Shooting

The Devil's Backside

HIGH Some melee kills are decently animated.

LOW An utter lack of excitement from start to finish.

WTF The Devil doesn't even make an appearance in this game. Liars!

You Got Your Multi in My Singleplayer!

HIGH Getting caught in a jam and getting unexpected backup.

LOW Getting caught in a jam and not getting unexpected backup.

WTF Twenty-five hours and not a single machine gun better than my first one?

Tunnel Vision

HIGH Stepping out onto the irradiated surface in the midst of a downpour.

LOW The stealth approach is so overpowered it can completely break immersion.

WTF Those dancers jiggle harder than the Dead or Alive girls.

The term "Space Marine" has always been something of a misnomer. For all the "space" implied in the name, the vast majority of space marines do their fighting on good old terra firma. And while that same basic contradiction is true for Dust 514, there's no denying that its success, in this case, could connect gamers to the stars in one of the most ambitious ways imaginable.

Packing Heat from the Last Generation

HIGH Mastering combat and getting through bosses untouched.

LOW The forest area kills the pace and drags on for way too long.

WTF What the heck is neblading?!?

It's the end of a generation, and the GC crew takes a look back at the era that was. We throw out our Most Overrated and Underappreciated games of the past gen, and somehow we were all still on speaking terms afterwards. Also, some bonus talk on the magic of Pokémon. With Sinan Kubba, Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, Mike "I Hate You All" Bracken, and Richard Naik.

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Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

At E3 2011, as part of the Electronic Arts press conference, Insomniac Games announced Overstrike—a campy, over-the-top cooperative shooter. Around a year later, the game had received a facelift and a new name: Fuse. I spoke to Insomniac Games' CEO Ted Price about rebranding, multi-platform development, and what it is like to launch a brand-new franchise at the end of a console cycle.

BioShock Infinite is a violent game, and it has to be. That's a contrast to BioShock, an equally violent game where combat conveyed nothing about its main character and had little to do with the game's themes other than spurring the player to engage in its various economies. Any stimulus—using plasmids to solve environmental puzzles, for instance—would have sufficed. That's not so in Columbia. Violence is essential to who Booker DeWitt is, and what Columbia is. Their story cannot be told without it.

More Like Crysis 2.5

HIGH Finely tuned predatory gameplay. Also, silenced shotguns.

LOW The abysmal final boss fight.

WTF The explanation for how Prophet's back in the saddle is ridiculous.

Hunting the Dead

HIGH Watching a single bullet plow through five zombies.

LOW Anything with skeletons. Seriously, the skeletons are horrible.

WTF I'm disappointed by the utter lack of zombie Hitler, Rebellion.