Plain Sight is a game about self-destructive robots banging into each other in low-gravity levels fashioned after cassette tapes, pirate ships, and pocket watches. And if that isn’t enough to pique your interest, then consider this: It’s also a ton of fun. This multiplayer-focused action game is a chaotic hoot, filled with cel-shaded robots zooming about beautiful minimalist environments. In fact, the frantic pace and flighty targeting can sometimes lead to a bit too much chaos, making it tough to tell exactly what’s going on, let alone respond to it. For the most part, however, the dizzying pace is an absolute joy. Plain Sight is an elegant and rewarding game that serves as a reminder that the sweetest pleasures are often the simplest.

The anarchy begins with a simple move: dashing. By holding down the left mouse button and then releasing it, you will dash forward. This is a good evasive move, but it’s also key to an offensive strike because holding the mouse button down will also lock on to an enemy in your field of vision. As long as your target remains within view and within range (in plain sight, if you will), your katana-wielding robot smashes into its clanking victim when you release the mouse button. This destroys your victim, and lets you suck up all of his stored energy. That energy may eventually translate to points, but only if you’re willing to make the ultimate sacrifice: suicide. The energy you accumulate only does you good when you blow yourself up and, hopefully, take down your enemies in your blast. The more energy you’ve stored up and the more zippy bots caught in your explosion, the more points you earn for upgrades. After each death, you apply these points to various enhancements to your jumping skills, your dash power, and so on. Then, you respawn and do it all over again.

Such a dry description doesn’t do Plain Sight’s moment-to-moment gameplay a bit of justice, however. Game arenas float in space like freaky deformed planets with stairways that lead to more stairways while you and your foes dash and triple-jump about like overcaffeinated toasters with legs. That every object exerts a gravitational pull further contributes to the fury. You cannot fall off any map–gravity will always pull you back. Using gravity to your advantage, you can circle about various objects for any number of seconds, trying to keep a surface between you and your foes by staying constantly on the move. Some of the maps make absolutely brilliant use of the force exerted upon you. On one map, for example, an inner object pulls every player to the center, while peripheral platforms offer a chance for respite. It’s wonderful chaos to be flung about space with a dozen or more other players or AI-controlled bots; explosions and trails are everywhere while you slam into your victims and catch them in your suicidal detonation. Because you earn points by detonating, you perpetually need to fight the urge to accumulate just a bit more energy, which leads to a bigger blast radius and more points. Of course, the longer you cling to life, the greater the chance that you will end up feeding the energy accrued to your next assassin. This points mechanic throws in a welcome sense of tension amongst the freewheeling fun.

Plain Sight’s greatest asset–this breakneck tempo–also happens to be its primary flaw. The madness of robots, robots everywhere is hugely entertaining, but you don’t always feel completely in control. You automatically target whomever the game wants you to target. This keeps the pace moving because you never have to fiddle with manual targeting, but with bots flying every which way, you aren’t guaranteed to lock on to anyone, let alone a specific target. This can lead to some camera flipping and random dashing as you try to get your next hapless victim in your view or simply try to come to grips with the gravitational pull of multiple objects at once. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take too long to wrap your head around Plain Sight’s quirky rules. Once you get a feel for the pull of gravity and the way you latch on to vertical surfaces, your twitch skills will rise to the occasion. Soon, you’ll be soaring through the abstract skies and zooming toward enemies at screaming speeds and only occasionally getting flustered by the bedlam.

Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes offer a great way to enjoy all this chaos. In fact, the speedy nature of the gameplay is a perfect fit for these tried-and-true modes, which allow you to zip around without worry of additional objectives. You can also try your hand at Capture the Flag, though it’s the other two modes that bear special mention. Ninja! Ninja! Botzilla! is an all-versus-one mode in which one player starts at gargantuan size with a Godzilla mask on his or her head, and the others repeatedly slam into the superpowered Botzilla, whittling his size down with each successful smash. This can be a lot of fun, though because your sights are set on a single player, you don’t get the pandemonium that makes Plain Sight so special. (Granted, it’s a ton of fun to be Botzilla and slash away at the little bots that hound you.) Lighten Up mode is a King of the Hill variant in which players compete to see who can set off the largest explosion in a particular location. While it can be tricky to maneuver to a very specific platform, this is Plain Sight at its best: absolute mayhem. Ostensibly, you can check the in-game leaderboards to see how you stack up to others, at least in the Steam version of the game, but as of this writing, the leaderboard screen never got past the “looking for entries” indicator.

Plain Sight pairs its insane speed with a beautiful visual style, in which rich, bold colors provide a galactic backdrop to the sterile constructs on which you run and tumble. Players leave behind them vivid trails that indicate the amount of energy they’ve hoarded, and foes explode in a flashy twinkle of glittering stars. Even the platform you land on glows in the same hue as your trail, and the resulting look is crisp and colorful but never so busy as to be distracting. The jaunty jazz of the menu screens might lead you to believe that Plain Sight will sport a similarly catchy audio design, but the sound is minimal. Yet while the sound effects harbor no surprises, there are minor delights in the clink-clink of your ninja robot prancing across a platform and the joyous grunts he occasionally emits.

Plain Sight is a cheerful flight of fancy. Things can get a bit messy, but that’s a forgivable side effect of a game that is all wonderful madness. While there aren’t great hordes of people playing online, you can practice against bots if you have trouble finding a match, and bot play is almost as much fun as competing against humans. Plain Sight is available on Steam and other digital distribution outlets and offers as much pure fun as you could expect for $9.99.

While playing Sims games of yore, sending your little computer people off to work was a straightforward process: The carpool drove up, and you waved good-bye to your digital self, who then earned simoleans by doing unseen tasks in some unseen work environment. In the Sims 3, you could exert minimal control, but your sims’ workday tasks were hidden safely under the hood. The Sims 3: Ambitions changes that. Now, with the addition of professions–as opposed to careers–you no longer need to wait patiently for your sims to return from work before you can set your evil (or altruistic) plans in motion. Work tasks are now integrated into your sims’ daily lives, sending you about town to accomplish such tasks as solving mysteries, fighting fires, and capturing ghosts. This expansion adds other goodies to the main game as well, from new hobbies to new public lots. None of these extras are as unexpected or game-changing as the additions made by The Sims 3′s first expansion, World Adventures, but you shouldn’t sell this expansion short. Ambitions alters the moment-to-moment gameplay in fun and refreshing ways, and Sims fanatics needing more to tinker with in their digital dollhouses will want to pick it up.

The most obvious way Ambitions enhances The Sims 3 is with professions. By choosing a profession rather than a career, you receive job-related tasks on your designated workdays that you perform to earn simoleans. These objectives are generally fun and clever role-playing-type missions typified by grin-inducing writing and a touch of the bizarre. Take the ghost-hunting profession, for example. Paranormal investigation involves sucking up spirits into your portable ghost vacuum, though as you progress, you encounter a greater variety of jobs. For some extra cash you could sell the lost souls you collect to the local lab, but if you look kindly upon these groaning ghouls, you may prefer to set them free in a nearby graveyard. If you’d rather pursue a more earthly personality, you could always be an investigator. Your initial assignments are fun and funny, having you interview clients who may inform you that a nemesis is talking smack on some Internet forum or that some mouthwash has gone missing. As you rise up the ladder, you dust for fingerprints, hack computers, write police reports, and root through your neighbors’ trash. Though you should expect to do some low-level grunt work for the police station early on, you might eventually set up your very own investigations office. You could be an architect, a stylist, a firefighter, and more, but no matter which you choose, you’ll enjoy meeting your clients and completing your objectives. City hall may even have some substantial rewards in store for you for a job well done.

