a couple of times with the antialiasing turned on and was quite stable without it, but the visual improvements may be worth sacrificing some stability for. One additional bug showed up at the end of the campaign when the two different ending cutscenes played back-to-back in a seemingly endless loop. On the plus side, though, the system requirements are low, so you can play the game on an older computer. As for the sound, it holds up well by any standard, with sufficiently varied music, detailed sound effects, and excellent English-language voice acting.

Elven Legacy is a sure bet for fans of the fantasy wargame subgenre, but they’re not the only ones who will appreciate its charms. Fans of more traditional wargames can appreciate it as a fun fantasy diversion, and new players will find it simple to learn and enjoy. If you are new to the genre, Elven Legacy is a great choice for an entry-level wargame. With its simple yet tactically robust combat options, its antihero protagonist, and its cutthroat multiplayer, Elven Legacy could easily become your “gateway game” to more sophisticated wargames.

For going on two years, the biggest mystery about the Mysteries of Westgate adventure pack for Neverwinter Nights 2 was whether or not it would ever be released. Developer Ossian Studios finished the download-only module way back at the tail end of 2007, but the powers that be at publisher Atari held the game back for ages due to unexplained issues with digital-rights management. So, was it worth the wait? Not entirely. Even though this D&D adventure delivers plenty of bang for the buck, with more than 15 hours of dungeon delving for the low price of $9.99, two years of sitting on the shelf did not do it any favors. Although you can feed your swords-and-sorcery jones with this solo jaunt through an exotic new corner of the Forgotten Realms, the graphics and gameplay are lacking, especially by comparison with more modern role-playing games.

Battles in Mysteries of Westgate range from over-before-you-know-it beat-’em-ups to murderously hard, strategic spellcasting affairs.

The story is quite rough around the edges, in that it abruptly starts and stops without much character development and motivation. The plot is centered on your discovery of a domino mask belonging to a guild of thieves and assassins called the Night Masks, but this actually takes place offscreen and is recounted in a brief cutscene at the start of the game. All you’re told is that the mask is cursed, that it’s giving you nightmares, and that you’ve taken a ship to the crime-ridden Dragon Coast burg of Westgate to hunt down the Night Masks and get rid of this leftover from the filming of Eyes Wide Shut. It’s hard to care about any of this. For instance, the impact of the mask itself is negligible. It’s a minor-league MacGuffin that has no impact on anything that you do. You can fight, rest, cast spells, and generally go about the business of an adventurer unmolested. Aside from being prompted to put the mask on a couple of times, you can pretty much forget all about it.

The quest structure is also forgettable, given that there is no narrative drive to what you do. Most adventures involve taking on unrelated odd jobs for various characters, including the grumpy dwarf commander of the city watch, an arrogant priest of Lathander, a merchant involved in a childish feud, and various lowlifes including a guy rigging a dog race. At least many of these assignments are enjoyable distractions. There is a lot of variety and many moments of real role-playing through dialogue choices and puzzles. Combat isn’t always necessary, or even advisable. The only serious string of battles here takes place in the town arena, which you unfortunately can’t avoid due to a plot twist that forces you to raise a crazy amount of money to push along the main story. Westgate is also loaded with colorful rip-off artists that underline the town’s seamy nature. And the module has a great sense of humor, which is provided by these not-so-lovable Westgate scumbags and a few in-jokes about D&D games of the past.

The grim streets of Westgate provide an atmospheric backdrop to your adventures.

None of these jobs has much to do with your mask, though. You eventually become involved with the Night Masks and their rivals, another gang of goons called the Ebon Claws. But this takes hours to heat up, and during that time you’re really connected to the main story only by one of your companions, a former Night Mask by the name of Rinara. And even she is hard to figure out. The neutral-evil rogue pops up unexplained at the start of the game as your friend and traveling companion, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you’re playing a good character. There is at least some satisfying interplay between her and your other two party members, a guilt-ridden fallen paladin named Mantides and an obnoxious cleric of Tyr named Charissa, both of whom you run into the moment you step off the boat. Yet even though their dialogue is well written, most situations feel forced, with the gung-ho Charissa always goading for a fight and the righteous Mantides forever getting into it with the in-it-for-the-loot Rinara. These exchanges don’t have much impact on the story, either. Your alignment never moves much one way or another, and even the worst arguments never shift your influence over a character more than a point or two that you can quickly regain.

Wildly careening difficulty is another issue with quest design. Some battles are amazingly easy. You can soar through many scraps in moments, with your party carving up the opposition before you can tell if you’re fighting a mummy or a zombie. However, others are absolutely brutal–Throne of Bhaal brutal. There are more than a couple of moments in the game in which your party is ambushed by enemy spellcasters that rip you to pieces before you can even think about a proper response. You can generally get through these battles by dropping into puppet mode and taking control of each party member. Yet even fighting in this quasi-turn-based fashion isn’t a quick ticket to success. The toughest brawls in the game require a good half-dozen or more reloads, which makes victory in them seem more like pure “Hey, I finally knocked down that mage!” luck than any sort of spellcasting strategizing that you might concoct.

