The storyteller's art involves more than simply repeating tall tales of old, or reciting scripts that have been committed to memory. A true spinner of yarns is a conduit that filters a story through his own experience, drawing you in not just through the epic he relates, but also through the embellishments he gilds it with. He knows how to tell a legendary fable as if it's the first time you've heard it.

Lost Constellation's great accomplishment is that it captures the improvisatory spirit of the bard and the jester. Characters in games don't often speak like people actually speak--they speak like writers write. In this ephemeral 2D adventure, the characters aren't people; they are cats and mice, snowmen and alligators. Yet they speak as if they are individuals unto themselves, rather than exposition machines. What they say might baffle you: "I'm not following this line of logic," exclaims the game's heroine to a mouse that serves as the gatekeeper of a mysterious totem. Later, the young cat that stands in as the game's audience asks the narrator--her grandfather--what this story is about. "What do you want it to be about?" he responds. Whether or not you find that reply helpful or unhelpful depends on how important it is to you that a tale provides all the answers and dutifully states its meaning.

As the alligator astronomer that stars in Lost Constellation, you move to and fro as you might in an old-fashioned platformer, but this is a PC adventure of the classic sort, gating narrative developments behind light puzzles and exploratory tableaus. Interactions are simple: you gather snowballs and throw them, build and customize charming snowmen, and speak with the delightful denizens of the woods you travel through. The simplicity complements the story, stressing the graceful snippets of dialogue with object collection and chime-ringing. Lost Constellation is not so much about "what," however, than it is about "where" and who."

The "where" is a forest of wintry beauty. The trees grow towards the heaven as you watch, rising from their current infinity to an even greater infinity, if such a thing were possible. You enter a coffin salesman's hut, and the background peels away, leaving you to bask in the warmth of the tiny cottage. It's such a small but meaningful detail, the way the falling snow dissipates and you are left with the orange glow of a cast iron stove and the comforting presence of a pipe-smoking fox resting in a rather cozy coffin. The "who" is a funny and diverse bunch, from a royal troupe seeking audience with a spirit, to a rat forced to confront her own wickedness. Lost Constellation's surreal soul, however, emanates from those snowpeople you build, who come to house the lost spirits of the wood.

The question of "why" still lingers when Lost Constellation draws to a close, but by then, it has fulfilled its purpose admirably, not just as a brief adventure, but as a companion piece to the developer's forthcoming Night in the Woods, a more expansive game set in the same universe. The game's clearest and most human sentiment accompanies that finale, at which point it muses on how we seek connections to the things we least understand--a suitable conviction for a story with such free-associative ideas and dreamlike tangents. To play Lost Constellation is to wrap yourself in a fleece blanket and shelter yourself from the cold.

A defining moment of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth comes at the end of the second dungeon. Throughout the five floors, in between random battles, dodging damage floors, evading high-level enemies, and drawing a detailed map of places you've been, you are asked to answer questions about what you want in an ideal partner. Lo and behold, right before the penultimate dungeon boss, I was plopped down into a flowery, fairytale-wedding wonderland with Marie, a mysterious, bitter girl with a secret penchant for writing terrible poetry. As we progressed towards the boss, I was given the option of making all manner of cheesy, romantic gestures towards her for the sole purpose of watching her get adorably flustered. After defeating the boss--a disturbing, four-armed caricature of a minister--I exited back to the hub, only to find another piece of poetry Marie had tried to hide about her would-be marriage to me. It was then and there, with that ridiculous bit of character interaction, that my love for Persona Q blossomed.

Persona Q is a mix of the Persona series’ character interaction and the careful first-person labyrinth exploration of Etrian Odyssey. It takes place between the events of Persona 3 and Persona 4, uniting the casts of the two games in a strange alternative dimension that resembles the Yasogami High School festival. Everything about this world is off: the otherworldly shelter known as the Velvet Room is in shambles; time stalls like one never-ending day; the festival attractions have morphed into elaborate labyrinths filled with enemy shadows; and the only people from the bizarro Yasogami who pay any attention to the squads are the enigmatic--and unsurprisingly amnesiac--Zen and Rei, two students unknown even to the P4 team. It’s up to this motley crew to challenge the dungeons and solve the mystery of the endless festival.

The first thing you notice about Persona Q is the visuals. While the interface and overall presentation are comfortably familiar to anyone who has spent time with Persona 3 or 4, the characters have been transformed into adorable caricatures. They might be more cartoony, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve lost their appeal. In many ways, these precocious polygon models are even more expressive than their pre-Persona Q counterparts. It’s tremendous fun to watch the chibi cast members emote their way through the game’s various scenarios, including some truly absurd situations (like the would-be wedding) that are bound to make you smile.

The visuals go hand-in-hand with the game’s overall tone. The mainline Persona games strike an interesting balance between the serious and the comedic, with humorous scenarios lightening the tension after dramatic encounters. In Persona Q, the emphasis is firmly focused on the “comedy” end of the scale. Character traits and quirks are played up heavily (sometimes to the point of minor annoyance--yes, Chie likes meat, we get it), and putting both casts together allows the scenario writers to create fun interactions that weren’t possible before: Teddie trying (and failing miserably) to hit on the stone-cold Mitsuru; Kanji developing an intense affection for adorable Persona-using doggie Koromaru; and everyone in the game mocking poor Theodore. That’s not to say that there aren’t serious moments in the game--there are some touching exchanges, like Yukari talking with Rise and Fuuka about her character flaws, and them giving her a dose of harsh truth in reply--but the seriousness is relatively rare. Typical story sequences, optional side quests, and bonus scenes tend to portray the characters as adorable little goofballs, more than anything else.

But once you step foot into the first labyrinth, the Persona elements take a seat behind the Etrian Odyssey influence. These multi-floor, grid-based mazes are presented in first-person format (much like the original Persona, actually), and you can map the dungeon and its various hazards on the bottom screen by drawing and making notes with the stylus. The mapping element adds to the fun of exploration and the feeling of progress and completion. There’s even an onscreen indicator that tells you how much of the current floor you have yet to see, which intensifies that compulsive, completionist drive to find absolutely everything. The dungeons themselves are fun, too: a strange Alice-in-Wonderland labyrinth; a take on the ill-fated Group Date Café from Persona 4; a spooky Japanese-horror-film school/hospital; and so on.

They’re no relaxing stroll, however. The maze halls are filled with mysteries, puzzles, traps, and hazards. Damage panels, collapsing floors, dead ends, hidden passages, treasure chests, and item collection spots are among the things you might encounter. Every so often, you run into character dialogue and story bits as well. While generally entertaining, these scenes are sometimes placed awkwardly, interrupting exploration just when you’re getting into a groove.

These precocious polygon models are even more expressive than their pre-Persona Q counterparts.