If you want to make your workday even more free-form, you could designate yourself as self-employed and take advantage of other aspects of The Sims 3′s economy. Dedicate yourself to gardening, fishing, or World Adventures tasks like nectar-making, and sell off the fruits of your labor to make a living. Even better, you could dabble in some new hobbies: inventing and sculpting. Inventing requires you to collect scrap, which you can buy or gather at a junkyard. Early inventions are good for selling off at the new consignment shop, or for a bit of household decorating. But there are also new related social opportunities, so you can earn a decent reward for making a bunch of toys and donating them to the neighboring school. Eventually, you’re making time machines (just wait until you see what you can do with that) and ghost-capturing devices. Just be careful: Inventing is a dangerous hobby, so have a fire extinguisher handy, lest your ingenious inventor die a horrible flaming death. Or perhaps a partner sim can come to your rescue in a fire truck and put out the blaze before the grim reaper arrives to make his deathly deal.

Sculpting is a bit safer, and while any given sculpture usually takes more time to complete than a given invention, the resulting art brings in more dough and looks nicer sitting by the pool. This hobby, too, is nicely integrated into the other parts of the game. If you like throwing parties and want to improve your social status, impress your guests with an ice sculpture. Choose your medium–be it clay, wood, or something else–and chip away. You can duplicate previous creations easily, but it’s much more fun to set your sim to work on something new, because it’s a joy to see what interesting creation might spring forth from the raw materials you start with. Yet whether you spend your day putting out fires and rescuing trapped neighbors, giving your friends and family members a new hairdo, or doing laundry using the newly added washer and dryer appliances, you’ll have a smile on your face the entire time. As it turns out, your sims don’t always lead lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity, and Ambitions makes a standard workday as enjoyable as you could hope for.

All these new professions and hobbies come with new animations and sound effects to liven up the mood, and they’re as excellent as series fans expect. The way your investigator sim waves underbrush in front of her face as if hiding behind camouflage isn’t realistic, but it’s absolutely charming and hysterical. Watching your inventor dig through the trash at the local dump is equally fun as he throws about unwanted pipes. All that beloved Sims personality is keenly on display, what with the delightful Ghostbusters-type music you hear when capturing poltergeists and the clever designs of the inventions and sculptures you might strew about the house and yard. Unfortunately, there are still bugs and performance issues, and you may run into a few glitches with Ambitions that you haven’t run into previously. We encountered long-standing saved-game bugs that have carried over from the main game, along with relationships that refused to update regardless of continued interaction. In addition, item pop-in and stuttering can also be an occasional eyesore, particularly when moving the camera across the map.

The Sims 3: Ambitions isn’t an outwardly dramatic addition to the Sims universe, and technical problems could potentially get in the way of your fun. Yet this is a thoughtful and delightful expansion, full of wit and character, and it gives you even more control over your sims’ daily lives. If you enjoy nurturing (or antagonizing) these unintelligible avatars that need to be told to empty their bladders, then adding Ambitions to your games library is a sure way to show off your logic skill.

As a romantic comedy, Runaway: A Twist of Fate works pretty well. As an adventure game, not so much. Pendulo Studios’ final chapter in the trilogy recounting the travails of lovable goofball Brian Basco and his erstwhile girlfriend, Gina Timmins, sacrifices gameplay for a whole lot of story in this mostly traditional point-and-click adventure. While you might enjoy this chick-flick-mimicking romp as a gorgeous animated movie with two likable leads, the dialogue is windy and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and the puzzles are thin and predictable. It’s not a great way for this charismatic series to go out, and even Runaway veterans will probably be left feeling flat.

The story is a little offbeat, especially if you finished the previous game, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. That game took place on a tropical paradise and ended with an abrupt “to be continued” conclusion, while its follow-up begins in New York City with Brian dying in a mental hospital after being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. Other than the characters, nothing directly connects this game to the last one right away. You have to wait until past the midway point before things start to connect, which is frustrating for those who have been following the trials of this pair since 2003 and want a more immediate payoff. The only upside of this fresh start is how it allows newcomers to jump on board with the new game and not feel as if they’ve missed anything.

The personality of A Twist of Fate follows in the footsteps of the two previous Runaway games. Lush production values remain the highlight. The exaggerated faces and backgrounds gives the game a unique aesthetic which fits in nicely with the cartoonish vibe of the storytelling Nothing is taken seriously, even a supposed murder and time spent locked up in Happy Dale Sanatorium (where the slogan is “You’d be Mad to Go Elsewhere”). In a game like this, it’s perfectly natural for a dimwitted pretty boy like Brian to have wide eyes atop a lantern jaw, for goofy sidekicks to resemble cartoon Steve Buscemis and fat Elvis impersonators, and for the heroine Gina to rock a spunky look with cocked eyebrows and Sophia Loren lips.

Voice acting is equally luxuriant. Every character comes equipped with excellent, if intentionally cheesy, spoken dialogue. But you can have too much of a good thing. Most conversations drag on far too long, forcing you to wade through lots of unnecessary wordplay. Even worse, lines often give center stage to dumb jokes a lot less funny than the writer thought they were. The only real exception is Brian’s nutcase buddy Gabbo, who has a lot of funny tics, like how he shouts “Bananas!” in the middle of sentences for no reason. Even the music is a strong point, with the tunes perfectly reflecting what’s happening on the screen and adding to the interactive-movie atmosphere.

Puzzles are simple point-and-click item collections, resulting in a short game where you do nothing aside from picking up odd bits of rubbish and experiment with this stuff to see how it might solve various dilemmas. Chances are you know this tune very well. In every scene you hit F2 to highlight the hotspots on the screen, and then you pick up whatever you can and go straight to the obvious solution if one presents itself or start playing around until you stumble upon what you need to do.

Just about everything is at least somewhat convoluted, so you do need to use some adventure-game logic. When breaking Brian out of his tomb, for instance, Gina has to go through a crazy sequence of actions, such as flash-freezing a glove and translating an Ikea-esqe coffin assembly manual with the help of a dead Swede (well, actually a crooked medium with a Swedish-English dictionary). So much for just heading down to the local hardware store for a sledgehammer. Still, even though you need to make outlandish leaps of logic, there are few enough items and locations in the game that it’s never difficult to figure things out. Trial and error gets you through in a jiffy even when Sherlock-ian deduction fails. And even if you do somehow happen to get really stuck, you can fall back on the in-game hint system (although some of its hints are more cryptic than the actual puzzles they purport to help solve).

Runaway: A Twist of Fate is an adventure for those who just want to enjoy the ride. It’s an interesting enough story with likable protagonists and great graphics, even if the dialogue is stretched out beyond all limits of patience at times, but the actual game-playing part of this adventure leaves a lot to be desired. There isn’t much challenge, nor is there any innovation over what developers like LucasArts and Sierra were doing well over a decade ago, so what you’ve got is more of an animated movie than a game.

The Absolute Power expansion for Tropico 3 is a welcome addition to the original game, throwing in a great new campaign loaded with oddball objectives, a range of new buildings that enhance and fix aspects of the core game mechanics, more creative edicts to inflict upon the peasants, and a lot of little frills. Developer Haemimont Games has built a better banana-republic simulation bound to appease virtual dictators up for rigging a few more elections and killing more gangs of rebels.

The gameplay basics have been left virtually untouched. You still take on the role of El Presidente, a Latin American strongman ruling a tropical island during the hottest years of the Cold War from 1950 through 1980. But a lot of little things have been changed. Right off the bat you’ll notice an advanced tutorial, supplementing the insufficient, short one from the original game with more information about economics. It’s a great way to address a shortcoming, although you would think that anybody buying this expansion would already have played Tropico 3 and figured out all this stuff. There are more choices with your in-game avatar now, as well, including a dude named Voodoo Pizzaman who looks like he just stepped off the set of Live and Let Die. Personality traits, backgrounds, and new costumes have also been added, so you can play as a guy with a green thumb, installed in power by the mob, who likes wearing a fat Elvis jumpsuit. Or not.