The graphics create further issues. Virtually all of the artistic improvements made to the game engine through the two retail NWN2 expansions are missing in action here. Character models are often afflicted by featureless faces and odd “flashlight under the chin” lighting in close-up dialogue sequences that make it look like your party members are telling stories at a kiddie Halloween party. The cityscape level design is a generic medieval affair marked only by the inclusion of a new sewer tileset and a few ornate chambers such as the church of Lathander. There is a dark eeriness to the surroundings, though, due to the run-down neighborhoods and the rainstorms that pour down into the grimy gutters. Nevertheless, having virtually all of the action take place in and around the constricted streets of Westgate is a drag because the game engine doesn’t handle close quarters very well. You spend a lot of time swiveling the camera down narrow laneways and navigating past buildings. All in all, it’s kind of hard to look at Mysteries of Westgate if you’ve gotten accustomed to the more elegant art in the two retail NWN2 expansions.

The goal of finding the cursed mask that forms the basis of your quest is noted briefly only in the opening cutscene, which doesn’t exactly give the story a good foundation.

It can be hard to listen to the game, too. Although the new music is fantastic and merges into the existing soundtrack so perfectly that you don’t even notice a transition, the voice acting has been done in a slipshod fashion. For once, though, this isn’t due to the quality of the thespians bringing the script to life. Most of the acting is actually quite good, at least on a par with what can be found in the original NWN2 campaign and the retail expansions. But there isn’t much of it, and what is there has been scattered all over the place. Some dialogue sequences have no vocal component at all, whereas others begin with a few spoken words and then lapse into silence, which is so stilted that it seems like the result of a bug. These awkward silences ruin a lot of the most dramatic moments in the game and make some cutscenes impossible to understand.

Admittedly, that is a lot of negativity. But even despite its many flaws, Mysteries of Westgate offers a reasonable stopgap for NWN2 fans desperate for new content for an even more reasonable 10 bucks. It also finally includes the downloadable adventure-pack program for the D&D franchise, which at least offers the promise of bigger and better modules to come.

At its core, And Yet It Moves is a simple game. You move your paper character through the level, hitting checkpoints along your way to the end goal. Falling too fast or getting crushed will rip you to pieces, but you’ll reassemble quickly back at the last checkpoint, none the worse for wear. You can jump and move left or right. You can rotate the world 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, or spin it 180 degrees in one go. This meager set of abilities is all you have to work with, but the power of rotation gives you an astonishing freedom of movement. You can move along virtually any trajectory with the right combination of jumping and rotation. No matter which way the world rotates, your feet are always pointed down, so if you’re in the air, you’re always falling. If you stay aloft too long, you’ll reach terminal velocity and rip to shreds when you finally hit the ground. Managing your speed is crucial, and you’ll want to get accustomed to landing on sloped surfaces to lessen the impact and decrease the likelihood of death. Regardless of how careful you are, you’ll die fairly often. Fortunately, generous checkpoints and almost-instant respawning keep death from slowing you down too much.

Death is just a part of the learning process, and it takes a while to recalibrate your spatial awareness. It’s easy to confuse clockwise and counterclockwise when you’re falling through space, but once you start to get the hang of it, you’ll find yourself doing some pretty cool stuff. One of the early puzzles requires you to go through a passage blocked by a nasty horned toad. To sneak by him, you have to herd a flock of bats near him and force him to retreat. Bats always roost on the ceiling, and you always fall to the floor, but you have to rotate the world so that you and the bats end up in the same area. It’s a tricky situation, and figuring it out is satisfying. There are a number of other environmental challenges like this that jibe well with the game’s quirky charm, including moving a banana through a maze without bruising it too badly and sneaking past an oversized Venus fly trap.

The real challenge of And Yet It Moves isn’t getting by the various creatures you encounter, but rather mastering your own movement. Every level is packed with situations that force you to calculate strange trajectories or fall a long way without gathering too much speed. Sometimes it’s clear what you need to do and you just need to execute properly, which is easier said than done. Other times it’s not so clear, and you’ll do some serious trial and error (read: lots of dying) before you puzzle it out. There’s a certain plasticity to these problems, so when you eventually succeed, you may or may not know exactly how you did it. You may feel like you somehow cheaped your way past an obstacle, but more often than not you’ll just be delighted to be on your way. This flexibility means that you don’t always have to hit upon the one specific solution, which gives the puzzles a forgiving feeling that makes And Yet It Moves very accessible.

The puzzles in which you also control a shadow version of yourself are particularly good.

