Xbox 360

I Am Alive clearly wants to be a serious, adult take on post-apocalyptic survival, and in some respects it is. Unfortunately, the game's treatment of women, among other things, seems to devolve back to the attitudes of a teenaged boy. In I Am Alive, women are helpless objects to be fought over and protected by men.

Dragon's Dogma was a game I was very curious about since seeing an early demo last year, but there were a lot of questions in my mind about what the final product would be like. After speaking with others who were also looking forward to it, I see that I wasn't alone in wanting more information. Now that I've logged some time with it, I thought it might be helpful to clear up a few things for those of you who are considering picking it up.

Once again, the guys at Extra Credits go through some games that caught their eye but may have flown under everyone else's radar. Some obvious ones make the list like Dungeon Defenders and Recettear, but they also include some lesser known releases like Dear Esther, The Dark Meadow and Xotic to name a few. Check out the video to see they mentioned one of your under the radar releases.

Square, Cube, Spiral

HIGH "A-HAAAA!!!"

LOW It ain't fun fighting the Backtrack Monster.

WTF The ending is pure gaming gravy.

It was the power of adorkableness that convinced me to buy Kingdoms of Amalur. Seriously. I tried the demo and was resoundingly apathetic towards it, but when Day9 streamed it with Felicia Day at his house, and with the ridiculous hilarity that resulted by their combined dorkiness, I was dazzled by the geekiness and shelled out a full sixty bones for the PC version.

An Evolutionary Dead End

HIGH The Prototype characters are über-badasses.

LOW Outdated mission and world structure, repetitive tasks.

WTF The eleventh-hour attempt to humanize Heller.

Looking forward to a Gamecritics review of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition? I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we won't be covering it anytime soon due to the game shipping in an unplayable state.

Three Slices Through the Same Exquisite Corpse

HIGH Tense and significant story-based choices.

LOW Not knowing whether I was stuck or just waiting for the plot to progress.

WTF The way to break a window "silently." Also, batteries.

Who Can Stop the Rain?

HIGH The Hansel and Gretel play sequence—it's a cool setpiece that pays off in an even cooler way.

LOW Too close to call—clunky combat or the occasional crashes.

WTF Why are there so few enemy types in this game?

Mortal Kombat and Portal 2 combined last April to move well over 1.5  million units. Compare the significance of those two games with Kinect Star Wars, and Prototype 2. You really can't. Even adding The Witcher 2 to the mix, these games simply don't have the same kind of selling power as last April's slate of game releases. Without prominent and captivating game releases, consumers aren't going to spend money on software… or hardware, for that matter.