Of course, these wouldn’t be proper dungeons without enemy encounters. The combat interface here is pure Etrian Odyssey: you fight enemies from a first-person view, seeing your party members only during special attacks. You make menu-driven action choices for all of your characters in one go for each turn, watching the combat between you and your foes play out after you’ve entered in all your party’s commands. It’s markedly different from P3 and P4, where (depending on AI settings) each character’s turn allowed them to be controlled individually. Because of this shift, the weakness-exploiting system of P3 and P4, which granted characters extra actions, has been changed into a “boost” system: by scoring critical hits and exploiting enemy weaknesses, characters enter a “boost” state that reduces skill costs to zero and allows them to act first on the next turn.

At first, combat seems a bit overwhelming--enemies hit hard, and your characters start out with very few usable skills. Soon after launching your dungeon-crawling escapades, you gain access to more Personas to utilize. Unlike P3 and P4, where only the lead character can change Personas, every character can equip a sub-Persona that grants them additional skills and status boosts--with the caveat that these Personas cannot be changed mid-fight. This can help characters cover weaknesses and augment their combat capabilities, but the inability to switch mid-fight means that you can sometimes find yourself in a battle with few, if any, effective skills on hand. In a pinch, you can also use extremely helpful navigator skills from Rise and Fuuka, depending on what Personas they have assigned, and provided you have enough energy in your gauge to do so.

At first, combat is tough. If you’re unfortunate enough to run into some of the fiercer enemies that appear directly on the map--the dreaded FOEs--the first time you explore a floor, you’re bound to regret it very, very quickly. The ever-present threat of the FOEs quickly becomes the biggest source of tension in the game, as they can usually down you within a few turns if they catch you unprepared. Fortunately, they also follow specific behavior patterns, and learning to recognize these patterns allows you to avoid them... unless you screw up, of course. When you’re even mildly low on resources and eager to explore more, the question of “Do I go back? Or do I run around some more and risk getting cornered and wiped out by a potential FOE lurking in the next room?” is a real conundrum.

FOEs are extremely dangerous, but even the standard encounters are very rough if you don’t use the combat system to its fullest. A few floors in, when you’ve started to get the hang of fighting, the combat never quite reaches the challenge level of some of Etrian Odyssey’s most harrowing random encounters. Particularly open to abuse are dark and light instant death spells, as many enemies have a weakness to either one or the other. (Naoto, who can access both skills naturally, quickly becomes one of the game’s most powerful party members as a result.) Finding the most effective skills and fusing them onto as many Personae as possible significantly reduces the challenge, though the scarceness of cash (and the Etrian Odyssey sell-dropped-loot-for-cash-but-you-have-limited-inventory system) can make the expensive process of Persona fusion a bit of a grind. Combat is enjoyable enough, but it’s not as much fun as the character interactions or the dungeon exploration process.

Once you step foot into the first labyrinth, the Persona elements take a seat behind the Etrian Odyssey influence.

Persona Q doesn’t quite hit the peaks that Persona and Etrian Odyssey do on their own. It does, however, take some of the best elements of each game, blending them together into an immensely satisfying and lengthy RPG. Persona Q is proof that this series has the power to delight, surprise, and engage, no matter the form it takes.

Kalimba is bereft of both filler and fat, an especially impressive feat for a game that forces you to control multiple characters at once. Unlike many platformers that let you get comfortable with a newly introduced gameplay mechanic across multiple stages, Kalimba's developer, Press Play, is perpetually eager to show you something new in every area. For example, one stage introduces character swapping, while another enlarges your heroes to four times their normal size. It's a notably streamlined approach, not only compared to other side-scrolling adventures, but also when measured against Press Play's prior platforming endeavors like Max: The Curse of Brotherhood.

Whether they be crystals, orbs, or emeralds, the malicious scattering of valuables is a time-honored adventure game premise. In Kalimba, the catalyst is an evil shaman, whose goal of disrupting the island setting's good vibes is simplistically akin to a bully kicking over someone else’s sandcastle. Specifically, the shaman breaks up a totem into its separate animal parts, blanketing the island in darkness. The equally plain protagonist tasked with retrieving the totem pieces is called the Shaman Lady, essentially just a marker that travels throughout the stage select screen. The real heroes are the totems who traverse Kalimba's highly hazardous two-dimensional levels. You are told that the Shaman Lady controls these totems, but that single-sentence factoid is as unnecessary as the lady herself.

From the first stage, Kalimba looks like two platforming games split horizontally down the middle. The goal of getting to the other end of the level is straightforward enough; the challenge is that the halves are never alike and you're controlling two totem characters with a single control stick. With levels abundant in deadly pools of black lava (among other numerous dangers), learning to move one totem without endangering the other becomes quite the puzzling task.

Any sense of novelty from controlling two characters simultaneously is forgotten early in Kalimba with the introduction of color matching. As in Outland and Ikaruga, matching colors is essential, and touching conflicting colors with your totems fatal. You often have time to plan your next move, but there are numerous moments without this luxury. When both characters are launched from a cannon and sent flying through multiple screens filled with colored waterfalls, survival is only possible through adept color-matching character swaps, often in rapid succession. One of the stimulating joys of Kalimba is how it rewards presence of mind and the ability to think two or three steps ahead. But when you try to plan four or more steps ahead, you're penalized for being too clever. Consequently the temptation to outsmart a stage (and by extension, the developer) is ever-present.

When Press Play isn't trying to outsmart you with its level designs, the studio balances that fine line between cruelty and fairness. Kalimba's approach to retries isn't so antiquated that you start out with the standard issue three lives. You also don't have to worry about getting 100 coins or rings to gain additional lives. Instead, there are 70 item pickups in each stage; dying reduces a portion of those pickups. Perfection, which means keeping all 70 pickups, is rewarded handsomely with a gold totem, while poor performers are shamed with a deformed block of wood. No matter the result, getting to the end of a stage unlocks the next one. In a game that demands a lot for the highest awards, I admire Press Play's leniency, enabling subpar players to continue progress. Racking up double-digit deaths in a given area may make you cringe, but you'll smile as well. Like many other well-tuned platformers, Kalimba instills you with confidence that a perfect run is only a handful of retries away. And even after you've restored the land with a 100% gold totem pole, the taunting digits of friends' completion times and the drive to set new records will give you the incentive to revisit each level.

Patience is a prerequisite of all good platformers, but saintly patience is helpful when enduring Kalimba's couch co-op levels. Press Play wisely avoided the lazy route of merely repurposing the single-player levels, since giving each totem independent movement would make a playthrough too easy. With levels specifically designed for co-op, this mode is reminiscent of the same-screen co-op Super Mario Brothers games from the past few years, just slightly less hectic and with a lower risk of damaging relationships.

