Up to, during, and after its release, Mass Effect set the imaginations of gamers ablaze. It was an experience that many people seemed to embrace without a second thought. It was some time after its release that people saw Mass Effect for what it really was: a nice, if unsuccessful attempt. Poor handling during driving sequences (that only served to pad gameplay), bland combat, cumbersome inventory management, long load times, and texture pop-in marred what could have been a great game.

Gamers complained. Bioware listened. Mass Effect 2 is a prime example not only of what a sequel should be, but of how good games can be when everything just works.

When I finished Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond to sit down and write this, I was the 12th ranked Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond player in the world. This does not bode well for Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond. The game begins with a joke about how you can find the first Matt Hazard game in a bargain bin near you. I remember, around a month after that game came out, printing a coupon to purchase it at Best Buy for under ten dollars. The coupon remained on my desk for a week before I threw it away.

C.O.P. The Recruit starts off with a series of car chases, protocol lectures, and tutorialized shootouts impressively rendered in a surprisingly accurate version of the New York Metropolitan area. The player is cast as Dan Miles, some awful experimental hybrid of The Fast and the Furious hero Brian O'Conner and Ace Attorney's Phoenix Wright. Dan is a former street racer brought onto the force via the Criminal Overturn Program (I love it when I know that they came up with the acronym before the meaning of the acronym.) C.O.P. has the player stopping heists, ferrying people around the city, shooting bad guys, and performing stylus-centric mini games in an investigation of artist-gone-bad terrorist group Bomb Zombie (which is also the name of my new GWAR/Kid Rock crossover cover band.)

Divinity 2: Ego Draconis is a bit of a monstrous game, like the dragons that supposedly burst from its world. A third person European RPG, it is like its recent comrade, Risen, in derivation alone. While every second in Risen is a dark, dangerous, desperate fight for survival, Divinity 2 is a long hard slog, for the most part. Surprisingly, it feels quite unique in most ways. It takes familiar settings, plots, characters, and gameplay and turns them just a bit, so that you can see a different side of everything. Similarly, the developers at Larian have managed to twist all of these tired fantasy and gameplay tropes to their own will, making for a game just different enough to stand out from the rest.