The clever gameplay of And Yet It Moves is matched eloquently by its homemade paper-craft aesthetic. Levels look like they were assembled from high-resolution images that were printed out, casually ripped apart, and placed carefully to form the basic level structure. Roots crisscross the soil in the underground sections, and the rainforest areas feature explosively colorful flowers that are incongruously bounded by torn edges. Later levels get significantly wilder as brash textures set the stage for some of the more abstract puzzles. It’s a truly unique look that gives the game a lot of visual charm, though the white-paper line-sketch protagonist doesn’t bring a lot of character to the table. There is some ambient music that loosely fits the weird vibe, but it’s pretty sparse and you’ll probably prefer to use your own soundtrack. Muting the sound effects is also recommended. Every time you die, there erupts an abrupt, sibilant “TSOOTCH!” that feels like a brisk reprimand and is likely to grate on your nerves.

There are some really tricky parts, but you’ll generally move through the game at a reasonable pace and beat it in a few hours. When you are moving confidently and rotating the world comes naturally, And Yet It Moves is engrossing and satisfying. Progress is your only reward here, given that the game has no narrative elements or sense of purpose. The mute protagonist has a few cute animations, but for the most part you’ll rely on the joy of extra-spatial navigation to keep you interested. This joy does lose its luster as the game goes on, but the increasingly exotic level design manages to keep the good times rolling until the end. Those looking to get more out of the game can try for achievements and speed runs, and even if that isn’t really your thing, it’s worth competing against a top-scoring ghost just to see how people flirt with terminal velocity to pass levels alarmingly fast.

And Yet It Moves is certainly unique, and novelty is one of its main selling points. The clever rotation mechanic is fun to play with and satisfying to master, though you will yearn for a meaningful twist or a new gameplay device before all is said and done. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of engaging puzzle action here, and it’s all presented in a strange and delightful way. You may end up wishing it was more substantial, but And Yet It Moves has enough style to make it a fun, worthwhile diversion.

The core action is quite simple. Your lawn is divided into a grid, and each square can hold one plant. Zombies shamble up the rows of the grid toward your house, and if they get past your defenses, well, you know. At the top of the screen there are a number of slots that house the various plants at your disposal. Setting a plant down in a square costs sunlight, a resource that falls intermittently from the sky. However, you need more sunlight than is freely available, so you have to plant sunflowers to generate more sunlight. During the first minutes of a level, it’s a measured balancing act between building your sunflower ranks and laying down defenses to deal with the first few zombies. Your basic attack units shoot peas down the row that they are planted in, so you’ll need one in each row before too long. As the zombies become more numerous, you bolster your botanical battalion with a growing variety of projectile launchers, defensive barriers, attack amplifiers, and one-use weapons of zombie destruction. After you’ve survived the final wave of zombies, you’re rewarded with a new minigame, a new type of plant, or perhaps just a hastily scrawled note from your would-be assailants.

Variety and creativity take this basic mission structure and turn it into something special. Just when you’ve gotten your daytime defense strategy down, the zombies decide to attack at night and you have a whole new set of plants to manage. When you’ve taken care of the nocturnal nasties, it’s back to the daytime, only now a few of your rows are taken up by your backyard pool (there are snorkel zombies). New units come along that fit the new environments, and this steady trickle of new elements helps keep the gentle difficulty curve from becoming dull. Still, tower defense veterans will have to endure a lot of simple, familiar action in order to find a real challenge, and the wait may prove too long for some. Fortunately, all of the units are cleverly realized and adorably animated. Happy sunflowers bob merrily as they fuel your defense efforts, and pole-vaulting zombies jog toward your house with gangly athleticism. From angry jalapenos to spacy wall-nuts, each unit has a great sense of personality, and the first time you watch a dancing zombie moonwalk onto your lawn and summon his garishly dressed backup dancers, you’ll likely chuckle with amusement. The visual charm makes the game a pleasure to look at, and it helps keep things feeling fresh.

A well-fortified lawn is a happy lawn.

Once you’ve completed the main adventure and unlocked most of the units, the Survival mode offers a number of stages in which you can seek a tougher challenge. Each Survival stage is basically a bunch of increasingly difficult levels strung together. In both Adventure and Survival mode, you get a preview of the zombie types to expect, so you can array your defenses accordingly. Certain zombies can bypass certain defenses; for example, the balloon zombie floats over normal projectiles, but you can plant a cactus to shoot him down. In Survival mode, adjusting for these midstage changes might mean that you have to uproot some of your plants to make room for strategically crucial ones, or just push your established perimeter out further toward the zombie invaders. Unlike in the Adventure mode, your defenses are persistent throughout each level and you get the chance to change your plant loadout periodically. Building on established defenses is an interesting tactical twist and is a great opportunity to use some of the more exotic species that you may not have used in your Adventure mode strategy. This all adds up to make Survival mode surprisingly rewarding. It offers new tactical challenges and a reason to play beyond the main adventure.