For all the engrossing elements that drew me to replay the same stages in the pursuit of perfection, I was surprised that I felt indifferent about many of Kalimba's features beyond gameplay itself. While the vibrancy of the art direction is pervasive, the colors are seldom complementary and lack cohesion. It was also difficult trying to get a handle on Hoebear the Metabear, the narrator and teacher who is meant to supplement the in-game hints. His blunt attempts at fourth-wall-breaking humor fall flat, as does his unperturbed attitude about some of your accomplishments. His laid-back demeanor is poignantly out of place and his casual attire makes him more suited as a Margaritaville tour guide than an island sage.

The few memorable visuals are the moments when characters, structures, and the user interface smoothly disintegrate into tiny triangles. Watching these triangles float around the screen conjures mental images of polygonal models from the PlayStation's early years, only now these shapes fly through Kalimba's environments with graceful fluidity.

The beauty of Kalimba is in its high replay value, even more so than the gratification of solving its platforming puzzles. A lifetime of experience in this genre might lead to a gold totem in your first attempt in a given stage, but don't be disappointed if such achievements are rare. Kalimba doesn't need to pad its overall play length with similarly-styled levels, because getting all 70 pickups without dying is a test in and of itself, especially when you have to keep your eyes on two characters simultaneously. From a multitasking standpoint, I could see skilled drummers quickly picking up on Kalimba's platforming depth.

My opponent is smart. After laying a laughable ambulatory eldritch owl creature on the board in her first round, she lulled me into a false sense of security by laying a warrior on the battlefield on her second turn. Sure, he can attack at every single turn, but he only hits for two damage and only has two health. He can wait. I already have a deranged cultist on the board that will kill her warrior on my next turn, but to be safe, I put a putrid shrine between my cultist and her warrior. But that eldritch creature gives her small army more resources with every turn, and she lays down a forest shrine that periodically heals her Nordic warriors. I can't kill the shrine in this turn, so I sacrifice a small bauble that would allow me to curse my opponents so I can play a ravenous zombie from my hand. In a couple of turns, she will regret not laying out more offensive weaponry.

Or so I thought. On her next turn, my fiendish opponent gave her warrior a magic ring, and suddenly his attacks hit harder. "It's fine," I told myself. He still only had two health, and my cultist was going to kill his protection that turn, leaving my zombie free to tear him to shreds next time. I laid down a wolf. I had three attackers to her one. I killed the shrine only for my opponent to lay down a cheap scout, and then my troubles really began. She cast verdant magic, and suddenly, this simple peasant warrior had more health and was immune to my own necromancy. A couple of turns later (and more foolishness on my end), that single unit had health and attack in the double digits and was slaying my units whenever they entered the battle. I surrendered and congratulated my opponent on her clever play.

Scrolls, the latest game from Minecraft developer Mojang, is full of opportunities for stories like that. A potent mix of turn-based tactical strategy with collectable card games, Scrolls understands the basic quality needed for either genre to succeed: choice. Whether it's the hard-scrabble battles being fought on the 3X5 hexagonal grids that each army calls home or the painstaking decisions made in moment-to-moment card-drawing and laying, Scrolls forces players to make smart choices at each step of play or fail. You will fail a lot. Scrolls stakes its claim as one of the more difficult and complex games in the crowded CCG market, and unless you've already sunk countless hours into titles like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering: Online, you can expect an arduous hike up this game's immense difficulty curve.

In Scrolls, players battle one another or the computer in a series of matches with decks of up to 50 cards. Players start with one deck--the Growth deck, which is a basic nature rush deck--but you can eventually unlock starting decks for all four of the game's main resources: Growth (nature/rush), Order (knights/buffing), Energy (machines/direct damage), and Decay (zombies/debuffing). Players generate resources and gain cards at each turn to lay their cards as units on their half of the game's grid. Units deal damage or proc magical effects to units in their row with exceptions for special ranged artillery units, which have a wider area of effect for their attacks at the sacrifice of complete immobility. The end goal is to destroy three of your opponent's idols, which are hidden at the back of each row. And you will likely swear uncontrollably, mostly in a good way, while doing it.

Part of what makes Scrolls so unforgiving is its resource system. Unlike Magic or Pokemon, which have dedicated cards that one sacrifices to slowly but surely play more powerful cards in your deck, or something like Hearthstone, which has an auto-resource generation system, Scrolls forces you to sacrifice cards in your hands to generate resources or to get two other cards. It's rare for a match to begin without both players sacrificing a card for resources. If your deck is constructed well, you'll have few cards that you'll want to let go of willingly. And while you have to keep sacrificing cards to get enough resources to play the best units in your hand, if you only sacrifice cards for resources, you're asking to end up top-decking against your opponent. Scrolls is not a game where top-decking is a sound strategy.

So a constant balance is struck between sacrificing for resources and sacrificing for cards. And the longer you play, the more times you'll see an opponent use a card that you thought was an easy sacrifice choice in a new and interesting manner and crush you. And you begin to recognize the situational value of each card in your hand. And that makes the choice of what to let go that much harder. But you have to let something go. If you don't sacrifice one way or another, your opponent will break away in resources or cards, and either one is a lethal advantage in Scrolls. The choices become agonizing because every choice you make has immediate and measurable consequences.

Scrolls would be difficult if that were the only quirk in its systems, but the grid combat itself is just as punishing, though significantly more tantalizing in its complexity. Units, with the exception of ranged artillery and structures, are laid on the grid, but they have freedom to move about it. Units also have countdowns that determine when they can attack and when they can simply hope to defend, although “defense” is perhaps the wrong word because units attacked during their opponent’s turn do not do any damage to their attackers. They simply have to endure the attack and hope that they can vanquish their abuser before its countdown resets.

Scrolls forces players to make smart choices at each step of play.

And if there are enough pieces on the board--it's very easy to simply be swarmed by your poor decisions and good draws/decisions by your opponent--Scrolls becomes akin to a game of chess. Do you place your strongest units at the back of the row to ensure that they remain in play, or do you put them in the front to shield your weaker units while putting your most powerful players at major risk? Do you throw intentional sacrifices on the board to force your opponent to waste turns attacking meaningless units? Matches are won and lost in the minutiae of troop placement, and mastering that system is as important as understanding the competing values of your cards.

Fortunately, Scrolls offers a large and substantive training mode to ease players into the game before you take on human opponents. Beyond the basic tutorials, the Trials challenges (of which there are dozens) teach you to think situationally about the game. The Trials range from Easy and Medium to Hard. The Easy Trials give the player stat bonuses and various other buffs/extra units to start matches. They are used for situating yourself with the Growth deck and help you unlock the other decks. They can still be lost if your draws are bad enough; no matter how tactically driven Scrolls is, there's still a random element to the game. But, by the time you finish all of the Easy Trials, you should understand the basic ebb and flow of Scrolls matches.