Not quite so brand-new is the 10-mission new campaign. It sees you island-hopping from one Caribbean dictatorship to another, just like in the original game, but the objectives are now more outlandish. Whereas the old scenarios dealt with mostly down-to-earth goals, such as increasing farm production, making a killing off oil, and so forth, here you do zanier things, such as rig an island for anti-industry hippies, make peasants believe in the existence of chupacabra, deal with a rift in time and space, and even look into unsolved mysteries by setting up a secret police unit called the Alpha Files. These out-there goals are tempered in that they lean on the same city-building/political mechanics that have always been at the heart of the Tropico games, although they do provide a more involving story to each mission. Everything you do is more purposeful now, instead of feeling vague like many of the original game’s scenarios.

Even though you might be dealing with Rastafarians and maybe even aliens in Absolute Power, you continue to focus on keeping the treasury flush and the citizens happy through building farms, factories, churches, police stations, and casinos and messing about with politics as in any other Tropico game. But things have been spiced up with more options across the board. A new political faction called the Loyalists has been added to the old mix of Capitalists, Communists, Militarists, and their other pals. They’re not particularly loyal, though, unless you do things that inevitably offend almost everybody else, like building a museum to your greatness and canceling elections. Factions are easier to manage, because lists of major and minor needs are now included in the interface to keep you from guessing what you need to build to make a particular group happy. The whole interface is actually improved where information is concerned, giving you more little hints like the above and keeping you in the know about even little matters, such as how many months until the next farm harvest.

New buildings have been tossed into the mix, adding options and fixing minor flaws in the original game. Garages have been shrunk so they’re easier to place. Generating electricity is possible with cheap wind turbines, so you can get the juice flowing early in missions without spending huge bucks on a power plant. Grade schools boost intelligence and can be used to indoctrinate kiddos into the Loyalist faction. A pricey nuclear program can fend off circling US and USSR warships. You can try to please environmentalists by constructing garbage dumps that come with recycling options. A satellite dish lets you hunt for aliens and spy on the superpowers. Entertainment and tourism have been revamped with Ferris wheels, marinas, and balloon rides over monuments like ancient pyramids. Giant monuments can be used to satisfy your ego. If you’ve got the cash, you can build a towering Eternal Flame to awe people into respecting the dear leader, a massive Christ statue like the one that towers above Rio to endear yourself to the religious faction, or even a huge golden statue of yourself, a la Nero, to please the Loyalists. Industry hasn’t been altered much, although you can make a few bucks by processing metal into military hardware in the new weapons factory. These aren’t huge changes, though they open up scenarios in many subtle ways. You’ll soon wonder how you ever managed without them.

Ten extra edicts have been introduced for you to unleash on those poor, unsuspecting peasants. Like the above, there isn’t anything here that could be considered earthshaking. But it’s good to have additional options to lean on when clinging to power or trying to goose citizen happiness up a few percentage points. Outlaw Faction is helpful when you need to take a group completely out of the picture and have a strong army ready to handle the inevitable outpouring of support for the rebels. Print Money gives you $20,000 immediately at the cost of a huge inflation hit, but this can come in handy when you’re in need of cash to close out a scenario win and don’t care about the long term. Clicking on National Day earns cheap respect and blasts off fireworks over the island once a year. Kill Juanito not only shuts up the loudmouthed deejay, but it eliminates rebel attacks for a full three years. That’s handy when you’re sorting out the army and worried about an uprising. In the same vein, Lure Rebels starts a battle with the revolting populace right away, so you can fight at a time of your own choosing.

Absolute Power keeps the Tropico 3 party going. Nothing revolutionary can be found here when it comes to game design, but all the offbeat new islands, new buildings, and other extras do a great job of extending and improving the core experience. There is also a ton of content in the lengthy campaign scenarios, which should occupy virtual dictators for at least 20 hours–which isn’t entirely positive, as this running time exposes the lack of new music and the tiny smattering of new radio prattle from a whiny revolutionary named Betty Boom. Still, even with the repetitive tunes and dialogue, consider this expansion a must for anybody who enjoyed the original game’s take on tropical tyranny.

The game begins with a bang–or more specifically, a horrific explosion. Taking a cue from our modern political climate, the opening scenes depict a missile colliding with a commercial airliner. Shortly thereafter, you meet the game’s protagonist, Michael Thorton, who is being inducted into a top-secret United States government agency known as Alpha Protocol. Your first mission: travel to Saudi Arabia and investigate the terrorist group responsible for the bombing. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems, and Mike’s first mission ends like it began–with the explosion of a well-aimed missile. Thus, a globe-hopping journey through Russia, Italy, and Taiwan ensues as Mike sifts through the information he gathers and follows the necessary leads. The story plays out more or less like a season of 24, though in this case, you get to decide how you to proceed toward the final hour.

Alpha Protocol’s greatest asset is, by far, the complex workings behind its plot progression. Conversations with other characters bring with them broad dialogue choices. Most of them boil down to one of three attitudes: aggressive, professional, or suave. Different characters react to you in different ways depending on what approach they most appreciate. A sweet-natured fellow agent may enjoy your flirtations, for example, while a tough-talking Russian vixen may not be so enamored. These characters may stay neutral toward you or they may take a liking (or disliking) to you. If the individual is your handler–that is, your mission guide–you may receive a bonus perk, such as a boost to your endurance levels. In other cases, an allied faction may fight alongside you in battle or provide access to weapons you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. In extreme cases, there are life-or-death consequences in which you must weigh the risks of allowing a nemesis to live against the potential benefit he or she might offer: guns, information, and so forth. Many of the plot essentials are more or less static, but how you discover them and the people that join you on the journey can differ from one play-through to the next. Few games can truly make you feel as if you are having an impact on the story, but this is the one area in which Alpha Protocol delivers–and extraordinarily so.

Unfortunately, the storytelling gets bogged down by its own ambitions. What with all its complicated machinations, the game doesn’t have much heart, which in turn makes it difficult to feel invested in its branching plot developments. At one point, you may receive an in-game e-mail from a female character that references the sexual tension you’ve apparently developed, but the story never adequately demonstrates that tension; the e-mail comes as a complete surprise. You may even get the opportunity for a few sexual dalliances toward the end of the game, but because the story never builds on these relationships, these scenes seem forced and mechanical. By the time you reach the final mission, you get the sense that developer Obsidian Entertainment had no idea how to wrap the story up. One potentially emotional moment is treated so flippantly that it’s almost insulting; another major revelation foreshadows a confrontation that never comes, making the development feel more cheap than shocking. You sense that the voice actors have done their best to lend some humanity to the story, but Alpha Protocol is all business and no fun; all plot and no character. There are light moments, such as some hysterical news reports on the television (a story about children and sugar is a fun highlight), and Mike’s cocky half-grin is occasionally disarming. But these are small delights in a robotic narrative that may stimulate your intellect but not your emotions.

Like the story, the character progression offers a good number of options for letting you advance as you see fit. You decide what abilities to focus on, what weapons to take into battle, and what gadgets to equip. You choose a specialization for Mike early on, which is tantamount to choosing a class or profession in other RPGs. This discipline then determines the depth of your skill trees, from pistols and submachine guns to stealth and endurance. As you’d expect, each time you level up, you then spend points in these various disciplines, which in turn makes the associated actions more effective and unlocks new abilities. For example, leveling up your shotgun tree opens up the room sweep ability, which adds a critical knockdown to every shot; upgrading the martial arts tree adds the fury skill that enhances your hand-to-hand effectiveness. Armor and weapon modifications, as well as a healthy array of different weapons, ammo types, and gadgets, allow for further customization. The resulting flexibility is incredibly impressive.