There are some other fun reasons to continue playing after completing Adventure mode, namely puzzles and minigames. There are two types of puzzle game: Vasebreaker and I, Zombie. In the first, you are given a lawn with a number of nondescript vases on it. You have to break them all to win, but you never know what will pop out. It might be a zombie, or it might be a helpful plant. You have to dispatch all of the zombies to survive, and doing so with improvised defenses is fun and hectic. I, Zombie turns the tables and lets you deploy the zombies. Busting through each row of plant defenses requires that you use your strategic knowledge for evil; and, in a delightfully morbid twist, you’ll actually enjoy the sound of zombies chewing on plants. The minigames are a wacky assortment of one-off challenges that further play with the basic dynamics of Plants vs. Zombies. Some games pit you against modified enemies (zombies with plants for heads; invisible zombies), whereas others mess with your planting strategy (planting entire columns at once; mysterious portals that redirect your projectiles). With 20 levels of puzzles and 20 different minigames, Plants vs. Zombies offers a lot of entertaining ways to keep playing.

The Doom-shroom: What happens when you put your compost pile on top of buried weapons-grade uranium.

Of course, satisfaction for a well-defended lawn isn’t your only reward. You can earn money throughout every mode, which you can then spend on a variety of items offered by your crazy neighbor, who sells things out of the back of his car. Items range from defensive boosts, to upgrades for your existing plants, to a wide variety of gardening implements to help you cultivate your Zen gardens. These areas are simple greenhouses in which you can grow your exotic plants in a zombie-free environment. The music helps set the Zen vibe and is quite good across the board. It generally consists of lighthearted, progressive loops that bop along at a good pace and set a great tone for the action.

It’s impressive how well everything works together in Plants vs. Zombies. Every element, from the gameplay to the bonus extras to the presentation, seems to follow the core philosophy of accessible simplicity underpinned by thoughtful complexity. It is well suited for a wide range of audiences, but those who seek a challenge may not have the patience to play through the few hours that it will take to encounter the more difficult levels. For frugality’s sake, interested parties are advised to purchase it from Valve’s download service, Steam, where it is selling for $9.99 (as opposed to $19.99 on PopCap’s Web site). Plants vs. Zombies is fun, funny, and a great buy at either price.

The game doesn’t give you much in the way of exposition, ushering you into the frozen tundra by way of a seemingly unrelated voice-over about a tribe of forest dwellers seeking refuge within the wildwood. This tale evolves during the game through a series of scattered parchments, though its meanings and metaphors are slow to unfold–much like the main narrative. It’s not immediately clear as you start your initial explorations where you are and why you’re there, though the raging blizzard and lifeless bodies strewn around indicate that you aren’t apt to encounter many friendly faces. Eventually the framework becomes more apparent: You are on a nuclear-powered icebreaker whose crew has befallen an unusual tragedy, though the glacial crash that seems the most likely cause is only one piece in an increasingly complex puzzle. It’s a great mystery, and the gradual flow of information will keep you guessing–and keep you tethered to your screen.

The story is uncovered in flashbacks, but these recollections aren’t just plot morsels that exist outside of the gameplay. Rather, you relive key moments as you encounter the scattered corpses of crew members. When you discover bodies, you’re transported back in time to witness important events that eventually coalesce into a meaningful narrative, and you do so through the eyes of the poor soul you’ve discovered. However, you aren’t always just a powerless witness; in many cases, you must actively change the circumstances of the past to affect the present. This mechanic manifests itself in different ways and leads to some of the game’s most memorable moments. For example, by piloting an undersea vessel through some murky waters within one sinister flashback, you conduct repairs that then remove obstacles in the present. In another case, you’ll make a quick jump before icy waters plunge into the room and wash you away.

Reliving this victim’s past transforms the present.

In fact, many of these “mental echoes” involve saving the victim’s life, and often require a bit of trial and error as you jump into the past and figure out which actions lead to success. Try-and-try-again gameplay can be an annoyance in other games, but in Cryostasis, these conundrums take on a classic adventure-game feel with successful results. The puzzles involved aren’t overly difficult, but you may need to make a few attempts to complete them without succumbing to environmental hazards, like suffocating smoke and rising water levels. Should you fail, you’re transported to the present without penalty. Should you succeed, your surroundings change and usher you toward more mystery.

However, Cryostasis isn’t always so forgiving. You may find a lurching fiend awaiting you when you return to the present, and the best way to communicate with such flesh demons is with an axe to the head or a shotgun blast to the belly. These enemies aren’t the smartest bunch, but they can inflict a lot of damage, so every shot you fire must count. This is partially because your weapons aren’t built for speed; like every facet of the game, slaying your lumbering enemy is a measured affair. The axe, your close-combat mainstay, feels remarkably heavy, and the camera sways forcibly when you swing as if to reinforce that notion. Ranged weapons can be just as ponderous, often devastatingly so. Reload times are incredibly long, and the camera bob that signifies recoil with some weapons is dramatic. The sense of impact doesn’t always match up with these effects, which can make combat cross the line from “heavy” to “needlessly clunky.” Nevertheless, pelting a blowtorch-wielding brute with flares and watching it panic as it burns to death is satisfying. On the other hand, trying to use the Mosin rifle and its infuriatingly blurry scope won’t lead to similar glee.

