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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

November 22nd, 2012Top Story

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

By Tina Amini

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest GamesThis year has been chock full of games. With the holidays approaching we've rounded up some gift guides covering all sorts of bases for you. Price range, platform, etc. But what if you just want to refresh your memory of this year's highlights?

Here are all of our reviews of the biggest games this year. Hopefully it will help in your holiday purchases, and to occupy your non-family time with some good game choices.

If you don't see a title you're interested in, try Kotaku.com/review where you'll find a full list, including hardware and even snack reviews.

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Need For Speed: Most Wanted is a laser-focused, unblockable gut-punch of constant acceleration. Speed freaks, rejoice. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Because it may not be the best Assassin's Creed but it is a refreshing recharge to a well-made series. It's an important game about America, about killing bad guys and about climbing beautiful trees. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Assassin's Creed Liberation brings the series to Playstation Vita in strong fashion and adds inspired new mechanics to an already strong formula. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Halo 4 is an emotional, beautiful look at Master Chief's struggles in war. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Nintendo Land is the best way to experience all the wonderful weirdness of the Wii U. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Far Cry 3 does so much right: It's an exhilarating and empowering adventure that marvelously combines player freedom with shiny technical polish. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Hitman: Absolution is a sprawling, satisfying game that offers dozens of vicious possibilities with each new scenario. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Like most Mario games, it never stops feeling fun. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games Black Ops II feels great to play, especially when futuristic weapons are involved, yes-but it also makes you think. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It offers a continuation of the World of Warcraft experience, but at this point that experience just isn't quite enough. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Medal of Honor Warfighter is slipshod, uninspired, unpolished, and unfun. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

007 Legends is not only terrible a homage to James Bond, but it's a mediocre shooter too.
More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Skylanders Giants, like Spyro's Adventure before it, gives collecting colorful pieces of plastic a purpose. It's a chimerical combination of two passions, and hey, the kids seem to dig it. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Forza Horizon lets down its parent brand's hair and gives you the fantasy lifestyle of racing gorgeous cars in the prime of your life. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

XCOM: Enemy Unknown takes a classic PC strategy game, improves it then makes it playable for console owners as well. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Where most games have strict rules and guidelines, Dishonored has suggestions. Suggestions that it encourages you to mess around with at every turn. Blending the do-what-you-want structure of Deus Ex with the masterful world design of BioShock, this game is really something special. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

NBA 2K13 serves the flashiest sport and sports lifestyle in North America with rich gameplay and deep career modes. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The interesting changes in this Resident Evil can't save it from feeling bloated and boring. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

You have to catch all the things, and revisiting old friends and exploring the aftermath of events two years prior is an entertaining way to do it. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

With a mix of familiar MMORPG tropes and new, modern approaches to delivering them, Guild Wars 2 is an excellent, welcoming take on the genre. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

A fresh style, new stages to tear apart, and expansive story / training mode and solid online play, this is a Dead or Alive sequel that's finally worth its new number. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Torchlight II is a sprawling, ambitious game that does one thing very, very well. It gives you a world you'll want to explore, filled with enemies you'll love to destroy. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Borderlands 2 is a charming, funny, hell of a cooperative game with lots of style and personality that you can spend hours with. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It is one of the most unique games to come out of Japan in the last decade. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

NHL 13's skating and AI refinements make it a very lifelike, very strategic interpretation of a real-world sport long abused by the speed and power of video games. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The offline action represents one of the best Tekken games in years and the online portion is promising, though it still needs to be properly tested by hordes of players. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