It's when you reach the Medium Trials that Scrolls brings out its claws and teaches you how to react to the odds being stacked against you. While you may occasionally get buffs in Medium trials, your opponents also get bonuses like extra units and their own enchantments. And you will play these trials over and over and over again until you solve the puzzle. And while the opponent's advantage may seem unfair, the lessons are invaluable. You learn how to deal with opponents with comical health stacks. You learn to eliminate units that generate other units first. Sometimes wins in Medium Trials seem as if they came down to pure luck, but that element is at play in all card games. Hard Trials are for only the most masochistic, as the computer's advantage is nigh insurmountable unless you are a top-tier Scrolls player.

Matches are won and lost in the minutiae of troop placement.

Scrolls is one of the best-looking games of its genre. When cards come into play, the units on the board transform from cards into the units themselves. And with a visual aesthetic that is drawn equally from Western and Eastern inspirations, Scrolls' character models recall the art style of Nickelodeon's The Legend of Korra with a touch of George R. R. Martin. Units have unique battle animations for attacks and will sprint across the board to attack their opponents. It's a small touch, but it adds to the feeling that your cards are waging a war on your behalf, and it removes from the abstraction of health points and damage boxes. When a hulking, carapaced blob tears through three of your units in one go, it feels more satisfying than a glowing card and flashy ephemera for damage ever could.

Another highly redeeming feature of the game is its minimal microtransaction model. Real money can be spent for "shards," which allow you to buy things like preconstructed decks, individual cards, or entries into the game's "drafting" mode, Judgment. But there's a limit to how often money can be spent on shards, and there's almost no reason to "pay to win" in the first place. Even matches that you lose pay out a decent amount of gold, which can be used to buy anything you can buy shards with. The various Trials reward with gold as well upon completion. And in my time with the game, I had enough gold to enter Judgment three times, buy over half a dozen card packs, and purchase four of the six preconstructed decks. Shards also can't be spent on the random deck packs, further minimizing the advantage that wealthier players can accrue. Here's hoping that more CCGs follow Scrolls' suit in this case.

For all the ways, then, that Scrolls rewards players who are willing to delve into the caverns of its mechanics and possibilities, it's a shame that the endgame is often such a drag. Scrolls matches are long. If neither player concedes and one opponent isn't squashing the other with a nasty rush deck, matches can last between 30 and 50 minutes. It's easy to tell when you're too far down to have any possibility of coming back. Many matches are won in the first five to seven turns, but if you have enough hope to struggle forward on the off chance you'll get the one card you need to survive, matches can drag on for an eternity as you and your opponent slowly pick away at each other's defenses. You know you aren't going to win, but you don't know it with enough certainty to throw in the towel. It ties into the game's countdown system, which keeps units from attacking at every turn, and while that adds a delicious layer of tactics to the early and mid-game, it manages to rob the endgame of that urgency. It's especially problematic when you and your opponent have so many units on the grid that neither of you has the mobility to execute complex strategies in the first place. It just becomes a repetitive slug fest.

The endgame isn't always a drag. I played in (and lost) a ranked match against a player running an Energy deck against my Decay deck. My deck was built around surviving to the endgame because I had a spell that would transform all of my creatures in play (which would, I hoped, be a lot by then) into re-animated husks with high damage that could attack immediately. And I could then play a creature that summoned more husks like that every two turns. But Energy decks revolve around area-of-effect ranged attacks and a ton of direct damage, and we were trading pieces back and forth for almost an hour until he played a spell three times in a row that wiped essentially my entire army off the board on the third go (a spell that attacks every unit connected together, which at that point in the game is every unit). It was a frustrating loss, but the match was thrilling from start to finish.

Scrolls also suffers from a handful of bugs. The most benign simply erases the attack/health/countdown information about the units on your screen unless you hover over the unit, though even that bug can cause serious headaches if you momentarily forget numbers and do bad math in your head. The more serious bugs require regular resets of the game because the game will simply refuse to connect you to Trials or to put you in the queue to participate in multiplayer ranked matches. They don't happen often, but they are far from rare. The matchmaking system is also somewhat disappointing, and there have been dozens of times where I've fought the same opponent multiple times in a row, which can be frustrating when the game consistently fails to match you with other players around your rank/rating.

Scrolls shouldn't be your introduction to collectable card games; Hearthstone serves that purpose far better. In fact, you should probably pop in Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea should you need a primer on Scrolls’ strategic concerns. But if you crave a challenge and a new type of CCG experience, Scrolls may fulfill that role. The community needs to grow, and some general balancing issues need to be addressed, but it's not hard to imagine Scrolls becoming the home of the most dedicated and talented of the CCG community.

Blizzard’s iconic World of Warcraft has been one of a handful of games that have endured in the massively multiplayer arena. While many highly-touted MMOGs have come and gone, World of Warcraft has lasted despite its tendency to rely on outdated mechanics and antiquated practices. Tens of millions have fell in love with the worlds of Azeroth and Outland, and the newly explorable realm, Draenor, proves equally appealing. Few other games offer that same sense of accomplishment you earn when completing a raid or finally receiving just that right piece of gear, and few have years' worth of quality content ready to absorb and stimulate you. When World of Warcraft gets a new expansion, it's a big deal.

Warlords of Draenor picks up right after the events of Mists of Pandaria, and has the game's latest big-nasty, Garrosh Hellscream, escaping from his confinement with the aid of a very large accomplice. He then travels back in time to Draenor, stops the Orcish clans from becoming corrupted, joins the Burning Legion, unites the clans into the Iron Horde, and realigns the Dark Portal to invade Azeroth. (As you might surmise, the Warlord of the Warsong is a very busy Orc indeed.) You play the role of an Alliance or Horde General, part of the force that drives the Iron Horde back through the gate. Warlords of Draenor opens with the most thrilling preamble since The Burning Crusade and the Legion's invasion of Azeroth, and in doing so, infuses the game with a sense of urgency that makes it feel like truly dire times.

Warlords of Draenor's complementary ties to The Burning Crusade are clear. It is, in many ways, an analog to the first expansion, but instead of Lord Kazzak opening the Dark Portal to Outland to release the Burning Legion into Azeroth, it is instead Garrosh unleashing the Iron Horde from a pristine Draenor. Warlords of Draenor’s deftly utilizes its thematic ties to previous events, offering an alternate universe that treats you to story elements that cleverly refer back to the entire series. Expect some mild confusion: This Draenor is an alternate Draenor and not actual Draenor Prime (which is Outland), and while the events that happened in previous expansions expansions actually did occur, they didn't occur on Draenor--or perhaps more precisely, they haven't yet occurred on Draenor. The in-game Draenor (as opposed to the Outland Draenor) exists 30 or so years before present-day Azeroth, because the Dark Portal can transcend both space and time. (Don't worry if you already feel lost; it's best to take it all in a little bit at a time until it makes sense.) Luckily, you can enjoy Warcraft lore whether you skim it or dive deeply, and if you haven't explored the original game and its first two expansions in great detail, you might wish to spend time with them, if only to enjoy all of Warlords of Draenor's delightful cameos and references.