The occasionally awkward combat doesn’t thaw the frigid tension, thankfully, and scare attempts hit more often than they miss. Some encounters are predictable, such as those that follow your haunting visits to the past. However, most of them still manage to shock, thanks to clever uses of slamming doors, scurrying beasts, and good old-fashioned surprise appearances, complete with flickering lights and high-pitched ambient chords. Far-off clatters, your character’s heavy breathing and occasional wheezing, and the churning, clanging machinery juxtapose well and generate tension on a broad scale. Frequent silences make the excellent sound design even more effective by making it unpredictable, just as the tense lulls between enemy attacks make those encounters seem all the more vicious. Cryostasis is legitimately scary, because death’s cold embrace seems perpetually close at hand.

The flare gun isn’t your best offensive tool, but it sure buys you precious time.

There is limited solace to be had in the various heat sources found on the vessel. Burning torches, flaming debris, and even desk lamps not only provide visual warmth, but also let you replenish your health reserves. Your health meter is dynamic, given that it is affected both by taking damage in combat and by the chill that permeates the Arctic. Although the standard levels of cold won’t kill you, they will keep your health meter practically empty, and a few short jaunts through superchilled fogs can easily be fatal. This mechanic is not only a cool idea on its own, but also enhances the tension and general sense of chilled danger, because the effects of the cold directly impact gameplay. The only drawback to this system is that every so often, it foreshadows enemy encounters, which sometimes occur shortly after you discover heating elements.

As you crawl through the tight corridors, you may occasionally experience a sense of deja vu, but that’s a product of the setting rather than of uncreative design. In fact, as the tale evolves, so too do the environments that you explore. Just as the frosty hallways start to wear down your resolve, Cryostasis will introduce a new area, often via a grainy mental echo that recounts the eerie events of the past before you explore the same now-decrepit environs in the present. Some of these locales are constructed well, such as a room with a large reactor that looks far different in the present than it does when you first explore it via flashback episode. But no matter which region of the ship you’re traversing, you’ll feel perpetually frostbitten. Flakes of frost waft down from above, undulating sheets of ice crystals cover walls and machinery, and when you’re exposed to full blasts of the arctic tempest, the roar of the wind will deafen you whilst the rush of snow and ice blinds you.

Pro tip: Pack a blanket.

The water and ice effects are quite good, as are the lighting and shadows. Flickering lights and icy reflections set up the scares, but these touches aren’t used so often that they lose their edge. Additionally, though not always perfectly smooth, good animations bring characters to life, human and nonhuman alike. Yet though the graphics engine projects the right mood, it is somewhat dated. Textures are greatly lacking in detail, and some jagged edges and blocky geometry make Cryostasis look uneven. Despite that, the graphics technology has a difficult time keeping up. The game is prone to major fits of slowdown, even on machines that greatly exceed its minimum requirements, which is a head-scratcher in a game that clearly doesn’t push the limits of modern technology. We also experienced a couple of crashes, though the experience was otherwise mostly bug-free. The frame-rate difficulties usually lead to only minor annoyances, though they can be a bit more frustrating when they occur in the midst of combat.

These visual issues aside, Cryostasis’s measured exploration and sense of frigid tension make it an experience unlike any other. Additionally, the flashback and health-replenishment mechanics aren’t just interesting on their own, but also enhance the atmosphere and give weight to the enigmatic tale as it slowly unfolds. If you need the constant stimulation of flying bullets and sprays of blood, Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason likely won’t inspire you. But if you appreciate slow-burning suspense, this adventure will keep you glued to the monitor to uncover the secrets buried deep within the inhospitable tundra of the Arctic circle.

Velvet Assassin makes heavy use of darkness to bring to light the events of World War II. As an espionage agent fighting behind enemy lines, you slip in and out of shadows, silently stalking through dimly lit streets and grimy prisons as you attempt to sabotage the Nazi war effort. But the darkness in Velvet Assassin is more than just a cover for satisfying stealth play. The grim realities of war are also present, giving added weight to your objectives and a moral backbone to your killings. As you slink through burning Parisian villages and witness innocent civilians being executed for no reason, the chilling brutality of war becomes clear. The unsettling atmosphere drives you ever deeper into this ravaged land, but a few gameplay problems hinder the suspension of disbelief. Sluggish gunplay and nonexistent enemy intelligence make your actions feel artificial at times, lessening the impact of these atrocities. However, Velvet Assassin is largely able to rise above these issues and present a powerful, unnerving look at one of history’s darkest periods.

You can hide in the bushes when it’s bright outside.

You assume the role of Violette Summer, a British assassin sent alone to slow down the German war machine. When the game begins, you see yourself from above, lying in a hospital bed after a mission gone terribly wrong. There are morphine syringes scattered across your bed, and the influx of drugs in your system creates a series of dreams that let you recount your past missions. As your efforts in the war play out, Violet begins to question the events around her, making her character empathetic and believable. Interspersed with these flashbacks are quick looks at the present, in which two Allied soldiers stand above your hospital bed, trying to decide your fate. The story is told in brief snippets, which makes it initially difficult to follow what’s going on. But as the plot becomes clearer, the moral decision looming overhead becomes more powerful, casting all of your actions in a new light.