Unfortunately, the basic gameplay mechanics prevent the wealth of options from getting the justice they deserve. It’s clear from the moment that you move around in Alpha Protocol that something isn’t quite right. You control Mike from a third-person perspective, but the camera is often zoomed rather close to him, which is a hindrance to taking in your surroundings or navigating close spaces. If you stoop, the camera pulls away somewhat and you get a better view, though the way Mike scuttles about while crouching is laughably awkward. As you progress, you find the camera can cause mild headaches in other ways as well. For some unknown reason, descending a ladder or jumping from a ledge (always a contextual action, never a freely controllable one) causes the camera to swoop to an overhead view and remain there, which is unhelpful and disorienting. At other times, you might pop up from behind cover to take a shot, only to have the camera shift into a useless position or even have your own body get in the way. These gaffes seem odd, considering most game developers seem to have worked through such basic obstacles years ago. You get accustomed to them, but these problems make the simple act of moving from place to place feel uncomfortable.

The camera isn’t the only issue with the cover system, which is generally workable but also inconsistent and occasionally buggy. At a basic level, cover works as it does in a third-person shooter like Gears of War: You press a button to take cover behind a barricade or wall and peek over or around to shoot at enemies. But like much of Alpha Protocol, cover isn’t implemented well. Sometimes you encounter walls that you can’t take cover behind for no discernible reason; at other times, the stickiness of the cover mechanic combined with the close camera can make it awkward to get out of the way of an incoming grenade. You might also run into glitches and bugs where cover is concerned. Some of these are bizarre but not likely to bother you too much, such as weird animation glitches or moments when you might slide a few feet to the side like the ground is coated with ice. Other bugs are more annoying. You might pop up from behind cover only to discover that your targeting reticle is missing and you can’t shoot your weapon–a problem that can only be fixed by extricating yourself from cover. Or for some reason you won’t be able to toss a grenade from behind a barricade. Again, basic mechanics gone bitter distract from the complexities that make Alpha Protocol special.

The shooting isn’t great in Alpha Protocol, but you may have some fun with it, assuming you choose the game’s most effective loadout. If you want to take the shoot-first, talk-later approach, you should almost certainly take an assault rifle with you. They are the game’s most powerful weapons, and when used with the auto-targeting ability you unlock early on, they can make you almost unstoppable. Alpha Protocol is not a straight-up shooter, however. Under-the-hood calculations figure into your abilities in the field, so just because you aim directly at a bad guy’s head and pull the trigger doesn’t mean you’re going to lodge a bullet in his skull. If you expect your shooting prowess to translate to battlefield superiority, you’ll find that it’s only part of the equation. It’s too bad it isn’t a bigger part of the equation where pistols are concerned. Pistols feel relatively weak, which is to be expected, though they would seem an attractive last-resort option if you pursue the stealth angle. But you are often put in situations that can only be solved with firearms and are clearly designed with long-range weaponry in mind. In these situations, a pistol/shotgun combo is often ineffective. If you focused on stealth and melee at the expense of ranged weapons, expect some frustrations in certain combat scenarios and boss encounters.

The combat challenges come primarily from such imbalances, not from the opposition’s desire to stay alive. The AI is pretty dreadful. Security agents and mercenaries run about the levels in haphazard ways, may start climbing ladders as you fill them with lead, will kneel on top of exploding barrels, or might stare directly at you but fail to react unless you take a shot or give them a good punch. There’s a weird sense of randomness to your enemies’ behavior that diminishes the impact firefights may have had. Other flaws also conspire against the shooting–flaws so simple it’s surprising they made it into the final product. For example, when you activate a power, the screen takes on a bright yellow tone, as if someone turned up the light bloom setting extraordinarily high. Unfortunately, your targeting reticle is a dull yellow and can become practically invisible when the effect occurs. The effect can even obscure your target. This is a big inconvenience when using the chain shot ability, which can also cause your screen to jitter uncontrollably. There are chances to get behind turrets and take aim, but the loosey-goosey controls keep these moments from being much fun–a drawback that also applies to a few sniping sections. We also ran into some bugs here as well. On several occasions, manning a turret caused the screen to become painfully blurry and moving the camera resulted in egregious screen tearing.

Not every section requires you to shoot, however. The stealth skill tree harbors some of the more helpful abilities, such as master awareness, which pinpoints nearby enemies automatically. The higher up the tree you go, the more viable stealth becomes. Yet Alpha Protocol is no more a proper stealth game than it is a shooter. As with the shooting, the inconsistent AI provides a major hindrance, and the typically close camera can get in the way of locating nearby enemies. Instead of offering typical stealth game tropes–a minimap with vision cones or the ability to hide in the shadows, for example–the game gives you superhuman moves, such as temporary invisibility. Sneaking up on an enemy and taking him down with a minimum of fuss is mildly rewarding, as it tends to be in most games. But the actions you take leading up to that point involve activating certain skills and scurrying around in your silly crouched position–not outsmarting sharp AI or using the environment in clever ways.

An espionage RPG wouldn’t be complete without a bit of hacking and alarm disabling, and to that end, Alpha Protocol features three corresponding minigames. One of them is not so bad: You identify a sequence of mazelike lines in the correct order. It feels just right–not too easy, and not too challenging. It’s just enough to keep you on your toes, but another minigame isn’t quite as successful. Here, you must identify two lines of stationary code in the midst of a busy grid of moving characters. It can be a challenge to identify the code, which is great. But the still bits you need to identify will be repositioned after a few moments, and the cursor you must position over the matching code moves too slowly. It can be exasperating to isolate the code, only for it to be relocated while you’re trying to move the overly sluggish cursor to the right spot. Lock-picking can be equally tense, at least in the console versions, but it’s a much more sensible mechanic. Here, you need to position the depicted rods by finessing the left trigger into a specific spot. This takes some getting used to, but it’s challenging in just the right way. Sadly, that’s not the case in the PC version: You just move the rod into position with the mouse and click. It’s super easy.

Alpha Protocol utilizes the Unreal 3 graphics engine, though the only sign that this modern technology was used occurs with the engine’s telltale texture pop-in. The pop-in is barely noticeable on the PC, but it’s quite an eyesore in the console versions of the game. Sometimes, it takes up to 10 seconds or more for higher-resolution textures to appear, and at rare but noticeable times, they may never appear at all. The pop-in is a distraction, though it may have been more forgivable had the game compensated for it with great visuals. But Alpha Protocol is not a looker on any platform. Environments are plain and textures lack detail, and you won’t encounter the quality lighting and shadows you might expect to see in modern games. Animations are stiff and occasionally buggy and often appear to be missing multiple frames, which contributes to the game’s overall inelegance. Alpha Protocol is not ugly, however; it’s just behind the times and artistically uninspired. Nevertheless, the safe houses Mike operates from between missions have some nice views, and some of the outdoor missions throw in some welcome flashes of color. Similarly, the sound design gets the job done, though without much style. The voice acting is at least solid, and the generic action-movie soundtrack ramps up at the right moments but otherwise stays out of the way.

Alpha Protocol’s ambitions are commendable, and if you’re a role-playing fanatic, you’ll enjoy investigating its intricacies. It’s unfortunate that its various ingredients are so undercooked. The flaky cover system, the mediocre production values, the fundamental blemishes gone unchecked–these elements add up quickly and drag the experience down. The elaborate storytelling and character progression are impressive. It’s too bad that the gawky, glitchy gameplay can’t rise to the same standard.