This expansion doesn’t only turn the lore on its head, though: there is plenty under the hood to be excited about. The ability and stat systems have been overhauled to squish the stats down into more palatable numbers and a set of useful abilities for each class. If you had a million health prior to the expansion, you might discover you only have 400,000 upon entering Warlords of Draenor. However, the stat readjustment applies to enemies as well, so you will still be as powerful as you were previously. It is undoubtedly cool to deal thousands of damage per second, but it takes little time to realize that "hundreds" is the new "thousands," so you needn't worry about losing that sense of power that comes with the hard work of tailoring a character to your liking. Blizzard has also retired the superfluous stats of hit, expertise, dodge rating, and parry rating, thus streamlining the process of building a character even more. Abilities have been refined for each class to draw from a more useful pool, with fewer cooldowns and less crowd control, making gameplay more tactical than strategic in nature, with less emphasis on complex macros in an attempt to get players to spend more time playing and less time preparing. If you're a sporadic player, the new changes are welcome, as they minimize the commitment required to learn and absorb such a daunting amount of information. Fortunately, new characters can instantly level to 90, so anyone new to World of Warcraft can play with friends that have subscribed to the game for years, and veteran players have a fresh template upon which to experiment with new abilities and a new character.

Blizzard also has thankfully improved the visuals. All character models (save Blood Elves, Worgen, and Goblins) have received updates, and Blizzard is in the process of creating new models for enemies as well. Although World of Warcraft is still not a graphical powerhouse, the new models and textures make for a great compromise, enhancing the game’s aging visuals while still supporting an enormous range of systems. The graphical improvement is a bit haphazard in its current form though. The effect of the new models populating a world with many of the old is sometimes jarring, but more and models are scheduled to be improved, so this should not be a permanent gripe. Nonetheless, as graphical fidelity in other games increases at such a tremendous rate, it becomes harder and harder for World of Warcraft to counterbalance its aging looks with its charming aesthetic and enthralling adventuring.

Subtle improvements permeate the new expansion. The auction houses for each server have been consolidated into one entity, which makes searching for appropriate equipment less frustrating than before and widens item availability. The user interface, while staying the same as a whole, received a host of tweaks and upgrades to reduce frustration. It is great, for instance, to be able to finally label bags by item type and have treasures auto-sorted into them. Quest items now go in their own separate menu, so you never have to miss out on that 50th pair of leather pants just because something essential was in the way. Reagents can now be used in the bank, which is a huge plus, since it makes having to carry them around for long periods of time unnecessary. Given the importance of gear and items, it's wonderful to be able to spend less time organizing them and more time earning them.

Warlords of Draenor’s questing is notably more focused than with previous expansions. Although there are the typical collection quests, the quest UI changes get you into the meat of the game quicker than ever. The Dungeon Finder and player-vs.-player windows have been folded into the Group Finder, making it simple to find quests, dungeons, raids, or anything in between, thus eliminating a ton of the most frustrating aspects of WoW in one fell swoop. Blizzard has also expanded its phasing technology, allowing Draenor to appear quite different to each player, depending on their progress and story choices. Depending on your place in the story, you may see characters that have been long dead in other players' stories, though you still inhabit the same zone. The new garrison system uses phasing extensively, as each player-maintained garrison can only be seen by its owner or invited friends.

With all the changes laid out in Draenor, however, adventuring sticks to a familiar path. You log in, perform your dailies, then get to work for the various NPCs strewn throughout the land. Where things tend to diverge from the day-to-day workings of seasoned players are in raids and dungeons, if not drastically so. Raids have undergone a respectable facelift as far as difficulty goes, while still serving up satisfying encounters to seasoned vets. Dungeons automatically adjust individual difficulty levels depending on the number of players involved, and raids themselves range from casual to challenging. There's a system in place to ensure lower-level players can't accidentally sidle up into a higher-level dungeon they simply aren't ready for, and progression is tiered in a way that forces you to approach dungeons in a way that's fair for everyone. Loot drops have also been refined, ensuring hard-working raiders are rewarded with items they actually find useful rather than a bunch of trash or less-than-personal goodies for a one-size-fits-all series of frustrations.

Given the importance of gear and items, it's wonderful to be able to spend less time organizing them and more time earning them.

NPC awareness has never been one of World of Warcraft's strong suits; you might strut around upon a rainbow-colored tiger, brandishing high-level gear, and quest-givers might still talk to you in annoyance, as if you are a mere underlying in annoyance. In Warlords of Draenor, NPCs acknowledge you as a powerful hero, and your position as a General of the Horde or Alliance is rewarded by the aforementioned garrison system, which provides you with a large plot of land and the means to develop it. The initial garrison is fairly humble, but as you place more buildings and level them up, a collection of huts and tents transforms into a large fortress. Each building serves a purpose, with some serving to boost your profession or access the benefits of other profession, while some are just fun places to visit. Each building has its own unique impact on the world as well, activating quests once they have been built or upgraded. You eventually max out at 10 plots of land in your garrison, and with 21 buildings available, you must choose the proper ones to get the best benefits from your garrison. (Luckily, if you erect a building that doesn't suit you, you can demolish and replace it.) After the garrison reaches level two, you face keep invasions, although thankfully, invasions are not time-sensitive. It's easy to become attached to what amounts to your own little town, and you can find yourself spending more time collecting resources and attracting followers for your garrison than you do on the main quest line.

With a garrison come soldiers and staff, and you can also recruit a whole host of followers to command. As you journey across Draenor, you meet NPCs that can be recruited through meeting them, completing quests, earning achievements, or buying them from taverns. They come in three quality levels which determine their effectiveness: uncommon, rare, and epic, with the rarest of them requiring you to meet stringent prerequisites. Once followers make it to the garrison, they can be assigned to missions, or to work in one of the buildings. Each one possesses his or her own profession, items, and level, and you manage them through menus. You send your followers to quest, gather resources, and manufacture goods in their respective buildings, and use the same menu to collect the rewards. It's an adequate system, but with so much care put into the customization and building of your garrison, it's disappointing that you cannot accompany your followers on quests, help them work, or lead them into battle against another player in fortress-versus-fortress gameplay. For now, the garrison endgame lacks luster.

Warlords of Draenor has revitalized World of Warcraft with a huge amount of new content and refinement of the basic gameplay. Unlike the debacle of the New Game Enhancement of Star Wars Galaxies, Blizzard has not taken away anything with the stat changes, but instead finally fixed the “stat inflation” that had built with each expansion. For those new to World of Warcraft or those who have been around since the original release, Draenor feels like the beginning of a new era of the game. There are those who have said that World of Warcraft is on its way out, and that it is tired and old. Warlords of Draenor proves otherwise. Blizzard’s winning formula is not going anywhere.