For a real-time physics engine that keeps you in the action, and a brilliant career mode that unites players of all levels of interest. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's the grown up version of grabbing a bunch of Transformers from your toy box and acting out the final days of their doomed home world. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Like putting on your favorite sweatshirt or curling up in bed and re-reading a great book, New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a familiar, warm, comfortable story. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Although the game is entertaining and fun to play, the sheer number of bugs encountered in the PS3 edition really need a patch. We're waiting for confirmation on if the Xbox 360 and PC versions are plagued with the same issues or not. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Sleeping Dogs is both great at making a beautiful Hong Kong your playground, as well as portraying the drama hidden in its streets. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's a nice change of pace to see an MMORPG in a modern setting, the class-free leveling is nice, and the attention to story, detail, and setting are fantastic. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Spec Ops: The Line is a considered and thought-provoking game that deserves to be experienced for its flaws as well as for its successes. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Despite a heavy reliance on traditional massively-multiplayer role-playing mechanics, Tera's addictive active combat system is a breath of fresh air in a relatively stagnant genre. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Slicing up zombies with a chainsaw is incredibly fun, and you get to experience endearingly stupid humor fighting in boss battles. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

If you want an engaging open-world RPG with action combat to spend way too many hours playing, there are plenty that do what Dragon's Dogma fails to. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier can feel a bit ungainly, but for the most part it successfully balances stealth, tactics and all-out action. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The action role-playing game that launched a thousand clones remains the most viscerally entertaining way to click your mouse several hundred thousand times. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

This unrelentingly grim thriller boasts great storytelling, sharply implemented mechanics and inventive multiplayer. It's the total package. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

More than just demonstrating some truly spectacular superpowers in an open world, you're doing them with a great character, James Heller, even if the game's story doesn't take any risks. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Fez is more than just adorable. It's a world that makes you want to explore every corner, and solve every obscure puzzle. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Despite its many flaws, Xenoblade is a great fix for MMO junkies and sidequest nuts. This is a world you'll want to breathe in. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

If gameplay upgrades are a key demand made by consumers of annual sports titles (ones rarely fulfilled) then Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13's improved swing control, by itself, makes the title recommendable. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's a tedious, uninspiring mess that neither pleases the franchise's old fans nor appeals to a new audience. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The three-part chaos is fun but there's not enough to make this Resident Evil feel like something you need to experience. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The drama might be lessened but the fighting engine is has improved significantly and the character roster ridiculously huge. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's still the only Major League Baseball game on the Xbox 360. That's not a hell of an endorsement, but MLB 2K12 is an improvement over MLB 2K11 in gameplay. Its visuals are plainly a disappointment, though. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Technically, it's a smooth next step in a well-loved franchise and narratively, it's still haunting me days after finishing. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Street Fighter X Tekken brings together two of the greatest fighting game franchises of all time in a game that's incredibly accessible to new players. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It takes all the best things from old-school RPGs and brings them into a modern format. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Journey is a gorgeous, meditative game that combines disciplined design, cutting-edge technology and beautiful art into something remarkable and moving. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

A beloved extreme sports franchise gets rebooted with realism and asynchronous online play. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The unusual combination of storytelling styles, along with the vibrant and detailed art design, make this short experience worth the while. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

Syndicate challenges your brain's flexibility in chaotic situations, while testing your ability to adapt to new threats. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's like being the Game of Thrones. You build castles and invade Kingdoms, but you also get to bang courtiers and humiliate that disappointment of a son you banished to Wales. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

For mixed martial arts fans, it's an astoundingly deep offering that could be the only game you play for long stretches. For fighting game fans, there are enough symmetries in its gameplay to make the introduction into a simulation sports title. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

After all these years it's still the best the vehicle combat genre has to offer. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The allure of a portable Uncharted game is strong, but Golden Abyss feels for the most part like a cut-rate version of 2007's Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The four-arm action is the only interesting thing about this game. And you can get that, and a better overall experience, in the original game. Everything else feels like a step backwards. From a game that came out five years ago. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's an extremely well-crafted action role-playing experience with all the bells and whistles fans of the genre crave and countless hours of quality hack-and-slash entertainment in a fully-realized new fantasy world. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

The core fighting remains as sharp as ever and gets tweaked with interesting changes. Also: you can fight a furry, or be a furry. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It improves upon Final Fantasy XIII in nearly every way. More »

Kotaku Reviews All Of This Year's Biggest Games

It's a superb Resident Evil game and easily one of the 3DS' most impressive games. More »

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