Blur answers the long-contemplated question: What would happen if a speeding Renault dropped a land mine in front of a gaining Nissan at 130mph? The answer is, of course, a massive wreck, but it’s only now that Blur has merged the real-life cars from Project Gotham Racing with the over-the-top weapons more commonly found in the cartoony Mario Kart series that such questions can finally be laid to rest forever. This odd combination paves the way for an exhilarating racing experience with an absolutely relentless pace, but there is another element borrowed from a popular franchise that makes it even harder to put this racer down. An experience system similar to the one that worked so well in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has been integrated into the missile-shooting, corner-taking action, giving you a healthy stream of prizes for successfully pulling off specific maneuvers. The thrilling racing does hit a couple of rough patches, though. The drifting is a little too stiff, and the level cap in single-player can be hit long before you finish up your career. But once you get a handle on the driving, nothing can slow down your fun in this exciting racer.

Despite all the fancy rewards and destructive weapons in Blur, the most important aspect is still the driving, and thankfully, it’s a blast to take to the road. This is a fast-moving game where quick reflexes are paramount to success, and the controls rarely get in the way of your chance to grab the checkered flag. You can smoothly glide between competitors, dodge land mines and missiles without any worry, and take tight turns at top speeds–at least after a bit of practice. The drifting is a bit stiff, and it can take a little finesse to steer yourself around corners without slamming into the wall. This stiffness can be mitigated by selecting a vehicle with more grip, allowing you to stay fully in control when cornering at the expense of speed. But once you get a handle on the timing needed to perform a perfect drift, it’s a rush to scream around corners with style.

The early portions of the single-player campaign make it easy to learn how to drive on the fly, but the challenges become stiffer once you get deeper into the game. There are 63 events to compete in, topped off by nine bosses that are none too pleased that you’re trying to wrest their racing crowns from them. There are three unique event types: racing, checkpoint, and destruction. In racing, you test your mettle against up to 19 other drivers, squealing around corners and unleashing weapons to claw your way to the top. Checkpoint removes the weapons and competitors, and the game is just as fun when you’re focused on the smooth driving without anything to distract you from the road. Destruction flips that idea around, forcing you to dispatch as many nameless drivers as possible before your time is up. With only three different event types, there isn’t a ton of variety, but the action is so engaging and fun that it hardly matters that your overall objective doesn’t change much.

A lot of the enjoyment comes from the secondary objectives you need to complete. Every action you take in Blur is tracked and tallied, and rewards are doled out when you reach certain milestones. Rewards include new cars and passive modifications, giving you plenty of control over your on-track strategy. The mods give you all sorts of additional powers to play around with, such as earning turbo boost at the beginning of every lap or equipping your car with a laser sight to make shooting weapons easier. There are also mini challenges in every event that let you earn more fans which unlocks more cars after you gain enough. Every track has a checkpoint challenge where you must drive through a series of markers within a time limit, but there are more specific challenges as well that keep the racing fresh. These include hitting opponents with a missile while you’re drifting or achieving a certain high speed, and it’s a blast to strive for these goals while trying to overtake the car in first place. The only strange thing is how quickly you reach the maximum fan-level limit. In single-player, 25 is the highest level available, and you can reach this long before you finish all the events. There are still other rewards to strive for, but it’s disheartening to reach your fan limit and be left without levels to strive for before you reach the end of the game.

The weapons have mostly been inspired by Mario Kart, but they’re well balanced and provide a satisfying way to overcome your foes. The assortment of missiles, land mines, and homing bombs are expected inclusions, but most items have multiple uses that make you strategize a bit more. For instance, your force push attack can slam a nearby enemy into a wall or straight off the course, but you can also use it as a defensive mechanism. Time your button push right, and you can destroy a missile homing in on your tailgate. Also, unlike in Mario Kart, none of the weapons are overpowered. The lightning bolt does send three electrical clouds after the pack leader, but these are easy enough to avoid that they won’t drastically upset the balance. Because defense is just as important as offense, the rearview mirror is incredibly useful. You need to have eyes in the back of your head to counter offensive barrages or accurately shoot missiles backward, so you have to learn how to protect your backside while still concentrating on where you’re going.

All of these different elements culminate in a thrilling experience. Between the weapons and objectives, there is plenty of variety to be found in each race, with a new experience waiting for you every time you take to the track. And earning the right to challenge a boss takes more than just coming in first in enough races. Instead, every one of these battles comes with its own set of requirements, and it can be difficult to pass some of these tougher objectives. Some of these requirements come in the normal course of your racing. Passing drivers using a nitro burst or drifting for a set number of meters comes with the territory, but there are others that require you to change your tactics. Knocking an opponent into the water with a push attack or maintaining at least 120mph for an entire lap are not easy goals, but it’s still a lot of fun to reach these lofty levels. The rewards system ensures that you have a chance to earn something even when you come in last place, always giving you an incentive to take on one more race.

Cars can get a little touchy feely

The tracks are just as varied as the objective types, making each race feel unique. Although they are based on real locations, they are not necessarily realistic. One ridiculous track takes place directly behind the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, where one lousy turn could see you tumbling off a cliff. Another track takes place on the hilly streets of San Francisco, and as long as you don’t mind slamming your undercarriage repeatedly against the ground, it’s tons of fun swerving through this iconic city. There’s also a one-lap course that takes place on a mountain. You have to navigate narrow, winding roads at top speeds, desperately trying to make it to the finish line in one piece. Because of the diversity in the track types, you need to plan a strategy ahead of time. Certain courses have so many tight corners that you need a car that’s good at drifting, while others have dirt shortcuts that beg for an off-road vehicle. The assortment of tracks makes it interesting to play these courses again and again as you attempt to unlock all the rewards.

Once you finish the single-player experience, there is a multiplayer mode with its own rewards to strive for. Like in the campaign, you earn fans for pulling off fancy maneuvers during races, and these points go toward your overall level. Instead of being limited to the single-player level cap of 25, the independent level cap goes up to 50 in online play, giving you much more reason to keep getting out on the track to prove your worth. You unlock cars and modifications as you get deeper into the game, and it’s a blast mixing and matching to form the perfect strategy for coming out in first place. When you first go online, you’re limited to just a few different race types, but after leveling up for a few hours, the rest opens up to you. These include races with or without power-ups and even battle arenas on circular tracks. Adding to the online experience are challenges you can send to people on your friends list, giving them specific goals to try to beat. If you get an impressive time and high score during a race, you can see if your buddies are good enough to top your best. It’s a lot of fun to send out and complete challenges, and the diversity in objectives ensures there’s always something to strive for.

There’s a split-screen mode as well, but this is far less entertaining than single-player and online multiplayer. First of all, there are no persistent rewards. Even though point markers appear whenever you strike your friend with a weapon or pull off a smooth turn, they don’t accumulate, and there aren’t any prizes to earn. This removes much of the appeal of the other modes in which striving for new toys to play with is almost as much fun as the racing. Furthermore, the rearview mirror has been taken out, which makes it difficult to play defensively during races. It’s almost impossible to dodge attacks when you can’t see them coming, so you find yourself immobilized far more often. Finally, you can’t go online with a friend in tow. Split-screen is fun if you just want to play a quick race with a buddy, but it lacks any sort of long-term appeal and doesn’t stack up to the other elements in the game.

The first-person view puts your chin right on the asphalt.

The visuals also have a few rough patches. When your health gets too low, the screen throbs read, which is fine except that it makes it difficult to see the road in front of you while you’re desperately trying to stay alive. Crashes also leave a lot to be desired. When you tumble off a cliff or fly into the water, you passively watch your car fly off in the distance without a satisfying explosion. Everything else is technically proficient but lacks any sort of flair to keep your eyes entertained. The cars are nicely detailed and move at a breakneck speed, but everything has a generic look that makes it difficult for this game to stand out from the crowd. The one bit of personality Blur’s visual exhibit is in the outlandish power-ups. The neon purple missiles and shocking blue lightning bolts add a dose of energy to the sterile view. The bland visuals don’t take away the thrill of the high-speed action, but it lacks the artistic brilliance that could have made this a treat for your eyes.

