TwoDots 

Available on iOS. Played on iPad Air.

Almost all free-to-play games are fundamentally evil, slyly convincing players to hand over the bucks through endless microtransactions after luring them in with the free initial download. On the other hand, TwoDots’ microtransactions might actually be an act of immense humanity. 

This minimalistic puzzle game is crazy addictive, like Cookie Clicker or 2048 levels of addictive. The paywall and recharge times for lives actually do a great service in rigidly enforcing playtime limits. You won’t blow away a whole day playing TwoDots the same way you could spend endless hours shifting tiles in 2048. 

The goal is simple: You connect dots of the same color together. The connected dots then disappear. You must get a certain number of dots in a certain number of moves to complete a level. Levels ramp up in difficulty appropriately, with each successive stage becoming harder than the last, but never too much harder. 

TwoDots makes for an excellent game to play during commutes or tiny bits of downtime. The microtransactions ensure that it never becomes all-consuming, while the rest of the game proper offers a lot of well-designed fun. 

Watch Dogs

Available on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Wii U. Played on PS4.

Watch Dogs hit store shelves as a bit of an underdog: Following a stunning debut trailer, every single piece of footage released thereafter was harshly scrutinized by the Internet and deemed lacking. The last-minute delay certainly didn’t help matters, nor did Grand Theft Auto V’s thunderous launch in September. 

Unfortunately, the final game doesn’t do much to silence the naysayers. A glitch-ridden, inconsistently executed muddle, Watch Dogs is the textbook example of a day late and a dollar short. 

The central premise is still pretty interesting. Gamers play as elite hacker Aiden Pearce, running around Chicago controlling traffic lights and hacking into bank accounts with an overpowered smartphone. 

The premise and the announcement trailer promised a huge, immersive sandbox set in a thoroughly simulated city where your highly advanced smartphone lets you be cyberpunk Batman. You could cause car accidents on a whim; reveal the deepest, darkest secrets of the Chicagoans around you; or hack into the city’s police database and stop crime. 

The actual game does contain a lot of the promised features, but without almost any vision, coherent design or confidence. As a result, Watch Dogs is only intermittently engaging. Some of the core hacking mechanics are compelling, but the game’s insecurity means that all the neat hacking puzzles only serve as wallpaper for yet another open-world, third-person shooter starring yet another hypocritical, gravelly-voiced hero. 

Watch Dogs does have some merits, especially the surprisingly fun multiplayer, but it’s certainly nothing close to the definitive next-gen experience it was hyped to be. 

Wolfenstein:The New Order

Available on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Wii U. Played on PS4.

For some baffling reason, the developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order must have watched the entire filmography of Terrence Malick before making their hyper-violent grindhouse game about Nazi space wizards.    

How else would you explain returning protagonist B.J. Blazkowicz’s constant voice-over or the game’s clumsy stabs at profundity? To be fair, The New Order is a lot better at storytelling than any game starring a character named B.J. Blazkowicz has any right to be. 

The year is 1960. The aforementioned Nazi space wizards have won World War II and conquered the rest of the planet. Blazkowicz wakes up from a 14-year coma and immediately seeks out any survivors of the resistance. The protagonists, a ragtag assortment of tired resistance fighters, are all well-rounded and conceived with surprising depth and nuance. Blazkowicz himself is a surprisingly compelling figure, convincingly vulnerable despite all the insane carnage he deals out over the course of the game. 

A lot of effort has gone into fleshing out the world of The New Order. Newspaper clippings hinting at the alternate timeline litter the world, as do sharply designed German propaganda posters and funny alternate-timeline versions of 1960s music. 

Wolfenstein: The New Order then wraps all of these charming elements around a thoughtfully designed shooter, mixing certain old-school elements (such as the ability to carry all of your weapons at once) with more modern sensibilities (your health recharges) into a solid game that only occasionally overreaches. 

These trespasses are seriously jarring in the moment, but they’re easy to forgive when the rest of the game is so fun and engaging.

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