The better the game, the easier expansion packs can rely on a more-of-the-same approach (see Mass Effect 2 and Diablo III). Mystery of the Mooil Rig! is wholly effective in its series of nine missions, with objectives recognizable to those who have beaten Sunset Overdrive. Normally, I dislike being an errand boy in open world games, yet I’m happy to engage in fetch quests in Mooil Rig, because each quest is succinctly designed and retains the same kind of comedic storytelling found in the main game.

It’s hard to turn down assignments from one of the world’s more resilient and endearing quadriplegics. If you’ve played several hours of Sunset Overdrive, you’ll know I’m talking about Brylcreem. The absence of arms and legs didn’t stop him previously, and he remains the eternal optimist in the Mystery of the Mooil Rig. Now armed with a fortified exosuit, Brylcreem plays Colossus to the hero’s Wolverine, launching you toward key objectives, including a boss’ mouth. These scenes add thrilling forward movement; the more you hurtle at breakneck speeds, the more you want to keep going.

Add-ons to open world games either expand the maps with a new landmass (e.g., Burnout Paradise’s Big Surf Island, Forza Horizon 2’s Storm Island) or conjure up new experiences within the current city (e.g., Watch Dogs: Bad Blood). The Mystery of the Mooil Rig opts for the former, with a sprawling oil rig primed for more perpetual grinding. It’s an overly intricate off-shore base littered with life rafts, barges and other tiny landing points to help you avoid the water. With the exception of one occasionally lethal undersea creature, spending time in the ocean isn’t a hazard at all. Like an energy drink-addicted version of Jesus, this expansion capitalizes on the main game’s speedy methods of unaided water traversal. Whether you’re on or near the rig, the biggest rushes come from stringing together movement combos as you make your way to your next objective. The addition of two new water moves--a deep dive and an eye-catching high-flying uppercut--mean you can maintain movement combos for hundreds of yards in watery areas within Sunset City, not just the Mooil Rig. The upper cut--oddly named ‘Water Slam Bounce’--looks like a water-based Shoryuken, although I was unsuccessful in using it to attack flying foes. It’s more practical as a method for reaching elevated parts of the rig.

If I were to describe Sunset Overdrive’s look and feel to someone who knows nothing about Insomniac Games’ latest hit, it would be ‘bubblegum punk’. The closest aesthetic relation I can come up with is Crazy Taxi, but even that Sega classic didn’t saturate its visuals with this much fuchsia and neon green. Couple that with Sunset Overdrive’s grind-intensive gameplay. If it’s a railing or some semblance of a railing, you can grind on it. If it has an edge, you can grind on it. Somewhat like the adrenaline-fueled action film Crank, suspending forward movement often results in death. These situations are diciest when you have to protect stationary objects from invaders--it forces you to get creative with nearby grind points. Provided you mix up melee and ranged attacks, you’d be surprised how long you can survive going back and forth on a 50-yard railing.

Those who love Sunset Overdrive already know how playing well creates a feedback loop within seemingly chaotic combat. Having a sliver of health is seldom a cause for concern, because you know that firing another explosive teddy bear is likely to yield a health pack, along with a high body count. The missions in the Mystery of the Mooil Rig are seldom short of such moments, so surviving them is all the more gratifying.

Insomniac’s writers for Sunset Overdrive exude the chops of a revered, decades-old comedian, one who never laughs at his own jokes and knows to keep quips short and sweet. That includes avoiding the sin of over-explaining a punchline or the myriad pop culture references throughout the main game and this expansion. Even with a boss sporting multiple tentacles, the script wisely avoids hamfisted nods to Japanese erotica. Like the multi-generational appeal of Looney Tunes animated shorts, the Mystery of the Mooil Rig namedrops cultural allusions that many adolescents today won’t pick up on, like a certain Alfred Hitchcock film with cross-dressing. One of the most memorable missions is a fetch quest for the versatile ‘director’ Alan Smithee, whose name has been attached to many edited-for-TV movies dating back to the 1960s, a Metal Gear Solid trailer, and numerous voices in games like Eternal Sonata and Street Fighter X Tekken.

For all the risks Sunset Overdrive takes with its vibrant art direction and intuitive level design, the Mystery of the Mooil Rig is a fundamentally safe spin-off. It’s impressively consistent with the main game, and enough that relearning the controls takes no time, even if you haven’t touched Sunset Overdrive since launch week. This user-friendliness leads to tight, concise story mission playthroughs that will be familiar to fans of the main game. It’s not to say these objectives are easy. They’re just short, a result of Insomniac’s talent for creating scenarios trimmed of fat and devoid of filler.

Loadout feels good on the PlayStation 4. It’s not just how well the game has adapted Sony’s controller, but also that small changes have translated into some big differences. This free-to-play third-person shooter is all about collecting gun parts and crafting them into vicious weapons that lash out with fire, lightning, or spiked metal spheres--just as it was on the PC. But on the PlayStation 4, Loadout tries new things, completely revamping its method of distributing weapon parts that makes collecting them almost as exciting as constructing them into a vast array of deadly guns. Despite a lackluster campaign and a locked-out ranked mode, Loadout is a frantic and entertaining shooter on the PlayStation 4 and will keep you happy on your quest for loot, with a smile on your face and a numb trigger finger.

The highly craftable guns are the stars of the show, and the customizable loadouts set the stage. Abandoning traditional classes, Loadout instead offers a toybox that slowly fills with various gun parts that you can play with using its robust weaponcrafting menu. For instance, creating a powerful shotgun is as easy as snapping a scatter barrel and a shell-loading magazine onto a gun chassis. Swap that scatter barrel out for a Gatling barrel and strap on a high-capacity magazine to create a Gatling gun, and so on. Different ammo types kick things up a notch or two, and can make your weapon belch fire or send out a slap of electricity that sends chain lightning through a group of hapless foes. Not all ammo types are deadly: loading your gun with healing rounds transforms your weapon from a death dealer to a wound healer, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be the team medic. Or, if you’re feeling sneaky, you can use a gun with a silencer, and, using the disguise equipment, go undercover to infiltrate the opposing team and silently take them by surprise. And you might as well slap on a suit, mask, and tie from the outfitter store while you’re at it, and become the spy Team Fortress 2 always knew you could be.

Earning parts in Loadout on PlayStation 4 is a much different experience than in the PC version of the game. On a PC, you unlock parts from daily prizes or in a tech tree by earning experience and spending blutes, Loadout’s in-game currency awarded at the end of matches. On the PlayStation 4 edition, weapon parts, gear, and safes are often awarded at the end of finished multiplayer matches or campaign missions. Safes, which contain items of varying rarity, are opened with dynamite, which is bought with spacebux, Loadout’s other currency that must be purchased with actual cash and not blutes, somewhat like the currency in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s weapon cases and keys. Parts are assigned levels, as well as a degree of rarity that moves from common to rare items. Rarer parts can grant optional attribute boosts, such as decreased reload times or additional health.