Thankfully, the lame split-screen mode and unremarkable visuals won’t keep you from enjoying this exciting racing game. The odd combination of Mario Kart and PGR is surprisingly fun, and the added rewards system makes it extremely difficult to put this racer down. Blur is so fast and fun to control that you can lose hours slamming into enemies and racking up fans, always coming back for one more race before you turn the system off and walk away. This unlikely marriage has created an offspring that does a fine job of honoring its well-respected parents.

Split/Second is all about power plays. As you zip about the 11 tracks (a 12th empty slot hints at the possibility of future downloadable content), you earn power by drifting, drafting, and getting air. Once you gain enough power, icons appear, indicating an opportunity to take down opponents by triggering a destructive event. If you press a button, a helicopter might drop metal pipes onto the course, a crane may go sliding across the roadway, or rocks and boulders may erupt from a canyon wall. Alternatively, you might trigger a bridge to be lowered or a door to be raised, opening up a temporary shortcut. If you trigger a level-two power play after completely filling your power bar, the devastation is even more dramatic. A chunk of roadway could collapse, changing that entire section of the course, or you might cause that enormous airplane to barrel menacingly down the runway. Just be mindful: You could fall victim to your own power play.

The first few times you unleash your newfound power on an opponent are breathtaking. Explosions and screeches are loud and obnoxious, and if you’re driving a lighter vehicle, the powerful shocks might send you careening out of control for a moment. You won’t always steer clear of trouble, however. Depending on your position and the timing of your opponent’s power play, there may be no evading that enormous obstacle that comes crashing down in front of you. If you’ve ever cursed the unavoidable blue shell in the Mario Kart series, the inescapable events in Split/Second might annoy you. But getting wrecked is rarely frustrating, for several reasons. Firstly, power play triggers are intelligently laid out, so you aren’t likely to get caught up in an inexorable string of accidents. (It’s possible to respawn in the middle of more devastation and wreck immediately, but such aggravations are uncommon.) Secondly, the game gets you back into the race quickly after you crash. And thirdly, being behind the pack isn’t really a bad thing because it gives you the opportunity to bust up the competition.

The single-player campaign is structured as a reality television show on which you are contestant. Split/Second doesn’t do a whole lot with the premise (you won’t meet any slimy TV producers or peek in on any bloodthirsty viewers), but each episode’s introduction and credit sequence is produced so well that you look forward to seeing what courses you unlock next. Episodes and one-off events include the usual races and elimination matches, all limited to eight participants. There are a few additional modes worth noting, however. In Survivor mode, you earn points by passing a series of semitrucks as you circle around the course. There’s some fine print, however: These trucks are dropping explosive barrels onto the track. The more trucks you pass without wrecking, the faster you accumulate points. In Air Revenge mode, you must avoid a helicopter’s missile strikes long enough to trigger a power play that deflects the missiles back toward the badly behaving chopper. Neither mode features the environmental devastation that makes Split/Second stand out, but they make for fun and anarchic diversions nonetheless.

Yet even with the variety these and a couple of other extra modes add, Split/Second comes off as a bit basic. It doesn’t take long to memorize each track, including power play locations. So while entire sections of the track may change if someone activates a level-two power play, the game doesn’t offer as much flexibility and variety as Burnout: Paradise or even MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. If you strip away the power plays completely, you have a solid but unspectacular racer with few trimmings. You unlock new vehicles as you play with various stats relating to power, drifting, and so on, but there is no way to customize their appearance, aside from changing their color. You also unlock decals as you play, but they appear automatically on your vehicle. Fortunately, the racing itself is smooth; a low camera angle gives sports cars a terrific sense of speed, and drifting feels great, even in the slipperiest of vehicles. Collision sensitivity, however, can go a bit awry. Sometimes you can bang into a wall and emerge perfectly intact, while at other times, barely scraping a girder can result in an immediate crash. But these are rare moments in an otherwise dependable racing model.

Rubbing is racing!

Once you’ve cut your teeth on the single-player season, you can show off your racing and crashing expertise online. There’s a rather bare-bones experience here. You can jump quickly into a race using the Public Game option, but the game cycles through tracks on its own. Conversely, you can host a match for friends and fill empty slots with AI racers, but you can’t limit the vehicles allowed in the race or even set the number of laps. Nevertheless, while it lacks the peripheral online features you’d expect from a modern racer, multiplayer Split/Second is often a riot. The AI is aggressive, but computer opponents don’t offer the cutthroat competition human players do. In full races, expect an intriguing tug-of-war as pack leaders fall victim to well-timed power plays from racers lagging behind. Besides, it’s always a pleasure to destroy a competitor who previously caused an enormous wrecking ball to smash into the side of your racecar.

You can play Elimination and Survival matches with other players, though standard races offer the most pound-for-pound thrills. (Multiplayer Survival can get too chaotic for its own good.) There are some Xbox 360-specific online quirks that need sorting out, however. In that version, the game may report erroneous times and point totals should a competitor drop out midrace. This issue doesn’t appear to affect the points you receive toward your overall ranking. However, it’s still annoying for the game to indicate you are in first place as you cross the finish line, only for the results screen to erroneously report that an AI racer crossed the finish line two minutes beforehand. We didn’t experience this issue in other versions of the game, though the PC version possesses a few foibles of its own. Most noticeably, the game’s button prompts don’t change if you’ve plugged in a controller, and in some cases, contextual prompts are completely missing. For example, you will get a prompt inviting you to view an instant replay, but for some reason, the game doesn’t tell you how to view it.

Just because you’re in first place doesn’t mean you can get complacent.

Split/Second is unlikely to become your go-to racer, but while it lasts, it’s one hell of a thrill ride. Tailing an opponent and taking advantage of his shortcut, watching a tall tower fall onto your speeding nemesis, drifting around a corner while miraculously avoiding destruction raining from the sky–these are great moments that will make you cry out in glee. This is a one-trick pony, and once you see through the trick, it’s hard not to wish there was something more substantial to support it. But if you’re in the mood for some rip-roaring fun with no strings attached, Split/Second makes for a boisterous weekend romp.

Traditional point-and-click adventure is alive and well in The Whispered World. But that’s both good and bad for Daedalic Entertainment’s surreal fantasy about a sad clown and the end of the world. While the German game certainly features the captivating story and memorable characters that made classic adventures so engaging, it also boasts dozens of those old-fashioned illogical puzzles that made you want to tear out your hair and a lot of wordy dialogue that slows the action to a crawl. This is one of those experiences that does enough right in terms of storytelling to make you embrace it, but enough wrong to make you wonder why you’re wasting your time.

The protagonist of this odd tale is Sadwick the Sorrowful Clown, a sad-sack kid in a jester’s costume. He looks a lot like Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh’s depressive donkey sidekick, with the tails of his jester’s hat taking the place of long floppy ears. Sadwick is also just as down in the dumps as Eeyore but with good reason–he’s the human cannonball and resident whipping boy for a small family circus. Grandpa can never remember his name. Bother Ben treats him like some kind of indentured servant and insults his artistic ambitions to write poetry or perform legitimate theater. And he’s having constant nightmares about the end of the world, which in this case is a medieval fantasy land of sorts filled with magic and far-off kingdoms. The only creature that loves this clown is his pet “caterpillar” Spot, a green globular character that looks like the Shmoo from ’80s Saturday morning cartoons that can similarly morph into different shapes like balls on demand. Spot lets his cuteness do the talking, remaining silent through the entire game with the exception of the odd squeak. He really serves as more of a tool that allows Sadwick to explore places he can’t get into than as any sort of adventuring companion.