The 12 missions have you fighting single-handedly against the German forces, assassinating a war criminal, destroying a fuel depot, and other objectives typical for the setting. For the most part, you must rely on stealth to meet your goals. The levels are blanketed in darkness, providing ample cover for you to weave through the disturbing setting. Troops patrol all around you, and if you can silently sneak behind them, you trigger a brief execution scene. The absolute patience needed to stalk through these missions is tense and rewarding, mixing the fear of being spotted with the relief of creeping through a particularly dangerous situation unseen. The levels are often linear, providing only the odd alternate route that leads to a hidden supply of weapons or armor, but there is still plenty of creativity needed to achieve success. Figuring out how to reach your goal in the most efficient way is hugely satisfying because no two situations play out in the exact same way.

In addition to stealth attacks, there are a few other ways to kill your enemies. You can release toxic gas from a barrel to suffocate them, pull the pin off of the grenade of an oblivious soldier, and send a current of electricity surging through a puddle of water on the floor. These different attack abilities add a layer of depth and cunning to your adventure, which makes you carefully plan the best way to kill the German forces. The strangest way to dispatch your foes is by using morphine. You can use the drug to enter a dreamlike, invulnerable state in which you can easily take out one enemy before you snap back to reality. The amount of morphine available in a level is extremely limited, so you can’t rely on this supermove as a crutch, but it still clashes with the ultrarealistic setting.

Rooms filled with toxic green gas require a mask if you don’t want to suffocate.

You can also kill your foes using a traditional firearm. Like the morphine, ammunition is limited, so you can’t rely on your guns too often. However, the aiming controls are too sluggish to provide satisfying deaths. It’s easy enough to line up a headshot when you aren’t moving, given that you have the element of surprise on your side, but when troops have spotted you and are moving in fast, the gun is too erratic to be effective. For the majority of the game, the lousy gunplay won’t hamper your enjoyment. The levels are designed for stealth kills, and using the gun as a last resort serves as an adequate line of defense. But there are a few poorly designed instances in the game in which you must shoot down a number of fast-approaching troops, and the sloppy mechanics are simply not up to the task. It’s frustrating and unrewarding, and you’ll rely more on luck than skill when you finally shoot down the last soldier.

The solid though unspectacular stealth action gives rise to thrilling moments, but it is the chilling atmosphere that makes Velvet Assassin so engrossing. The lighting is particularly impressive. From the orange hues of a level that plays out during sunset to a blue cloud enveloping a dock at night, the levels are all unique and realistic. But it’s the feeling that these levels call forth that is even more startling. In one, you slink through a Gestapo prison that is punctuated by cries for help followed by nerve-rattling gunshot blasts. In another, you creep through a burning Parisian village. As you crouch down behind walls, you will be face to face with slaughtered civilians. The levels are grim and disturbing, continually thrusting unsettling imagery to the forefront, never letting you forget what is happening all around you. The music sets the perfect mood perfectly, using pounding beats to make you anxious and unnerved. The atmosphere creates a feeling of claustrophobia, as if there is no way out, surrounded by violent forces everywhere you look.

Unfortunately, just like the wonky gunplay’s tendency to partially undermine the combat, the artificial intelligence often breaks the feeling that you are in a desolate war zone. The enemies are extremely robotic, walking determinately along a preset path; outside stimuli rarely distract them from their orders. Soldiers will often not react to shadows being cast on the wall or fuse boxes being blown. The inhuman dedication to marching feels out of place in the realistic setting, taking away the surprise that a more adaptable AI would have injected. Although the German troops are predictable to a fault, it doesn’t completely destroy the immersion. Sections play out like a methodical puzzle game, making you carefully plan your route lest you be found by a foe. The game is able to stay tense throughout because the penalty for being spotted is high, but it’s impossible to overlook the stupidity of your enemies.

Shattered glass is the ultimate defense against sneaks.

Even though your enemies are as dumb as wood, they still create a feeling of empathy not present in many war games. As you sneak around bases, you can eavesdrop on conversations that give your attackers personality. For instance, in one level, two soldiers quarrel over a stolen bar of chocolate, and in another, they reminisce about the women and wine they enjoyed in France. But these conversations are not merely superfluous looks at the yearnings of a soldier. Sometimes they reveal their darker side, which makes it more rewarding to kill them off. In one level, a soldier explains in meticulous detail how best to burn bodies that have been dumped in a ditch. In the prison level, a soldier proposes a game of rabbit hunt: a disgusting activity that involves shooting prisoners as they try to run free. There are also letters scattered throughout the levels that show the desperation that some of these troops felt. One soldier writes a heartfelt letter to his wife, telling her how miserable and suffocating military life is. These emotional moments paint the soldiers as real people and add a lot of weight to your actions.

