Considering Virtua Tennis was once the king of tennis games, its latest iteration is particularly disappointing, doing little to keep up with competition from 2K’s excellent Top Spin 4. The graphical tweaks are nice, and the new minigames are fun, but at its core, Virtua Tennis 4’s position-based shot mechanics are essentially identical to those in the 1999 arcade original. They’re easy to pick up, but they feel dated and unrefined by today’s standards, giving fans of the series a distinct feeling of deja vu and making you crave greater control over the ball. It’s not as if there’s fun content to play through either. The career mode is inherently flawed, the online options limited, and the Move implementation is terrible.

With Anno 2070, a well-regarded series of strategic city builders goes rushing headlong into the future. No longer do you produce spices and dates, or ivory and jade. Such notions seem almost quaint in Anno 2070, where fancy health drinks and microchips are in high demand, and submarines scan for anomalies near underwater islands. The game’s appealing futuristic vibe is apparent from the main menu screen, where you view the rotating Earth as if through a satellite feed, scan lines and static occasionally disrupting your view. But the joy goes far beyond the superficial. Anno 2070 is a detailed and daunting game that lures you in with its attractive trappings, and then hooks you with its interwoven social and economic structures. Sandbox urban planning and structured missions are combined effortlessly. It’s a one-two punch of game addictiveness: “Slowly expand and improve my growing civilization” and “I’ll do just one more quest before I turn in.

Codemasters’ third Formula One game sees the series finally find its feet. A broader range of game modes gives you much more to do, while great care has been taken to ease newcomers into the game. Though F1 2012 doesn’t capture the magic that surrounds the sport, the on-circuit action is the best and most exciting of the series. You’ll be holding your breath as you sweep around the majestic corners of world-renowned circuits, cursing as opponents swerve past you, and punching the air as you reach the chequered flag for months to come.

The world of Albion is brimming with a vibrant personality that few imaginary worlds are able to match. While strolling down cheery forest lanes with a soothing melody permeating the air, it’s easy to lose yourself in the fantastical atmosphere that encompasses this adventure. The quirky citizens you meet along the way are all too willing to make jokes at their own expense or send you on a ridiculous side quest that will leave you laughing at your given duties while admiring the stunning sights along the way. And it is these elements that make Fable III such an enjoyable adventure, even though the other aspects of your journey are not nearly as interesting. Subtle changes have further simplified the already uncomplicated gameplay mechanics of Fable II leaving an adventure that hardly requires any thought to complete. Streamlined combat and limited morality options make the life of an adventurer somewhat predictable, and a lack of emotional connection to any of the characters–including your dog–makes your entire journey feel slight. But even with some stumbles along this golden road, Fable III’s enticing aesthetics make it a pleasure to traipse through this fairy tale land.

Beyond the limits of civilization lies an island, a lawless place ruled by piracy and human misery, where your only escapes are drugs or the muzzle of a gun. This is where you find yourself, trapped in a place that’s forgotten right from wrong, a place that lives by the principles of violence.

The world of Tyria, as imagined in the massively multiplayer Guild Wars 2, is an endlessly intriguing place, stuffed with mystery and adventure, gifting you with gorgeous sights and personal stories that etch themselves into your memory. These are the kinds of stories you tell for months to come–and they arise from your own spontaneous experiences. There’s the one about how you and your guildmates emerged from chilly waters into an ominous thunderstorm, captured a tower from the enemy, and escaped from a roaring crowd of necromancers and rangers before they could deliver you to the devil. Then there’s the one where a giant lightning-breathing dragon landed in a dark-misted field, and you joined a legion of soldiers to cleanse the land of its blight. Guild Wars 2 strips away the traditional game of “follow the waypoint,” allowing you to feel like part of a vast living landscape rather than the tool of a thousand and one taskmasters.

In this third Guild Wars campaign, players must fight to hold back the night as a mad ruler attempts to free an outcast god and bring darkness to the continent of Elona. But players won’t fight alone. Guild Wars Nightfall introduces new customizable Heroes who level up, follow player instructions in combat, and use skills and equipment of the player’s choosing. These Heroes will follow the player through savage coasts, ancient monuments, and poisonous deserts during an epic story that spans twenty missions and hundreds of quests.

War on American soil isn’t a foreign concept for first-person shooters, but few do it with the grim dedication of Homefront. Its chilling vision of life in occupied America is vividly illustrated through lengthy scenes that depict the brutality of military subjugation and the desperation of its victims. This thoroughly developed setting is one of the most engaging the genre has seen in a while, making the campaign worthwhile despite its run-of-the-mill action and unsatisfying length. There is some longevity, however, to be found in Homefront’s competitive online multiplayer. Though the paltry few modes are little more than a pastiche of gameplay mechanics you’ve seen before, that little more tips the scales just enough to create a hectic and enjoyable combat arena. Much of what Homefront offers feels overly familiar, but the dramatic setting and good multiplayer recipe make it a worthy stop on any shooter fan’s tour of duty.

There’s something strangely familiar about Inversion and its topsy-turvy, postapocalyptic world. It’s not so much that it takes inspiration from the greats of the shooter world as that it rips them off entirely. Trying to find an original idea in this cover-based shooter is as hard as trying to find depth in its ludicrously over-the-top tale of planetary invasion, or in its painfully generic multiplayer offerings–there simply isn’t any. For all the bombastic set pieces and gravity-based blood and guts it throws at you, you’re left with nothing but a feeling of deja vu: you’ve jumped from these exploding buildings, splattered these heads with a sniper rifle, and guided this meatheaded protagonist to victory many a time before.

Sacrifice. It’s Mass Effect 3’s major theme, and rightly so. After all, the reapers were coming–it was only a matter of time. And now, those sentient space vessels are here, and with them, a galaxy’s worth of destruction. Mass Effect 3 brings the sound and the fury, but these aren’t meaningless shows of laser fire and alien devastation. The series has earned its right to showcase such destruction by drawing us close to its characters and teaching us of its universe.