Comparing the two systems of delivering items, from the tech tree of the PC version to earning parts post-match on the PlayStation 4, I prefer the latter. Parts and gear come at a steady flow in Loadout on PlayStation 4, and I can’t deny the giddy feeling of anticipation that grows just before opening each loot chest or safe filled with new toys to play with. You gain a lot of weapon parts as you progress, but not everything is worth keeping. The included fusion mechanic allows you to take a lower-tier item and merge it with other disposable parts to increase its potency. It’s a great way to burn off extra junk you don’t need, while making your weapons even stronger, all the while not spending any actual cash on upgrades yourself. And the upgrade is often quickly apparent, too; promoting that level three pyro rocket to level five or higher can mean the difference between leaving your foes medium rare or well done.

Crafting and naming your own custom weapon is a joy I’ve rarely experienced in other online shooters. A machine gun with the offensive output of mosquito bites later roars as it rips flesh from bone. A feeble rocket launcher that evokes more laughs than screams evolves over time to become a frightening, two-hit kill monster that causes enemies to burst into flame--it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye.

The weak campaign mode, however, is a wet blanket that stifles some of that fire. There is no “story” to speak of, only five chapters with missions that consist of you fighting waves of AI-controlled alien baddies on the available multiplayer maps and gametypes. For at least a few missions, the campaign is passable, if not somewhat disappointing. But after playing through chapter after chapter of similar battles, the venture becomes tedious and dull. The only real incentive to play each campaign is tied into Loadout’s new method of distributing loot. Campaign mode offers loot packs and safes that drop randomly as you play through a match, and that unfortunately means having to wade through the muck for some of those precious parts and equipment--some of which, like deployable health packs and jump boots, is awarded at the end of certain missions. At least collecting the extra loot in campaign is still enjoyable; it’s just the parts in between that are the issue.

The highly craftable guns are the stars of the show, and the customizable loadouts set the stage.

One additional positive about the campaign, however, is that it allows you to earn some additional spacebux without having to fork over any of your hard-earned cash. Currently, Loadout on PlayStation 4 is the only version to have the campaign included with the package. The PC version is set to have the currently separate campaign (now in beta) merged with the base game next year.

Thankfully, the core multiplayer experience is just as exhilarating and violent as ever, and it is here you spend most of your time. The controls adapt well to DualShock 4, though aiming does feel a little squirrelly when zoomed in--a problem that can be alleviated by lowering aim sensitivity. Other than that, Loadout plays exceptionally well on the controller; skirmishes haven’t lost an ounce of their raw intensity in the transfer from the keyboard and mouse. Across six varied maps that include deep crevasses, hidden pathways, and high ledges, you sprint, dive, and leap high into the air while raining fire on enemies above and below.

Loadout’s action is ferocious, and each clash erupts in a chaotic frenzy of flying rockets, popping grenades, and neon lasers; the vibrant cartoon visuals are a colorful foil to the absurd violence onscreen. During battles, flesh is seared from bone, heads are blown apart to leave bouncing eyeballs and a brain, and somewhere in the fracas is a person thrusting their gun between their hips as a pair of disembodied legs run across the war-tattered field before collapsing. Loadout is often as hilarious as it is grotesque, leaving you vacillating between laughing at the slapstick insanity and cringing at the immense gore. And you know what? It’s quite a lot of fun--though much of it is like a riding a rollercoaster through a whirlwind of bullets and body parts.

Multiplayer consists of four-on-four matches among five game types: blitz, death snatch, extraction, domination, and jackhammer. Blitz and domination are won by taking control points on a map, the latter of which has you fighting to control three points at once. Death snatch is Loadout’s take on classic death match, and plays similar to Call of Duty’s Kill Confirmed mode. In death snatch, dead opponents drop a vial of glowing blutes that must be snagged in order for the death to count as a kill. Extraction tasks each team with protecting a teammate who collects blutonium deposits and places them into marked grinders to score points. Finally, jackhammer is a mode similar to capture the flag, except the flag is a massive hammer that smashes enemies into itty bitty meaty chunks. You can kill up to five opponents, which adds extra points to your score when the hammer is claimed at your base.

There are two downsides to multiplayer; the most notable is the lack of the ranked mode, Annihilation, which is currently locked out with “Coming Soon!” written over it. Instead, you are left with the unranked arena, which performs rather poorly in terms of matching you with players of similar skill. You have an overall level that increases as you gain experience points earned after completing matches. However, that rank is effectively slashed in the arena, and you often find yourself paired with unskilled allies or against a team of seasoned players. I realize this is the caveat of any unranked multiplayer, but it’s incredibly frustrating to play a session consisting of about ten losses in a row due to unbalanced matchmaking. The other issue with multiplayer is that with only six maps, things soon slide into repetition. Having five game types does help deter some boredom, but after a dozen hours I was more than ready for a change in scenery. And just when will there be more than three customizable characters to choose from?

Loadout on PlayStation 4 is not without its issues, but overall it remains an energetic, madcap shooter with a violent sense of humor that delights as often as it disgusts. There are still tweaks to be made--the underwhelming campaign is the first that comes to mind--and, once released, the ranked mode will also greatly increase its value, which is a lot, considering that the game is already free of charge. Regardless, there is a lot of entertainment to be found in Loadout. The welcome new changes to earning gun parts will keep you killing, collecting, and customizing for many blood-soaked hours to come as the game continues to evolve, just like the many weapons that call it home.

On the year of its 30th anniversary, it's hard to think of new things to say about Tetris. Few games even come close to being as universally recognized and understood as the Russian puzzle game that has caused countless people to dream about stacking blocks into perfect lines.

So as hard as it is simply to write something original about the classic, it must be harder to invent new and exciting ways in which to actually play it. As a result, just about every gaming platform under the sun (and even many non-gaming platforms--hello, graphing calculators) tends to end up with at least one or two new editions of the same old formula, maybe experimenting with a new mode or two but mostly sticking to what's tried and true. Ubisoft's crack at celebrating the series' history falls into this exact trap, and Tetris Ultimate is mostly a game you can look at and say, "Yep, that's Tetris."

The basics are unchanged. You are given a vertical playing field in which you drop tetrominos--various shapes composed of four squares each. As a randomized parade of pieces falls from the top of the screen one at a time, you can move each one left or right as well as rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise. The goal is to create a straight, unbroken horizontal line of blocks, which removes the line from the playing field and scores you points (more points if you can eliminate several lines at once). The more lines you clear, the faster the game becomes.