The desolate atmosphere and empathetic look at your enemies make Velvet Assassin a powerful war game. It’s bleak and grim, making the horrors of war come to life in disturbing fashion. The lousy gunplay and moronic AI dilute some of the intense realism on display here, but the game is able to stand out despite these problems. Creeping slowly through the shadows is tense and believable, and pulling off these seemingly impossible objectives is deeply satisfying. Velvet Assassin offers a brutal depiction of war, creating an experience that is horrific but still rewarding.

Stand-alone expansion Tales of Valor coasts on the Company of Heroes name. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given that the 2006 original is still the gold standard of World War II real-time strategy gaming. But this latest addition to the family is pretty paltry, featuring just a trio of miniature campaigns comprising nine abbreviated missions, three new multiplayer modes, and a few game tweaks that you could probably do without.

Squad-level combat is the main focus of the three Tales of Valor solo campaigns.

None of the three new campaigns feel much like those in either the original game or 2007′s Opposing Fronts expansion. Most of the missions have been scaled down to focus on handfuls of units battling for chunks of the French countryside in the weeks after the D-Day landings. This enhances combat intimacy nicely, giving you a reason to care about individual troops. The tradeoff comes in depth, though; you don’t have to worry about wide-ranging tactical issues that affect an entire map when you’re looking after just a few units. Here, you’re pretty much always going it solo, especially in Tiger Ace, in which you lead a single German tank crew during a seesaw battle for control of the French village of Villers-Bocage, and Causeway, which deals with 82nd Airborne infantry squads assaulting the heavily defended La Fiere Causeway. All you generally do in these campaigns is fight, which leaves you with few decisions to make aside from ordering flanking maneuvers, moving units in and out of cover, and selecting special abilities. Only the Falaise Pocket campaign expands the scope of the add-on, forcing you to capture territories, build defenses, and order reinforcements while helping a German army escape an Allied pincer movement.

But it’s still over way too soon. Even Company of Heroes newcomers should be able to blitz through the three minicampaigns in Tales of Valor on Normal difficulty in no more than a couple of hours of playing time. Both Tiger Ace and Causeway involve little more than straightforward attacks, defenses, and counterattacks. It’s frenetic and exciting, especially during the second mission of Tiger Ace, wherein you have to sneak an on-foot tank crew out of a French village swarming with British patrols and machine-gun nests. Nevertheless, even this isn’t particularly challenging. Quick button-clicking is more important than strategizing. And the new “direct fire” shooting option with which you can manually guide weapons is completely superfluous. Falaise Pocket is much more elaborate, although poor enemy AI ruins a lot of the fun. For example, in the first mission in this campaign, you begin with a small German force under siege by attacking Allies. Your goal is to withstand this onslaught by running around and alerting garrisons of the attack and building 88 antitank guns to defend hiding Panzers until nightfall. But what starts off as a tense scramble against overwhelming opposition soon turns into a joke, considering that Allied tanks refuse to press advantages. One moment they’re blasting down the road toward your main base, forcing you to run for cover; in the next, they’ve pulled out for points unknown, leaving the way clear for you to wake up more garrisons and build those 88s.

Just like in Kelly's Heroes, one Panzer tank can do a lot of damage in a little French village.

Multiplayer is just as disappointing. Tales of Valor includes three new game modes, Assault, Panzerkrieg, and Stonewall, all of which just inflate minor aspects of combat into major concerns. Assault focuses on heroes assaulting enemy lines, Panzerkrieg on an armor mash-up deathmatch, and Stonewall on defending a town with buddies from an all-out attack. It’s hard to really get into any of these games, mostly because they vary so little from the core Company of Heroes gameplay already seen in both the solo missions and the earlier multiplayer modes. Panzerkrieg seems to be the only one of the new three to be developing something of a following online, probably due to its fast-flowing action. Regardless, there is no comparison between the numbers of players playing it and the crowds taking part in Classic Match and Skirmish games.

Even middling Company of Heroes action is typically better than what most other RTS franchises can offer, but the slim content in Tales of Valor is really pushing it. Although the core gameplay is still spectacular, both the single-player campaigns and the multiplayer modes of play on offer here aren’t exactly inspired. You can safely skip the whole thing and not miss much unless you’re determined to complete your Company of Heroes collection.

It helps that the violence in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is backed up by decent gameplay, and though it doesn’t bring anything new to the third-person action genre, it’s still solid and satisfying at most times. You play as the titular Marvel mutant, with the game’s muddled storyline mimicking and expanding on events in the movie of the same name. Along the way, you take Wolverine through the jungles of Africa, the hidden Weapon X base at Alkali Lake, the interior (and exterior) of a massive casino, and more. You have to take on groups of increasingly aggressive and dangerous enemies, solve not-too-taxing environmental puzzles, as well as go up against several guest boss villains from the Marvel universe. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job of introducing these nefarious individuals–such as the Blob and Gambit–and often throws them in with little explanation of why Wolverine needs to beat on them in the first place.

Most of Wolverine's boss fights can get repetitive.