Most of the story centers on Sadwick’s search for adventure. After spending the first few minutes of the game getting told off by his jerk of a brother and senile grandfather, he wanders into the woods and runs into a goblinlike messenger from the far-off kingdom of Corona. The king is sick and the realm may fall to a race of beings called the Asgil, so the only hope is to get a magic item called the Whispering Stone back to the castle quickly. A seer of sorts named Shana is apparently the only one who can help get the stone, but when Sadwick finds her, she goes into a trance and tells him that he is fated to destroy the world…just the kind of thing that every clinically depressed clown wants to hear. Sadwick can’t bring himself to tell her this when she awakens, however, so he lies and says she actually prophesied that he would save the world. At this point, she gives him a few vague tips on how to do so and the quest begins in earnest.

Unfortunately, you feel like you’ve done it all before. The Whispered World may be loaded with story and atmosphere, featuring striking painted backgrounds, character animations straight out of a great cartoon, and a haunting piano/flute musical theme, but everything is overdone. Some of the charm of this dreamy fairytale is lost because there is too much dialogue. Every rock and bush comes with commentary from Sadwick, and most of the conversations go on endlessly, through what seems to be a dozen or more options in branching dialogue trees. At first, this florid script immerses you in the story. An hour or so later, listening to all of this meandering jibber-jabber builds the tedium up so much that you’ll just scan the lines and click through them as quickly as possible. Voice acting quality is hit and miss, too. Some characters are very bland, while others are overwrought, and at regular intervals, a bug causes voices to go silent until you restart the game. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, because Sadwick speaks with a nasally whine (again, like Eeyore) that makes you want to smack him. Atmosphere as conveyed by the outstanding art is also a bit much because it is so detailed that items blend into backgrounds. Every locale is just crammed with great little touches, from all of the junk strewn around Sadwick’s trailer to the throne room in the castle at Corona. So while it’s great to just gawk at all of this art, it’s not so great to have to highlight the many clickable objects on every screen with the spacebar in order to keep the game from turning into an annoying pixel hunt.

The puzzles are very derivative. This is an old-fashioned adventure, like Sierra and LucasArts used to make, where you have to pick up everything that isn’t nailed down no matter how stupid it might seem. Common sense is trampled on much of the time. Sadwick just has no reason to grab some things, like his grandfather’s crusty old handkerchief, yet you make him do it anyway because you know that you’ll eventually be able to MacGyver some essential gadget out of even the smallest piece of refuse. Actually solving many puzzles is also virtually impossible because of the incredible leaps in logic necessary to figure things out. At one point, for instance, you need to grab some pantaloons stuck high up on a wall. You have a ladder. Simple, right? Not really. Instead of simply climbing the ladder, you have to close a door to see a mouse hole in the wall behind it, lure the mouse out with a sock, grab the mouse, and then dangle it by its tail on top of the wall above the pantaloons, where the little rodent grabs said puffy pants with his teeth. The human cannonball puzzle is even more insane, forcing you to do absurd things like make a sculpture out of tree resin, stone turtles, grandpa’s dentures, and bear claws to scare your brother into dropping his objections to your stealing (another) pair of pantaloons and a red juggling ball. Your head hurts just thinking about this stuff. At least the handful or so of set piece brainteasers are involving and challenging, even if they mostly rely on old genre standards. These include sliding tiles, moving chess pieces, and mixing chemicals to make various meals and potions.

In short, The Whispered World is beautiful, yet treacherous. Although the game has many strong points in the dreamlike storyline, gorgeous painted art, and detailed script loaded with dialogue, it is too slavish an imitation of the old adventure game formula to be completely enjoyable two decades after the heyday of Sierra and LucasArts. Going retro is one thing; forcing adventurers to wrangle with pixel hunts and riddles that you have no chance of figuring out without a walk-through is something else entirely.

You play as Ashley, one of many individuals frozen in a cryogenic stupor after environmental contamination rendered Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The time has come for the slumbering residents of the underground cryostation to reanimate and head back to the surface, but for some reason, you’re the only person the station’s AI can revive, which makes you humankind’s last hope. Well, you and your artificial guide, O.S.C.A.R., whose stale, droning monotone guides you through the facility’s dreary innards and provides you with occasional updates. If Portal’s GlaDOS is puzzle gaming’s charmingly sociopathic matron, O.S.C.A.R. is her boring second cousin. He’s voiced with all the appeal and adeptness of a fourth grader reciting his paper on what he did over summer vacation, and he wears out his welcome just as quickly. Ashley is faintly more interesting, though the actress’s attempts at occasional exasperation and fear are amateurish. To be fair, however, few actors could break out of a yawn over Twin Sector’s plain dialogue, which does just the bare minimum to keep the plot moving forward.

If you came for the puzzles and not for the story, you’ll at least like the concept behind the gameplay. Ashley wears two special telekinetic gloves: one that pushes and one that pulls. Using the pulling glove, you can yank objects like barrels and boxes toward you, or pull yourself toward walls and walkways. With the pushing glove, you can fling those same barrels away from you, or even propel yourself off the ground. You can perform a number of different feats using these gloves, such as leaping across wide chasms, throwing barrels to hit unreachable buttons, and breaking through busted doors by throwing flaming canisters at them or rolling big balls of trash into them. A few multistage puzzles are complex enough to seem clever, such as one in which you must maneuver a garbage ball through a number of corridors, up and down ramps, and through an antigravity room. Brief moments like this showcase Twin Sector’s notable potential.

Unfortunately, Twin Sector is characterized more by its lifeless production values and irritating design flaws. The physics are frustratingly uneven, so a simple leap onto a pipe above you may not work as you intended. Or you might try to set one barrel on top of another, only to topple the tiny tower when you attempt to carefully set the barrel in place and instead fling it forward. The presence of seekers–aggressive, hovering balls buzzing with lethal electricity–make certain levels even more exasperating, because you must overcome the imprecise physics while under pressure. In other cases, basic defects can bring the game to a dead halt. For example, the inexact physics may cause you to extinguish your limited supply of exploding canisters or insanely fragile water cylinders before you’ve accomplished the task you needed them for. This leads to a stalemate in which you cannot progress and the game does not fail you–a fundamental design flaw. In another case, a dispenser will eternally provide an additional canister if you should use up the last one (it somehow magically knows), but in this circumstance, it’s possible to lose a canister without causing it to explode. No explosion means no newly dispensed canister. This could have been avoided had Twin Sector allowed you to summon a canister of your own accord, but the game lacks this kind of common sense design.

Twin Sector also lacks a strong sense of place. The cryogenic facility is an aimless maze of gray hallways and large empty rooms inexplicably protected by lasers and turrets. Any object you encounter is meant to help you solve a puzzle or to hinder your progression; otherwise, the environments are flat and empty. Every room looks more or less the same, with few changes in color palette, lighting, or architecture. There are no creepy crevasses, no flickering bulbs, no looming shadows–no sense of tension, or joy, or sorrow, or anything at all. The sound design is even more dismally sparse, which becomes more noticeable when the musical score goes silent. You hear Ashley’s footsteps as you trod down the endless hallways, but she makes no sound whatsoever when she jumps. Industrial fans spin behind grates, but they don’t hum or whir–they make no sound at all. The effects that do exist, such as the miserable crackle of fire, sound as if they were pilfered from a public domain database. You’d expect that breaking open a huge metal door would result in a raucous din of clinging and clanging, not a simple dreary thump.

Twin Sector has an interesting idea that deserved a better game to bring it to life. A few competent puzzles hint at what could have been, but the game has no character and no drive; like that poor door punctured by rolling rubbish, it makes a dull thud rather than a raucous roar. Some games feel like labors of love. Twin Sector is pure labor.