Over three decades, this formula has remained largely unchanged, and rarely have the rules been so much as tweaked. But while there are no options to customize the look or sound of the game, Tetris Ultimate sports an admirable list of settings that let you tailor the feel of the game to your liking. For instance, you can turn off the hold queue (which allows you to save a piece for later use), change the behavior of the random generator, or turn off the more advanced wall kick and t-spin maneuvers. You can also tweak how long you can rotate a piece at the bottom of its drop--the controversial "easy" or infinite spin is not a default. You can't get super specific with these values, but the options are nice to have regardless.

While the potential variety of Tetris may seem limited, previous iterations of the series have nonetheless seen some rather inventive new modes using tetrominos. By comparison, Tetris Ultimate's mode selection is bare-bones. In addition to your standard marathon and endless modes there's Sprint (a race to see how quickly you can clear 40 lines), Ultra (a high-score challenge where you only have three minutes to play), and a couple of multiplayer-only battle modes--one with power-ups and one without. All modes can be played with humans or bots, with team versus team and co-op variations of each.

Co-op and team modes are the most interesting twists on the Tetris formula, as they widen the playing area (and thus lengthen the width you need to cover to get a line) and divide the screen up so that each player has his or her own designated section to drop pieces into, with a couple of columns of shared space in between that both players can use. Communication becomes important not only because scoring is impossible alone but also because all players on a team share both the pool of upcoming pieces as well as the single held piece, so if you're saving that straight block for a specific purpose, make sure your partners don't use it themselves.

While there are no options to customize the look or sound of the game, Tetris Ultimate sports an admirable list of settings that let you tailor the feel of the game to your liking.

When playing online, there doesn't seem to be a great system for matchmaking similarly skilled players. The only "rank" you ever achieve is designated by how far you are able to get in either the marathon or endless mode. But playing vanilla Tetris without interference is quite a different beast from a battle mode match against another player, and this doesn't appear to be a consideration when matching players together. Furthermore, many matches are hit with unfortunate lags and/or bugs, and if the game's host disconnects for any reason, the other players are out of luck even if they're 14 levels deep in a marathon game.

If you don't want to put up with the occasional lag that comes from playing against strangers, you can pretend to play against your friends by challenging their "Tetris Self," a bot that tries to play at about the same skill level as its player. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't feel any more special than playing against an AI with a custom name--which is all this is.

When playing alone or in offline multiplayer mode, Tetris Ultimate nails most of the basics. Unfortunately, it doesn't go far beyond them. The four-player versus and co-op modes are a lot of fun, and the classic high-score chase is as solid as ever, but there are no visual or music options, and the selection of modes feels lacking. To be fair, at $10, Tetris Ultimate is one of the cheaper Tetris games to hit consoles in recent years, and what you get for that price is perfectly competent. The game's main menu features a prominent store icon that promises more modes coming soon, so those looking for more variety may get what they're looking for via DLC.

Part solid execution and part missed opportunity, Tetris Ultimate is hard to judge. If all you want is a good version of classic Tetris for your new console, this one will suit your needs well. The low price is nice and the gameplay options provided are a nice touch, but it doesn't do enough to earn the "ultimate" moniker.

It may be as revolutionary as a hipster in a Che Guevara t-shirt. A lack of originality means that Tropico 5: Waterborne doesn't wring much more life out of the latest edition of Haemimont Games' dictator-in-a-box city builder. Much like the main game, which slightly stretched the familiar Tropico formula with new historical eras and nastier politics, this expansion barely broadens El Presidente's possibilities with a series of glub-glub gimmicks that lets you take Caribbean corruption into the actual Caribbean. Enough new content is provided with a new campaign, buildings, and window dressing to get diehard fans of the original game interested for a couple of days, but there isn't anything essential here, and the $20 pricetag is a little steep.

The premise is pretty simple. El Presidente decides that being the boss of a banana republic isn't satisfying enough, so he goes the Bond villain route and heads to the sea. Quicker than you can wonder why every other 007 bad guy in the 60s and 70s seemed to have some kind of watery HQ complete with submarines and pet sharks, you're expanding your tropical dictatorship from the traditional island jungles out onto the waves. All of this wet and wild action comes in the form of a new Lord of the Pearl campaign centred on the various kooky oceanic activities necessary to secure the legendary Black Pearl. Forget about giving out any brownie points for originality.

Most of the new campaign storylines and quests focus on the high seas, although there isn't anything here all that interesting, save the odd geeky reference to things like discovering R'lyeh and then sending good old Penultimo off to meet with Cthulhu. Unfortunately, the developers don't do too much with these out-there plot points. At the very least, they could have had the simpering toady devoured. That said, sending canned goods to R'lyeh for the bonus of importing what have to be Deep One immigrants is kind of nifty, even if there isn't anything here beyond the textual references. Still, the goofy sense of humor on offer in Tropico 5 is strongly present, adding chuckles to the yawns. This remains a charming and very likeable experience thanks to cornball humor, the great radio broadcaster, and the fantastic soundtrack with its peppy Latin beats and guitar plucks.

The campaign is something of a snoozefest. Waterborne scenarios play out pretty much exactly like they did in the original Tropico 5, with you continually being pushed along from one directed goal to another, given various trade quotas, and so forth. A stream of advisors and flunkies shows up basically to give you orders about exporting this or that resource, building this or that facility to please the great unwashed, dishing out an edict to please a foreign power or suck up to an island faction, and so forth. The only difference is the watery flavour of the plot, although it really doesn't make much difference if you're trudging through the same old goals on land or on the high seas. Dull is dull.

New game mechanics are few and far between. There is a paltry number of new facilities to construct, none of which is any sort of stop-the-presses addition to gameplay. You can now set up oyster farms to gather pearls, which can be a hot commodity on the export market. Smuggler's docks let you play up to pirates and open up black-market trade routes, but at the cost of occasionally being invaded by gangs of pirates that do little but expose the chaos of the core game's combat system.

Some of these features get a little more interesting as the years fly by, but even then, there isn't much to recommend such amenities as the glass-bottom boat, tidal power plants, bathysphere, and floating apartments. You can build nuclear subs in the modern era, at least, although these aren't exactly a show-stopper given the poor combat features of the core game. Most of the new features are minor variations on existing buildings that add nothing aside from a nautical flavour to your dictatorship. About the one positive is that there is something for everyone here. The new water-based structures feature in every aspect of your city-building, from core infrastructure like food production to tourism to military defense. They do add a sprinkling of variety that should liven up sandbox games.

Combine Popeye with Papa Doc, stir in the usual city-building procedures of Tropico 5, and you've got Waterborne, an expansion short on imagination and implementation. Nothing here adds any meaningful content to a game that was already pretty well-known to long-time followers of the franchise. Another half-dozen or so hours of peasant-oppressing, Swiss Bank-building fun is provided for the truly dedicated, but there isn't anything here with lasting value or appeal.