Your weapons of choice for dispatching these villains are Wolverine’s claws, and even though the game’s jumping timeline means that you’ll be playing as both pre- and post-adamantium Logan, the claws retain their indestructible ability to slice through practically anything throughout the game. You have light and heavy attacks that you can string together to perform various combos, and also an extremely useful lunge that lets you launch Wolverine at enemies from a distance. These combos are easy to pull off if you’ve got a gamepad, but as you’d expect, they’re a bit trickier when playing with a keyboard and mouse. Nevertheless, the keyboard control scheme is quite intuitive and is definitely manageable with a little practice. As Wolverine gains levels, new combos open up, as well as four different fury attacks, which are supermoves that require you to build up your rage meter before unleashing. These four attacks can be upgraded as Wolverine gains experience, giving the game a very basic character-customization element.

Although spamming the same combos can prove useful early in the game, you won’t be able to get away with mindless mashing for too long. The game does a good job of forcing you to change your tactics, sending at you a wide variety of enemy types that require different attacks and combos to dispatch. For example, though the lunge may work on low-level enemies, tougher foes and midlevel bosses will simply swat you out of the air. With a bit of practice, all of Wolverine’s moves can be chained seamlessly, making you feel extremely powerful as the mutant unleashes his rage on groups of enemies.

Among the game’s highlights are a number of particularly gruesome ways that you can dispatch your foes. Some are situational; throw enemies near any conveniently located floor or wall spike and you’ll automatically impale them. Some are part of normal attacks, which can result in arms, legs, and heads flying in any direction. The best ones are Wolverine’s various flashy finishing moves. The angry mutant can stab an opponent in the side of the head with one set of claws before decapitating them with the other; rip off someone’s arm and beat him to death with it; literally tear someone in half; use the spinning blades of a helicopter to transform an enemy’s head into bloody chunks; and much more. It’s certainly the most blood-soaked superhero game in years, and one that younger Wolverine fans should avoid. However, adult fans of the character will probably find this a guilty pleasure, in turns laughing and wincing at the blood-soaked display in front of them.

Your enemies will try to give as good as they get, and Wolverine will have to face off against a good variety of human, mutant, and robotic foes. Most pack heavy firepower or super abilities, but Wolverine has his rapid healing to fall back on. His health bar will automatically refill after a few seconds of not taking damage. In fact, Wolverine’s health recovers quite quickly, which makes the game fairly easy to breeze through on normal difficulty. It’s rare to feel too threatened by the odds stacked up against you, and chances are that the only time you’ll die in the game is when you fall off of a high ledge or into water. That’s right: Wolverine can survive bullets, swords, flames, explosions, and lasers, but fall into one of the game’s few predetermined no-go zones and it’s instant death.

Wolverine can take and dish out plenty of damage in the game.

This is particularly jarring during the game’s final boss fight, in which falling off means having to restart the battle from the last checkpoint. Wolverine’s other boss fights are mostly anticlimactic, with some of the bosses even freezing up on occasion. In one instance, a boss character simply stopped moving, whereas in another it failed to reappear after being thrown offscreen. These occurrences were rare but quite annoying when they happened, and to its credit, the game does have two standout showdowns, the first with the Blob, and the second a fight with a gigantic Sentinel. But though the latter is a fun multistage battle that culminates in a spectacular finishing blow from the near-invincible mutant, it’s probably not quite the epic face-off that fans of the X-Men series have been hoping for.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is easy; you’ll likely finish its five chapters in fewer than 10 hours. There’s no multiplayer here, and most of the replay value is in finding hidden alternate costumes throughout the levels, as well as an unlockable hard difficulty. There are only a few extra costumes (such as Wolverine’s classic brown spandex), but once unlocked, they can be used while you play through levels to replace the boring “faded jeans and white shirt” look that serves as Wolverine’s default.

The game’s environments–particularly its indoor ones–are plain-looking; the various corridors and laboratories lacking real distinctiveness. Characters fare a little better, sporting good animations if lacking a little in the detail and sharpness departments. The model of Wolverine himself is the standout and features an interesting structure that shows off real-time damage. Get hit, and the damaged areas will show the exposed muscle underneath. Keep on getting pummeled and you’ll even see the character’s skeletal structure exposed, to be gradually replaced by muscle and skin as Wolverine heals. This sounds better than it looks–most of the time, this real-time damage lacks clear definition, looking more like random red splotches on Wolverine’s clothes than serious injuries. Performance was rock steady, with a mostly solid 60 FPS even at high resolutions (and the game supports resolutions up to 1920×1200). As for sound, the highlight again is Wolverine, with movie star Hugh Jackman lending his voice to the character. However, other environmental effects are inconsistent. Most of the time, the various slashing, gunshots, and explosions in the game sound appropriately meaty, but there are some occasions when onscreen actions seem to lack the accompanying sound altogether.

Quick kills are both cinematic and extremely bloody.

Although X-Men Origins: Wolverine does sport some clear technical deficiencies, it’s never enough to fully distract you from what it is at its core: a solid if unspectacular game that, for once, takes those metal claws of Wolverine seriously. This is a game that’s at its best when it’s brutal, and though it lacks any real depth, it’s fun while it lasts.