Divinity II makes a good first impression. The initial areas are sunny and bright, and the first major town you visit has a nice fantasy ambience that’s just off-kilter enough to avoid looking generic. This is Rivellon, the same world in which the first two games in the series–Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity–took place, though you don’t need to be familiar with them to follow along here. You play a dragon slayer recruit, still in the process of the initiation stages, when you stumble upon a dragon knight in her final death throes. She transfers her powers to you, you meet a bearded sorcerer wearing a big floppy hat covered with stars, and before you know it, you’re a dragon knight yourself. It seems that dragons are not the real enemy; rather, the scowling, monologue-loving, bald-headed Damian has returned to the realm and is gathering a powerful army. But Zandalor, the aforementioned wizard stereotype, has a plan: infiltrate the Hall of Echoes, where the dead slumber, and revive Damian’s lover, Ygerna. Due to the powerful magic that connects their souls, doing so will in turn trigger Damian’s death.

It’s a good premise, but the game does a poor job of making you feel connected to the events that unfold. The transformation from slayer to knight could have made an impact, but scant character development and minimalist dialogue siphon away any potential dramatic tension. Some talented voice actors give their lines energy and enthusiasm, but they’re rarely given anything interesting to say, and key characters are simple cliches without much personality of their own. And even should you somehow become caught up in the struggle against Damian and his allies, the disappointing ending will let the wind out of your sails. Nevertheless, there are some clever delights scattered about Rivellon, and Divinity II is best when its tongue is planted firmly in cheek. A quest to stop a troll infestation eventually leads you to a roomful of clucking chickens; you solve a riddle filled with enough silly sexual double entendre to make even the most jaded player titter; and the creature you summon to your side stops from time to time to lift his leg and empty his bladder.

In the first hour you’ll be asked to choose one of three classes, but don’t give this decision too much consideration: Divinity II features a classless skill progression system and provides a good number of different skills to learn in multiple categories. Weapons and magic skills are what you’d expect to see in a fantasy game. Whether you prefer bows or axes, fireballs or magic missiles, you’ll find something to your liking, and the steady flow of new goodies will keep loot lovers happy. The early hours, in which you seek out the objects and knowledge that allow you to take your dragon form, send you across sun-drenched fields and into a looming tower. In time you explore goblin-infested caves, mysterious mines, a beach littered with whale carcasses, and a zeppelin port, among other locales. The technology powering Divinity II is not cutting edge; animations are clumsy, textures are bland, and oddities like boulders that aren’t flush to the ground and buildings that disappear when you move the camera betray a certain awkwardness. Yet there are some attractive vistas to ogle, and there is a nice amount of visual variety to the dungeons. The art design is familiar but lovely, masking the technical flaws with flourishes of ivy, the deep red glow of molten lava, and shafts of golden light.

It takes a few too many hours before you can take to the skies as a dragon. Once you reach that point, however, you’ll appreciate how freeing it is to fly about the oft-unfriendly skies. You can’t soar everywhere, mind you. There are plenty of mountains and invisible walls to hem you in, and certain areas are protected by force fields that will quickly fry you if you try to penetrate them. As a dragon you have access to a separate set of skills and armor, though these options are much more limited than those you get on the ground. Nevertheless, it’s a hoot to unleash scorching fury on enemy wyrms and anti-dragon towers, particularly in areas containing flying fortresses. These regions have a nice pace to them, requiring you to switch back and forth between forms, moving quickly from aerial lizard fights to ground-based skirmishes. Oddly, however, you can’t see ground-based enemies from the air, so you might exit dragon form only to land in the middle of a bunch of Black Ring troops eager to crush you to a pulp. On the flipside, airborne fiends will ignore you once you’re on terra firma. Your dragon form is not the only grand reward awaiting you once you’ve slashed your way through the first third of the game. You also gain access to your very own battle tower, which functions as a home base where you can store excess items and ask your private dancer to perform perhaps the unsexiest jig you ever did see. The tower is more than just a safe haven, however: it also provides you with a number of helpful non-player characters who make potions, enchant weapons and accessories, and extend your skill levels–all for a fee, of course. Enchantments make loot collection even more interesting, particularly since you can also improve your stats and skills by adding charms to many of your items. Your most intriguing employee, however, is the necromancer, who will sew a creature together out of various limbs you find or purchase. It all seems a bit creepy, but playing Dr. Frankenstein is fun, and the creature is a great help in battle.

Not all of Divinity II’s more original facets require you to wait so long before you can enjoy them. In the first hour or so, you earn the ability to read minds, and during most conversations, you can choose the mind-reading option to discover what kinds of secrets characters might be hiding. A few quests, such as a very early one involving an unfaithful wife and her not-so-innocent husband, use this option to some effect and let you use the information you discover to solve the quest in a few different ways. However, most mind-reading attempts of significance lead to treasure chest passwords, hidden loot stashes, lower vendor prices, or additional skill points. These benefits are nice, but rarely does the option lead to quest flexibility or greater insight into a character’s psyche. What mind reading essentially does is to turn experience points (which you must spend in order to read minds) into a form of currency: you spend XP for the chance to gain other types of rewards. Divinity II hints at the potential flexibility mind reading could have provided but never explores it, which is a shame considering the game’s linear nature. There are plenty of side quests, and you can tackle many of them in more or less any order. But don’t expect the kind of elasticity that games like Fallout 3, Dragon Age, or even Risen provide. In most conversations, it doesn’t matter whether you choose the line that makes you sound like a jerk or the line that makes you sound like a paragon of virtue. With very few exceptions, such as a fascinating sequence in which your moral choices determine which reward you receive, the result is always the same.

While not all of these creative elements work as well as others, the ideas are mostly sound. Unfortunately, developer Larian Studios botched too many game design basics, which all too often makes you wish that these inventive ideas were used in a better, cleaner game. Enemy encounters are often a big problem for many reasons. This is a challenging game even on medium difficulty, though the challenge too often results from unbalanced skirmishes and poor pacing and is further exacerbated by the imprecise combat. Enemies don’t respawn, so there aren’t many chances to grind if you enter an area that seems out of your league. You’ll die frequently as you make your way through the hordes of skeletons and dragon elves, but the game doesn’t offer the precise combat needed to make for fair fights. Most boss fights are more easily won by exploiting the game’s poor AI (hide behind a pillar so the bad guys don’t see you) or poor pathfinding (get the enemy stuck running in place, and then fill him with arrows) than with clever battle tactics. As it is, these tactics involve a lot of jumping, rolling, and hit-and-run attacks, which is erratic but not very strategic–and not much fun.

Other quirks and flaws will also get in your way. Platforming sequences provide a nice change of pace, but floaty, inexact jumping make some of these sections more exasperating than enjoyable. If you pull a foe too far from its home area, it will regenerate its health and be all but invincible until it runs back to its starting location. In one dungeon, enemies regenerate indefinitely but (like many creatures summoned by your enemies) don’t reward you with experience points, even though they can very certainly murder you. And we ran into a number of bugs on multiple systems. Exiting the game may cause the process to hang and force you to use the Windows task manager to close the program, and never-ending loading screens might also lead to a similar shutdown. In one case, we got stuck in an inescapable conversation and therefore could not complete a side quest. Divinity II is clumsy, from its poorly designed minimap to the thin quest log. As a result, it feels as if it were designed from the top down, rather than from the ground up.

Divinity II may draw you in despite its foibles. Flying about as a dragon, summoning your custom-made beast to your side, messing around with enchantments and charms–these elements are thoughtfully designed and inventive enough to be entertaining. But the disappointing story, glitchy AI, and all sorts of minor frustrations bog it down. If you’re a forgiving RPG fanatic, you may be able to overlook the faults and see this sequel for what it might have been. But great ideas don’t always make a great game, and Divinity II isn’t as slick and addictive as its predecessors, or as gripping and replayable as its modern competition.